Page 24 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)

And while “interested” was a massive understatement for how he felt about Alice, he didn’t know if he was a grown enough man for a woman like her.

Besides being breathtakingly beautiful, she was smart and cultured and sweet.

She saw ghosts . Hell, she had magic. It made sense now, that uncanny energy sizzling along his skin every time he touched her.

Literally, every little thing she did was magic.

Magic was real. Ghosts were real. And, according to the coven, there was some turf war over magical “locks” that gave witches more power in interacting with those ghosts.

The house being named “Shaddow House” suddenly made much more sense.

Talk about hiding in plain sight. Collin felt stupid for having been fooled for so long.

Somehow the world was a more interesting place to be in, knowing that there was more out there.

Of course, the something more seemed to be waking him up in the middle of the night to wander around the hallways of a hotel, which wasn’t going to be safe during renovations, but he supposed it was a fair trade.

Sleepwalking Collin had not had the consideration to lock the door behind him, which he supposed was good news, since he didn’t have a key on him.

The second bit of good news was that no one seemed to have broken into his house while he was out.

Wait, had he forgotten to set the alarm, or had Sleepwalking Collin taken the time to deactivate the alarm system?

Sleepwalking Collin was kind of a dick.

He locked the door behind him, unsure of whether he wanted to go back to bed or make coffee and call a moratorium on sleep for the night. He paused, taking in the cozy environs of Forsythia Manor. While less overtly opulent than the hotel, it was still lushly comfortable.

He was still adjusting to the idea that he lived here. This place had a sort of fairy-tale mysticism in his memory. Every image in his mind was warm and soft. He loved it here. He was loved. He was happy.

Over the years, his dad had bought out his relatives’ shares of the manor house until his little family of three were the sole owners.

His mother had redone the place in a sort of nautical theme with white and navy stripes, brass accents, and pops of turquoise here and there.

The furniture was durable enough to hold up under marauding kids, uncles who went comatose during baseball games, and aunts who never quite learned how to not spill chardonnay.

It was a home built in optimism for a big family and their messes…

but somehow, all that was left was him. A singular mess on a lot of levels.

Overhead, he heard the ding of a text notification coming through on his phone.

Collin frowned. Who would be texting him at this hour?

He padded up the stairs, cursing shoe-skipping Sleepwalking Collin, and followed the noise into the primary suite.

It had been difficult moving into this room, like he was admitting with absolute finality that his family was gone.

His phone lay on the cherry Federalist-style nightstand, charging.

He could see on the screen that there were several text notifications piled up, all from Paige.

He sighed. Apparently, they’d reached that stage of the cycle again. He’d made a mistake, ignoring her earlier texts. She’d seen it as a challenge.

Hi

Sorry to text you so late.

You know how I am with time zones.

Planning to come visit you sometime this month.

Been too long.

Collin swallowed a heavy lump of dread. He had ghosts and a potentially inappropriate romantic interest to deal with. He couldn’t deal with Paige too.

Paige wrote in staccato bursts.

I think it’s time we talk about us, don’t you?

I’ve spent too long waiting for you to make up your mind, Collin

when you know this is what you want.

This is what our families want.

We have too much history together to just throw away what we have.

There’s no point in putting off the inevitable.

He flopped back on his bed, feeling all the adrenaline that had carried him after the dream ebb from his body.

His nearly lifelong relationship had started off so sweetly when they were kids.

She was his first girlfriend, the first real friendship he’d built at their socially chilly prep school.

She’d been his first everything. She’d been there for him when he’d lost his parents.

Now it was so messy and noxious, it was barely recognizable as a friendship, much less a romance.

But Paige had never responded well to being told “no.” And it was way too late to deal with the repercussions of raising her ire.

He wasn’t sure his phone had enough battery for that, even fully charged.

He set his phone aside, thinking of all the things he had to do the next day for the renovation—and how he was going to use all of them to avoid texting Paige back.

Yeah, he was definitely not emotionally mature enough to try to date Alice.

