“Abercorn?”
“That’s the spot! Three o’clock today!”
I spun around to check the clock on my sister’s oven. It was almost nine in the morning. But business wasn’t exactly booming these days. The next gig I had was next Saturday evening at the Universalist church, and they paid me in pasta salad. And yet, I didn’t want to seem too eager. If there was one thing I’d learned as a small business owner, it was that gasping Oh thank God! didn’t exactly bring the clients flocking. “Let me see, hang on one second . . .” I meandered around the kitchen, twirling on the tiles on my tiptoes and then straightening my sister’s shopping list on the fridge. I put some bottles on the drying rack and wiped something sticky off the counter and then tried to get it off my finger. “Umm, let’s . . . oh, you know, you’re in luck! I just had this afternoon open up!”
Ivan tossed my yarn aside and pulled himself up alongside the coffee table. He smacked the tabletop with his hand, making na-na-na noises as he drummed on the magazines. I hustled over to help him before he made a mess of my sister’s People magazine. Hell hath no fury like Daisy when she found a photo of Jamie Dornan ripped in half. “I’ll be there. Thank you!”
“Fab. Bring your equipment. I’ll pay you double your rate to help my guy film his pilot. Just the one episode. One and done. How’s that suit you?”
What I said, in my head, was, Double. My. Rate? But I played it cool and calm and small-businessy. “That’ll be fine, Mr. Markowitz. I really appreciate your generosity. I can promise that the audio will be—”
Ivan smacked the remote, and the television turned on with a staticky click. And there, staring back at me from my sister’s television screen, was a man who looked an awful lot like Gabe.
He was shirtless. His skin was dewy with sweat, tanned and delicious. He was in a jungle, gesturing at something behind him. The camera bobbled as he turned to look over his shoulder, revealing a dark and sexy tattoo on his back. He held the camera out farther from his body, and I saw a row of muscular, rock-solid abs and a broad and rippling chest. Then he smiled.
And I gasped.
It was him. Even in the half-light last night, I’d seen that smile. I’d never forget that smile.
Though the volume was down low, it was just loud enough for me to hear him say, “I start our search for the mysterious Zambian swamp creature, known as the ‘boat breaker’ or the kongamato, right now on . . .”
An opening montage filled the screen, accompanied by a theme song that was manly and heavy on the electric guitar riffs. On the screen flashed Gabe, talking to the camera, in his swim trunks. There was Gabe, running through the snow, the snowflakes accentuating the salt and pepper in his sideburns. Gabe, eating something that looked like a roasted quail next to a campfire. There was Gabe bailing out a canoe in the dark. The image faded to black; the music kicked up a notch. Then there it was. Confirmation. He didn’t just look like he belonged on television. He was actually on television.
THE POWERS OF SUGGESTION
WITH GABE POWERS
“Mr. Markowitz.” I stared at the screen. How was I going to work with that man? I could barely keep the drool inside my mouth. Gabe leaped off a dock into a pristine African lake, and I bit my knuckle. He resurfaced, sparkling with water and beaming. “I think we might have a problem . . .” I gaped at the rather spectacular bulge in his swim trunks. “A big problem.”
“Three p.m., Ms. Jameson! Corner of Abercorn and Hull!”
3
GABE
The crawl space under the porch of my Airbnb was full of dusty old pool noodles, busted sprinklers, and an incomplete troop of faded Christmas gnomes, the remaining members of which each held a letter to spell ERRY CHRI M !
With the right light and the right filter, the house would look spooky as hell. In reality, it was actually stunningly beautiful. It was called the Willows, and it had a minor entry in two of the ghost-hunting books I’d used to gather information on Savannah. Built in 1802, it was three stories—six bedrooms and four baths. There was a big wraparound porch, a knocker in the shape of a horseshoe, and a garden thick with vines and flowers. In addition to being an Airbnb, it was also for sale. That morning as I drank my coffee, I’d looked it up on Zillow and checked out the real estate brochure in the front hallway. Original woodwork, new roof, updated wiring and heating and cooling systems. Modern conveniences with historic charm. It was, in fact, just the sort of house I would have loved to own . . . if I were a different dude with a different job and a whole different life completely.
