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“Are you having fun?” he had the balls to ask me in his coy, lilting way with his sexy accent that I wanted to kiss out of his mouth.

It was infuriating.

The dinner ended with Owain extricating me from the pirates’ clutches and leading me back to my room with my hand in his while the ghost party raged on below. My skin tingled and my body lit up, despite my anger.

Owain was very touchy-feely, which wasn’t exactly helping my attraction to him. I didn’t know if it was by design and the little shit knew how disarming he was, or if he really was just this strange and oblivious to normal social cues.

I was leaning toward the latter when Owain gave me a pat on the arse as a goodnight farewell before he skipped down the hall.

I caught a flicker of movement in the shadows, the dark emanation giving the strong impression that it was watching my every move in Owain’s absence.

They hadn’t let their guard down at all.

With a plan to sneak out of the room to find my equipment, I decided to turn in early. I cleared my bed of debris and did a quick safety check to make sure nothing else was going to try and kill me as I waited it out.

I fired off a quick text to Ted, Gerald’s secretary and front desk staff at the ExorSquad HQ. He was the only person I’d gotten to know over my short time there. The other employees were never around long enough for me to catch more than a name.

I thought there was a Barry? Or was it Gary?

Ryan

Still alive

It was after hours and the shady company didn’t exactly require frequent check-ins, only proof of life occasionally, but I still did it because I didn’t want to give that old man any reason to cut my pay.

The response was as terse as I expected.

Ted

Congrats

Ryan

Love you too, sweetie. Don’t pine for me too hard

Professional? No. But Ted needed an injection of some kind of joy into his life. I doubted a leprechaun fucking him in a pile of gold at the end of a rainbow would even make him crack a smile at this point.

Proximity to Gerald daily would do that to a person.

I received a picture message of Ted throwing me the middle finger. His brown hair was messy and his brown eyes narrowed. Even with his hand hiding half his face, I could still see those cheekbones. He would be cute if he bothered to stop looking so miserable.

Not Owain cute, but still.

I paused, wondering when my definition of cute started to be based on a guy I had only met a few hours prior. I must have inhaled too much flour; my brain was clearly baked.

A ghost of a feeling over my left shoulder, like someone was peering over to look at my phone screen had me whipping my head around. There was nothing, but with ghosts that didn’t mean jack shit.

The feeling had dissipated though, so I pursed my lips and turned back to my phone. If the ghost wanted to see Ted’s acerbic personality, they could knock themselves out.

I saved the picture and set it as my background, taking a screenshot and sending that back.

Ryan

Thanks pumpkin. I’ll treasure it forever and ever

I could practically feel my phone heating up from hundreds of miles away, the force of Ted’s displeasure clear as he typed and retyped messages at frantic speed, trying to come up with a retort.

I could hear my disappointed mother’s voice in my head again, begging me to stop being a wind-up merchant and do something more productive with my time instead.