The Ghost Exterminator by Vivi Andrews

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