But I wasn’t a different dude. I was a television host sweating my balls off in Georgia in July. And I had a pilot to film.
I army-crawled between the noodles and the gnomes and turned on the camera that was attached to my helmet. My face in the camera’s flip screen confirmed what I’d known already—the frozen veggies had helped with the pain, but I still looked pretty messed up. My nose was swollen, and there was a cut across the side. On the upside, I didn’t have a black eye, I could still smell, and Markowitz had made it plenty clear that the rough-and-tumble angle played pretty well with the twenty-four-to-thirty-six-year-old female demographic. Normally, demographic data was background noise to me. But now, the sweetheart demographic had a face.
Lily.
Even now I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Or the way her shorts fit her. Or the way her cleavage had looked under her hand when she’d pressed it to her chest.
But I snapped out of my Lily daydream and refocused on the camera. I hit record, made sure I didn’t have anything between my teeth, and then counted back from three. And action.
“I’m coming at you from underneath a house on Abercorn, known as the most haunted street in Savannah. Records indicate that this house was built in 1802 by a local developer named William Jeremiah Beaumont. Apparently, he and his wife spent every afternoon on the porch drinking lemonade and holding hands. The legend is that they’re still there.” I panned up to the floorboards above me, with rays of sunlight streaming in between the planks. “Just going to have a poke around down here to make sure that all this can’t be explained by something logical, like a family of raccoons or some issue with the gas meter.”
I planted my elbows and wriggled forward on my stomach, adjusting my camera on my helmet. It was then that I heard a car door swing shut. It sounded nearby. Mailman, probably. But then I heard footsteps coming up the walkway. I lifted my head to see through the diamond gaps in the lattice, and there she was. In a cute half sundress, half jumper printed with tiny flowers. The sweetheart demographic herself.
Lily.
But just hang on a second. Lily?
Her light and peppy footsteps moved up the porch steps, and she headed for the front door. She rapped a few times on the glass window, a soft but confident knock.
I crawled forward a few feet to get a better look at her as she stood there waiting. Between the slats I saw a smooth calf, a soft thigh. And a little bit of her underwear. Her shorts were loose enough and her stance was just wide enough for me to see them: bright yellow with white polka dots.
Fuuuuuck.
She lifted up onto her tiptoes to reach the knocker on the front door. As she did, the summer wind kicked up and showed me the spot where her ass made a ball-busting crease with her thighs.
Double fuuuuuuck.
But what the hell was I going to do now? Do my best Barry White impression and hit her with, Hey, baby, right here below you, looking up your shorts.
Nice, Powers. Real nice. Man of the year right there.
I stopped filming and stayed low. It had worked with the lumberjack yeti trespassing thing, and it might work here. Maybe she’d head back to her van and I could crawl my way out of gnomeland without seeming like a Peeping Tom.
But she didn’t go back to her van. Instead, she sat on the porch swing, directly above me. Her thighs pressed against the wooden slats, and her shorts rode up enough to make me almost groan out loud. She was fucking delicious. And
I wanted to nibble every damned inch of her.
She pulled her phone from her bag. The sounds of her typing were barely audible, a faint click-click-click above the breeze, followed by the airplane sound effect of a message being sent.
One second later my phone chirped in my pocket. As I shot my hand out to silence it, my elbow clipped the first of the gnomes. Which knocked over the second. Which knocked over the third. Pretty soon the whole goddamned line of the little bastards was toppling over and rolling around, with jingle bells jangling and toy drums banging.
Overhead, Lily leaped off the swing with a thump. “Who’s down there? I’ve got my pepper spray! You’ve been warned!” She dropped to her knees and peered through the knothole in the slats.
Goddamn it. “It’s me, Gabe.” I unclipped the chin strap of my filming helmet. “Just doing some light crawl-space investigation.”
She blinked once and stared at me. Then she hit me with that smile. “Hi.”
