Guilty Needs(13)

And found herself staring at Alyssa, or rather, through her.

After a year, she’d finally learned to stop jumping when she saw Alyssa’s ghost. But today wasn’t a normal day and she just barely muffled her yelp. “Damn it, Lys.”

Alyssa smiled. “Girl, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Ha, ha.”

“Bree, you really do need to lighten up. Live a little.” Her voice had a weird echo to it, rather like she was talking from the bottom of a well.

“So says the ghost,” Bree muttered, shaking her head. Grabbing her work tools, she headed to the next flowerbed. Sinking to her knees, she started weeding with a vengeance and hoping that if she ignored her, Alyssa might go away.

But it hadn’t ever worked before—wasn’t going to start working now. Alyssa plopped down right in front of Bree, so suddenly that Bree ended up sticking a hand right through her as she grabbed a pair of pruning shears from the bucket she kept her tools in.

Hissing, she jerked her hand back and glared. “Don’t you have some harp-song-on-a-cloud date to keep?”

Setting her jaw, she started pruning a Knock Out Rose bush. Alyssa snickered. “Harp song. How boring. You really think dying is about playing harps?”

“Oh, geez.” Since Alyssa didn’t seem interested in moving her transparent tail away from the rose bushes, Bree abandoned her pruning shears and moved on to thin out the pansies that were threatening to overtake one of the many small flowerbeds.

“He missed you.”

The sad honesty in Alyssa’s voice caused a knot to form in Bree’s throat.

“I know you missed him.”

“Him missing me doesn’t account for much.” Sighing, Bree tugged off her gloves and stared down at her hands. They weren’t a lady’s hands. Strong, capable, with palms calloused from her work and nails she kept cut brutally short. Her skin was a smooth shade of soft, mellow gold, a gift from the mother she’d lost back when she was a baby. Her gray eyes came from her father—though she didn’t know him either. He’d dumped her on his sister within a few months of having her dumped at his doorstep and he hadn’t ever looked back.

But it was his eyes she saw staring back at her from the mirror. Her aunt Cara had eyes the same shade of dark gray. Cara hadn’t been prepared to suddenly become mama to a two-year-old child but she’d done the best she could.

Bree didn’t suffer serious self-esteem issues. She knew what she looked like. She was attractive and when she put half a mind to it, she might even be beautiful. She preferred jeans over just about anything else and kept her hair cut short just so she didn’t have to spend as much time messing with it. Still, she was pretty.

But she wasn’t Alyssa.

She wasn’t the woman Colby had fallen in love with.

She was a friend. In his eyes, that was all she’d ever be. Delusional ghosts… Bree figured being grounded in reality wasn’t much of a concern for them anymore. Quietly, she repeated, “It doesn’t matter if he missed me. Yeah, I missed him too. But he missed a friend, Lys. That’s all I ever was to him. That’s all I’m ever going to be.”

Alyssa rolled her eyes. “Man, you are so stubborn.”

Bree blinked, then snickered. “Me? You’re the one hanging around here, determined to play matchmaker. A year, Lys. It’s been a year. And you’re not showing any signs of moving on.”

With a melodramatic sigh, Alyssa said, “I can’t move on until I know you’ll be happy. Both of you.”

Tugging her gloves off, Bree shoved her damp hair back from her brow and then fisted her hands on her hips. “You can’t force this to happen, girl. Things happen because they are meant to, not because you force them.” Rising, she strode away, determined to get a little peace and quiet.

Of course, the way her luck ran, Alyssa would just follow her.

But to her surprise, that didn’t happen.

She settled down in a flower bed near the back of the garden and worked in peace and quiet. It occurred to her that Alyssa had given up a little easier than normal this time, but maybe that was because Alyssa was finally getting the point.





Chapter Three

Alyssa didn’t understand the deal with being dead but it wasn’t what she’d expected. She hadn’t gone on to some glorious place in the sky, she wasn’t roasting in some pit of endless torment and she hadn’t ceased to exist either.

She hadn’t intentionally clung to the land of the living, but apparently, in her subconscious, that was what she was doing. She faded in and out of conscious existence, sometimes lost inside herself for hours, days at a time. But never for too long.

It had happened again, just now. One minute she’d been talking to Bree, teasing her, chiding her, nagging her and then, just like that, Alyssa was gone. Time passed and she wasn’t even aware of it, just that Bree had left and now Alyssa was alone in the house with a man who refused to see her.

She wasn’t always here—here being on Earth. Sometimes she was someplace…other. No place she could describe, but it seemed as if it were a prelude to what waited, if she could just move on.

She wasn’t always alone there, either.

People came and went. Some lingered for just a few heartbeats, but she’d been told that others had waited there endlessly. Trapped—trapped by their memories and regrets from a life that was over.