Page 25 of Runaway Bride’s Husband

A booming, loud crash from above interrupted him and both of us immediately looked up. Seconds later, something scurried across the ceiling and I froze, another trickle of fear running through me. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

Another crash rang out, followed by more scurrying, and Ryan slowly lowered the spatula to the counter. “Stay here.”

“No.”

“Fine. Don’t.”

He gave me a look that said he wouldn’t save me if whatever was up there turned out to be dangerous, but I knew he would, so I followed him up the stairs, both of us listening intently as whatever it was kept racing around the attic.

Ryan stopped beneath a small wooden panel in the ceiling and pulled the stairs down. “Okay, let’s go see what’s going on up there.”

I peered into the darkness beyond the panel. “It’s probably a ghost.”

He scoffed. “Go do something useful, would you?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How about you try calling Daniel and fixing this mess so that I can go home in peace?”

With that, he tested the first step of the ladder and started ascending. Meanwhile, my blood was simmering all over again. “Right. Because it’ll be that easy. If you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me exactly what it is you think I should say to the man?”

“I’d start with how sorry you are and telling him that you’re alive,” he replied, his head already disappearing into the dark. “I’m sure you can improvise from there, but at some point, you should probably also talk to him about what’s going to happen next.”

“Good luck with the ghost,” I called when he disappeared fully into the dark.

When he didn’t respond, I slumped against the wall, my heart racing with both anger and fear. Guy thinks he knows everything, but he doesn’t really know anything, does he? He has no idea how hard I tried to talk to my parents.

“Ryan?” I called up, fully intending to let him have it for thinking that he knew anything about me just because I’d bitten him thirteen freaking years ago, but again, he didn’t respond. “Ryan, are you alive up there?”

I gave him a second, but when he still didn’t say anything, I climbed the stairs too, surprised by how large the attic was once I climbed into it. Lightning flashes and the occasional sliver of moonlight as the clouds rushed by lit up so much Revolutionary War memorabilia that I immediately wondered if my grandfather had been preparing for an extremely niche apocalypse.

It sure looked like it.

Either that, or he’d wanted to start his own museum. Old trunks and military uniforms stood all over, antique furniture, maps, flags, books, newspapers, and piles upon piles of dusty photographs.

I took a step forward, not seeing Ryan in my immediate field of vision, but then something moved and I screamed. A shape that looked a whole lot like a human under a sheet jerked forward and I screamed again, but as it shot toward me, the sheet fell and a raccoon darted between my legs, disappearing through a hole in the roof a split second later.

So scared that I was basically paralyzed, I looked around wildly, but I still didn’t see him. “Ryan! Where are you?”

An image raced through my head of Ryan having been bitten by the raccoon, dramatically bleeding out somewhere in this very attic, and it spurred me into motion. I raced forward, desperately searching for him on the floor.

“Ryan!”

When I practically slid around a stack of military-looking crates, I found him crouched beside an old wooden trunk, completely calm and definitely not bleeding. Instead, he was holding his phone up, its flashlight on as he inspected the contents of the trunk.

Before I could ask him what he was doing and why he hadn’t answered me, he held out a stack of pictures. “They’re of your grandfather’s wedding.”

I took the stack in a trembling hand, along with several bundles of what appeared to be old letters, but I barely even heard him when he spoke again. “The raccoon got into this trunk, unfortunately. I’m trying to see what we can save, but most of it is ruined.”

Staring down at the old photograph at the top of the pile, I tilted it closer to the light to get a better look. What I was seeing just made no sense whatsoever. Ryan, meanwhile, kept rummaging through the crate, pushing some things aside and extracting others.

“I suppose we should be grateful their wedding pictures survived,” he said. “Your grandmother was very pretty. Seriously. He got lucky when they arranged his marriage to her.” Ryan finally looked up at me then, and in my periphery, I saw him frown. “Maggie? What’s wrong?”

I turned the picture to show him. On it, my grandfather stood beside a beautiful young woman in a wedding dress, looking both impossibly young and impossibly happy. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him look quite that happy in my lifetime.

Ryan glanced at the picture and smiled. “Yeah, I saw that one. Good thing it’s not ruined, right? Your grandmother⁠—”