From New York Times bestselling author Cindy Dees—a thrilling new romance with a sinister edge

Lover. Trickster. Villain. Hero. Which of these is undercover spy Max Kuznetsov? Despite her psychic gifts, Lissa Clearmont isn’t sure. All she knows is the gorgeous guy saved her life outside her New Orleans curio shop. And now they’re fighting brutal Russian mobsters…and feeling extrasensual passion.

Although he’s protecting her, Lissa knows Max keeps his darkest self—and true mission—hidden. It pains her when Max doubts the powers that have already cost her a normal life. But when Lissa foretells inescapable danger, Max and his team of SEALs must believe in her…or the dead people she sees will be all of them.

“About that kiss last night…”

Max leaned forward curiously. “What happened? Is that what it’s always like to kiss you?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never kissed myself.”

“Something happened when you kissed me, Lissa.”

“You mean the earth moved under your feet?” she joked.

He frowned across the table at her. “I’m serious.”

She really wished he would drop the line of questioning, but she sensed there wasn’t a chance in hell he would do that. Instead she asked a shade shortly, “Describe something.”

“It was like my imagination went crazy. I saw all kinds of images and felt all kinds of feelings. But it all happened in, like, a millisecond.”

She swore under her breath. Did he have a gift of his own, then? “Has anyone ever told you you’re an empath?”

He leaned back hard in his chair. “I have some experience in watching other people’s body language. But that doesn’t make me some kind of psychic.”

He said the word as if it was filthy. A momentary knife of pain twisted in her gut.

* * *

Dear Reader,

It seems fitting that, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, you and I should return to New Orleans for a steamy story of intrigue, magic and love. In the next installment of my Code: Warrior SEALs series, the team receives some unexpected help from Eve Hankova’s older brother, Max, and from the strange and wonderful fortune teller he meets while performing surveillance on her shop. The Warrior SEAL net is tightening around the shadowy Russian spy running a mob ring in New Orleans, and their foe is more dangerous than ever as they close in on learning his true identity.

I’ve long been fascinated by the role of intuition in special operations situations. Soldiers rely heavily on gut feelings to warn them of unseen danger and approaching threats. But exactly how far will a warrior trust not only his own intuition, but the intuition of a woman who may be working for the enemy?

Let’s find out as Max and Lissa run for their lives and run for love…

Happy reading!

Cindy

Her Secret Spy

Cindy Dees

www.millsandboon.co.uk

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author CINDY DEES started flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan, where she grew up, to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European Studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War, and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories.

Her hobbies include medieval reenacting, professional Middle Eastern dancing and Japanese gardening.

This RITA® Award-winning author’s first book was published in 2002 and since then she has published more than twenty-five bestselling and award-winning novels. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com.

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This book is for all the brave and resilient residents of southern Louisiana and Mississippi who survived and bounced back from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. You remind us all of the best of the human spirit. Let the good times roll!

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Extract

Copyright

Chapter 1

Lissa Clearmont looked around her aunt Callista’s shop—her shop now—torn between both affection and dismay. The purple string lights hanging all around the ceiling cast a spooky light on the eclectic inventory of Callista’s Curiosities of the Magical and Macabre. An inventory that was hers to replenish and grow now, ideally by embracing the inner weirdo she’d spent years doing her best to deny.

Until last month her world had been thoroughly cleaned out of both the magical and the macabre. But then her peculiar aunt called to announce that she’d had a vision and was going to die any day. And, oh, by the way, she’d willed everything she owned, including her wacky store in New Orleans, to her favorite niece.

She hadn’t taken Auntie Callista seriously at first, but the woman had been adamant that the end was near and she had to get her affairs in order immediately. The curiosity shop was infamous within the Clearmont clan, which was populated by generations of rational, logical, scientific souls who saw anything having to with the unexplained, prophetic, occult—or heaven forbid, magic—to be rubbish of the first water. The family grudgingly gave Callista credit for managing to sell her crystals, tarot cards, talismans, spells and palm readings to a gullible public and making what was, by all accounts, a decent living at it. But their patience for her eccentricities ended there.

Lissa, named loosely after her aunt, had been the only family member to take Callista’s startling announcement of her forthcoming demise seriously. She’d questioned her aunt in alarm over any diagnoses or heretofore unknown health issues, and Callista had responded firmly that she was in the bloom of fine health. Nonetheless, the spirits had spoken, and she was about to die. Of course, Callista had snorted at the mere mention of visiting a traditional medical doctor.

If only her aunt had been more specific about how she’d expected to die and why. Maybe then Lissa wouldn’t have this nagging feeling that something was very wrong with the circumstances of Callista’s abrupt death two days after that phone call.

Frustrated, Lissa turned off the bronze lamp by the antique cash register, pausing for a moment to admire the deep rose silk shade with its beaded fringe and black lace edging. It was a pretty little thing in spite of its uselessness at actually emitting light. She trailed her fingertips wistfully through the cool fringe.

