Billionaire Ghost Tour - Stephanie Fowers Page 0,46
great. Her arms didn’t trap him; they felt like coming home. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been searching for her, but now that he’d found her, he knew he’d been a lost man. She freed him, brought him back to life. The cure to whatever ailed him was here in this town and with her. Janson felt it—it was the last thing to ground him to the present. Stand still and know that I am God. Yes, good things were coming. He just had to have the hope and the faith. He lifted his head. “I believe there’s something in the water here. Maybe it will heal me, too.”
“Are you pretending you have a thing for me again?” she asked, almost sleepily.
He shook his head and tried to cover every freckle of hers with a kiss. “I mean every last...” he caught another freckle that tried to hide from him near her ear, “kiss.”
Her shoulders stiffened, though she concealed that with a feisty look. “You say that...”
His gaze sharpened on hers. He’d messed up with that fake kiss before. He’d seen it in her eyes when he’d brought it up in the catacombs, but there was more to her putting up walls and trying to disappear in all that black. She was a romantic through and through. He suspected that she fell harder and felt her wounds deeper than he’d ever know. And yet, she’d opened up to him—if just for a moment. He didn’t know why she’d decided to take a chance on him, but he had to return the favor, even if that meant telling her the truth. “Mollie, the only reason you don’t have dozens of suitors knocking down your door is because you won’t let them in. The only reason.”
Her eyes watered, and for a moment he wondered if he’d said the right thing until she laid her head against his chest in a sweet truce. “Does that make us even?” she asked him. “I know your deepest darkest secret... and you know mine.”
“No, Red,” he said. “We’re not even yet.” And he kissed her again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The morning light shafted through the barred windows into their cozy greenhouse overlooking downtown. She leaned against Janson’s muscular shoulder as he slept. Their pursuers had been relentless. Their flashlights had marked the streets below in a wild pattern that had grown more disorganized and wild as the night had worn on. Mollie had eventually fallen asleep against Janson, wedged between him and a pot of dead plants.
She was touched that he’d finally confided in her, though perhaps that was slightly eclipsed by the memory of his kisses. That man was good at making her forget that her life was in danger—she’d give him that. He’d accused her of putting up walls, but for some reason she let him in. So how did that make sense? She’d opened her heart to the most impossible, difficult person she knew. She must be crazy. And still, watching him under the morning light, she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. The more they were thrown into each other’s company, the more she liked him. He was strangely protective of her and unafraid to show his warmth... unlike her.
Janson groaned, his eyes blinking open so that he caught her watching him. His mouth curved up—that same mouth that had shown her exactly how he felt about her last night—and she flushed with embarrassment when he refused to look away. He leaned over and kissed her cheek with a quick peck, then, holding his sling in place, he stretched up to stare out the window. “Are they still out there?”
There was no telling. The hopping nightlife had transformed into a busy and overcast Halloween morning as the town got ready for the Zombie Crawl. The usually deserted road was jammed with cars. The festivities would make their escape a little more complicated, since they had no idea who they were up against. There’d been so many men out there in the darkness last night that she was sure they’d leave someone behind to watch the area. Even so, Janson and Mollie couldn’t stay here much longer, not when his father was about to be mixed up in this, too. The problem was that if they went down the way they’d come in the light of day, anyone could see them.
Studying the room where they’d spent the night, she finally noticed the gaps in the ceiling showing another story above them. There were windows within reach