Ghosts of Southampton
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The Hockey Prince's Secret Ice Queen
All I wanted was to find a computer genius to process the non-linear dynamic equations for my ecological model. Instead, I found myself cornered by Julian Andrews, the university's hockey prince, trading a public, staged kiss for his academic support. To finalize our "deal," I was dragged to the campus ice rink. The cheerleaders and puck bunnies immediately swarmed him, mocking my plain clothes and treating me like a pathetic joke. Brooke, the head cheerleader, even set up a figure skating competition with a date with Julian as the grand prize. She performed a basic spin, blew him a kiss, and smugly waited for me to fall flat on my face and humiliate myself. His hockey teammates laughed from the sidelines, watching me try to support Julian as he stumbled around the ice like a newborn giraffe. But as I held his warm hand to keep him from falling, I couldn't help but feel something was terribly wrong. Why was a top-tier athlete faking such awful balance? And why did his ice-blue eyes stare at me with such knowing anticipation, as if he already knew about the professional figure skating past I had spent years trying to bury? "Just let go and skate." He whispered, slowly releasing my hand. I took a deep breath, glided to the center of the rink, and landed a flawless double Axel. As the entire rink fell into a dead, shocked silence, I realized I had just exposed not only my own hidden past, but also the biggest secret of the campus god.
Chapter 1 No.1
Sage POV:
"Let me kiss you."
The request was a low, hurried murmur—warm, quiet, and laced with the faintest edge of mortification.
Stunned, I snapped my head up toward the sound.
Julian Andrews filled my vision. He easily towered a head over me, his lean, athletic frame silhouetted against the bright morning glare, casting a long shadow across the cobblestones. Briar University's star forward. Team captain. The athletic department's untouchable golden boy.
Campus rumor had it that Julian was notoriously indifferent, never sparing anyone a second glance.
Behind him, a solid wall of navy-and-gold varsity jackets blocked the brick path. His teammates were whistling, shoving each other, and effectively cutting off my only exit.
The sudden commotion immediately bottlenecked the morning foot traffic. Whispers rippled through the crowd, and within seconds, a dozen students reached into their pockets out of sheer muscle memory, black camera lenses catching the light as they aimed squarely at us.
Julian's sharp eyes tracked the movement, his jaw tightening into a hard, irritated line.
Before I could take a single defensive step back, he closed the distance between us. Leaning down into my space, his broad shoulders shifted in a subtle, fluid maneuver—throwing up an impenetrable physical wall that completely shielded my face from the intrusive glare of the cameras.
His sharp, striking face hovered breathtakingly close. His deep baritone brushed against my ear, lost to the autumn wind, meant for me alone:
"Sorry to drop this on you," he whispered, his pale blue eyes disarmingly earnest, holding a quiet heat that sent a tremor straight down my spine. "The guys backed me into a locker-room dare... but I'm not here to use you as a joke. We can fake it. Angle it so it looks real—whatever you're comfortable with. Just help me get them off my back, and I owe you one."
It was only then that my brain finally rebooted.
What on earth? He's actually trying to kiss me?
A sharp flare of pure absurdity hit me, and my gaze dropped to my reflection in the dark glass door of the adjacent building: an oversized, faded gray hoodie that swallowed my frame whole, soft, thin jeans worn at the knees, bare-faced dark circles carved beneath my eyes from forty-eight hours of non-stop coding, my dark hair hastily twisted into a cheap plastic claw clip, and a pair of oversized, thick black-rimmed glasses sitting heavy on the bridge of my nose, completely hiding my face.
I looked like a refugee from an all-night disaster. How had Briar's golden prince ended up in front of me?
When I looked back up, my breath trapped in my throat anyway. He was too close, his clean scent of winter mint and cedar wrapping around my senses. Having those pale blue eyes staring straight down at me made my chest tighten in a way I really didn't want to acknowledge.
"Clock's ticking, Cap!" Landon howled from the sidelines, hands cupped around his mouth as the rest of the players lost their minds laughing. "Plant one on her, or enjoy the five-AM bag skate!"
A raucous chorus of barks and chest-thumping went up from the team.
A few yards away, two girls heading toward the dining hall froze in their tracks, pointing their phones.
"Wait, who the hell is that?" one of them laughed loudly, zooming her camera in on my face. "She looks like she just crawled out of a dumpster. There's no way Julian's actually kissing her. Post it on Sidechat right now—this is going straight to number one."
The cruel words hit like a splash of ice water, snapping me out of my daze and instantly killing the stupid flutter in my chest.
I hated the attention.
Four years ago, after my family and my former training partner framed me and destroyed my competitive skating career, I swore I would never be public entertainment again. I buried my name, switched majors, and hid behind oversized fleece and thick glasses just to live an invisible life. If I ended up on the campus forums with Julian Andrews, the internet vultures would dox me before noon—and drag up the toxic scandal I had bled to walk away from.
My research was already on the verge of falling apart. I didn't have time for this circus.
I locked my grip around my heavy binders, my knuckles straining white.
"Find someone else for your dare, Andrews," I said coldly, taking a step back to put distance between us, my voice tight with adrenaline. "I'm not interested in being part of your game. Move."
I kept my head down, attempting to brush past him.
"You're Sage Kelley, right?"
The sound of my name brought my boots to an immediate halt.
I blinked up at him, caught completely off guard.
"Professor Beaumont's senior research student," Julian straightened up slightly, his cadence measured and even, carrying an intellectual sharpness that seemed impossible beneath a varsity jacket. "I saw your Havenwood Creek senior capstone proposal sitting on his desk over Sunday dinner."
