She almost fainted in shock. Men did not touch her. . . She instinctively shoved at him.
Instead of letting go, he squeezed her in a hug that left her breathless and almost terrified. He was so damned strong. . .
“Damn, I needed you around today!” he declared, releasing her to prowl her shop.
Heart pounding faster than it should, Amber retreated to the counter. “Sorry I couldn’t be there,” she replied, drifting to that safe place in her head that slowed her pulse.
He looked so damned good. . . Josh’s sharp cheekbones weren’t classically handsome, but his features were mobile and expressive and so full of life that it was impossible not to be drawn to him. And watching him wasn’t conducive to finding her mellow.
“What did you want to show me?” he asked, stopping his prowling.
Deep breaths, Amber, you can do this. “I don’t know how to explain. It’s in back.” She pulled aside the beads and gauzy curtain to her private tea room where she’d set up a table for their use.
He stepped into the room she’d lit with candles. He filled her feminine hideaway with raw testosterone that increased her nervousness, but this was Josh. She was safe with him. Breathe deeply, count to one hundred. . .
He glanced around at the candles and shadowy ambiance. His wide shoulders brushed the beaded drapery. “Nice. Is this where you hit me over the head and stuff my body under the floorboards?”
That was so much the Josh she remembered, poking fun at her with his movie references, that she instantly calmed down. “I’m not Sweeney Todd. It’s either candles or that swinging bulb up there.” She pointed at the bare bulb hanging over the table. “My customers prefer candles.”
With the polished ease of a professional performer, he leaned his shoulder against the wall, crossed his muscled arms, and exuded movie star sexuality. The boy was all grown up. He raised his eyebrows and waited.
Swallowing hard, keeping her hands steady, Amber uncovered the crystal ball. It seethed with gray mists instead of the color of earlier. Mariah had thought the mists might solidify into ectoplasm, but she refused to touch it and endanger her unborn child.
“That’s the pricey crystal that was sitting out front yesterday?” he asked in surprise. “What’s got into it?”
“This. . .” Amber gestured, unable to come up with the right word. “Whatever you see in this ball. . . was driving Cass insane earlier today. She ranted and raved and wanted to kill whoever had done this to her.”
Josh drew his expressive brow down in a frown. “More explanation, please.”
Amber gestured at the table. “Sit. Dinah sent a nice wine. I think we’ll both need it. Maybe we should eat first. Tell me about your assistant.”
He glared suspiciously at the swirling crystal ball. Apparently willing to be distracted, he took a seat and began opening food boxes. “Ernest is a drama queen, rather literally. But he’s smart and efficient and he’s dealing with reporters and Willa’s staff and whatever other matters are piling up. I apologize again. He’s a fan of yours, but he didn’t recognize your name.”
“He knows about me?” she asked anxiously.
“He can keep a confidence. I’m fairly certain that he’ll go to his grave carrying any secrets Willa entrusted to him. That’s not necessarily convenient if he knew who she was with yesterday and promised not to tell.”
“Even if that person may have murdered her?” Amber asked, appalled.
“He would need proof because Willa could do no wrong in his eyes. He doted on her.” Josh stirred his gumbo and glanced at the crystal ball again.
“Awkward. Do you think she may have been seeing someone else?” Amber savored the gumbo.
Josh contemplated that as if it were a math equation and not an emotional grenade. “I don’t know how she’d find time, to be honest. I won’t claim Willa meant to be faithful, but we were in business meetings night and day. We barely had time to see each other privately. Our communication was mostly unending texts. Unless she was screwing someone while texting, I’m guessing she didn’t have anyone else on the side.”
“Interesting relationship.”
He shrugged. “We’d known each other for years, worked together, understood each other. I guess that made us friends. That’s the most anyone can ask in the hothouse atmosphere of Hollywood.”
Amber peeled some meat off her muffuletta but didn’t feel like indulging enough to eat bread. “Did you tell Willa you met me up here?”
“Of course. She was thrilled and meant to use it in publicity. Why?”
