A Date with the Other Side (Cuttersville #1)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Chapter One

The man gave a whole new meaning to the words rise and shine.

Shelby stood with her hand still on the doorknob to the blue bedroom, the one where the ghost of Nanny Baskins resided, and took a long lingering look at the sleeping male form on top of the white eyelet spread.

The naked man, mouth dropped open on a soft snore, his black hair sticking up, had one hand on his bare broad chest. The other was slung carelessly on the pillow. He didn’t look familiar, not a single bare inch of him.

Gran had forgotten to tell her that she’d let the room again.

Yet Shelby couldn’t help being a tiny bit intrigued by this tenant. It wasn’t quite 9 A.M. yet, and he may have been sleeping, but his thingamabob was ready to start the day with a bang.

“Hey, Shel, you gonna let me in or not?” came Brady’s undulating teenage voice. “Bad enough you made us do this at the crack of dawn, but now you won’t let us in?”

Shelby started to back up, bumping Brady and his girlfriend Joelle as she retreated, still keeping one eye on that bed. Or an eye on what was on that bed, anyway.

It had been so long since she’d seen a man naked, she’d almost forgotten what they looked like. Besides, her ex-husband had never looked like that sleeping. She might not have left him if he had.

“Sorry, Brady, we’ll have to move on to the next stop on the tour.” She tried to keep her voice down so she wouldn’t disturb Naked Wonder.

Brady didn’t take the hint. Tossing back his blue hair, he rolled his tongue stud around. “Huh?”

Shelby wondered if kids were still dyeing their hair Easter egg colors or if Brady was sadly dated. Fashion came late to Cuttersville, Ohio. Sort of like getting a flyer in the mail after the sale is over. Cuttersville was always late for the sale.

So even if Brady was way out of style elsewhere, in this town he was a rebel. He was also her cousin, which was why she was letting him take the Haunted Cuttersville Tour at nine in the morning free of charge.

“Shh,” she ordered, flapping her arms in her white tank top, giving herself a whiff of her deodorant. “I’ll explain in a minute, back up.”

With a little luck, she could get the door closed before . . .

“Who the hell are you?”

Too late.

Shelby shot Brady and Joelle, who were straining to see around her, warning looks. Then she closed the door in their faces, leaving herself alone in the room. With him.

Turning around, she said with a smile, “I’m Shelby Tucker. It’s nice to meet you.”

The man was sitting up, and he’d pulled the eyelet spread over his lap, but he hadn’t taken into account that eyelet spreads by nature are full of many holes. Small and large, affording her interesting glimpses of golden skin and dark hair. Not the comforter of choice for preserving modesty.

Once she forced herself to look up into the dark eyes of Gran’s new tenant, she decided modesty didn’t suit him. There was something authoritative in his inquiring stare, a brisk calculating gaze that swept over her without moving.

“Well, Shelby Tucker, is there a reason you’re in my room or do I have to guess?”

He’d shaken the sleep off pretty quick. He’d caught her name on the first try.

“You can guess if you really want to. But I doubt you’ll guess right.”

If she had expected him to smile, he disappointed her. An eyebrow rose. “This isn’t going to require me to call the police, is it?”

Shelby nearly snickered. Men in Cuttersville just didn’t talk like that, and it amused her that he sounded so patronizing, his accent so flat and city-like, when he was buck-naked wearing nothing but her gran’s coverlet.

“Why would we be required to call the police? Gran just forgot to tell me you were here, that’s all.” The doorknob rattled with vigor behind her. Shelby slapped the palm of her hand on the door. “Knock it off, Brady!”

Naked Man leaned back on his hands, stretching his arms out and giving her a great view of his broad, muscular chest, without a single hair growing on it. Geez, did he wax that thing? Men with black hair tended to be hairy, in her experience, which, granted, was limited to glimpses of whoever was swimming in the lake, not from any personal knowledge. Yet this man was satin smooth.

The new position forced the eyelet spread up in the air below his waist. Shelby fought a hard-earned battle not to look. She lost. It just wasn’t every day a naked man with a hard-on was presented to her, and she might never get another peep. Of this man, anyway. Surely she was going to see another erection sometime in her lifetime. She was only twenty-six, and what did it matter that her divorce had gone through nearly three years ago now and in all that time the closest she’d come to sex was watching the horses mate?

He was still hard. As a rock. That was the only reason for the spread to be sticking up like that, unless it was his knee she was looking at. The spread hooked him through one of the large holes when he shifted. Nope, that was no kneecap, no siree.

“So, since you insist on being obscure, is your gran my landlady, Mrs. Stritmeyer?”

“That’s right.”

“What does that have to do with you standing in my bedroom while a teenager with blue hair pounds on my door?”

He really was sharp. He’d had only a twenty-second glance at Brady, while half asleep on top of it all.

“I’m giving my cousin Brady the Haunted Cuttersville Tour. I think he’s trying to scare Joelle so he can take her off behind the barn and comfort her.”

Shelby heard an outraged female gasp from behind the door. Oops. That might put a dent in Brady’s plans.

The naked guy’s head fell into his hands and he rubbed. “I don’t even want to know who the hell Joelle is.”

While he woke up alert, in all areas, he sure didn’t have the best of manners.

He fixed her with a frown. “And if this explanation is going to take any longer, can you tell me where I can get my hands on some coffee?”

“The explanation is over. I told you—I’m giving the Haunted Cuttersville Tour.” Shelby tucked some hairs that had fallen out of her loose ponytail and wondered if she should warn him that he was about to cut off circulation to a vital area, with the way he was now completely poking through the eyelet hole.

He made a sound of disgust.

She decided to let him figure out his predicament on his own. “And you can get coffee at the diner, but you’ll have to get dressed for that.”

Boston Macnamara squinted at the woman in front of him. He felt like he’d fallen into a damn rabbit hole. Somebody back in Chicago needed to die for this.