The Ghost Exterminator (7 page)

Chapter Ten: Tiny Tim, the Slut

Jo stood in the lobby of Karmic Consultants with her arms folded across her chest, one foot tapping irritably as she glared daggers at the little twit who was denying her entrance to Karma’s office.

“I’m s-sorry, Ms. B-b-banks,” the twit stammered, clearly debating whether she should be more terrified of her new boss or the woman standing in front of her threatening bodily harm. “Miss Karma said no interruptions.”

“No interruptions” had never stopped Jo before. The locked door, however, was a little harder to get past.

Jo narrowed her eyes, trying to look as menacing and outright demented as possible, which wasn’t as much of a stretch as it might have been twenty-four hours earlier. “I know you have a key,” she snarled at the ineffectual little secretary.

The twit blanched, visual evidence that she did, in fact, have a key.
Well, that’s unexpected.
Jo hadn’t thought Karma would trust the temporary twit with the keys to the kingdom.

“Jo, perhaps—”

“Shut up, Wyatt. I’ll get you a replacement exterminator in a minute. Right now, I’m disciplining the staff.”

The girl looked like she was about to pass out from fear, but she wasn’t forking over the key. Jo cracked her knuckles, never taking her eyes off the secretary.

Right now, Jo needed to get in to see Karma the same way she had once needed her mommy after a nightmare. There was something wrong with her ghost exterminating mojo, Wyatt’s house was haunted, Wyatt was haunted, and Jo needed Karma to
fix it
. Everything was wrong today.

And no wet-behind-the-ears receptionist on a power trip was going to keep her from the one person in the world who might know what the hell was going on.

Wyatt inserted himself between her and the clerical clone. His broad shoulders completely blocked her view of her target. “Ignore her,” he said calmly—
calmly!
—to the secretary. The bastard.

“Move it or lose it, Haines,” she growled.

He smiled apologetically at the twit before turning to her with a 4.0 Pissed-Off-CEO Richter scale frown in place. “Which way is your office? We can wait for Karma there.”

“My office? What makes you think I have an office?”

“You work here don’t you?”

“What exactly would someone with my job do with a desk? Draw pictures of ghosts on it?”

Wyatt was momentarily stumped by that one and Jo felt a little surge of vicious satisfaction. Until the traitorous temporary twit piped up behind him. “Ms. Banks’s office is the third door on the left, down that hall, sir.”

Jo would have glared at her, but Wyatt was in the way. She glared at him instead. “So I have an office. You have a problem with that?”

He ignored her latest combative snarl, just as he had ignored every other attempt to draw him into a brawl since they had fled the re-haunted Victorian. “Thank you,” Wyatt purred for the secretary, clamping his fingers around Jo’s upper arm and half dragging her down the hall.

She smiled cheerfully at the cubicle inhabitants as they passed, trying not to look like she was being bodily forced toward her office. The accountants and filing clerks who kept the office running smoothly averted their eyes as she passed, which was nothing new, but was particularly annoying this afternoon as Wyatt was there to see it, taking it all in with his Executive X-ray vision.

He herded her into her office as if he owned the place and crowded in behind her until he could shut the door behind them. Jo’s office didn’t exactly qualify as spacious, or even humane. It was microscopic, a glorified storage closet, but it was hers. There was a small desk that she had to squeeze against the wall to get behind, a large, outdated desktop computer, which had been destined for the garbage heap before she rescued it, and a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling.

Wyatt glowered at every corner of the tiny office before lowering himself gingerly down onto the single chair wedged into the space. “I see Karma knows how to treat her prized employees,” he commented dryly, working a 3.2 on the Pissed-Off-CEO Richter scale.

Jo matched him frown for frown. “You have a problem with my office?”

He sighed and leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes. “Stop trying to pick a fight, Jo. I’m too tired to indulge you.”

“
Indulge
me? As if I’m some sort of toddler having a temper tantrum?”

Wyatt groaned, pinched the bridge of his nose, and changed the subject with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. “Why was everyone looking at me so strangely as we walked through the office? Could they all tell that I’m haunted?”

She must have seriously lost her mojo. She couldn’t even rile Wyatt anymore. Jo admitted defeat. All of the fight drained out of her, shoulders slumping as she edged one hip onto her desk. “None of them can see ghosts. And they weren’t staring at you. It was me. How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine,” he growled, glowering in the face of her concern. As she’d seen earlier in his office, Wyatt Haines did not like sympathy. “
What
was you? Did you give them some kind of ‘Help me, this insane businessman is trying to kidnap me’ signal?”

“Sadly, no. It didn’t even occur to me. Nah, they just think I’m a little woo-woo.” She spun one finger in a circle next to her ear in the time-honored gesture for lunatics.

Wyatt’s frown worked up a few notches on the seismograph. “You aren’t crazy,” he stated firmly, then grimaced and quickly amended, “Except for your insistence on believing in ghosts. And the way you pretend to be Goth. And the fact that you have the emotional attention span of a fruit fly. What I mean is, you aren’t dangerously deranged. Your delusions are harmless.”

Just when he seemed to be human, he went and opened his mouth again. Jo rolled her eyes. “Golly, Wyatt, you do say the sweetest things.”

“You know what I mean,” he growled impatiently. “You’re weird, not psychotic.”

“A crucial distinction that many people fail to make.” Jo stood and waved back toward the front of the office. “Take that secretary, for example.”

Wyatt crossed his arms across his chest, the fabric of his suit jacket pulling tight against his biceps. “What about her?”

Jo yanked her attention away from his manly biceps.
How did a professional pencil pusher get manly biceps?
“She’ll be gone within a week and it won’t be anything Karma does or anything any of the consultants does that sends her screaming into the hills. She’ll fall victim to her own imagination, decide that Karmic Consultants is not the professional organization it appears to be, but rather this terrifying freak show, and
poof
. No more secretary.”

