Remembering that she wasn’t supposed to want this anymore, she pulled away but not before he had seen the intake of breath that betrayed her. She turned and hung the glass bauble on the tree before accepting the cup of eggnog Julie handed her. The timing could not have been better; her mouth was dryer than desert sand.
When he moved close and leaned in to hang a crystal angel on a lower branch, she let her breath flow across the sensitive part of his neck. He shivered. Two could play at that game. When his eyes flew to hers, she quirked a brow at him and it was on.
Touch for touch, they fanned the flames, built the pressure to a screaming level that could only be released by one thing. The one thing they both wanted more than they wanted to breathe. The one thing they both wanted to avoid.
So they did the dance.
By the time the tree was decorated and it was time to leave, the tension was so strong between them that neither spoke during the ride home. Her continued silence had Reid planning a cold shower and another night cramped on the tiny couch.
Amethyst was the first one out of the car and as he watched her walk down the path to her front door, he wished things could be different. He certainly wasn’t expecting what came next. He had barely closed the door behind him when she launched herself into his arms and fitted that gorgeous mouth to his.
Within seconds, he was lost in the taste of her, the scent, and her breath mingling with his. Both hearts hammered to the same tempo as blood ran through veins heated by desire and he gave her back kiss for kiss.
If it was a mistake, she was beyond caring as she threaded her fingers through his hair and tipped her head back to let him run his lips down her neck in a trail of fire.
Mine. The word rang in her head and was echoed as he spoke it against her lips. Mine.
Clothes trailed to the floor as she pulled him to the bedroom to give him the softness of the bed and the softness of her and they became husband and wife again in more than name only.
_,.-'~'-.,_
Amethyst awoke, yet again, to the sure knowledge that someone was watching her. When she cracked open an eye, she expected to see Tommy’s familiar face its usual inch away. However, it was not the cat whose intent gaze had coaxed her from the depths of sleep.
Reid lay on his side, propped on one elbow, watching her warily.
Well, now, this is awkward was her first coherent thought.
Two distinct desires warred inside her. The first to just roll into his arms and repeat what had happened the night before, the second to jump out of the bed and run away as far and as fast as she could go. She knew that second one was not rational and that if she chose it, it would be herself she was trying to run from, not him.
No, she would not run. This time, she would stay and this time it would be forever.
Looking at his face, she saw it was too late. He knew her well enough that he had picked up on that moment of uncertainty.
Launching himself out of bed, he pulled open the drawer and began to gather his things.
_,.-'~'-.,_
“I can’t do this right now. Not when I can tell you already have one foot out the door. You don’t trust me with your auras and I get that but it goes both ways, darlin’ because I don’t trust you much, either.”
When he said it flat out like that, it was a slap in the face. “I’m not going to run again.” She denied but he had seen the desire for it in her eyes.
“Really? Tell me that wasn’t your first thought this morning.”
“I can’t tell you there wasn’t a moment of panic but I’m over it now. Go ahead and leave if that’s what you want. You owe me the payback. But I’m not going anywhere.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. You think I’m looking for payback? For petty revenge? Payback is the last thing I want or need and if that’s what you think of me, this isn’t going to work. It’s never going to work.”
“So go.” In a minute, she would turn into a sobbing puddle of pain.
“I made one stupid mistake, wasn’t walking out on me punishment enough?”
He was right and she knew it. The woman she wanted to be would admit it, make things right and move on to live the life of her dreams with him—have babies with him—but like Galmadriel had said, some part of her always stayed locked away keeping her from totally trusting anyone. It was why she struggled with controlling her new level of abilities and it was why she would probably end up alone.
Amethyst looked away to keep him from seeing the truth in her eyes. More than anything, she wanted him—the life he offered—and yet, irrational though it was, the fear of deception had crawled its way inside her again and would not let go.
Frustrated, he spoke sharply, “Look at me. At least have the decency to look me in the eye this time and tell me you don’t want me. I refuse to sneak out the door while you’re not looking.”
No response; she couldn’t turn her head and just watch him walk away. Not and survive. That tiny voice in the back of her head whispered, “See? I told you he couldn’t be trusted.” That it was complete fiction seemed not to matter.
Softer now, “Look at me, please.”
She owed him that much so she did as he asked.
“I see you and I accept you—the whole package, fears, flaws, purple, auras and all—and if I walk out that door, it will be by your choice, your lack of trust.”
No words could come when there wasn’t enough breath to speak, when her heart was breaking. Cursing herself, she remained silent but tears streamed down her face.
It nearly killed him to see that she wasn’t going to tell him to stay. He laid the divorce papers on the table, took one last, long look, then turned and walked out the door.
Chapter Eleven
The door closed behind Reid and Amethyst completely dissolved. The divorce papers lay on the table where he had left them and she could see their aura full of the red, and pulsing pain he had felt when he signed them.
