“Why’d a lumber baron make his house out of stone?” Darcy asks, her voice quiet in the low light of Beechcourt Mansion’s enormous entryway.

“Maybe he got tired of looking at wood,” I say.

Darcy grins.

“The Lumber Baron would be a great nickname for a porn star,” she says.

I just raise my eyebrows at her.

“He’s got a lot of wood?” she says, and grins at me. I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling. “Think of the porn setups a lumber baron could have. Hey there, can you inspect my wood? I’ve got too much wood, can you take some off my hands? Wood for sale, long, hard and...”

She trails off, thinking and staring up at the ceiling of the mansion. There’s a hole in it, the stars shining through.

“Splintery? Maybe don’t use that one.”

“Because the others were solid gold,” I tease, walking toward the sweeping stone staircase on one side of the huge foyer. This place feels like an old hunting lodge crossed with a medieval castle or something, empty and made of stone, our voices echoing through it.

I check out some of the stone work, little carved patterns along the railing, but I’m wondering if she watches porn. I’m wondering what kind she watches, whether she watches it at night, after I leave, and I can’t help but picture her.

Screen glowing, Darcy in one of the chairs with the ugly bear-patterned fabric. One hand down her pants, moving quickly, the way her eyes might drift shut when she gets close, her other hand clutching the armrest, her lips parting.

God damn it, I’m doing this again.

Since she turned me down I feel like this is all I do. She’ll say something dirty, or even just salacious, or I’ll see a sliver of skin or a glance I’m maybe not supposed to see and I can’t stop thinking about her, Darcy, what if she’d said yes.

I’m fighting the urge to kiss her neck when she stands in front of me, the urge to slide my hand into her jeans from behind when I tend to her burn, see if she’s as wet as I’m hard. Fuck, I watch her ass every time she walks away and think about the way it would bounce while she rode my cock in reverse cowgirl.

The more time I spend with her, even after getting turned down, the worse I want her. The more I think about all the ways I could make her come and how fucking spectacular it would be when I did.

I shake off the thoughts, yet again, and slowly circle the room we’re in. It’s on the first floor of the mansion, big stone blocks forming the floor, a sweeping staircase going to the floor above and then the floor above that. Walls made of cut stone blocks, doorways lined with smaller stone.

It’s like we’re in a medieval castle, only we’re two hours outside Seattle. I think Woodford might have been slightly insane.

“All right,” Darcy says, suddenly behind me as I stare into a doorway, half thinking about Woodford and half thinking about how I want to pull her hair and watch her eyelids flutter. “Which part is supposed to be haunted?”

“The whole thing, as far as I know,” I say.

She looks around, the pupils in her blue eyes wide and black in the darkness.

“So we’ve gotta explore the whole place?”

“I guess.”

“And what time is sunrise?”

I smile at her, just slightly.

“You think you’ll last that long?” I ask.

“What, you think there’s gonna be a weird shadow and I’m gonna run screaming?”

“No, I think you might get tired and bored when there’s no ghost,” I say.

Neither of us actually believes in ghosts. Or, at least, I don’t. Darcy says that she’s agnostic on the topic of ghosts, but has never seen any compelling evidence in favor of them. We’ve debated this about a billion times while watching trashy ghost-hunting reality shows.

“If there’s no ghost it’s your fault,” she says. “You found this place.”

“My options were limited,” I point out. “Let’s see if you can find me a more-haunted mansion in this small town on short notice.”

She takes a step closer, smirking, as a gentle breeze blows through the broken windows and past us.

Somehow, I manage to meet her gaze instead of looking to see whether her nipples stiffen in the cold. She’s stopped wearing the Ace bandages around her wound — doctor’s orders — and the tank top she’s wearing instead of a bra doesn’t do a whole lot to hide when she’s cold or excited.

It’s another nail in my coffin, sheer goddamn torture. Two days ago, when we were drinking on the roof again, talking about the tour coming up, there was a lull in the conversation and I caught her looking at me?

Excited.

Happy hour yesterday, when she drank two glasses of wine, I drank one, and she teased me for ten full minutes about the middle-aged woman who recognized me and might have been flirting?

Also excited.

“I think that’s Woodford right now,” I say, the breeze still moving her hair slightly. “He’s angry that we’re questioning him.”

Darcy just laughs, her eyes flicking to my face in a way I don’t quite understand, and she twirls one finger in the air.

“Turn around and let me get our ghost-hunting equipment out of the backpack,” she orders.