He arched his brows skeptically. “And you’re basing this on…?”

“Years of experience, baby. Karma hasn’t kept a secretary for more than a week in all the time I’ve been with Karmic Consultants. For a while, she hired them herself, but all of the people applying for the front desk position were either wannabe psychics with no marketable skills or supernatural groupies who thought working for KC would be one exciting paranormal catastrophe after another. As soon as they realized that a) they were not going to suddenly be promoted to exorcist or aura reader and b) this is just a regular business offering somewhat unusual specialized services, they lost interest and took off. We were too normal for them. Go figure.”

As she spoke, Jo tugged her ponytail loose and finger-combed her hair. “So Karma started using a human resources agency, but knowing how fast someone can type does not tell you what their personal threshold for weird is. The normal temps are fine until they figure out exactly what kind of company they’re working for, or rather what kind of freaks they’re working for. Then they’re off like a shot. Sometimes they last a little longer, but usually those are just the ones who think we’re faking it. Then they realize we’re for real and
hasta la vista
secretary.”

She yanked her hair back into a tight ponytail, expertly flipping the elastic around it. “Karma could just offer to overpay ridiculously for the receptionist position like she does for all the other normal office jobs—it’s amazing what people will ignore for money—but the rotating secretaries have become something of a joke at KC. That, and it doesn’t hurt to be reminded every now and again that we aren’t normal. The secretaries are good for that.”

Wyatt leaned forward in the chair, bracing his forearms on his knees. “Is that why you come in here? Why you have an office? So you can be reminded that you don’t fit in?”

Jo smiled. “Believe it or not, you couldn’t be more wrong, buddy. I don’t come in here because I want to feel like a freak. I come in here to try to feel normal.”

“But you just said—”

“The pencil-pushers think I’m nuts, yeah, but it isn’t about what they think, it’s about what I do. I commute to work. I have an office and a desk. I check my emails and get coffee from the break room. I do normal stuff. So even if they avoid me like a leper, at least I’m still behaving normally. I don’t come in for them. I do it for me.”

“And the office?”

Jo shrugged. “Karma let me convert one of the storage closets. It didn’t cost KC much and it kept me happy.”

“Do the other consultants have offices?”

“Not a one,” she replied brightly. “I’m special.”

“I can’t argue with that.” His mouth twisted. It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was close.

Jo felt herself unintentionally smiling in response. “None of us really need offices. I certainly don’t need mine, but it gives Karma someplace to drop the dossiers she prepares on the clients that I never bother to read.”

Wyatt’s eyebrows flew upward. “I suppose you have a dossier on me?”

Jo snorted. “Who needs a dossier? I had you pegged the moment I laid eyes on you. Uptight, upwardly-mobile, stick so far up your ass it must interfere with your internal organs, and guaranteed to think I’m a fake, a fraud, a freak or all of the above. Wyatt Haines, in a nutshell.”

Wyatt gave a short bark of laughter. “Don’t hold back, Jo. Tell me how you really feel.”

“My God, he laughs!” Jo feigned a swoon. “I didn’t think you were capable.”

“I care about my business so I’m not capable of laughter?” Wyatt demanded, a frown starting to menace his otherwise pleasant features.

Jo pulled a face. “You frown more than any person I’ve ever met in my life, Wyatt Haines. It has nothing to do with what you do and everything with who you’ve made yourself into.”

He frowned. 4.2. “And who have I made myself into?”

“Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“Does that make you the ghost of old Marley?”

Jo laughed. “Nah. I’m Tiny Tim. God bless us everyone, and all that crap.”

Wyatt blatantly eyed her chest, where the Girls were barely contained beneath her tight T-shirt. “Oh yeah, you’re tiny all right.”

Jo had never been the type to blush and she wasn’t about to start now. “Why, Wyatt,” she purred. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

“So I’m blind as well as incapable of laughter?” He cleared his throat roughly. “I continue to be flattered by your glowing opinion of me.”

“You aren’t the one glowing. That’s the ghosts hiding in your chest.”

“So they’ve moved to my chest, have they?”

She let her eyes take a leisurely trip over his gorgeous body. “Is there some other location you’d rather they camp out?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Anywhere else besides inside me.”

“Is it really so awful being a ghost host? I’ve always kind of wondered what it would feel like to have someone else inside me.”

She hadn’t meant it to sound dirty. Really she hadn’t. She didn’t even realize her words could have a wicked interpretation until his eyes lit darkly, the blue as hot as the flame from an acetylene torch.
Oh, baby. Come to mama.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said hurriedly.

He laughed, a low, husky rasp of sound. “Didn’t you?”

That laugh was going to be her downfall. She couldn’t be interested in him. She just couldn’t! He thought she was nuts, for crying out loud. But when he wasn’t glowering down on her like a disappointed deity of propriety, he could actually be remarkably charming. And there was no point in denying the physical attraction between them. The man was gorgeous, no two ways about that, and her hormones had been singing the
Hallelujah
chorus since the moment she set eyes on him. As far as Jo was concerned, that was all the more reason to stay away from him.

Unfortunately, there was only so far she could go within the confines of her tiny office and she was stuck with him until she could foist him off on another ghost exterminator whose mojo wasn’t on the fritz.

Dammit. Her mojo couldn’t be gone. It just couldn’t.

Jo began to pace—one step forward, one step back—as much as she could in her miniscule office.

“Jo? You okay?”

“I don’t know what went wrong,” she said, fighting down hysteria again. “My mojo has never failed me before. It’s who I
am
—” Her voice broke on the last word and she shook her head sharply. She was
not
going to cry in front of awful, judgmental, occasionally charming Wyatt Haines.