Sometimes she felt like the little lamp. Pretty and useless. The only thing in life she was good at was the one thing she was determined to leave behind in this cross-country move to New Orleans. Not that her parents hadn’t tried to suppress her talent for years before now. In fact, they’d done everything in their power shy of trying to pray it away to eliminate her gift for seeing past and future events, and, worse, seeing into people’s souls.

She’d kept the shop open late tonight for a coven of witches who’d come in to buy supplies for an upcoming Imbolc ritual. The holiday coincided with a full moon this year, and they were planning to throw a big shindig to celebrate the conjunction. The group couldn’t agree quickly on anything, and they’d lingered a full hour after her usual closing time at seven o’clock. She barely had time to rush out and grab some cat food for Mr. Jackson, Callista’s entirely cliché black cat, before the convenience store two blocks away closed for the night.

The women had just left in a joyous cluster, taking with them their noise and laughter and leaving her alone. Worse, night had fallen while the customers browsed the shop. To say that the store turned creepy after dark would be like saying the sun was hot. She peered into the dim corners and to the back of dark shelves in an effort to find the source of her unease. Yet again, she failed to spot whatever it was that made her so blasted nervous. It was as if she was being watched by some foreign, and possibly malevolent, force.

Shuddering a little, she wrapped herself in her favorite vintage wool coat, locked the iron grillwork over the glass door behind her and hurried away from the store into the bowels of the night. It was a sorry thing when a dark, deserted street in a dodgy neighborhood in a sometimes violent city felt safer to her than her own store did. Aunt Callista would have told her to do some sort of exorcism or cleaning ritual to the curiosity shop and see if she could improve the place’s vibe. A white sage smudge probably wouldn’t be enough. No, a full spell, complete with a ritual circle, libations, candles—

Stop whispering into my brain, Aunt Callista! You’re gone. I’ll make my own decisions. She didn’t do that kind of woo-woo stuff anymore. Immersing herself in the mystical world had cost her too much. Brought her too much pain. No more. Henceforth, she would live life as a normal, mundane human being.

A warning vibrated somewhere in the back of her mind, and she scoffed at it. Nope. She didn’t pay attention to baseless intuitions and vibes anymore. She could handle life entirely on her own. The powers that be could just get over it.

Something big slammed into her from behind as a hand slapped over her mouth, yanking her back against what turned out to be a powerful body. “Don’t fight. Don’t make a sound, or else I’ll mess you up right here.”

Son of a— Stupid warning intuition had to go and be right, didn’t it? But then panic and terror rolled through her, and all else disappeared in the face of certainty that this man was intent on doing something terrible to her.

The voice vibrated with malice. Urgency. Accent: local. Smell: cigarette smoke and cheap strip club. This assailant clearly planned to harm her or worse.

His plan roared through her mind, projected so loudly he might as well have spoken the words. He was going to drag her into an abandoned space—big, open, drafty like a warehouse of some kind—tear off her clothes, beat her up, cow her into submission and then do unspeakable things to her before finally strangling her.

She fought then. For her life. With all the violence and desperation her five-foot-two frame could muster. Which wasn’t enough, of course. But she gave it her best shot. Her attacker merely tightened his arms around her in a vise that crushed her ribs and made breathing nigh unto impossible, and then he waited out the expenditure of her remaining oxygen. This obviously wasn’t the first time the man had done this.

An image of another girl’s face, bloody, scared and pleading for her life, flashed into Lissa’s head. She froze, arrested momentarily by the image, memorizing the face carefully.

Lifting her slight frame mostly off her feet, the man dragged her backward toward an alley even darker than the street they currently wrestled on. If only he would take his hand away from her mouth and nose and let her draw a proper breath. Then she could scream. Or fight some more. Or do something to save herself.

She felt herself dropping into a state of shock. This must be what it was like to be a gazelle in the moments after a lioness caught its neck in her mighty jaws and crunched into it. Paralysis first and then blessedly numbing shock. The gazelle wouldn’t even be aware of its bleeding muscles being ripped away by razor-sharp teeth, its living organs being torn from its warm belly. There would be just the shock. The blessed, detached, distant awareness of encroaching death. Warmth. Quiet. Calm. She was going to die, if not right now, then soon, at this man’s hands.

Vague regret at having never been in love—the real thing, with all-consuming need, soaring heights of ecstasy, a melding of minds and souls, and, of course, really great sex—passed over her. She was too young to die. And she sincerely wished it didn’t have to be like this.

But maybe it was fated. She’d been conceived in violence, after all. Maybe that meant she had to leave this life the same way. Was this some cosmic evening out of the scales? Had she never been meant to be born? Was that why the universe saw fit to take her out like this? Or was it some wrong she’d committed in her own life coming back to haunt—

Something big and fast flew at her from the side. More shadow than man. But big. Fully as big as her attacker. A second attacker? Oh, Lord. Were they going to gang-rape her?