***

The next morning, Collin sat at his desk, thinking about his nightmare, pretending to review the binder of pieces Alice had scouted from her contacts.

She’d suggested dividing the various suites into different looks from the art nouveau movement, and then she started talking about different “schools”—“Nancy” and “Glasgow” and some guy named Mackintosh.

Collin wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but it was beautiful and exactly what he was looking for—classic, airy, but still comfortable, even if the guests might be a little afraid to sit on the chairs.

It was exactly the sort of elegance people expected when they visited the Duchess.

Was it the work on the hotel that had Victoria running down the hallway from an unseen threat?

Now that he knew ghosts existed, he’d done some reading.

The “highly reliable” ghost-hunting websites he’d read (and then immediately cleared from his browser history) stated that sometimes changes to a house stirred up ghost activity.

Changing their environment confused them.

He wondered if that was why there always seemed to be renovations happening at Shaddow House when he was a kid, to keep the ghosts subdued. Apparently, there were hundreds of them over there. How much havoc could hundreds of ghosts cause?

Collin shook his head and tried to focus on the work Alice had done for him.

The moment she’d presented him with the binder—all pretty and pink-cheeked in her sensible gray suit before she’d run off to her actual job at Superior Antiques—he’d wanted to blurt out the whole story about the nightmare and his sleepwalking.

But she just looked so busy and hurried that he didn’t have the heart to lay something else on her shoulders.

He was really going to have to do something about his feelings for Alice.

On his desk, his phone dinged with a text notification from Paige. He’d successfully avoided dealing with the previous texts by focusing on other things. He wasn’t about to lose focus now.

Nope.

Paige had texted several times that morning.

Most of the texts boiled down to, Miss you.

Can’t believe you left for the summer and didn’t say goodbye!

and When are we going to catch up? He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

He had too much going on right now for a Paige visit.

But if he ignored her, it was like leaving a toddler unsupervised with a can of spray paint.

You didn’t know how it was going to turn out, but it wasn’t going to make you smile.

He dialed her number and after a few rings, he’d hoped that maybe he was going to get the opportunity to leave a voicemail without an awkward conversation. But on ring four, no such luck.

“Darling, how are you?” Paige cooed. “Is the cell signal terrible there? You haven’t been responding to my texts.”

In the background, he could hear the click-clack of her heels on hardwood floors.

An art gallery? Paige never walked through galleries slowly, appreciating the art.

She moved like she was on a mission: find the best art, buy it, move on to the next gallery.

Terminate . Her parents appreciated it. She’d put together a very nice collection for their various homes.

“I’m fine. Still settling in here,” he told her without addressing the surprisingly robust cell signal on the island.

“I know,” she sighed, as if he’d told her he was almost done with this round of rash medication. “I was thinking of coming to visit.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, Paige,” he protested. “The island isn’t really what you’re used to.”

“Don’t be silly. I used to come there during the summers to visit you.”

“You stayed in my house, which is, uh, under renovation, and the hotels just aren’t up to your—”

“You know, if I didn’t know any better, I would think you were trying to put me off,” Paige said, her pout smacking him in the ear.

Thank goodness, there was a knock at his office door. For a second, he wondered if it was a real knock or a ghost knock. Wasn’t that how ghosts were supposed to communicate in seances?

The knock sounded again.

“I have to go.” Frowning, Collin hung up without another word to Paige and crossed his office to find Clark Graves standing there in his doorway.

Collin tried not to let his distaste show.

He didn’t know what to make of Clark Graves and the way he’d approached Alice on the sidewalk, all possessive and weird.

Alice had been frightened that day. The way she’d reached for Collin—she’d needed help in that moment.

But then she’d shrugged it off. Even now, she was…

skittish. There were times when Collin thought Alice was comfortable around him, but then she’d pull back.

It was like she’d built an impenetrable force field around herself and no one could get through.

Was it an unresolved relationship with Clark? Clark and his stupid handsome face?