NOCTE (Nocte Trilogy #1)(15)

Or am I?

Because as Dare looks up and meets my gaze, he smiles a mischievous smile that makes me think I am.

Dare me.

To do what? That question makes me tingly.

Dare slowly walks across the yard, and motions to the chair across from me. “Is that seat taken?”

I roll my eyes. This game again?

“No.”

He doesn’t ask, he just sits in it, stretching his long legs out and crossing them at the ankles and stares at me, like he belongs in that chair. I raise an eyebrow, but he’s still silent.

“So, you have a British accent, but your last name is DuBray. How does that work?” I finally ask, desperate to make him stop staring at me. His mouth twitches.

“Is that your third question?”

Frustration bubbles up in me, regardless of how cute things sound coming out of his mouth.

“Do I have to count every single question I ask? I’m only making polite conversation.”

He shakes his head, and smiles just a bit. “Fine. I’ll give you this one in the name of polite conversation. My father died when I was a baby and he was French. My mother was British, so we moved there. I’ve lived there my whole life, hence the accent.”

His beautiful, beautiful accent. I nod. “I’m sorry about your father.”

He shrugs. “He was a good man, but it was a long time ago.”

I itch to ask him how old he is, but I resist the urge. I can’t use another question already. Besides, I’d bet money that he’s twenty-one. Or so.

“Can you speak French?” I ask hopefully, because Lord have mercy that would be hot.

“Oui, mademoiselle,” he answers smoothly. “Un peu. A little bit.”

Be still my freaking heart. I stare at him, enthralled.

“So,” he finally says, changing the subject so very casually, as though he’s not the coolest, sexiest man alive. “How do you survive living in a funeral home? Have you ever seen a ghost?”

I ignore my pounding heart and raise an eyebrow. “I’ll take this question to mean that you did, in fact, have the balls to rent the carriage house?”

He chuckles, a raspy, husky sound that vibrates right into my belly.

“The fact that I have balls of steel is now unarguable,” he announces with a grin. “And I’m never nervous. Not even about ghosts. Also, since I gave you one answer, turnabout is fair play, right? So… have you ever seen a ghost?”

I’ve not seen one, but the ghost of my mother is here… present in every picture, pile of clothing and memory of this house. But of course I don’t say that.

I shrug instead. “I’ve never seen one. As far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing.”

“Really?” he answers, sounding doubtful. “That’s disappointing.”

“You’re going to be in the Carriage House anyway,” I tell him. “There aren’t any dead people out there. I mean, I assume you’re renting it, right?

Please be right.

He nods. “Yeah. Thanks for letting me know about it. It’s just what I’ve been looking for. A nice little space with gorgeous scenery.”

As he says the words gorgeous scenery, he stares straight at me, with purpose.

I’m his gorgeous scenery. I suddenly can’t breathe enough to even try to ask him why he wants to be in Astoria in the first place.

“Kismet,” I manage to eke out.

He nods. “Kismet.”

Dare stares at me, long and hard and dark, and I manage to take one deep breath, then another.

“So I’ll be seeing you,” he says, abruptly ending our conversation by standing up.

“When are you moving in?” I ask, suddenly panicky at the thought of him leaving. He brings with him an air of comfort, of excitement, of something charged and dangerous and new. I don’t want to let that go just yet.

He grins.

“Now. I brought my bag.”

His bag? I follow his gesture to see a duffel bag strapped to the back of his bike. One bag.

“That’s it?”

“I travel light,” he answers, heading back to the Carriage House. To his home, which is now only a hundred feet from my own.

“I guess you do,” I murmur. I watch the way his wide shoulders sway, and the way the breeze flutters his dark hair. He grabs his bag and ducks into his new home and I realize that I forgot to ask him something.

How long he’s staying.



***



Dinner feels different tonight, mainly because I know Dare is a hundred yards away.

I serve up spaghetti, which is the easiest meal on the planet to prepare, and garlic bread and corn. My father eats with gusto, while Finn, as usual, pushes things around on his plate. His meds make him lose his appetite.

We’re eating late, because my father worked late.

At the thought of his ‘work’, I can’t help but glance at his hands. I know he washed them several times when he came upstairs, but just the thought of what he’d been doing with them, what he’d been handling, grosses me out. I know that a scant hour or so ago, he was jamming a needle into a dead person’s neck and replacing all of their blood with chemical fluid.

And now he’s eating with those same hands.

It’s gross and it’s hard to swallow my blood-colored spaghetti sauce.