A Date with the Other Side (Cuttersville #1)(13)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“Oh, God, are you okay?” Shelby rushed toward Danny, her sandals crunching on broken glass. “Let me see your hand.”

“It’s fine.” Danny was knocking the few remaining shards out, but he paused to give Shelby a loud smacking kiss on her cheek. “You look hot.”

Which was a damn tacky thing to say, in Boston’s opinion.

Shelby didn’t seem to mind. She shrugged. “It’s stuffy in here.”

Like the guy had been referring to temperature.

Boston started forward, intent on repairing the damage to his image. He gently tugged on Shelby’s arm to pull her back. “You’re standing in the glass. Be careful.”

But before Shelby could answer, Danny snorted. “Shelby’s not delicate. Come on, babe.” He gripped her waist and forcibly hauled her through the window and into his arms.

Boston absolutely hated men who went around showing off their strength. He could bench-press as much as Danny Tucker, worked out in the company gym five days a week, but you didn’t see him dragging women through windows like a caveman. Or a farmer.

After Danny had carried Shelby down on the ground and enveloped her in another one of those smothering hugs that made him wonder why the hell they had bothered to divorce if they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, Boston climbed out the window himself. And met the steely gaze of Mrs. Stritmeyer. She shook her head, clearly disappointed.

“What?”

“I just thought a slick businessman like you, a city boy, you might work faster than the cowpokes around here. Guess I was wrong.”

And with that charming insult, she turned and yelled at the fireman. “John! Get that ladder off my house, you’re chipping the paint.”

Boston descended the four rungs of the ladder, not the least placated that the fire department had three men and three ladders scattered window to window yet it had taken Danny Tucker to spring them from the parlor. No, it didn’t make him feel better at all.

Shelby had left Danny’s arms, but he still shadowed her as she went and helped John pull the ladder off the house. “John, you smell like a burger and fries. Is that what took you so long to get here?”

The guilty flush on John’s extremely youthful face gave truth to what Boston suspected had been a joke on Shelby’s part.

Danny laughed. “That’s where I hooked up with them. I was having a cheeseburger, and they sat down with me and told me what was going on.”

Shelby smacked John on the arm. “How could you do that? Run off and eat a big old cheeseburger when I was stuck?”

Boston had to agree. If they had gotten there sooner, he wouldn’t have been cuffed with a demonic lamp or come close to kissing Shelby, who was a flake and a distraction and not why he was in Cuttersville.

Except he didn’t believe that Shelby was a flake, and he didn’t want to be saved from himself anymore. He still wanted to kiss her. Especially when her shirt rode even higher as she reached for the second ladder. The underside of her breast flashed him and he gave himself up for lost.

Danny reached out and stuck his fingers between Shelby’s br**sts and undid the knot so her shirt fell back into place. “You were showing us your hooters, hon.”

Shelby grabbed at her shirt, tugging it down farther. “Oh! Sorry.”

“I’ve seen them before, I’m happy to say, but the other guys might mind,” Danny said with a grin.

Boston knew right then and there what Danny Tucker was up to. He was making it clear that he had been married to Shelby, knew her and her body, and that he still had a claim on her.

It should be a reminder that he, Boston Macnamara, Samson executive, had no business messing around with Shelby Tucker, haunted house tour guide. That she belonged to Danny Tucker or another man just like him. A local.

But it didn’t. It only sent his blood pounding and his lust soaring, and he wanted. With the intensity he had wanted that scholarship to U of C. That first job. That VP spot at the age of twenty-eight. This he couldn’t have.

Only his body didn’t like that answer.

Howie stuck his head out of the broken window, standing in the parlor. “Hey, I’m confused. If you all were stuck, why did the parlor door just open for me when I pulled on it?”

Shelby looked at him and shivered.

Jesus. Now he actually found himself believing in a ghost named Red-Eyed Rachel.

Chapter Five

“Right about here, hovering between the graves of an old Episcopal minister and his wife, is where some folks swear two pale white hands can be seen intertwined on dark nights as the happy couple rests in the hereafter together.” Shelby gave a dramatic flourish with her arm to the grassy knoll in the Cuttersville Memorial Cemetery and enjoyed the appreciative murmurs of her latest tour.

It was bunk. It was theatrics. It was the power of suggestion and she knew that. There had to be a scientific explanation for why she and Boston had been locked in Gran’s parlor together. One that didn’t have to do with disembodied beings with a hatred of testosterone.

A kid tugged on her shorts. Shelby looked down into his round moon pie face, a little sticky around the edges, an empty popcorn kernel clinging to the corner of his mouth. “What’s up, bud?”

“You don’t believe in all this junk, do you?”

She was getting there. “I believe there are some things we can’t explain. Some things we see and hear that don’t make any sense with the knowledge that we have.”

He rolled his eyes with the authority of a seven-year-old skeptic. “My mom says ghosts aren’t real. That God would never let anyone suffer so long between here and heaven.”

“Then why are you on the Haunted Cuttersville Tour?” Shelby was considering slapping a PG-13 rating on her tour anyway, and this was confirming it. She spent the two hours talking about philandering men and women, drunks, violent crimes, and psychotics bearing machetes. She didn’t want to be responsible for churning out the next serial killer.

“My mom doesn’t know. My grandparents brought me.” He jerked his thumb back to a couple in their sixties, who had been hanging on her every word since go.

“You know, I just think some things we have to accept we can’t explain and move on.” Like her lunatic lust for Boston Macnamara. “If ghosts are real or not, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Except that it was her chosen profession to march people around and tell them they were and where to find them.

“I just think you have to say that so you can take our money.” Mr. Wise-beyond-his-years turned and went back to his grandparents.