“You told me to take the flashlight,” Ashley shouted at Jim over the roar of the rain as he pulled her closer to the main trunk of the banyan tree. “You tried to talk me into leaving you here! And now that’s not an option…?”
The branches overhead helped only a little, and she had to close her eyes because the rain was streaming down her face. Without a hat, it was like standing in the bathtub with her face aimed up at the shower head.
“It was actually a good idea,” he shouted back. “I wanted to see if you’d do it. And since you didn’t want to, I didn’t have to shut it down. Until you did, and then I did. Shut you down. Because yeah, we’ve gotta stay together. We can definitely run—I can keep up.”
Ashley opened her eyes to look at him and had to use her hands to shield her face from the rain. “You’re serious.”
He was still holding the flashlight and it made his eyes look very blue. “Yeah. Navy SEAL…?”
It was then, as their gazes were locked with the rain pouring down around them and on top of them that Ashley realized… She may not have had a map, but she had a Navy SEAL.
“What would you do?” she asked him. “If you were in charge.”
“First, it’s called command, if I were in command.”
“That,” she said. “What would you do?”
He was silent but only for a few seconds before he said, “I’d take inventory.”
“Inventory?” she repeated.
“Yeah, you know, what do I have, what do you have…?” he said. “I’d also do an inventory of the team members’ skill sets. You’re a runner, that’s great, but alas, right now I’m an anti-runner, with my knees. But okay, what else are you good at? Arguing a court case—not gonna do us a helluva lot of good out here…”
“What are your skill sets?” Ashley asked him. “An ability to pull an extra baseball cap out of your ass during a thunderstorm would be awesome.”
Jim laughed. “Okay, so you’re way funnier than I thought.”
“What,” she repeated as pleasantly as she could, “are your skills sets?”
Available in ebook and print from Suzanne Brockmann Books and in audio from Blackstone Audio
(60,000 words or 200 pages)
Excerpt from Out of Body
Out of Body by Suzanne Brockmann
A romantic comedy with otherworldly elements
First published July 2018 from Suzanne Brockmann Books
Now a feature film starring Jason T. Gaffney and Kevin Held
Friends to lovers, with a supernatural twist...
Henry’s been in love with his best friend Malcolm since college, but after he kisses Mal on Halloween night, things go desperately wrong. Awkward turns to just plain weird when Mal mysteriously vanishes.
And weird gets freaky when Henry starts to wonder if he’s being haunted by Mal’s ghost.
Henry’s other friends think he’s losing it—that Mal’s just run from conflict. But freaky turns to full-on crazy when, with the help of a “spirit guide,” Henry casts a spell that allows him—and only him—to see and hear Malcolm, who’s been right there, in his house, the entire time.
If Mal really is a “lingering spirit,” he won’t “move on” until he completes some undetermined “unfinished business.” And Mal—who’s been in love with Henry since forever, too—assumes his task is to help his best friend woo and fall in love with another man.
But sometimes things aren’t what they seem, being invisible doesn’t always mean you’re dead, and love really can conquer all…
From Chapter Nine:
Henry
I was a mess.
I lay there, in my bed, in the dark, physically ill at the idea that Malcolm was really dead.
Although… the alternative was that he’d sat there, laughing and enjoying the “joke,” as I’d cried my eyes out on my living room floor.
So if Mal wasn’t dead, he was, like, the world’s biggest asshole.
Unless he was only trying to make me believe that he was the world’s biggest asshole so that I’d fall out of love with him.
As I lay there, eyes wide open, I grabbed onto that possibility with both hands, like Jack’s grip on the floating door as the Titanic sank. (That analogy made better sense to me at holy-crap o’clock in the middle of the night. But I bet you know what I mean. There was some intense stupidity happening for both Jack and me.)
Somehow—Gina—Mal had found out that I was hoping to nudge our platonic relationship toward the romantic end of the friendship-scale. And he panicked. And instead of sitting me down and giving