Page 2 of The Alpha’s Midnight Witch

I jerk back. The pumpkin slips. Gage catches it without looking.

Naturally.

"Coffee," I mutter. "I need coffee."

"Probably."

I hate how amused he looks. Well... Gage's version of amused. Normal men laugh. Gage's eyebrow shifts a millimeter. I've learned to read him the way sailors read weather.

"Why are you here this early?"

His gaze drifts past my shoulder, into the shop. Every trace of amusement dies.

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Maren."

My name sounds different when he says it. Low. Rough. Annoyingly good.

I cross my arms. "Most neighbors start with good morning."

"Good morning. What happened?"

Persistent bastard.

I glance back. Bell & Bone looks innocent now. Vintage dresses hang under strings of tiny orange lights. Antique jewelry glints in the glass cases. Old books lean against ceramic ghosts, and a six-foot skeleton in a feather boa guards the register. The whole place smells like clove candles and hundred-year-old lace.

Nothing is currently screaming.

But when I unlocked the shop twenty minutes ago, every candle in it was already burning. Thirty-seven. I know because I counted them last night while I snuffed each one out.

No one else has a key.

Then the mirror yelled out my name.

I'm not explaining any of that to Gage. He already thinks I'm strange. Probably. The truth is I have no idea what he thinks of me. Sometimes I catch him watching me from across our yards. Not casually. Intently. Then I look back and he pretends he's studying a tree.

The man is terrible at pretending.

"I dropped something," I say.

"You screamed."

"The mirror screamed."

His entire body goes still. Not startled-still. Hunting-still.

I blink. That got a reaction. Interesting.

He steps into the shop. "You heard a voice screaming?"

"I was kidding."

"No, you weren't."

He heads for the counter. I dart around him and slap both hands over the mirror. "Whoa. Boundaries, Corbett."