Minutes later, we’re walking through a wide stone doorway and into another room, this one with a massive fireplace. Darcy’s got the meat thermometer in one hand, held out like a sword or something, and I’ve got the can of baby powder.

The thermometer is for finding cold spots, which apparently indicate ghosts. The baby powder is... I’m not exactly sure. I just know that reality TV ghost hunters are always throwing powder everywhere, so I bought some.

“This is stupid,” Darcy whispers.

“It really is,” I whisper back.

She hits the button on the thermometer, then peers at the tiny LCD screen. I sprung for the instant-read kind, because I’m fancy.

“Sixty-six point six,” she says. “Satan’s temperature.”

“That’s a good lead for sure,” I say.

“I don’t think these are really designed to take air temperatures, by the way.”

“I’m gonna tell you what I told you before,” I say, slowly looking around the room. “I’d like to see you do better.”

She grins and flips me off before walking through that room and into the next, then the next, and I follow.

Soon, we’re not really ghost hunting any more. We’re just exploring this crazy mansion. There’s not much left in it, hardly any furniture, but there are a few random knickknacks here and there. She finds a letter opener in a corner, and I find an old spoon lying under a sink that clearly hasn’t been used in a long, long time.

And beer cans. There are plenty of beer cans, not to mention weeds growing through the cracks in the stone floor, giving the whole place a half-wild feel, like we’re adventurers discovering a lost city in the Amazon.

We talk about whether the roof’s going to cave in. We speculate about why Woodford would want to haunt this place and not somewhere else, maybe somewhere with more people to be haunted.

We move through the entire first floor of the house this way, slowly. Darcy sticks the meat thermometer into her back pocket and forgets about it. I toss the baby powder back into the backpack I’m carrying, because we’re obviously not using it.

“I think he haunted this place because he really hated premarital sex,” I say.

“The guy with the porno name hated premarital sex?” she says, a smile tugging at her lips.

“You know it’s not a very good porno name, right?” I tease, ducking my head slightly through a doorway. “It takes a little too much thinking to get the joke.”

“And people were doing it here?” she asks, looking away. We’re walking back through some of the first-floor rooms toward the foyer where we entered, our feet brushing softly against the grass that’s grown between the cracks, encouraged by the sunlight through the broken windows.

“Doing what?”

“Premarital sex.”

“That’s what the legend says. That they were doing sex,” I say, repeating her phrase just to tease her.

“Maybe he’s just jealous that he’s not getting any, being a ghost and all,” Darcy says.

“Married couples didn’t seem to have the same problem with the bed and breakfast burning down,” I point out.

“Maybe they didn’t have sex while they were here.”

“But it’s a romantic getaway.”

Darcy walks through doorway and back into the foyer, then looks around at the staircase sweeping upward, the partially-gone ceiling above.

“Is it?”

“What, you don’t think so?”

Darcy looks at me with an expression I can’t decipher, and I wish I could hit delete on that sentence.

“Well, it’s either that or a serial killer’s lair,” she says. “Middle of nowhere, totally secluded, no one can hear you scream regardless of why you’re screaming.”

“I promise not to serial kill you,” I say, half-laughing, the words out of my mouth before I can think them through.

“Thanks, but I wasn’t worried,” Darcy says. “If you haven’t serial killed me yet, then I’m—”

THUMP.

Darcy stops, mid-sentence, her mouth still open, and my blood chills.

Scuff creak scuff...

Footsteps. That’s footsteps. Darcy’s mouth snaps shut as she looks at me, eyes sparking, reaching for the thermometer in her back pocket.

“It’s probably a squirrel,” I whisper, half trying to convince myself.

I don’t think it’s a squirrel. Not unless it’s a squirrel carcass dropped from a hundred feet, the only way a squirrel could conceivably be loud enough to make that thump.

I’m thinking bear. I’m thinking vagrant, squatter, someone who’s made their home here and is probably not happy that we’ve shown up all of a sudden.

“Sounds like Woodford is angry,” Darcy murmurs, the hint of a smile playing around her mouth. “And we haven’t even—”

She stops. We look at each other, the first time since that morning over coffee that we’ve come close to talking about what didn’t happen. Sort of, kind of, and in that second, I read her face, surprised like she just slammed on the brakes.

Darcy closes her mouth. She clears her throat, looks away, her back straightens and I think she turns pink though it’s hard to tell in the dark, her self-defense spikes out in full force.

“Let’s go find him,” she says, takes the thermometer out of her back pocket, and darts up the stairs.

“Darce, wait,” I say, but she doesn’t listen to me. “Darcy. Fucking seriously, Darcy!”