My heart gave a hard, hollow thud. Professor Beaumont was my academic advisor—and the guardian of the final research endowment my late father had left behind.
Julian leaned in slightly, his voice dropping to a near-whisper against the whistle of the wind. "I spent an hour going over your codebase."
My lips parted. "You... read my proposal?"
"Your simulation keeps crashing because your core fluid algorithm strategy is flawed," Julian murmured, his pale blue eyes deadly sharp. "And Uncle Des mentioned that if you don't deliver a working version by this Friday, the department is pulling your grant—which means you don't clear your senior thesis, and you don't graduate in May."
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Friday was the deadline. If the funding was pulled, the project died, my senior capstone failed, and I would be forced to stay another semester without my degree. Worse, my father's final ecological legacy would be reduced to scrap paper.
I had been panicking over that exact deadline for two days straight, and Julian had just laid it out like it was nothing.
Worse, I couldn't even brush him off. I had heard the rumors about Beaumont's nephew—the CS prodigy everyone in the department talked about. I just had never realized it was him.
"I know how to fix your algorithm," Julian stated plainly, laying his cards on the table, his gaze locking onto mine with an unshakeable, quiet certainty. "Help me get through this bet. In return, I'll rewrite your boundary calculations tonight. Deal?"
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Tales of Men and Ghosts
Down his spine he felt the man's injured stare. Mr. Granice had always been so mild-spoken to his people -- no doubt the odd change in his manner had already been noticed and discussed below stairs. And very likely they suspected the cause. He stood drumming on the writing-table till he heard the se
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Animal Ghosts
In opening this volume on Animals and their associations with the unknown, I will commence with a case of hauntings in the Old Manor House, at Oxenby.My informant was a Mrs. Hartnoll, whom I can see in my mind's eye, as distinctly as if I were looking at her now. Hers was a personality that no lapse
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Chasing Ghosts
Tala Gonzalo was a werewolf, and a single mother. Her daughter, Ava, had never met her father. This is the story of how Tala ended up in the city, raising a child alone. In college, Tala was in love and dating a man who turned out to be a werewolf. After being bitten and transformed, Tala embraced h
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Wandering Ghosts
THE DEAD SMILE - CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV THE SCREAMING SKULL MAN OVERBOARD! FOR THE BLOOD IS THE LIFE THE UPPER BERTH - CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV BY THE WATERS OF PARADISE - CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III THE DOLL'S GHOST
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The Book of Dreams and Ghosts
The chief purpose of this book is, if fortune helps, to entertain people interested in the kind of narratives here collected. For the sake of orderly arrangement, the stories are classed in different grades, as they advance from the normal and familiar to the undeniably startling. At the same time a
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Cyber Ghosts
What if a man walked so fast that his soul could not keep up? Zhou Yuan, an Internet worker, chose to make a deal with a demon, as to get a higher ability with his body by giving up his soul. The only way to save him was to create a new god. Thus his friends Hao Ning and Liu Shuai tried everything t
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Ghosts In The House
I'm a horror novelist. Recently, the release of my new work made me quite a bit of money. However, I haven't written the ending for this story yet. To be honest, writing the ending of a horror story is really difficult. My new work is titled "The Building Ghost." Late at night, a reporter named Yola
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Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories
Arthur Quiller-Couch was one of the 20th century's most famous literary critics, but he also wrote many popular works of his own, including this horror tale.
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Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch wrote short stories, novels,criticism, and edited anthologies, including the "Oxford Book"series. He was Assistant Editor of the Liberal weekly "TheSpeaker," and from 1912 until his death was Professor of English atCambridge University. Writing und
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Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
Settle in for a chilling thrill-ride with H. Addington Bruce's Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters. This volume collects a series of reported hauntings in various locations throughout Europe, as well as detailed reports of the attempts that were made to contact, question, and in some instances, even e
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Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore
Stranger Than Fiction: Being Tales from the Byways of Ghosts and Folk-lore by Mary L. Lewes
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Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft
Hours with the Ghosts or, Nineteenth Century Witchcraft by Henry Ridgely Evans
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Rebirth of Martial God
Traversing back to the ancient Prime Martial World from modern age, Austin finds himself in a younger body as he wakes up. Yet, the young man he possesses was a miserable dimwit, what a bummer! But it doesn’t matter as his mind is sound and clear. Possessing this younger and stronger body, h
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Billionaire's Sweetie: Honey All The Time
Lollo got set up to an arranged marriage upon reaching the age of twenty. Aside from this discovery, what shocked her most was that her future groom was no other than Harrison, the billionaire whose photo she secretly took for a job assignment. "You have the liberty to marry any woman you fancy. Wh
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Madly In Love
She was forced to wed him. Their marriage was only a deal, but he intended to get more from her. How could she resist a perfect and cunning man like him? She thought it was true love between them until she found out his secret... "Divorce?" Then, the divorce agreement was burned and she was coerced
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Queen Of Racing: Rebirth And Revenge
On a spring morning, she opened her eyes to a different world. A world that looked familiar, yet eerily strange. Wendy woke up as a child again! By a stroke of mysticism, her life had started all over again. But her destiny was fixed. She grew up to become the queen of racing again. This time aro
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Money Darling
A love child who failed to fulfill her father's wish for a son and was abandoned by her mother at birth, Leona grew up in the Ling household, being scorned at by her step-mother. Although born in a wealthy business family, she had to fund her tuition fees and living expenses on her own by doing part