I pulled off my helmet. The thing was incredibly useful, but it had the slight disadvantage of making me look like both a geek and a storm trooper. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“You first,” she said. “Lemme guess. Going spelunking?”
I was going to have to tell her something. I was under a porch with a camera on an articulating arm bolted to my helmet. Just hanging out wasn’t gonna cut it. “Yeah, so. I’m actually . . .” See, I hated this part. As far as I could tell, there was no way to explain what I did without sounding like a total prick. “I’m actually on television. I have a television show.”
It didn’t seem to faze her at all. “I know. I was teasing about the spelunking.” She pinned her tongue between her teeth as she smiled. “I happened to stumble upon your show for the first time this morning. You were in Zambia hunting for the kongamato lizard thingy. You look really nice in swim trunks.”
Awww, fuck yeah. I might not love being recognized, but this was different. That new desire in her eyes? Gimme. Some. Of. That. Sugar. “Glad you think so.”
“And I really liked your show. Which is good because, apparently, I’m your new audio tech.”
Markowitz! Asshole! But it was no mystery to me what he’d done—it was his standard MO. He’d googled “audio engineers in Savannah” and clicked on the top result. That was how he always did his research. She probably had like four hundred five-star reviews with everybody saying, “We love Lily!”
Totally understandable.
Lily pressed her eye closer to the hole in the floorboards. “Your nose looks pretty good! I brought you some arnica cream. And some sweet tea. Have you had sweet tea yet?”
Like she’d doused me with a bucket of water, my Markowitz annoyance subsided. Her smile made me smile. If that was what help looked like, it might be exactly what I needed. “Not yet.”
“Then you’re in for a treat.”
She was goddamned right about that.
4
LILY
Gabe crawled out from under the porch, dusting himself off as he walked up the wooden steps. I handed him the tea I’d gotten for him on the way over—I’d hemmed and hawed over flavored or plain before finally taking a gamble on him liking peach. Instead of drinking it from the straw, he popped the lid off and took a few greedy gulps.
The ice in the plastic cup clattered as he wiped his mouth on his forearm. In a few seconds, he’d gulped down what took me half a morning to drink. “Fuck, that’s good,” he said.
But as he said it, his eyes moved all over me, making it abundantly clear that he wasn’t actually talking about the tea.
Everything got a bit swirly when I looked straight at him. Like when I got off the teacup ride at the fair with Ivan. I hooked my arm around one of the porch posts and hung on tight.
“So,” I said, gripping the wood and clutching my tea to my chest, feeling the sweaty coolness of the condensation against my skin, “you’re staying here? And filming here?” I glanced up at the porch ceiling, painted baby blue in the old-fashioned way. When I looked back at him, I found he’d been staring right at me the whole time. My knees felt a bit wobbly, so I gripped the post a little tighter and wedged my tush up against the railing.
“That’s the idea.” He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a key, and opened the front door. “After you, beautiful.”
I stepped underneath his rippling outstretched arm into the foyer. I was met with a wave of cool air-conditioning and a faint whiff of furniture polish. The house was even prettier inside than it was outside. Dark, shiny woodwork was offset with immaculate paint in elegant colors that nobody used anymore—mauve and chartreuse and olive green. Sitting on the side table in the foyer was a sales brochure with photos of the house. I peeked inside and saw an eye-popping row of zeros. It wasn’t just expensive. It was a fairy tale. And standing there in the reflection of the foyer mirror was this fairy tale’s rugged, dashing prince. He checked something on his phone, and the muscles of his jaw fluttered.
What was happening to me? I was getting all hot and bothered over jaw muscles? I blamed the fact that I’d been binge-watching him all morning. The Powers of Suggestion wasn’t just sexy and exciting, it was also playfully cheeky, and it let me get a delightful glimpse at Gabe’s personality. He didn’t take himself too seriously and always investigated the mystery du jour with a respectful curiosity. He never exploited anybody’s fear or superstition but tackled everything with an almost boyish zest. Cutie patooootie. It wasn’t my fault that my hormones were shooting through me like an exploding cartoon thermometer.
