Silver at Midnight: A Paranormal Romance Urban Fantasy (The Keepers of Knowledge Series Book 5) by Bridgette O'Hare (best large ereader .TXT) 📕

floor. Judging from the outside of the building, and the height of the vaulted ceilings, there were three floors to The Black Cat Café. Naturally, I wondered what might be found at the top of that stairwell.

There was no one behind the bar, so I meandered around the café’s interior perimeter, taking in the artfully lit photographs flanking the walls. Each one nearly disappeared into the black-painted ceiling, giving the illusion they were larger than they actually were. Still, the photographs alone were easily three feet in height. Breathtaking panoramas of snow-covered mountaintops, sunset over a vineyard in Italy, and The Great Wall of China lined the wall opposite the bar.

I stopped several paces before reaching the table with the Witches, but my gaze continued to follow a sequence of photographs that transitioned from raging rivers caught in mid-splash to a brilliantly colored flock of macaws in the Peruvian rainforest and ending just short of the bar with a silhouetted photo of a surfer standing against a glorious sunset on a tropical beach. The photo held my attention until a deep voice broke the silence and resonated through me. Something about it caused my very soul to tremble and sent a shiver across my skin. I didn’t like it.

“Mesmerizing, isn’t it?” he said from only a few feet away.

I turned slowly. The unexpected tremble had left me feeling a bit cautious. What I found was not at all what I expected—not that I knew what to expect. However, I had certainly not expected to see dark hair just long enough to sweep carelessly over a pair of ocean blue eyes with eyelashes any woman would kill to have.

My gaze instinctually gravitated down to his broad shoulders and chest. Yup. That was definitely a Hemsworth in a Marvel movie physique beneath his fitted gray Henley. Almost as soon as my eyes had deviated, I snapped my stare back to his face only to find the corner of his lips had risen slightly in a smug grin. I quickly diverted my attention to his right eye, searching for definitive proof that I was face to face with Libby’s Super Attractive Guy. Only, his sweeping hair was sweeping just a little too low for me to be certain.

“Can I get ya somethin’, miss?” he asked with a smirk. His slight Irish inflection caught me off guard.

I tried to pull in a deep breath as slowly as I could manage without it becoming obvious I was attempting to settle my nerves. Super Attractive Guy—if he was, in fact, the same Super Attractive Guy Libby had encountered—had me on edge, for a variety of reasons. One being that this man was Irish, and Libby had said my clandestine visitor had definitely not been Irish. Without the proof of his jagged scar, I was staring at one crazy ridiculous coincidence. The second reason being that this man, Super Attractive Guy 2.0, had a strange effect on me, and I was not a fan. No one had ever been able to shake me to my core, but there I was . . . shaken, and feeling the effects every time he uttered a sentence.

“Umm . . . yeah. Sorry. Ya just remind me of someone,” I said, trying to play off my inability to interact normally.

He snickered. “Well, I hope that someone isn’t on your cac list.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at his use of Kara’s favorite Irish term. It made me think of the first time I’d used cac in front of her and had to explain it. She proceeded to substitute it in every saying she could think of—no cac, you’ve got to be cac’in me, cac happens, and my personal favorite . . . cac just got real.

“I’m still decidin’,” I said.

“Fair enough. So, since you’re new to town, would ya like t’ see a menu? Maybe have a seat while you’re here?” he tacked on with a hint of sarcasm and nodded to the barstool directly in front of his post behind the bar.

I stepped over to one of the high back bar stools and settled in. “What makes ya so sure I’m new?” I challenged.

Another snicker was followed by, “We’re not exactly in a metropolis, ya know. If new people are comin’ in t’ town, everybody knows about it.”

“Aye, that’s fair.”

“Besides, you’d be hard to miss,” he added, and our eyes locked for a rather intense moment.

All at once I couldn’t swallow, and I had to force myself to take a breath. I fought the flush that threatened my cheeks, and when the tension grew too thick, I changed the subject.

“So, about that menu?” I asked.

That was something new for me—not knowing how to respond.

“Sure thing,” he said, and within seconds he was sliding one across the bar.

“Also, I was told to ask for Cian and some kind of Columbian Special.” I tried to make small talk, hoping to both settle the uneasiness prickling around inside me and learn something that might help me understand why I wasn’t getting a solid read on this guy.

One of the powers Grams had taught me to keep to myself—at all costs—was my ability to look into someone’s soul and see them for who they truly are. If a person’s intentions are pure, there is a lightness within them. Even if they don’t always do the right thing, even if they screw up royally, at their core they still had noble intentions. Those with dark souls never had virtuous objectives. More often than not, that distinction is not obvious from the outside looking on. The dark souls are the ones who would blow sunshine and roses your way all while their ultimate goal was to stab you in the back when the opportunity arose and take whatever it was they wanted. Then there’s what I have come to call gray souls; they teeter on the fence depending on the situations they are facing and the influences in their lives. I’ve seen some slip into the darkness