She could go to bed with this man, which was saying something. She was particular. Not liking to be touched did that to a woman.
“Go ahead, distract me from the pain,” he whispered, his lips so close she could meet them. “Tell me your fantasy.”
Fantasy? Oh yeah. Well, at least he had a playful side, even if it was only sex play. She wanted the real thing, not the fantasy, but her seducer was too skewered to play the kind of game her body craved after his sensual onslaught. She wanted to be impaled . . . by him. “Much good you do me like that,” she said.
“You’re all heart, Cartwright.”
“I try.” She turned her mournful sigh into a sexy one. “Okay, here’s the fantasy . . . I’m thinking your chest is as exposed as your ass—”
“Your word choice sorely lacks fantasy quality. As a matter of fact, it’s flip and annoying.”
“Sorry,” she whispered and blew in his ear. “I’ll try to be dulcet and seductive in tone.” She sat up and turned her attention to his tush.
“Without sarcasm,” he suggested, resting his forehead on the sofa arm.
“Fine. In my mind, I’m stripping you naked, slow and easy, one piece of clothing at a time, and I’m kissing every bit of skin I expose, licking you inch by salty inch.” She picked up the spray can of topical anesthetic. “Then, because I want that hot rod where it belongs, I stand and take off my panties, one side, then the other . . . and you reach up and—” She sprayed his butt.
Paxton yelped.
“I didn’t touch you.”
“That was as cold as your heart.”
“You must’ve made one tough soldier, buster.”
“I never joined the military.”
“Don’t military school grads usually go on to join one branch of the service or another?”
“I didn’t graduate.”
“You didn’t quit. You’d rather be shot than quit. What happened?”
Paxton heaved a sigh. “I was expelled, if you must know. Ouch! Cripes!”
“Splinter’s out!”
“You could’ve warned me.”
“I wanted to surprise you so you wouldn’t . . . ah . . . clench. Maybe I should bruise some southernwood from Gussie’s witch garden and spread it on your ass. Her grimoire says that southernwood ‘draws forth splinters and thorns from the flesh.’ It makes a good worm medicine, too.”
“I wonder how many people she shot with those bayonets, if she had to grow her own remedy.” Paxton touched his temple. “Look at me, talking like there is a—”
“Don’t say it. You can’t afford another hole in your—”
He looked back at her. “Being tended by you is like playing ice hockey bare-assed.”
“Or like being seduced with no payoff?”
Paxton slammed his forehead against the sofa arm several frustrated times.
Chapter Nine
“NOW we have to get you back on the job as if nothing happened.” Harmony cleaned and disinfected Paxton’s wound, applied an antibiotic ointment, and covered it with a bandage. All set.” She palmed, stroked, and slapped his perfect, undamaged cheek. “Soft as a newborn peach,” she said, sliding a roving finger lower, lower . . . but stopping short of giving him—and herself—the sexual jolt his tense body expected.
When she leaned toward him, his expression expectant, he looked shocked to see her. Releasing his breath in a whoosh, his body went limp, except for the tic in his locked jaw muscle.
“You okay?” she asked.
He narrowed his eyes. “Why did you do that?”
“Hey, you see a fine piece of a . . . art, and you wanna touch. I’d ask if I took any of the starch out of you, but—” She sat back to admire his backside, and lower. “But from this angle, you seem generously starched.”
His eyes were no less intense when he looked back at her. “I mean, why did you stop?”
“I’d never take advantage of a wounded man.”
“My luck. How about I lie on my side and give you full permission to take advantage?”
“I think you’re delirious.”
“I am . What would you do if I copped a feel of your backside?”
“What did I do when you copped a feel of my boobs?”
With a head tilt, he granted her the point. “I think you purred.”
And she damn near came, if only he knew.
He leveraged himself on his side, his zipper tented with his slacks so loose, and he pulled her down against him. “You’re trouble, Cartwright.” He made another meal of her lips, nibbling her top lip, then her bottom, and when she opened her mouth to return the favor, he Frenched her and surged against her with the energy of a bull out for stud, his man brain primed and thinking hard .
“Wow,” she said, coming up for air. “Wounding your pride didn’t hurt your kissing skills. You’re still good at it.”
“Thank you, but I can’t take all the credit. An equally greedy partner helps,” he said, swooping in for another, cupping her bottom, and pulling her pulsing center against his pulsing rod.
When they took to rocking against each other, and Harmony thought she was gonna come just like that, Paxton pushed her away, and she nearly slipped off the sofa.
He saved her and held her, his brow against hers, while he caught his breath. Brow to brow, breath to breath, Harmony tried not to cry, or scream, or rant, or deck him, just for the fun of it.
King sighed. “Help me, will you?” he asked, words she suspected he’d never strung together before.
“Another minute,” he said, “and I would have been up to my . . . man brain . . . in trouble.”
“Your point?” she snapped.
“We’d be sorry. Me for taking advantage, and you for letting me.”
Harmony mocked him with a laugh. “That was mutual !” She shoved a finger into his chest so he winced.
“Look, you brass-ass humanzee. I’m a big girl, responsible for my own sex life and my own orgasms.