Her first attacker grunted as the newcomer barreled into him and Lissa, knocking all of them into a pile on the ground. She rolled clear of the melee of flailing limbs as the two men struggled to untangle themselves.

She scrambled to her hands and knees, sucking air into her oxygen-starved lungs gratefully. Must get up. Run away while they still tried to gain their feet. She must fly like the wind—

But no wind could outrun the wave of psychic power that rolled over her as she panted on the sidewalk. It was as if a great floodgate had swung open and a massive flood of energy clobbered her. The scale of it was staggering. It made the rest of her life look as though she’d been sipping at a trickle of psychic power from a leaky faucet. But this. This was unbelievable. Time had no boundaries; her vision had no limits. Knowledge of all things was right there, hers for the taking.

Something hot and wet and smelling of iron splattered her face, jolting her out of the vision and banging the floodgates of time and power shut. In front of her nose, a fist connected with her attacker’s jaw again. Hard. With a smack of flesh on flesh that spoke of violent intent. Wait. What? The new man had just slugged his partner in crime? Maybe not his partner in crime?

Very belatedly she realized the two men were fighting. The second man was rescuing her! Well, then. That changes things. She pushed to her feet, balled up her fists, waited for an opening...and dived into the fray.

* * *

Max mentally groaned as the woman he’d just rescued leaped into the fracas in a misguided attempt to help him. He could kill this punk here and now if he wanted to, but he was trying hard to keep the guy alive so the police could have a chat with him. The attack on the woman had been too practiced, too perfect, for some amateur lowlife looking to score drug money. This guy was a professional stalker of women.

The woman, however, had different ideas. She seemed hell-bent on killing the bastard and was punching and kicking with all her strength. Although, on second thought, she was probably too tiny to do the guy any serious damage. And it was undoubtedly therapeutic for her to kick the hell out of the punk for scaring her like that.

The stalker finally rolled into a fetal ball with his arms over his head to protect himself from the woman’s fury, which was prodigious now that she wasn’t on the verge of dying.

Max rolled away and pressed to his feet, panting. He jerked his leather bomber jacket back into place and dusted off his jeans, which were torn at one knee. Dammit, he liked these jeans.

“Okay, lady,” he said drily. “That’s enough, or else the cops will charge you with assault when they get here instead of that jackass.”

The woman looked up at him, confused. As if she was just now registering what her feet and fists were doing. “Oh. Oh! Right.” She stumbled back and commenced shaking so hard he could see it from where he stood.

The attacker made a move to jump to his feet and take off, but Max put a hand on the back of the guy’s neck and shoved him down to the ground with casual strength. “You stay right there, or I’ll break your neck.” The punk lurched one more time, and Max increased the pressure. “For real, man. I’ll kill you. Right here. Right now. No compunction.”

The punk subsided.

For good measure, Max went down to one knee, kneeling on the spot between the guy’s shoulder blades and no doubt pressing the stalker’s cheek painfully into the gravel-strewn sidewalk. He glanced up at the woman. “Ma’am, if you’d be so kind as to call nine-one-one. Tell them to send the nearest cruiser. Then tell them to call Detective Bastien LeBlanc and pass the message that Max could use a hand.”

“Is that your name?” the woman asked in a shaky voice close to tears. “Max?”

“Please make the call, ma’am.”

“What is it?”

“What is what? You mean my name?” he echoed blankly. That was a good question. He’d been living under that other name, not his own, for so long, he almost didn’t remember his real name anymore. Not that he had any great fondness for either his real name or his real life. All of it had turned out to be a lie of epic proportions. And he was so caught in this new lie, so deeply ensnared in its tangles, he couldn’t breathe, let alone move.

“Max,” he mumbled. “Call me Max.”

“Max what?”

Damn, she was persistent. “Smith,” he muttered under his breath.

In what little light there was in this crappy corner of town, he made out a faint frown puckering her brow. The sort of frown that said a person didn’t believe what she was hearing and was trying to understand why the speaker would lie to her. An urge to tell her the truth, to tell her his real name, bubbled up from somewhere deep in his gut.

But thankfully a siren’s wail sounded just then, and the woman looked away, relief painted in every sweet line of her face. She was a little thing. She looked like Mary Poppins in that old-fashioned wool coat and those funny curved-heel granny shoes. Her hair was curly, and about half of it remained in a bun at the back of her neck. The rest fell around her face in a wild, sexy riot of curls that fit her face massively better than the old lady attire did.

A police car careened around the corner, and in the glare of the headlights he saw the woman’s curls were dark, dark red. Almost maroon. And she was young, midtwenties maybe. Which he supposed wasn’t that young. It was just the age of his younger sister, who would forever and always be his baby sister, even when she turned old and gray.

Like his sister, the woman trembling in front of him was beautiful in an old-fashioned way. Her skin was porcelain, her lips rosy and full, her eyes huge and dark. Her beauty was soft.

Under any other circumstances but these, he would have registered this woman as ridiculously attractive, walked away from her and then obsessed about her for weeks afterward, kicking himself for not talking to her or at least getting her name and phone number.

