love to pawn the nightmare off on a relative. There isn’t a one of them who doesn’t deserve it.”
Her suspicions were getting the better of her. “Did you spend a lot of time here as a very young child?”
“If you must know, I was born here.”
Holy astral plane! “Why not in a hospital?”
“I arrived early in what the record books call the hundred-hour snowstorm, February 26, 1969. Storm surges of hurricane proportions. Couldn’t get my mother to the mainland, but what does that have to do with—”
His beeper went off. “My foreman needs me.” Paxton hit the elevator’s Down button and stopped on the second floor. Before he got out, he turned to her. “Stay.”
“Woof,” she replied, as she stepped on the landing to watch him run down the stairs, admiring his loose-limbed, pantherlike gait, his butt as tight and fine as his pecs. Hot and hunky Hurricane Paxton, whose spirit and ownership so permeated this ancient stronghold that he became her very own psychic pot of gold.
When he’d released her wrist to leave, she was surprised she’d let him hold it for so long, but now she felt bereft, foolish her, and reading him became difficult, which shouldn’t surprise her. Proximity always shed light on a psychometric’s impressions, and touch clarified them. Touch brought images, scents, sounds, and emotions into focus. Positive vibes uplifted her. Negative vibes depressed and sometimes made her ill.
For that reason, the only physical contact she allowed and trusted were her sisters’ . . . until King blooming Kong.
In a castle overflowing with negativity, he had touched her. And not only had she allowed it, she’d welcomed and wallowed in the skin-on-skin contact. Like water in the desert, she’d welcomed it.
Who knew she’d been so parched?
She hated being touched. She hated being carried, and she particularly hated having her space invaded—her father had said she was a horror of a screaming baby—but when Paxton took her outside, then back in again, she had to force herself to stop being passive by pretending to fight him.
His touch warmed her. To cinders, it could warm her. If he put his mind and man brain into it, who could tell what kind of inferno they could create.
Wha’d’ya know, her psychic gift had led her to a horny hunk with a lockbox of lifetime secrets and assessing Jesus eyes . . . a man as instantly and magnetically hot for her as she was for him, though he’d never admit it, not to himself, and especially not to her.
She’d seen a hint of the real man in the wild ebony curl on his brow and in the unexpected laugh lines around his eyes—a seductive and challenging surprise.
Men like him starred in a lifetime of sexual fantasies—hers and every other woman’s. He was that one unreachable, potently sexual male whose stone-encased heart and self-erected wall flashed Not Emotionally Available in neon . . . the beast every woman dreamed of taming.
Not five minutes later, he carried himself up the stairs in a rigid stance that proved he’d gotten his emotions in check. A drill sergeant under orders had replaced the man unnerved by a connection he sensed but couldn’t name. But on the inside, he seethed with a heat she had a surprising urge to match, a sharp sexual intensity, which he managed admirably to hide—from everyone except her—so it came off as disdain to the room at large.
“Who are you, really?” he asked, a question she’d considered asking when she encountered the brick wall around his heart.
Harmony shivered and crossed her arms. Reading him did not count among the most placid of abilities in her psychic life journey. “I told you. My name is Harmony Cartwright. My sisters and I own the Immortal Classic Vintage Clothing and Curio Shop on Pickering Wharf in Salem. I’m the buyer. Old castle, old clothes, right? What’s the harm in asking? Do I still get to look around?”
He wanted to say no on principle, as a means of self-protection, she