GABE
The crawl space under the porch of my Airbnb was full of dusty old pool noodles, busted sprinklers, and an incomplete troop of faded Christmas gnomes, the remaining members of which each held a letter to spell ERRY CHRI M !
With the right light and the right filter, the house would look spooky as hell. In reality, it was actually stunningly beautiful. It was called the Willows, and it had a minor entry in two of the ghost-hunting books I’d used to gather information on Savannah. Built in 1802, it was three stories—six bedrooms and four baths. There was a big wraparound porch, a knocker in the shape of a horseshoe, and a garden thick with vines and flowers. In addition to being an Airbnb, it was also for sale. That morning as I drank my coffee, I’d looked it up on Zillow and checked out the real estate brochure in the front hallway. Original woodwork, new roof, updated wiring and heating and cooling systems. Modern conveniences with historic charm. It was, in fact, just the sort of house I would have loved to own . . . if I were a different dude with a different job and a whole different life completely.
But I wasn’t a different dude. I was a television host sweating my balls off in Georgia in July. And I had a pilot to film.
I army-crawled between the noodles and the gnomes and turned on the camera that was attached to my helmet. My face in the camera’s flip screen confirmed what I’d known already—the frozen veggies had helped with the pain, but I still looked pretty messed up. My nose was swollen, and there was a cut across the side. On the upside, I didn’t have a black eye, I could still smell, and Markowitz had made it plenty clear that the rough-and-tumble angle played pretty well with the twenty-four-to-thirty-six-year-old female demographic. Normally, demographic data was background noise to me. But now, the sweetheart demographic had a face.
Lily.
Even now I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Or the way her shorts fit her. Or the way her cleavage had looked under her hand when she’d pressed it to her chest.
But I snapped out of my Lily daydream and refocused on the camera. I hit record, made sure I didn’t have anything between my teeth, and then counted back from three. And action.
“I’m coming at you from underneath a house on Abercorn, known as the most haunted street in Savannah. Records indicate that this house was built in 1802 by a local developer named William Jeremiah Beaumont. Apparently, he and his wife spent every afternoon on the porch drinking lemonade and holding hands. The legend is that they’re still there.” I panned up to the floorboards above me, with rays of sunlight streaming in between the planks. “Just going to have a poke around down here to make sure that all this can’t be explained by something logical, like a family of raccoons or some issue with the gas meter.”
I planted my elbows and wriggled forward on my stomach, adjusting my camera on my helmet. It was then that I heard a car door swing shut. It sounded nearby. Mailman, probably. But then I heard footsteps coming up the walkway. I lifted my head to see through the diamond gaps in the lattice, and there she was. In a cute half sundress, half jumper printed with tiny flowers. The sweetheart demographic herself.
But just hang on a second. Lily?
Her light and peppy footsteps moved up the porch steps, and she headed for the front door. She rapped a few times on the glass window, a soft but confident knock.
I crawled forward a few feet to get a better look at her as she stood there waiting. Between the slats I saw a smooth calf, a soft thigh. And a little bit of her underwear. Her shorts were loose enough and her stance was just wide enough for me to see them: bright yellow with white polka dots.
Fuuuuuck.
She lifted up onto her tiptoes to reach the knocker on the front door. As she did, the summer wind kicked up and showed me the spot where her ass made a ball-busting crease with her thighs.
Double fuuuuuuck.
But what the hell was I going to do now? Do my best Barry White impression and hit her with, Hey, baby, right here below you, looking up your shorts.
Nice, Powers. Real nice. Man of the year right there.
I stopped filming and stayed low. It had worked with the lumberjack yeti trespassing thing, and it might work here. Maybe she’d head back to her van and I could crawl my way out of gnomeland without seeming like a Peeping Tom.
But she didn’t go back to her van. Instead, she sat on the porch swing, directly above me. Her thighs pressed against the wooden slats, and her shorts rode up enough to make me almost groan out loud. She was fucking delicious. And I wanted to nibble every damned inch of her.
She pulled her phone from her bag. The sounds of her typing were barely audible, a faint click-click-click above the breeze, followed by the airplane sound effect of a message being sent.
One second later my phone chirped in my pocket. As I shot my hand out to silence it, my elbow clipped the first of the gnomes. Which knocked over the second. Which knocked over the third. Pretty soon the whole goddamned line of the little bastards was toppling over and rolling around, with jingle bells jangling and toy drums banging.
Overhead, Lily leaped off the swing with a thump. “Who’s down there? I’ve got my pepper spray! You’ve been warned!” She dropped to her knees and peered through the knothole in the slats.
Goddamn it. “It’s me, Gabe.” I unclipped the chin strap of my filming helmet. “Just doing some light crawl-space investigation.”
She blinked once and stared at me. Then she hit me with that smile. “Hi.”
I pulled off my helmet. The thing was incredibly useful, but it had the slight disadvantage of making me look like both a geek and a storm trooper. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“You first,” she said. “Lemme guess. Going spelunking?”
I was going to have to tell her something. I was under a porch with a camera on an articulating arm bolted to my helmet. Just hanging out wasn’t gonna cut it. “Yeah, so. I’m actually . . .” See, I hated this part. As far as I could tell, there was no way to explain what I did without sounding like a total prick. “I’m actually on television. I have a television show.”
It didn’t seem to faze her at all. “I know. I was teasing about the spelunking.” She pinned her tongue between her teeth as she smiled. “I happened to stumble upon your show for the first time this morning. You were in Zambia hunting for the kongamato lizard thingy. You look really nice in swim trunks.”
Awww, fuck yeah. I might not love being recognized, but this was different. That new desire in her eyes? Gimme. Some. Of. That. Sugar. “Glad you think so.”
“And I really liked your show. Which is good because, apparently, I’m your new audio tech.”
Markowitz! Asshole! But it was no mystery to me what he’d done—it was his standard MO. He’d googled “audio engineers in Savannah” and clicked on the top result. That was how he always did his research. She probably had like four hundred five-star reviews with everybody saying, “We love Lily!”
Totally understandable.
Lily pressed her eye closer to the hole in the floorboards. “Your nose looks pretty good! I brought you some arnica cream. And some sweet tea. Have you had sweet tea yet?”
Like she’d doused me with a bucket of water, my Markowitz annoyance subsided. Her smile made me smile. If that was what help looked like, it might be exactly what I needed. “Not yet.”
“Then you’re in for a treat.”
She was goddamned right about that.