She winced and was almost glad Willa was no longer in charge of his publicity. She did not want to be anyone’s puff piece. It was her turn to glance at the whirling mist. “Because whatever inhabited Cass today spoke directly to me. It said He told me he saw you. I don’t know who else but Willa might say that. Then the voice asked if I wanted her dead and called me Fatty. Did Willa by any chance speak like that?”
Setting down the camera he’d been using to catch a few photos, Josh stared at her through the candle flame. “Whatever inhabited Cass?”
Here was where she threw away any chance of resuming their friendship.
Josh knew Amber had always had a flair for the dramatic. She’d set a mood with the candles, wine, and Creole dishes that had him relaxed enough to admire her fairy queen looks and forget the outside world. He loved the red-gold of her long wavy hair far better than the spiky blonde she’d sported as a kid. He’d had to capture the image on film, hoping he could replicate it in his production.
She wore a gauzy scarf over her generous breasts tonight, but that didn’t prevent him from remembering how they’d once felt in his hands, or how her swim-muscled legs had felt around his hips. She’d been his first sexual experience, and that was permanently engraved on his brain.
It was probably a damned good thing she didn’t watch his shows. The love scenes occasionally veered a little too close to that encounter, probably because the films were made for adolescents, and despite the awkwardness, their lovemaking was his only good adolescent memory.
He studied the weird foggy crystal. The swirling mist intrigued his curiosity. Even as he watched, reds and purples began to pulsate, almost appearing angry, which was ridiculous. He was simply having difficulty translating what Amber was telling him.
“Cass is a medium,” she patiently explained. “Among other things, not all of which I understand. But she connects with spirits from beyond the veil.”
“Like the spiritualists you told me about. The dead come to her and tell her their secrets and everyone sits around holding hands and lighting candles.” He glanced at the candles, then back to the crystal ball. “Aren’t crystal balls for Gypsies?”
“Crystal has many purposes, as you’ll learn if you stay here for long. Fake psychics pretend to read the future in crystal balls, but foreseeing is fraught with complications. Like holding hands, though, crystal can channel energy. Candles allow us to focus too. Speaking to the dead is not magic. The vortex is like a hole between the living and the spirit world. There are limitations.” She pushed her spoon around in her gumbo, looking troubled.
Josh wanted to reassure her, but he wasn’t sure of what. “What kind of limitations?” He snapped a photo of his food to send to Instagram.
She gestured with a soft white hand bedecked in rings. “Our perception, of course. Not everyone who dies is interested in returning to this plane and dumping their grief on their loved ones. They happily move on to the next plane without a trace. The spirits most accessible to our mediums seem to have earthly connections with Hillvale. Cass has a chatty miner willing to hunt around in the afterlife for spirits who might answer our questions, for instance. But like everything else Lucys do, nothing is cut and dried. We have no routine.”
“You almost make it sound feasible,” he said, biting into his spicy sandwich to keep from saying anything he shouldn’t.
“Not really. The newly dead generally aren’t available. We guess tha
t they’re too confused by the transition. The ones who have been dead a long time tend to fade out. A séance is an interesting experience but seldom practical. We sort of talked to Walker’s father once, but he’d been gone for a long time and couldn’t tell us who murdered him.”
“You honestly believe you talked to Walker’s dead father?” Josh used his wine to wash down the sandwich, pondering that. “You are occasionally spookily correct with the cards, but I always thought that was good guessing. Talking to the dead. . . I’m having difficulty with that one.”
She sighed. “Then maybe I shouldn’t tell you more. I just thought you should be warned in case that really is Willa’s spirit in there.”
“Willa’s spirit?” Josh stared at the whirling glass, appalled. He scrambled to recollect what Amber had been telling him. Whatever inhabited Cass today said he told me he saw you, then asked if I wanted her dead, and called me Fatty.
Not computing. But Willa’s voice echoed in those words. He shoved away from the table, feeling a little sick.