It wasn’t that he’d never successfully put the moves on a hot female. But he’d been undercover for so long that he was starting to worry about forgetting how to come on to women at all.

He could not see her figure under that ridiculous coat, but even swathed in heavy wool, she was slight in stature. She hadn’t fought like an athlete. And then there’d been that horrifying moment when she’d started to go into shock. She’d gone limp in her captor’s arms like prey in the jaws of death.

He hadn’t intended to leave his surveillance post. He’d been prepared to let her get robbed, maybe even roughed up a little. But when that bastard had started to drag her away—and, worse, she’d appeared to go catatonic—he’d had no choice but to leave his hidey-hole and act.

She might be the target of his op, but that op did not include watching the damned subject die. He needed her contacts. Her connection to the top leadership of the group he’d spent all these months infiltrating.

It was a huge breach of security protocol to blow his cover like this, to come into direct contact with the person he was supposed to be watching. But what choice did he have? He couldn’t stand by and let that jerk drag her off and do his worst to her. Swearing to himself, he pasted on the bland expression of a casual passerby who was just grateful to have been in the right place at the right time to lend a hand to a lady in distress.

The cops collected the assailant, who was now looking quite a bit worse for wear. He watched carefully to make sure they didn’t mess up Mirandizing and cuffing the perp.

As a police officer stuffed the assailant in the back of a squad car, Max straightened and turned to check on the woman. He lurched as something light plastered itself against his chest. It was her. Oh, God, sobbing.

“I got to you as fast as I could,” he muttered unwillingly. “I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner.”

Reluctantly his arms came up around her, and, swear to God, she snuggled against him. The strangest feeling washed over him as this tiny female burrowed closer against his chest as if he were a combination furnace and Second Coming. It made him feel protective. Possessive. Needed. What the hell was that all about?

Lord knew, other people had needed him his whole life. His father after the divorce devastated him. His mother after the car accident paralyzed her. His baby sister after their mother died and left him alone to raise her. But never had any of that made him feel like this. Like he could climb a mountain or conquer an army single-handedly.

The woman’s shaking lessened as he held her, and eventually a policeman peeled her off his chest to take a brief statement from her about what had happened. She gave her name, Lissa Clearmont, but, of course, he already knew it.

He already knew lots of things about her. Like what time she opened the bedroom blinds in the morning to greet the sun. That she practiced yoga almost every day. That she didn’t like being in the store alone after dark. Which electric company and telephone company the shop used. What brand of laundry soap the owner preferred. After all, he was very good at his job.

He was intrigued when she begged off coming down to the police station immediately to make a report, saying that she had something pressing to do before she talked to them again. What was more important than putting away the bastard who’d tried to assault her and possibly kill her? There’d been something about the way the assailant had attacked Lissa that smacked of a psychopath and not a regular, garden-variety mugger.

Another police car pulled up, this one unmarked except for a magnetic siren stuck to the driver’s side roof. Bastien LeBlanc, a friend of his sister and her fiancé, piled out of the car. He looked as if he’d been pulled out of an undercover mission, too. Or maybe he’d been at a strip club down in the French Quarter using all those bad-boy good looks to get lucky. He stopped to speak briefly with the arresting officers and then made his way over to Max.

“Hey, bro. What up?” the New Orleans cop and former navy SEAL asked him.

“That guy—” he pointed at the perp in the cop car “—mugged that woman—” he pointed at Lissa “—a few minutes ago.”

“Lemme guess. You dived in and saved the day. Dude’s looking a little rough around the edges. Street name’s Julio G. He’s a notorious gangster. We’ve been working on taking him down for a couple of years. Problem is, his flunkies keep taking the fall for him and he keeps slipping out of our net. But not tonight, methinks. Make sure the NOPD doesn’t get blamed for busting him up like that, eh? We wouldn’t want him to get off on yet another technicality.”

Max grimaced. “The girl did most of the visible damage after I took the bastard down. I thought it might be good for her to work out a little of her fear on him before we called you guys.”

Bastien grinned. “I’m beginning to see why my future brother-in-law called you an ice-cold motherfu—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Max interrupted. “Listen. I need a favor.”

“Name it. The district attorney’s going to be thrilled that we finally got Julio G. dead to rights. We think he’s top dog in one of the more violent gangs in the area. Not only did you take him down, but you gift wrapped him for the police. No way is he passing off these charges on to one of his boys. We owe you one.”

“I need my name kept out of the police report. In fact, I need all mention of my being involved with this incident sanitized out of the official record.”

“You don’t want any credit at all for catching this slimeball?”

“Nope. None. I was never here.”

Bastien grinned again. “I dunno. The way that pretty little lady’s lookin’ at you, I might rethink that ‘never been here’ thing. She’s one sweet piece of—”

“And that’ll be enough out of you,” Max interrupted.