I’m not some throwback to the dark ages. If I were staying longer, you’d need protecting from me. I’d get you in the sack, sooner or later, and you’d plucking love it. The name’s Harmony. Remember it, because you’d be screaming it in ecstasy under other circumstances. Now shut up before you piss me off.”
She helped him stand, and he was too shocked not to lean on her. She held his pants together in the back, and by the time he took over, he had himself in control, which couldn’t be said for her.
“Harmony?” He put an arm around her shoulder to turn her his way. “For the record, I thought if I took advantage of you, you’d ‘deck me’ or ‘strike me with a sharp object in my good cheek.’ ”
Harmony wilted. “I’m sorry. I have been sending mixed signals. Not intentionally, and not that I haven’t gotten a boatload of those, myself, today. So let’s say we forgive each other and start fresh? The statement I just made stands. This is the new millennium, Paxton, and I’m the queen of my own sex life.
Got it?”
She’d gotten through, she saw. He looked at her in a new and more enlightened way, as if she—as a sex partner and a proponent of the spontaneous—might be his equal. An obviously new concept for him.
“Thank you,” he said. “For a proud-to-be-awesome seductress, you make a good nurse.”
Okay, he’d changed the subject, but she loved a challenge. “My sisters and I practically raised each other. We’re good at scraped knees and such.”
“There are more like you?”
“You have no idea. Scary thought, isn’t it? But that’s not the point.”
“There was a point to this?”
“There was a point to the toys. A message.”
Confusion furrowed his brow. “Which is?”
Harmony huffed. “Gussie was toying with me to show me she could. Then you rescued me and we joined forces, so to speak, so Gussie toyed with us both. Ergo, a bayonet landed too close to your man brain for comfort
.”
Paxton winced. “I’m not a cliché. I stopped using my ‘man brain,’ as you call it, when I was in high school.”
“You wore it out?”
“No, I used it for nefarious purposes and got myself screwed in every possible way.”
“Even so, you don’t live like a monk, because the way you kiss—”
“I’m a sane man with a strong sense of self-preservation . . . and a healthy libido. I choose carefully, nearly to the point of celibacy.”
“And yet, you just put your ass in my hands.”
“I must have been in shock.”
“You could have gone to a hospital.”
“They’d have put me on the psych ward if I told them how it happened.”
“Whatever.” Harmony looked toward the toy room. “Warning taken, Gussie,” she called.
“I’m going up to change,” Paxton said. “Want me to walk you as far as the cedar dressing room?”
“No thanks. This parlor’s like a museum. I’d like to look around for a while. Gussie’s too tired to cause any dire mischief. Besides, this parlor is nowhere near as negative as the toy room, plus Gussie likes me .”
“I’ll come back for you after I’ve changed and checked on the crew. Don’t go back to the toy room.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“See, that’s where our opinions differ.” He limped away.
The formal parlor emitted an unusual vibe. Harmony was used to different people’s vibes warring for prominence in her mind, but strangely enough, the only warring energy in this room, whatever Harmony touched, belonged to Gussie. Glory, the poor witch even fought with herself.
After the toy room, Harmony understood her better. Mad, sad, and belligerent, Gussie had lived and died to wreak havoc. She caused discord and fed on it, either for fun or to set herself up as both
controller and arbitrator, which meant that she had probably been universally disliked, even in life. But why? And while wreaking havoc might have satisfied her in life, nothing seemed to satisfy her in death, so what did she really want?
That new but familiar cold draft and decaying lilac scent entrapped and danced around Harmony while the answer filled her mind: Vindication . “Oh boy.” The scorned, mad, dead witch, who for some reason liked her, or thought she could use her, wanted vindication.
Vindication from what? And who had scorned her? Two more vague pieces to an indefinable puzzle.
Harmony thought she should get her twitchy witchy self out, and fast. But despite the psychotic ghost and because of the psychic mandate demanding to be fulfilled, she needed to explore the castle, its treasure of vintage clothes, and its owner, not necessarily in that order. To that end, she wandered the formal parlor, sat on a piano stool with dolphin feet, and played “Chopsticks.” She opened every drawer, searching for the other half of her ring or another clue. Sensing Gussie, she sat in a Queen Anne chair beside a long wall covered by an equally long tapestry.
The chair, or the area surrounding it, vibrated with Gussie’s energy—not simply her malevolent ghostly energy like in the toy room, but her true spirit, as it might have been in life, some of it powerfully positive .
Pay dirt. Gussie had frequented this area in good times and bad, and the sum of her energy seemed to boil down to this one wall.
The strains of Brahms’s “Lullaby” reached Harmony, and she turned to see the piano keys moving, with no one playing. If Gussie was playing, the hopeful vibes were out of character. Yet Harmony believed the music was a sign that she should continue, that she was on the right track.
She pushed furniture aside and slipped behind the tapestry, but she found no hidden latch, door, safe, staircase, or tunnel along its length, nothing but an oddly textured surface that reminded her of brushstrokes. Harmony pulled a corner of the tapestry aside to reveal a wall that looked like a dirty canvas, its vibes muted by a strong force.
Gussie puzzled her almost as much as Paxton, the kick-ass kisser, who was returning now to get her.
