Love at First Fright

She’s spent this whole year watching her friends fall in love. She didn’t plan on the tweedy stranger who walked into her shop wanting her haunted mirror.

Birdie O’Hare has a good life and she knows it — an antique shop on Main Street, a folklore master’s she puts to thoroughly unprofessional use, and a big Victorian four-square her parents handed her with full ceremony three years ago. Then she picks up a desilvered walnut mirror at an estate sale in Truckee, a steal because nobody else wanted a looking glass you can’t see yourself in. Two weeks later, a man in a tweed jacket walks into her shop, doesn’t say hello, and offers her four times what she paid for it.

Birdie isn’t selling.

Heath Galloway has been tracking one mirror across three states for seven years, and he carries the proof in a battered leather satchel he handles more carefully than the mirror — four owners and a chain of incidents nobody wants to explain twice. He doesn’t do small talk, and he doesn’t do charm. What he’s never once run into is a woman who can date a frame by its ornamentation, who’s read the folklore he’s only heard secondhand, and who looks at the worst page in his file and smiles, absolutely delighted.

Between a seance her friends agree to with varying degrees of sincerity, a six-hour drive to a Sierra ghost town, a B&B with one room and two beds, and a rectangle of unfaded wallpaper where the mirror hung for forty-one years, Birdie is falling hard for a man who came to Holliday Home for an object and will leave the day he gets it. And Heath isn’t chasing a story. He’s finishing one — someone else’s, left unfinished by a man who didn’t live to end it.

But Heath is the kind of man who protects people by deciding for them…while Birdie has spent three years living in a house she was given, in a life she keeps meaning to choose. By Halloween, one of them is leaving — and she doesn’t get to decide which.

Note to readers: All the books in the Holliday Home series are standalone romances with no cliffhangers.