Free In Love With a Haunted House (Contemporary Romance) by Kate Goldman Page B

Lonnie but she still felt a little sorry for him though.
     
    Lonnie yelled, “I won’t sell it to the developer! Will that make you happy, Grandma Lewis?”
     
    Immediately his grotesque parody of a dance stopped. The lights blinked off then on again and Lonnie looked around like a frightened little child who had just been caught stealing. “Now come on, Grandma Lewis, you know I own this house fair and square.”
     
    He was snatched back up in the air and this time he was dangled by his foot from somewhere around the center of the light socket. When he stopped screaming he was set down as neatly and gently on the sofa as if he had never been lifted off it.
     
    “Still want the house?”
     
    Greg looked over at Blake and said, “I can’t sell that. I could never turn it into apartments and renovating it just to sell it as a single house makes no sense from a financial perspective. If I can’t make money off it, the house has no value to me.”
     
    Mallory did a happy little dance. Things were not really solved, but they were better than they had been. In the house Lonnie shouted out, “Hey, y’all come get me!”
     

Chapter 6
     
    Lonnie was gone and Mallory and Blake were standing in front of the house. Mallory’s mother came out on the porch, saw them standing there and gave them a little wave of her hand before going back inside.
     
    “Your mother seems nice,” Blake observed.
     
    “She’s a big romance reader. She’s probably hoping you have a horse stuck somewhere in your back pocket. That way you could just ride off into the sunset with me, all your armor clanking as we go.”
     
    “I don’t have a horse or armor, but I do have a lot of other things.”
     
    Mallory turned to face him, suddenly shy. She looked up in his eyes and said, “What are we doing?”
     
    Blake said, “I do believe it’s called falling in love.”
     
    “I thought it was losing my mind.”
     
    “I hear the two have a lot in common.”
     
    “Blake, we hardly know each other. What if this is just some crazy infatuation that wears off?”
     
    “How will we know if we don’t try?”
     
    The man had a point. Mallory looked back at the house and as she stared at the window of the bedroom that had belonged to Shannon Lewis she saw a tiny slender flame flare up.
     
    “Do you know she never gave up on him? Until the day she died she waited for him to come back to her. My mom said that when she was a little girl people still talked about all the séances and stuff she used to hold in the hopes of bringing his spirit to her.”
     
    Blake put his arm around her neck and pulled her close to him. She was just tall enough that her head came exactly to his chin and she filled up all of the spaces left by the curves and turns of his own body. It was as if she had been made to be beside him, she fit there so perfectly and he knew she felt the same but was afraid to say so.
     
    “Did you know they met at a bus stop and from the moment they met until the moment he was shipped out to fight, they were almost always together? Even when he was supposed to be on base, locked down, he snuck out and went to her. He could have been court-martialed or labeled a deserter. It was a hell of a risk but he had to take it, he could not leave her alone. He slept right beside her in her bedroom at Gray Oaks.”
     
    Mallory had not known that and she stared at him, saying, “You know about all of that? I thought nobody knew. He was here, at Gray Oaks? I don’t think anyone knew about that.”
     
    “My dad’s parents knew all about it. When I was about fifteen my grandmother was dying and she told me about it. She said it didn’t matter anymore—that everyone who could have been hurt by the truth was either dead or too old to care.”
     
    Mallory could not contain her curiosity. “How did they meet?”
     
    “George, my grandfather, was riding in a car with some friends of his when he saw Shannon, who had just gotten off the bus