Bastien frowned. “The woman’s testimony ought to be enough to put Julio away. But if it’s not looking good at trial, I’m gonna have to give your name to the DA and let him call you to testify. We can’t let this guy slip out of our grasp. He’s seriously bad news.”

Max nodded reluctantly. “Understood.” This was the paradox of being undercover and going after bad guys. It became a trade-off of blowing one’s cover versus putting away the scumbags one encountered along the way. At what point was it worth blowing two years’ worth of undercover work to put away one guy?

“Do me a favor in return, bro,” Bastien said.

“What’s that?” he asked cautiously.

“See to it Ms. Clearmont gets home safely. She’s refusing to come down to the station until tomorrow to make her statement, and I’d hate for one of that bottom-feeder’s buddies to find her overnight and take it upon himself to silence her before she can press charges. Given the gang he affiliates with, he’s got some downright unfriendly associates.”

“You protect her. That’s your job.”

Bastien shrugged. “She’s refusing any police protection. Insists on you being the one to take her home.”

Max rolled his eyes. It wasn’t as if he could say no to that. Dammit. “Fine. I’ll follow her to her place.”

“You’ll do more than that if I’m keeping your name off the report. You hold her hand and tuck her into bed. She’s had one hell of a scare, and the way she tells it, she’s got no family or friends in town to take care of her.”

“Why me?” he protested. “I’m on an op and she stumbled into the middle of it...” He left out the part where she was the op.

Bastien threw him a withering look that said he’d thought better of Max than to abandon a lady in need. Max huffed. “All right already. I’ll walk her home and make sure she’s safe overnight.”

“You’ll stay with her?”

Max frowned. “If she’ll let me. And if not, I’ll spend the night outside her place and keep an eye on her. She’ll be safe.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, Bastien. I’ve got her back.”

The cop stared at him intently for a moment and then nodded, accepting his word. “All right. I got me a date to get back to, then. Can’t keep the ladies of New Orleans waiting for all this hotness.”

Max rolled his eyes as the cop strolled away; then he turned his attention back to the problem at hand. Rather, the damsel in distress at hand. Dammit. He really didn’t need to pull babysitting duty when he should be out hunting bad guys. Or maybe being the bad guy would be more accurate.

A soft hand touched his sleeve, and he reacted violently, spinning to face Lissa, who pulled back sharply at his abrupt move. He carefully stilled his entire body and pitched his voice to calming tones. “The police asked if I’d mind walking you home. Would that be all right with you, or would that frighten you?”

“Why on earth would that frighten me? You saved me. You’re my knight in shining armor.”

Oh, God. He was so not a good guy. Were it not for some random creep attacking her, he’d be the one scaring her. He would be the one stalking her without her knowledge, the one peering in her windows with a telescope, the one bugging her house and cloning her computer and cell phone. He would be the one putting that haunted expression in her big dark eyes.

He shoved a distracted hand through his short hair. “Look. I’m going to be honest with you. The police have asked me to keep an eye on you tonight since you won’t accept their protection. Does that freak you out?”

“No freakage. But I hate to impose on you. Keep you from your family...?”

She left it hanging as a question. “No family,” he replied shortly.

“Job? Pet? Girlfriend?”

“None of the above. Correction, I have a job, but I work for myself. Set my own hours.”

“Perfect! You can stay at my place. We’ll make a party out of it.”

Did she have to sound so damned tickled about having a slumber party with him? There was no way he was spending the night in her apartment with her. He might be a cad, but he wasn’t that giant a cad. “I think the police have pretty much wrapped up here. We can go soon. Where do you live?” As if he didn’t know already. Ha.

“I live over the curiosity shop down the block. But I was on my way to the store. I’m out of food. And Mr. Jackson—well, he’s not patient about missing supper.”

He frowned. He’d seen no evidence of a man of any kind in her life. He glanced down to verify that her ring finger was naked. It was. “You have a boyfriend?”

She blinked up at him rather owlishly. “What?” A look of dawning comprehension. “Oh! You mean Mr. Jackson?” Gay laughter. “I’ll introduce you two when we get home. He’s gonna love you. C’mon. I need tuna fish and mayonnaise. He loves my homemade tuna salad and asked after it this morning.”

Something deflated inside Max. Had he actually been a little attracted to her? Hell, how could he not be? She was fascinating in a strange kind of way. The woman had an eccentric style that had nothing to do with regular conventions of society or fashion. A hint of...death...clung to her. Or at least a knowing of it. And yet, within that overriding impression of darkness, a discordant note of happiness was audible. It was entirely at odds with her darker self.

Either that, or the long months undercover had finally gotten to him, and he was losing his marbles. He did a quick mental craziness check. Nope. It wasn’t him. There was something special about her, something alluring, that called to him. Hell, tempted him. This was the way he felt when he found a lost art masterpiece. The discovery brought out the greedy poet inside him.

Or maybe his reaction to her stemmed from the fact that he’d just saved her life. Yeah, that must be it. That had to be why he felt so protective all of a sudden. He was a lot of things, but compassionate was not one of them. And yet here he was, walking his own personal damsel in distress home.

