Emily Greenwood by A Little Night Mischief

her father spent so many nights reading quietly together in this place? The room was practically a closet.
    “Of course you would be right, Miss Wilcox, if I were talking about anything but a visit from the very same Lovely Annabelle that you described to me not a few hours earlier.”
    “No!” she said in what she hoped was a shocked tone. With James Collington standing so near, looking down at her with those lights in his eyes, she was not at all sure what she was doing or how she sounded. He was doing it again, working his charm on her as he had in the balcony.
    Inching backward away from him, she came up against the sitting room wall. He followed her and rested his bent arm against a built-in shelf near her head, managing to look relaxed and menacing at the same time as he stood at the outside edge of a polite distance from her. Though she needed more space between them, she would not give him the satisfaction of watching her slink back.
    She tipped her chin up and found his dark brown eyes focused intently on her. Was she blushing? Her face, and especially her lips, felt hot. Stop this , she wanted to yell at her body.
    “Yes!” he said. “Astonishing, isn’t it? Why, you had just mentioned her at dinner, and then she appeared.”
    “Well, um,” she said. Her voice came out irritatingly breathy, and she cleared her throat. “She perhaps heard us talking about her at dinner. Or maybe she’s been lonely. No one has slept in Tethering Hall since your nasty letter arrived.”
    One of his eyebrows arched. Really, the man looked astonishingly devilish at times, with his dark hair and eyebrows and those shrewd eyes. Was he suspicious? Nothing about him at the moment looked like someone who fooled easily.
    “Must be a lonely life, being a ghost in a house when no one is living there,” he said.
    “Yes, that’s the point, isn’t it?” She was glad to get back to the subject. They were talking about Lovely Annabelle, but there was a separate current flowing under their conversation that she needed to squash. “Ghosts are lonely and unhappy. Things haven’t worked out well for them. They want other people to suffer too.”
    He chuckled, a rich, canny sound. “So that was why she was moaning outside my bedroom door and rattling the doorknob.”
    “Well, it must be, mustn’t it?” She forced herself to focus, to forget about the exciting feelings his nearness was causing. This was a chance to push home her reason for the haunting. “You know, Mr. Collington, Lovely Annabelle never moaned and rattled my doorknob.”
    “She didn’t?”
    “No. I only ever saw her sitting in the chair in my room. Sometimes she sang me a little song, then she would sort of disappear.”
    “A little song? How sweet.”
    Sweet? Heavens, but the man was hiding his fear well. For a panicked moment she wondered if she could have made a mistake in what she overheard. But no, James’s servant had clearly been talking about his master.
    “Yes, well, the point is that she liked me being there and she doesn’t like you being there. I would not call moaning a sign of welcome.”
    “Some people would.”
    Her face flamed at his words and his sultry tone. She pressed her lips together primly, crushing their warm eagerness.
    His eyes narrowed. “Well, since you seem to be on such friendly terms with her, you may give her a message from me.”
    “Oh?” He wanted her to give the ghost a message?
    “Yes.” He drilled her with an intense gaze. “Tell her that, charming though she is, I will tolerate no more visits from her.”
    “And just how do you think I might relay this message?”
    He shrugged. “If she’s sung you songs in the past, I have little doubt that you’ll find a way to get in touch with her.”
    She was bewildered. Mr. Collington seemed so different from what she would have expected of someone in mortal fear of ghosts. But he must be accustomed to masking his terror, and he was doing so now, very effectively, with