As Harmony combed her hair with her fingers, Paxton closed the distance between them, his thoughts focused on corn silk that smelled of peppermint—her hair! She felt his yearning and his dogged determination to ignore her from now on, though he’d slipped several sensational times.
Aw, how nice. He thought she was sensational.
In other circumstances, she’d work him hard, and he wouldn’t be able to ignore her. She liked her effect on him as much as he hated it, yet he kept returning for more. He believed he should have stayed on the construction site, yet he’d headed her way instead, annoyed with himself over his attraction and his weakness in following his sexual inclinations where she was concerned.
Too bad she couldn’t tell him the truth, that when she fulfilled her purpose—whatever that was—their connection would be severed.
A clock struck three, and she realized the day had passed too fast. She couldn’t possibly examine and evaluate the clothes in the cedar dressing room in one day, never mind in the rooms she hadn’t explored.
Neither could she solve the puzzle of her psychic goal.
The closer Paxton got, the stronger and deeper Gussie’s hatred became. For a minute Harmony hated him as well, but she fought the encroaching negative vibes.
“Boy are you in trouble,” she said as Paxton came closer. “Gussie hates your guts. Did you know that?”
“All my relatives hate my guts. Your point?”
Chapter Ten
DETERMINED to get Hellcat Harmony to hang around for a few extra hours, King followed her back through the tunnel toward its termination in the cedar dressing room.
She’d had a nasty look on her face for him when he got to the parlor. Odd that. A few times today, she’d reminded him of a small wildcat—a lynx or a bobcat—graceful, beautiful, disarming, a feline who could close in with stealth and feed off you before you knew how deadly she was.
She hadn’t felt deadly when he was driving himself crazy kissing her in the toy room. He’d disarmed her ,
not the other way around. Not that she’d fought him.
Neither had she fought the sexual pull when she was bandaging his wound and frustrating the hell out of him with her teasing. Everything that happened between them this afternoon would make keeping her at a safe distance more difficult. But keeping his distance would be safer than the unwanted fantasy she inspired of the two of them together. Very together. Very bad.
What they’d shared, which had seemed fine for a day out of time, now endangered the scheme forming in his mind. Okay, the scheme his men had just planted, and not gently, in his mind—damn them and damn her. But that arrangement would only work if he could keep his distance. Not easy when she could seduce him with a look.
Before he took steps to put the scheme in motion, however, he needed to know the enigmatic interloper better, and the best way to do that would be to keep her around for a few more hours, after the crew left, no construction issues to distract them.
Back in the dressing room, he gave her some space.
“Something’s stuck in your craw,” she said. “You wanna tell me what?”
“Your acuity is alarming, but if you must know, I almost did have a mutiny, because of your ghost stories.
My workers all want to quit, and that’s the first time they’ve ever agreed on anything , thank you very much.” King tested his five o’clock shadow and examined the wildcat’s flawless features. Full lips, pouty, kissable—eminently kissable, he now knew. Hair of spun gold, eyes as big as saucers, aquamarine, and deceptively innocent. “Call me crazy,” he said, “but I’m determined to complete castle restorations, despite Paxton generational failures to do so . . . and despite the fact that you think I’m being hampered by a ghost.”
“I think ? Have you sat on your punctured butt in the last hour?”
“All right, so maybe I’m beginning to suspect you’re right. So what? I still have to finish the job I started.
”
“Which is?”
“To get this hellish place off my hands and sell it to the highest bidder.”
The familiar wail came from so close beside them, he jumped almost as high as the sexpot, which hurt like the devil. Pissed by his startled surprise, and by the pain in his ass, he took Harmony’s hand to lead her from harm’s way.
In Gussie’s room, she pulled him up short. “Wha’d’ya know, there’s a gentleman hiding behind those invisible fatigues, but I hardly need protecting.”
“You’re slipping, oh mighty mediator. That wail just now sounded more like a war cry than a peace offering, and did you already forget the toy room? Peacemaker, my . . . ass.”
“Now you’re just being mean.” Her full lips at rest fell into a natural pout, but when she all-out tried, like now, he wanted to make a meal of her, starting with her mouth, and ending with her mouth, but stopping at some amazing places in between.
“Unkind, perhaps,” he said, pulling himself from his fantasies, “but honest and practical, too. I have no choice. Getting this place off my hands is serious business.”
“More serious than you know. You heard Gussie’s wail of protest. She wants you to keep the castle in the family, and I think she has some serious persuasion in mind.”
“What do you care?”
“I . . . it’s complicated,” Harmony said, sounding to him like she was hiding something, then she bit her lip for a pensive, and seductive, minute. “I thought I heard in Salem that the castle can’t leave your family,”
she added.
“Legally, it can, and local gossip never gave my family anything but grief, so your sources are as suspect as your motive for being here.” King took down the empty picture frame with the cracked glass and waved it under the hellcat’s nose. “Off-loading this albatross, lock, stock, and bad luck, is good business. Excellent business.”
“For who?”
“Me. My heirs—the next generation of Paxtons, and the generations who come after them.”
Sex and the Psychic Witch Page 6