“It’s okay, Josh. I guess sometimes we should keep secrets from each other. I won’t bother you with this again.” She pushed away from the table too.
Rebelling against that notion, he grabbed the bottle of wine and refilled their glasses. “No, don’t keep secrets. Let me process. You’ve had years to deal with this place. I’ve only had a few days. You’re telling me this Cass—she’s the one who was supposed to conduct the marriage ceremony, right?”
Amber nodded, watching him warily. Josh mentally built up the script. “Cass got something in her head and started speaking like Willa?”
Amber wrinkled her nose and thought about it. “Close, except we don’t really know how Willa speaks. That’s why I asked you.”
He took a deep gulp of a very palatable red. “Willa was not a politically correct person. She said whatever it took to get what she wanted, and she believed vinegar worked better than honey.”
“I don’t think I would have liked her very much,” Amber admitted sadly, glancing at the crystal ball.
Josh shrugged. “No one did, except her father, and she was at constant war with him too. I understood her. That didn’t mean I actually liked her. I admired her. She was abrasive, but man, she was successful. So I couldn’t argue with her tactics—until she was deliberately mean, which she could be. She once fired a stagehand who stumbled over a prop. She called him Fatty and told him if he couldn’t see his own feet, he had no business on her set.”
Amber glanced down at her toes. So did Josh. She wore sparkly sandals and had painted her toenails to match—with sparkly gold polish. He had a ridiculous urge to kiss them, especially after he noticed her ankle bracelet. Even her legs were curvaceous. She was essentially telling him she believed in craziness, and he still lusted after her. His head was in a strange place.
“Willa was probably right,” Amber said, interrupting his distraction. “I’m prone to tripping over anything that hides beneath my skirts. It’s a liability issue for an employer. Rude to mention it, of course, but from the way you’ve described her, practical.”
“And this spirit thing called you Fatty?” He eyed the whirling colors, trying to imagine it talking.
“Cass was talking to me in a voice not her own when she said it, yes. You told Willa that you’d found me?”
Josh nodded absent-mindedly. “I don’t know where she was calling from. I told her I’d just met you and wanted her to meet you at dinner. That’s when she told me she wouldn’t be back, she had to head to LA.”
“And that was the last anyone heard from her?” Amber asked, not concealing her horror.
“It’s like a time warp, isn’t it?” Josh mused. “You leave me, my past ends, and I start anew. You return, and my new life disappears. It’s as if a magic genie is toying with us.”
“Or a bad screenwriter.”
They both stared at the whirling mist.
Nine
Amber called Tullah and asked if she’d be interested in trying to contact the spirit trapped in the crystal ball. The thrift store owner flat out refused.
“Cass is practically comatose,” Tullah declared. “I’m not letting that evil vodun inside my head. And you’d best not let Mariah near it either.”
“We can’t leave a spirit trapped,” Amber protested. “We need to talk with her if it’s Willa. We owe her that.”
“We don’t owe her no such thing. That was one angry bitch. Find her killer, put him in a cell with her, and then we’ll try something.” Tullah hung up.
Amber glanced apologetically at Josh, who was staring enrapt at the crystal ball. “I’m sorry. The Lucys are pretty shaken. Cass means a lot to us, and if she can be controlled by whatever’s in that crystal, it’s pretty risky for everyone else. We’ll have to find another way of solving the crime.”
She’d wanted to be helpful. She’d fallen flat. She waited for the inevitable dismissal. It wasn’t as if she had much to offer anyone, especially not a man who had the world at his fingertips once he recovered from shock.
“Your friends are probably right,” Josh said with a shrug. “I’m trying to imagine Willa in the afterlife, raging against her killer, and it’s not pretty. There would be a lot of damage. I have a quick temper. Willa’s was phenomenal.”
Amber blinked, trying to register what had just happened here. She’d told him his fiancée might be trapped in a crystal ball, that Willa was too evil to contact, that Amber couldn’t help him after all, and he shrugged?
“Like Jacko, you’ll just find another ball?” she asked, skeptical enough to reference the character in their old show.