Frowning, he fell in beside her as she strode off down the street. For a woman who’d just been attacked and nearly killed, she’d recovered her mojo damned fast. Either that or she was a fine actress.

“Are you okay?” he asked, blatantly throwing out a trial balloon to gauge her mood and mind-set.

“Why wouldn’t I be? You’re here now.”

Well, hell. It kinda made a guy want to puff out his chest and put a little swagger in his step. He glanced down at her and caught her staring sidelong up at him. Their gazes met, and something crackled between them. He could almost see the energy forming a complete circuit between them. Sheesh. His imagination was working overtime tonight. He was a trained covert operative, for goodness’ sake. He didn’t do crackling sexual attraction, particularly not with civilians.

But then she reached out to touch the energy. Her fingertips exactly traced the invisible lines arcing back and forth between them. Crud. Could she physically see the attraction between them? Did that mean she was crazy, too, or was it just him losing his mind? Either way, charges zinged through his body, drawing him to her as if they were opposite poles of human-size magnets. The pull was inexorable and irresistible. And hot. Shockingly hot.

Lust for this woman shot through him along those strange ley lines of sexual energy, and it was all he could do to keep his hands off her. Only the sure and certain knowledge that he would be no better than that sicko stalker behind them kept him from seriously contemplating dragging her up against him, kissing her until she begged him to bed her, burying his body in hers and inhaling all that crackling sexual energy flowing from her into him.

“I’m not a superhero, you know. I’m just a guy.”

“You’re my superhero.”

Huh. He liked the sound of that. Enough that he ordered his raging libido in no uncertain terms to take a hike. Enough that he volunteered to hold the basket for her as he trudged around a local convenience store behind her.

Grocery shopping was a domestic task he had never done before with a woman. It was surreal. Terribly domesticated. So very normal. He had to admit it held a certain charm. Weird charm but charm nonetheless. Or maybe it was just the company he was keeping that made it seem so damned fantastic.

Gah. This was an anomaly. He would deliver her to Bastien in the morning, she would make her statement, the bad guy would go to jail for a good long time and Max would get back to his regularly scheduled life as an undercover agent. Stalking her.

In a state of minor shock, he carried her plastic grocery bags back to Callista’s Curiosities of the Magical and Macabre and dutifully stood at Lissa’s side as she fumbled at the door with a big old-fashioned key.

“You should let me install a decent security system and a good lock on that door,” he commented.

“Is that what you do? Security systems?”

“Something like that.”

The door lock surrendered just then and granted them access to an incredibly cluttered space. Floor-to-ceiling junk crammed the store. It was enough to make a person feel a little claustrophobic. “Hell of a name this place has. Quite a mouthful.”

“I call it C2M2 to myself,” she replied.

He stopped in the doorway. It felt odd to be entering the place he’d been doing surveillance on for weeks.

“Come in. Please.”

Dammit, if he hadn’t detected that hint of fearful pleading in her tone, he’d have refused her. But as it was, he had no choice. He’d promised Bastien, after all. And truth be told, he wasn’t the kind of guy to leave a woman in the lurch.

She wound across the crowded and cluttered space, heading for a narrow staircase near the back of the store. “I’m sorry in advance for the chaos upstairs. I just inherited this place, and it needs a ton of work.”

She said that as if the downstairs wasn’t a colossal, messy hoarder’s wet dream. He hesitated to see what she considered trashed enough to apologize for. He rounded the corner into her second-floor home and stopped cold. It was a war zone.

The place had been stripped down to the lath and plaster wallboards, and in some places down to bare brick. Corroded copper plumbing was exposed, ancient electrical wires hung in dangerous festoons, bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling provided the only light and the floor was scraped boards. The angle of his surveillance cameras on the shop didn’t capture any of this.

“What the hell happened in here?” he blurted.

“The previous owner started renovations, and I haven’t had time to finish them yet,” she threw over her shoulder as she headed over to a corner that contained a 1950s vintage refrigerator with a rusted door, a hot plate on a wooden milk crate and a metal washtub on the floor under two bare faucets.

“Where did the kitchen go?” he asked cautiously.

“In the Dumpster out back. It was disgusting. I tore out what was left.”

“So I gather.” He picked his way around a pile of debris and across a canvas painter’s tarp stretched over the floor. “And your workmen left the construction site like this? Fire them. I know some good contractors—”

“I’m doing the work myself.”

He stared at Lissa as she shed her coat and hung it on an elaborate wood-and-iron coatrack in the corner. In a properly restored home, it would be a lovely piece. In this chaos, it was wildly out of place.

Good Lord. She was even tinier than he’d imagined, a mere slip of a woman. And she was capable of the heavy labor involved in a complete home restoration? Color him impressed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were a contractor.”

“I’m not,” she answered cheerfully. “But how hard can it be? It’s only hammers and nails and saws.”

