Free The Ghost Exterminator by Vivi Andrews Page B

was a little harder to get past.
    Jo narrowed her eyes, trying to look as menacing and outright demented as possible, which wasn’t as much of a stretch as it might have been twenty-four hours earlier. “I know you have a key,” she snarled at the ineffectual little secretary.
    The twit blanched, visual evidence that she did, in fact, have a key. Well, that’s unexpected. Jo hadn’t thought Karma would trust the temporary twit with the keys to the kingdom.
    “Jo, perhaps—”
    “Shut up, Wyatt. I’ll get you a replacement exterminator in a minute. Right now, I’m disciplining the staff.”
    The girl looked like she was about to pass out from fear, but she wasn’t forking over the key. Jo cracked her knuckles, never taking her eyes off the secretary.
    Right now, Jo needed to get in to see Karma the same way she had once needed her mommy after a nightmare. There was something wrong with her ghost exterminating mojo, Wyatt’s house was haunted, Wyatt was haunted, and Jo needed Karma to fix it . Everything was wrong today.
    And no wet-behind-the-ears receptionist on a power trip was going to keep her from the one person in the world who might know what the hell was going on.
    Wyatt inserted himself between her and the clerical clone. His broad shoulders completely blocked her view of her target. “Ignore her,” he said calmly— calmly! —to the secretary. The bastard.
    “Move it or lose it, Haines,” she growled.
    He smiled apologetically at the twit before turning to her with a 4.0 Pissed-Off-CEO Richter scale frown in place. “Which way is your office? We can wait for Karma there.”
    “My office? What makes you think I have an office?”
    “You work here don’t you?”
    “What exactly would someone with my job do with a desk? Draw pictures of ghosts on it?”
    Wyatt was momentarily stumped by that one and Jo felt a little surge of vicious satisfaction. Until the traitorous temporary twit piped up behind him. “Ms. Banks’s office is the third door on the left, down that hall, sir.”
    Jo would have glared at her, but Wyatt was in the way. She glared at him instead. “So I have an office. You have a problem with that?”
    He ignored her latest combative snarl, just as he had ignored every other attempt to draw him into a brawl since they had fled the re-haunted Victorian. “Thank you,” Wyatt purred for the secretary, clamping his fingers around Jo’s upper arm and half dragging her down the hall.
    She smiled cheerfully at the cubicle inhabitants as they passed, trying not to look like she was being bodily forced toward her office. The accountants and filing clerks who kept the office running smoothly averted their eyes as she passed, which was nothing new, but was particularly annoying this afternoon as Wyatt was there to see it, taking it all in with his Executive X-ray vision.
    He herded her into her office as if he owned the place and crowded in behind her until he could shut the door behind them. Jo’s office didn’t exactly qualify as spacious, or even humane. It was microscopic, a glorified storage closet, but it was hers. There was a small desk that she had to squeeze against the wall to get behind, a large, outdated desktop computer, which had been destined for the garbage heap before she rescued it, and a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling.
    Wyatt glowered at every corner of the tiny office before lowering himself gingerly down onto the single chair wedged into the space. “I see Karma knows how to treat her prized employees,” he commented dryly, working a 3.2 on the Pissed-Off-CEO Richter scale.
    Jo matched him frown for frown. “You have a problem with my office?”
    He sighed and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. “Stop trying to pick a fight, Jo. I’m too tired to indulge you.”
    “ Indulge me? As if I’m some sort of toddler having a temper tantrum?”
    Wyatt groaned, pinched the bridge of his nose, and changed the subject with the subtlety of a