He quirked one eyebrow—a trick he’d practiced to send his teen fans swooning. “I don’t think Ginger can fix this one, okay? I’m a big boy now. I’m on my own.” He turned back to the table and poked in the dessert carton. “There’s only one slice of pie.”
She wanted to slap him upside the head and ask where he kept his brains, but it wasn’t the pie she was thinking about. What the hell kind of relationship had he and Willa had?
He was telling her it was no longer her business. Great. Swell. “Dinah knows I don’t eat sugar. I don’t have coffee either. Would you like tea?” She started to get up.
He waved her back down. “The wine is fine. You should have some of this pie, it’s incredible.”
Her mouth no longer watered when she looked at sweets. It had taken years before she’d admitted she had a problem. It had taken a while to wean herself off sugar and now was no time to relapse, not when she was half way to her next ring. “I’m a sugar addict, and I don’t want to be a diabetic. So please do not tempt me.”
He grimaced and accepted this without argument. “No messing with diabetes, got it, sorry. I know better. My mom and aunt fight to keep their sugar down too.”
Most of his family had been large, what Hollywood had called Midwestern Obese—because they’d scraped by on cheap canned food. Back then, Amber had been skinny in comparison to his family, as he had been. They’d weirdly bonded over body size or lack thereof. So much she had forgotten—or tried to forget.
He closed up his pie rather than eat it in front of her. “If we can’t get psychic help, where do we go from here?”
Rendered speechless that he not only didn’t argue about her eating habits, but hadn’t given up on her help, even after she’d displayed her ineffectiveness, Amber simply shook her head. Words like Where have you been all my life? were senseless. She had been the one to leave him behind. And he wouldn’t have stayed around long anyway. He had a real life, one he needed to return to.
She needed to do all she could to send him there before she hurt herself.
Josh threw the black velvet back over the crystal. “Let’s try the old-fashioned way of sorting through clues. I get it that it’s bad for us to be seen together. Is there some way you can come up to my room, out of sight? We can have Ernest make notes and do searches while we brainstorm. If I try to do it myself, I’ll sink int
o my work to avoid thinking. I need outside stimulation, if that makes sense.”
He’d always been that way—creative but unfocused unless given structure. She desperately wanted to send Josh back where he belonged, so she stupidly nodded. “I’ll borrow Val’s golf cart and come up later. How were you planning on returning to the lodge without being seen?”
“Do you think anyone will recognize me in this outfit?” he asked, with a gesture of self-deprecation at the unflattering drab brown uniform. “I’ll just jog up. After this dinner, I’ll need the exercise.” He stood and pressed a kiss to her hair. “It’s a rough way of finding you again, but I’m glad I did.”
Paralyzed by that casual touch, Amber stayed where she was until he left, taking his pie with him. Then she wiped away a tear, collected herself, and cleared away dinner remains. She didn’t indulge in what-might-have-been anymore. She’d had a decision forced on her at sixteen that had spun her life around. Leaving had been necessary for her mental and physical well-being. She’d been a mess and hadn’t coped as well as she should have, but she’d survived.
Only seeing Josh made her feel as if she’d been in stasis for years. The first years of licking her wounds had been understandable. No matter how mature she’d been, it hadn’t been easy for a kid to start life on her own. She’d taken comfort and security where she could—mostly in the food she’d been denied for so long. But once she’d stabilized, she should have tried to shake off her protective cocoon.
So here was her chance. She had to think about her nephew. She had to put herself back out there for Zeke, if nothing else. Josh had useful contacts. He might even get her the voice-overs that would allow her to continue living here. He was offering an opportunity to brush up against his world, maybe reestablish a few connections, even if just the possibility of seeing Dell or his ilk again nauseated her.
She called Mariah, the computer research expert, and verified that she would be available if needed. Mariah might be pregnant and nesting, but she loved puzzles and liked nothing better than bringing down bad men. Amber hadn’t doubted her cooperation for a minute.
Amber Affairs Page 8