It took real strength to stop myself from staring at him, but for the sake of not being a total weirdo, I managed to turn my attention to a ring of old skeleton keys hanging on the newel post. It weighed about five pounds, and it had a small silver tag engraved with the words The Willows.
The house had a name. I’d always loved the idea of a house with a name.
“This place is incredible,” I said, admiring the way the staircase curved and wound up the floors. The steps and landings made a concentric series of rectangles with a sparkling chandelier in the center, suspended from the ceiling of the top floor.
“Right? Sitting right there on Airbnb.” He was close enough for me to feel the heat and warmth of his body and to smell some sort of sexy musky something. Maybe cologne, or maybe a dash of hair product. I looked at his thick dark hair for any sign of gel. I didn’t see any. But really, I’d have to touch it to know. Lord.
Oblivious to my lusty thoughts about his hair-care regimen, he went on. “I found it mentioned in a few books when I was doing research. I couldn’t hit book trip fast enough.” He glanced at me. “I can’t imagine owning a house like this. When I was growing up, my dad was in the army and we moved a ton. One cinder-block ranch house after another. This place is like a palace.”
I nodded slowly, watching him like I’d watched him on television. When I was watching his reruns, I’d been mesmerized thinking of him doing ordinary things—bringing his effortless sexiness to grocery shopping, and making scrambled eggs, and taking out the recycling. I’ll bet he’s a very conscientious recycler. Now that same thing was happening again except in reverse—what I was actually seeing fuzzed into a sexy daydream. Army had apparently been the keyword. I envisioned him in fatigues being brave and dashing. Shirtless—definitely shirtless. Hello, soldier!
Clearing my throat, I hooked the keys back over the post. I looked at Gabe again but this time zeroed in on what I imagined was the only imperfection on his entire body. The cut across the nose that I’d given him. Nice. Leave it to me to deface a masterpiece! Maybe later that afternoon I could pop over to the Telfair museum and dump nail polish all over the Bird Girl statue.
I dug the tube of arnica cream out of my purse and unscrewed the cap. I put a little dollop on my fingertip, got up on my tiptoes, and gently dabbed it on the bruise and the small cut. He watched me the whole time. Never winced, never grimaced. Just focused right on me with those deep-brown eyes of his. The
re was an expression I’d read about in my smutty romances. Bedroom eyes. I’d never known what that meant . . .
Until now.
He was so intense about the very act of staring at me that I didn’t even know what to say. So I just smiled awkwardly at him, feeling like my lips were sticking to my teeth. I rubbed the extra arnica into my hand and managed to whisper, “That should help.”
“Feels better already.” For a few seconds, we stayed locked in stop-motion. This time he turned away first and raked his hand through his hair. It was exactly what he’d done when he’d popped out of the lake in Africa. I’d freeze-framed that moment more times that I cared to admit. Same smile and everything. His shirt pulled tight over his biceps, and I realized that if he moved his hand a little bit farther, I might get a glimpse of the muscles. I didn’t know what they were actually called, but I knew he had them. The muscles. The man muscles. The V muscles. With veins!
The thought of them made me groan. Out loud. A sound that I think I’d only ever come close to making when I licked cake batter directly from the beater.
“What was that?” He cocked his head slightly, smiling. “Was that you?”
My cheeks went from hot to on fire. I was about point-five seconds from tumbling into his arms or tackling him on the steps as I roared, Not all Southern girls are polite! But instead, I clasped my hands, clenched my thighs, and squeaked, “Ghosts. Had to be the ghosts.”
He followed me around as I wired up the house, wearing my rolls of gaffer’s tape on his forearm. We put mics and recording devices in each room so that no sound would go uncaptured. He carried my ladder like it weighed nothing at all and never griped when we had to move it a few feet this way, or that way, or back again. But the thing with the tape was what was really getting to me. It meant that every time I needed a piece, I had to get really close. Close enough to be within grabbing distance, which made me want grab his fashionably wrinkled black linen shirt in my fists and send his buttons pinging all over the . . .
Do You Feel It Too? Page 3