With everything inside her, she wanted to call him back. The life she wanted—full of love and family—rested entirely with him. There would be no one else for her. If only she could have stifled that small voice inside that insisted it was all an impossible dream.
“Well, that was stupid.” Estelle pulled no punches.
Amethyst, nerves on edge, rounded on the uninvited visitor. “I don’t remember asking for an opinion.” She replied.
“Doesn’t mean you won’t get one.” Estelle remained unintimidated. One of the perks of being a ghost was that she was pretty much impervious to any physical threat. She planned on speaking her mind and there was nothing Amethyst could do to stop her.
“By all means, then. Unload some wisdom on me.” Her rolling eyes and sarcastic tone were both ignored because Estelle read despair in every part of Amethyst’s body from her hunched posture to her pale face and trembling hands.
“Reid accepts your auras. He can be trusted with them.” The words were sharp, cutting into already sensitive nerves like knives through butter.
“That’s ridiculous.” Amethyst scoffed.
“Is it?” Estelle gentled her voice as Amethyst stood to pace around the room, her steps moving her through the small space rapidly. “What evidence to the contrary has he given you since he came here?”
“Well, he—he…” Now that she thought about it, nothing concrete came to mind. “I just know.” The words halted her pacing and sounded flimsy, even to her.
“He what? Apologized for being young and callow? And for not understanding exactly what he had asked of you? What a horrible young man!” It was Estelle’s turn to drip sarcasm. “He confessed that he hadn’t signed the divorce papers because he still loved you and that he waited for you for three years. I think you did the right thing by cutting him loose. He’s a monster. You’re well rid of him.”
“No, he’s not. He’s everything a woman could ask for. Constant and loving and I’m an idiot for letting him go. Are you happy now?” Amethyst sneered at her own foolishness.<
br />
“Are you?” The sympathy in Estelle’s eyes was enough to deflate Amethyst’s anger, leaving nothing behind but misery and pain.
“Of course not.” She had one of those moments where scenes from her life flashed before her eyes. Waking up on the ground with a new sense of vision, seeing the sidelong glances in school as her popularity vanished, and worse, seeing that same look in the mirror as she struggled to make sense of the unexpected change in her life.
Somehow, by internalizing the reaction of others to her gift, she had deluded herself into thinking that acceptance came from understanding and that anyone without the same gift would be unable to understand her. None of that was true or real.
“But, it’s too late. He’s gone. Probably halfway home by now and he made his position pretty clear, he signed the divorce papers.”
“Did he, now?” Amethyst frowned at the humor she perceived in Estelle’s tone. “Have you looked at them?”
“Well, no.”
“I suggest you do so.”
The offending documents still lay where he’d left them on the table so she snatched them up and began to leaf through the pages. On every line where he was supposed to sign his name, he had written instead:
I love you until death do us part.
“He’s at Hayward House with Tyler. Have you forgotten he’s to be best man at the wedding?”
Amethyst slumped on the sofa, dropped her head into her hands and spoke, her voice muffled by her fingers, “How does this change anything? I’m still the same hot mess I was before. Worse, even, because I still can’t always control what I see. Did you know that dog pee gives off an aura?”
Estelle couldn’t resist. “Is it yellow?”
“Very funny.” More eye rolling.
“What did the angel say? I presume you’ve asked her for suggestions.”
“Ha. Galmadriel is worse than Julius. There will be three tests and you must accept your gift.” She imitated the stentorian tone the angel most often used. “I already did or I wouldn’t have it, would I?”
Estelle declined to answer.
“Is this one of those moments where Whitney Houston should be singing about learning to love myself in the background as I have an epiphany about how I’m not a bad person after all?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s total bull and you know it. I’ve never thought there was anything wrong with me just because I can see something that most other people can’t. I’m not a bad person, just different.”
“What makes you so different? Gustavia has learned to see auras and so has Tyler. Countless other people see them.” It was a simple question with no condemnation; Estelle truly wanted to understand.
“Seeing them is not the same as being able to manipulate auras. There is a lot of responsibility that comes along with being able to change a person’s energy patterns.”
“I see.”
“Do you? People come to me with bits of old trauma blocking their energetic bodies. I can remove the blocks but I have to think about how they came to be there in the first place and whether the person needs those blocks in order to deal with what happened to them. Galmadriel said my ability to heal would increase. What if I screw up? Do the wrong thing and someone gets hurt?”
Her explanation gave Estelle a lot to think about. With a better understanding of just how much weight the young woman carried when it came to her gift, she began to see why Amethyst tended to hold back in her relationships.
After a moment of contemplation, she clarified, “What I am getting from this conversation is that it is not a matter of Reid’s acceptance but of his understanding your sense of responsibility.”
She had never thought of it in that light but hearing Estelle say the words showed Amethyst the truth behind them. “I suppose that is one way to look at it.”
Estelle asked the obvious question, “Have you ever explained any of this to him? To anyone?”