Oh, my dear God. Was that what she thought? “And you know how to weld copper and run wiring and hang drywall and know the New Orleans building codes, then?” he asked lightly. He’d renovated his condo when he bought it, but he’d paid experienced professionals to do it and it had still been a nightmare. He’d pitched in to help the crew and had learned a ton about construction, but he wouldn’t know where to begin with this disaster.

“No, but I’ll figure it out.”

He managed to get his hanging jaw closed before she turned around, a small bowl of tuna fish and mayonnaise in hand. Other hand on her hip, she asked, “Now where has Mr. Jackson gone off to?”

If he were this Jackson guy, he’d have run away from home and not come back until this place was put back together. Belatedly, Max answered, “Can you call him on his cell phone? Find out where he’s gone? I know some guys who could pick him up and bring him back here.”

Lissa frowned at him as if he’d lost his mind.

Hey. He’d just offered to burn a hard-won favor from his employer for her.

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” she said slowly, as though he were some sort of ignorant child. “Mr. Jackson,” she crooned. “I made you your favorite. Tuna salad.”

Something landed on his shoulder from above, and he dived for the floor, rolling and coming up ready to kill. Jeez. Where had that guy come from? Stunned at the surprise attack, he looked around wildly for his attacker.

Nada. What the hell?

For her part, Lissa laughed and scooped up a...

Son of a bitch.

A cat. Small and black. With one white front paw that looked just like a feline glove. “Mr. Jackson, I presume?” he said drily, lowering his fists to his sides.

“Would you like to pet him? Although I don’t know if he likes men or not. You’re the first one I’ve seen him around. I inherited him with the store.”

“Along with this disaster zone?”

“I prefer to think of it as a project with unlimited potential.”

A cold knot of suspicion started to form in his gut. Had she actually, literally, inherited the place? From whom? And how recently? He’d been under the impression that the store’s namesake would be returning at some point. “Exactly how long ago did you inherit this place?”

“Let’s see. It’s been almost a month.”

He closed his eyes in chagrin as acid frustration ate its way through his gut. A month. The past few weeks of grueling round-the-clock surveillance had been for naught. She wasn’t the person he was supposed to be following. She wouldn’t have any contacts. She was useless to him. Worse, the trail had gone cold, then.

“Who owned this place before you?” he asked in resignation.

“My aunt. Callista Clearmont. She willed it to me right before she died suddenly.”

His one and only link to the next level of hierarchy in the mob he was infiltrating was dead? A stream of violent swearing erupted inside his head.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he murmured automatically. Crap, crap, crap. How was he going to track down Callista Clearmont’s mob connections if the woman was dead? Why hadn’t anyone told him?

Unless the niece had inherited the mob contacts, as well...

Lissa turned away. Her shoulders gave a suspicious heave, and she sniffed loudly. Oh, no. Not more female tears. He had no defense against them. They scared him to death. Frantic to distract her from launching into full-blown waterworks, he asked quickly, “You said she died suddenly?”

His question did the trick. Lissa turned back to face him, another one of those delicate frowns of hers puckering her creamy brow. “She called me. Told me she was going to die any minute and that she’d willed everything she owned to me.”

“Was she sick a long time?”

“Oh, no. She was in perfect health. We all thought she was going to outlive the rest of the family.”

His internal antenna wiggled abruptly. Could it be? Had the mob or one of its enemies killed her? “What were the circumstances of her death, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“She died in her sleep, supposedly. A customer found her after she didn’t come downstairs for an appointment to do a reading.”

“A reading?”

“She was a psychic. I think that customer had asked for a crystal ball scrying. She also read palms very well. The last time I talked to her, she claimed she’d had a vision. That a spirit told her she was going to die within a day or two and to put her affairs in order.”

A spirit, huh? More like a mob informant, perhaps? “Who were your aunt’s clients? Did she keep a list of them?”

“I suppose so. I haven’t found it if she did keep one, though. Her business papers are, well, a little disorganized.”

If the shop downstairs was any indication of how the woman had done business, any kind of organized client list was probably a long shot. With a list, though, he could maybe identify Callista’s mob contact and find the next level of hierarchy in the secretive Russian gang he’d spent the past two years infiltrating.

“Are you hungry?” Lissa asked, startling him out of his train of thought.

“You don’t have to feed me. I’ll grab something on the way home.”

“It’s the least I can do for you after you saved my life.”

“I wouldn’t go that far in describing what I did. I only interrupted a mugging. Any passerby could have done the same.”

“They could have, but that doesn’t mean they would have. He was going to kill me.”

How did she know that? Was she a psychic, too?

“I was just planning to heat up some leftovers. Let me fix you a plate.”

“Can I help, umm, prepare it?” He eyed the hot plate and metal washtub askance.

“Nah. I bought a Monte Cristo sandwich earlier and I’ll just pop it in the microwave. It’s a lot more than I can eat alone. I’ll split it with you.”

