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Cover Design: Meredith Russell
In a tiny Vermont town, two men are about to discover the joys of falling in love all over again.
Taliesin Wadleigh has lived in Couton-on-the-River for his entire life. Six of those twenty-six years he spent with the first man who had ever captured his heart. Those times were the happiest of his life and then, without warning, his fiancé was taken from him. Physically, at least. Spiritually, Carmichael is still in that whimsical shop with his beloved. Having a charming spirit close at hand to share late night tea with has helped heal Taliesin’s aching heart, and he’s happy spending his days selling antiques to tourists and avoiding the outside world and all those who inhabit it. Or so he tells himself…
Then a tall, handsome stranger walks into his shop and Taliesin, as well as Carmichael, senses that their life—and perhaps their afterlife—is going to change dramatically.
When Eason Dunne retired from professional baseball two years ago, he had plans. Amazing plans. Happy plans. Two years after he hung up his cleats, all those glorious ambitions have fizzled. He’s now divorced and flitting from one project to another, hoping to find…something special. Inheriting an old inn in some one horse—pardon him, one moose—town in Vermont was not at all something special. Lacking anything else of meaning in his life, he makes the trip from Las Vegas to Couton-on-the-River to try his hand at innkeeping. It’s in this little tourist trap that he wanders into the local antiquity shop and meets the eclectic, bespeckled, adorable owner. A man with somewhat offbeat taste in furnishings, a cross-eyed cat, a seemingly haunted radio, and one rather protective ghost.
Eason isn’t sure what to make of the situation or his attraction to the skinny man in the bow tie, but when danger threatens Taliesin, both men who love him are going to have to work together to save him.
Spiritual Whispers is a standalone small-town gay paranormal romance with a lovely age gap, a quirky antique shop owner, a disillusioned retired baseball player, a ghostly protector, a lazy shop cat, lots of tea, the occasional moose, and a happy-ever-after.
It was a handsome thing that radio, shiny veneer, and the dials were all seemingly in good condition. It was probably valuable, so I had to wonder why Taliesin had not sold it. Obviously, his store stock was depleted. Then again, maybe no one had come looking for an old radio. There couldn’t be much demand I wagered, but what did I know about antiques? Nothing. Other than they were expensive and hard to come by. I knelt down by the radio. The cat mewed softly. I tickled his chin, then reached around the back to slowly crank it around. Winston got down with attitude, his tail in the air, angry over being disturbed. I chuckled as he leapt to one of two padded chairs facing the radio and gave me a disgruntled, cross-eyed glare.
“Sorry, old man,” I said, returning to the radio. The tubes in the back were blackened. So this was probably the radio Tally had mentioned he needed parts for. “Bet those are hard to come by,” I whispered while stroking the veneer. The smell of chimney smoke, wet earth, and something long dead lingered here. I wiped at my weeping eyes, stood, spun the radio around, and gave the small grotto one final look. The fabric hat was back on the shelf. I blinked, then rubbed at my watering eyes. A second look confirmed what I had seen. The hat was back on the shelf. But…that wasn’t right. I’d put that silly hat on the table. Hadn’t I? A cold finger of dread ran down my spine and I bolted for the stairs, kicking over hat boxes left and right as I raced from the clothing grotto to the ground floor.
Taliesin came running out, thermos in hand, big green eyes wide behind his thick glasses.
“What happened?! Did you fall? Are you okay?!” he asked in a rush.
I pointed to the small space on the second floor. “I was up there,” I panted, and his gaze flew to the grotto, his lips flattening. “And I…the hat…I had a hat in my hands. The one the cat threw out the door when we kissed and then it was…” I scrubbed at my face. My brain was short-circuiting, just like that old radio. “Okay, so I think I just scared myself shitless.” I laughed nervously.
Tally slowly looked from the grotto to me. “What about the hat?”
“Oh, nothing. I picked it up to look at it, then got intrigued by that old radio, so I tossed the hat to the table. Only I must have just thought I’d tossed it because when I looked at it again, it was back on the shelf next to a black pillbox and a fancy bonnet. Stupid, huh? I was thinking about creepy kids this morning, and that must have been on my mind.”
“You saw a creepy kid in my grotto?!”
“What? No! Nothing creepy up there at all. Nope, just me being a dunderhead and spooking myself. Sorry about the mess.” I blushed all the way to the roots of my hair and then scrambled around to pick up all the hat boxes and put them back where they belonged. Or mostly belonged. They weren’t stacked quite right, but hey I was a jock, not a hat box stacker. “So yeah, there we go. All good!” I said after tidying up my mess. Tally was standing dead still, a thermos dangling from his fingers, his ivy-colored eyes fixated on the room at the top of the stairs. “You okay?”
He started. “Fine, fine! Just shaken a bit. Between your shriek and the tumbling hat boxes I thought you’d seen—”
“Just for future reference, I do not shriek.”
“Sorry. Your scream.”
“I also do not scream. Women scream. Men shout in surprise.”
USA Today Bestselling Author V.L. Locey – Penning LGBT hockey romance that skates into sinful pleasures.
V.L. Locey loves worn jeans, yoga, belly laughs, walking, reading and writing lusty tales, Greek mythology, Torchwood and Dr. Who, the New York Rangers, comic books, and coffee. (Not necessarily in that order.) She shares her life with her husband, her daughter, one dog, two cats, a pair of geese, far too many chickens, and two steers.
When not writing spicy romances, she enjoys spending her day with her menagerie in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania with a cup of fresh java in one hand and a steamy romance novel in the other.
