Oleander House: Bay City Paranormal Investigations, Book 1

Putting his life and sanity on the line—for a man beyond his reach.
    Bay City Paranormal Investigations, Book 1 Sam Raintree’s experience with things he can’t explain isn’t the only reason his new job as a paranormal investigator is a perfect fit. His coworkers, preoccupied with things outside the norm, will never notice he’s gay.
Once he settles into his first investigation at Oleander House, his gay-by-stealth theory goes out the window. Not only is his unexpected attraction to group leader Dr. Bo Broussard painfully obvious, he can’t hide his increasingly erotic and frightening dreams stimulated by the house’s violent history.
Though Bo conceals his sexuality behind a wedding ring, mutual attraction shrinks the wary distance between them until the sparks ignite an electrifying encounter. Next morning, Bo’s back in the closet and blaming his “lapse” on the house’s unusual effect on Sam’s latent psychokinetic ability.
In other words, a poltergeist made him do it.
Sam’s outrage feeds a determination to prove Bo wrong—until the heat of conflict opens a door to the house’s murderous past, unleashing a torrent of bloodshed and life-changing revelation.
    This book has been previously published.
    Warning: This title contains explicit male/male dream-sex, cross-dimensional electromagnetic theories (mmm, that’s hot!), intense violence, and language graphic enough to wake the dead.
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    This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or
organizations is entirely coincidental.
    Samhain Publishing, Ltd. 577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520 Macon GA 31201
    Oleander House
Copyright © 2010 by Ally Blue ISBN: 978-1-59998-134-5 Edited by Sasha Knight Cover by Valerie Tibbs
    All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
    First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: October 2006
Second electronic publication: November 2010 www.samhainpublishing.com

Oleander House
Ally Blue
Dedication
    For Sasha, who envisioned Great Things for this story right from the first.
Chapter One
    The sun had dipped below the horizon by the time Sam Raintree reached his destination. It was a full day’s drive from his home north of Atlanta to the town of Gautier, Mississippi, and nearly another hour from there to Oleander House. Luckily he’d gotten an early start.
    Sam smiled as he turned off the narrow road onto the gravel driveway leading to the house. The largest oleander bushes he’d ever seen lined the long, curving drive. Their bright pink blossoms littered the ground. Beyond the tops of the oleanders Sam could just make out a peaked roof of a red so dark it was nearly black.
    His pulse sped up. Oleander House was his first case in his new job as technical assistant for Bay City Paranormal Investigations. He’d been hired after several phone interviews and one face-to-face meeting with Amy Landry, one of the co-owners of the Mobile based business. He hadn’t even had time to move into the apartment he’d rented in Mobile before the job with Oleander House had come along. So he’d packed everything he owned into the covered bed of his pickup and left Marietta for the last time.
    When the truck rounded the final curve in the drive and the house came into view Sam stopped and leaned on the steering wheel, staring with wide eyes. The house was huge, squarish, white, with deep porches running the full width of both stories. Pine trees crowded against the outbuildings in back. The upstairs porch jutted out at either end and in the middle, forming wide balconies seething with shadows. Something about it seemed vaguely obscene, as if at any moment an unwholesome presence might reveal itself from around a bend in the humid air.
    “Wow,” Sam said out loud to the breathless evening. “What a place.”
He grabbed his duffle bag off the passenger seat, hopped out of the cab, and started toward the house. The setting sun dyed the heat-crisped front lawn a deep red. Sam imagined he was wading through battlefield gore as he walked across