“I think my mother gets it but no, I don’t think I ever put it into words before. I’m not even sure I understood it myself until right now. I think I’ve been quite stupid.”
Amethyst felt a sense of release as though a weight that she had never known she carried just simply vanished. Peace washed over her in a flash of bright light and warmth.
Bong. The bell dinged just as Galmadriel’s voice sounded, “To truly accept power, one must first understand power. This was the second test.”
_,.-'~'-.,_
The whistling wind smelled of snow and coursed through the trees to strip the last few clinging leaves and send them swirling toward the lake. Huddled on the couch, Amethyst pulled a colorful quilt around her shoulders and wondered what she should do next.
Having had an epiphany, even one that helped her pass the second test, had not really changed her situation. It was one thing to know what had been going wrong in her life and quite another knowing what to do to fix it.
Eyes closed, she relaxed into meditation.
Habit quickly took her back to the pleasant meadow that felt as comfortable and familiar to her as home. Breathing rhythmically, she pictured sun-drenched grass in that startling tender green of spring. Soft, warm air brushing against her face, stirring her hair and teasing her senses with the smell of spring. Soft mud oozing between her bare toes. Bees buzzing through the fragrant air to plunder the sweetness from tender blooms.
It was the most relaxed she had felt in weeks. No fighting to see through a miasma of shifting colors, just peace as the tension flowed out of her to take refuge in mother earth.
Walking through the waking dream, she lost herself in the sights and sounds until unexpectedly; she came upon a mirror standing alone in the grass.
The mirror revealed a different version of herself than the one she had been looking at for the past three years. Jane stared out at her from the polished glass; Amethyst glanced down and saw the ring on the reflection’s left hand before raising her eyes back up to that Jane’s face. What she saw there told a story of pain and sadness. This was the moment when she had turned and walked away from her marriage; the moment she would always remembered as the rejection of a negative situation. Now, looking at a static image of herself frozen in time, she saw more. She saw that it was not Reid she had turned away from, but herself.
Protection. That’s what she’d told herself it was for. That litany in her head that said, “No one will ever hurt me like that again,” and it didn’t matter that he had never meant to hurt her. She had been the one to build those walls, to lock parts of herself inside. At the time, it had been the only way she knew to get through—to keep moving when all she wanted to do was curl into a ball and cry.
This was what the angel had been talking about.
No, she had not accepted—not fully—that someone could love all the parts of her, especially the part that could see so deeply into them, so she had labeled herself as other, marked her ability as dangerous, and then never committed to it completely.
Now the image changed. It was her, as she was right now, in the glass. Leaning forward, she looked closely to see that shadow of sadness still lingering around the eyes, in the slightly stiff posture and defensive stance. This woman was a charlatan who prided herself that she practiced her true calling while, all the time, holding back.
Finally, a new image appeared. This one confident and strong. This one showing her the one thing she had never been able to see—her own aura. It was a balanced, powerful blend of color that pulsed with an otherworldly light. As she stared into the mirror, that aura reached out and enveloped her—just for a moment—bringing with it the promise of a life lived in truth.
Yes, this was her true image, her calling and her destiny. Yes.
The dinging of the bell signifying she had passed the final test vibrated through her body and soul as if she stood in the nexus of a thousand churches.
Galmadriel spoke, “To understand the self, one must look without prejudice. This was the third test.”
&
nbsp; Chapter Twelve
Stalking back into Hayward House, Reid resisted the urge to slam the door but punched the alarm buttons with unnecessary force before searching out Tyler who was working in his office.
Busy at his computer, Tyler looked up as Reid slumped into a chair, kicked his feet out, and let loose a stream of invective about “that woman.”
“Tell me how you really feel.” His comment netted Tyler a scowl.
“You really want to know? I love her. That woman is absolutely ridiculous and I love her anyway. She’s hot and cold and I know I did something stupid one time but how long do I have to pay for that? She ran off without a word. Not a goodbye, nothing. And she thinks I can’t handle her auras. I’m sleeping on the tiniest couch in the universe to make up for it. Well I’m done. You hear me? Done.”
That was a load of something most often found where bulls grazed in fields and Tyler knew it. “Did you tell her that?”
“Yes, I did. And then I walked out.”
“So you left her unprotected?”
“No, she has a group coming in for a guided meditation class today and Julius said Logan was gone for the time being. I hung around long enough to see three carloads of clients arrive, she’s safe enough for now, and I’ll go back before everyone leaves because I am so obviously not done. But I’m going to give her the silent treatment.” His jaw jutted out as if he expected an argument. “In the meantime, find me something productive to do.”
Tyler appraised him for a moment. “You ever do any historic research for insurance? I’m running searches through multiple sources but since we only have his first name and a possible family affiliation to work from, it isn’t going well. Basically, I’ve got nothing.”
Reid walked around to the back of Tyler’s chair, looked over his shoulder at the computer screen.
She Shall Have Music (Psychic Seasons Page 16