“Sure. If you’ll let me buy the next meal.” The words were out of his mouth before he stopped to think about them. There couldn’t be a “next meal” for the two of them. She was an innocent, not mixed up in her aunt’s mess and of no use to him. He would deliver her to Bastien in the morning, and then he would get the hell out of her life and never look back.

Chapter 2

Lissa’s hands still shook a little as she handed a paper plate with the batter-dipped, multilayered, fried ham-and-cheese sandwich to “Max Smith.” Which totally wasn’t his name. It didn’t take special powers to hear the evasion in his voice when he’d given her the name.

She was more rattled by tonight’s attack than she wanted to let on, even to herself. Thank God this stranger had been there to swoop in and save the day. She didn’t want to think about what would have happened had he not come along.

Speaking of which...“I’ll be right back,” she blurted. “There’s something I have to do.”

Max looked up at her in alarm. “You’re not leaving, are you?”

“Heavens no.” She ducked into what would have been the spare bedroom had her aunt not gutted it and dug around in her big trunk of art supplies for a sketch pad, pastels and her set of drawing pencils. Tucking that under her arm, she scooped up her easel and wrestled it out into the main room.

Max leaped to his feet to rescue the easel from her. “Where do you want this?”

“Over by the lamp. I’ll need the light.”

“Drawing something, are you?”

Crap. She couldn’t admit she wanted to capture the face she’d seen in her attacker’s mind as he’d attacked her. “It’s, umm, therapy. Helps me calm down when I’m upset.”

“You’re an artist, then?”

She shrugged. “Not really. I’m just a dabbler.”

She pulled a stool over in front of the easel he set up for her. In a few minutes a face started to take shape. She turned out to be a pretty girl, not unlike herself in features and overall coloring. Which was frankly creepy. Was her attacker a serial killer, maybe?

Once she’d captured the girl’s initial bone structure, she pulled out the pastels and really brought the face to life, drawing quickly and surely from memory.

“Who’s that?” Max eventually murmured from directly behind her.

She jumped, startled. She’d been concentrating so hard on the picture that she’d forgotten he was there.

“I have no idea.”

“It’s just a random sketch?”

There was no way she could explain it without sounding like a crazy woman, so she didn’t even try. Instead she lied. “Yes, it’s just a face.” And if she were a normal person, that was all it would be. Right, then. She’d determined to be normal; therefore, this was just a face.

Except why did the girl’s eyes stare out at her from the paper beseechingly, following her as she shifted right and left, checking the sketch’s perspective and making tiny corrections to the features?

It. Was. Just. A. Face.

Max moved in close behind her to study the sketch. “She’s pretty. You have a good hand for portraiture. You’re sure you’ve never seen this person before?”

Rather than answer his question, Lissa leaned forward to release the sheet of paper from the easel’s clips. “Here. Lay this on the floor in the corner and spray it with the fixative in the can over on the end of my work table while I put my art supplies away.”

It physically hurt Lissa to deny the girl’s fear and pain coming off that sketch. She had to get away for a minute and catch her breath. You poor, poor thing. Lissa jammed her pastels and pencils in a drawer in her dresser and slammed it shut. She wasn’t a psychic anymore. She didn’t listen to dead people anymore, and she didn’t draw the faces of murderer’s victims anymore. She was just a regular person living a normal life.

If only her gift didn’t seem to be tied to violence. Maybe she would have been able to live with predicting the sex of babies and telling people when to ask for a promotion at work. But her visions were, almost without exception, tied to death. She saw dead bodies. Sensed killers. Heard dead people. Saw death moving in to claim people. With a sigh, she returned to the main room.

Abrupt exhaustion swept over her. It was as if her psyche had held all her reaction to the earlier attack at bay until that sketch was out of her system. Now she felt on the verge of collapse.

“Are you okay?” Max asked quickly. The guy was pretty perceptive himself.

“I’m a little tired all of a sudden.”

He nodded knowingly. “Aftermath. The adrenaline drains away, and you feel like death warmed over.”

“Yes. That.” She sighed.

“Did your aunt leave a working bathtub in this wreck?” he asked.

Normally she would take offense at him calling her place a wreck. Even if it was true. She preferred to think of it as a work in progress. “Aunt Callista left the tub. Probably because it’s cast-iron and weighs a ton. I couldn’t even move it to scrape the linoleum from under the claw feet.”

“Then I suggest you go take a nice, long soak in a hot bath and go to bed.”

“Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. If you don’t mind, I’ll let you see yourself out. You’ve been more than kind, particularly since we’ve never met before tonight...” She trailed off, tilting her head to one side and staring at him as a little voice inside whispered that he knew her better than she could possibly imagine.

What was that all about?

She moved into the master bedroom and closed the door. Callista had not messed with the apartment’s original cast-iron claw-foot tub, and Lissa planned to take full advantage of that tonight. A bath was just the thing for quieting the voices rioting in the back of her head, clamoring more loudly than usual for attention.

* * *

Max waited until after the light went out under Lissa’s bedroom door to get up from the silly Victorian sofa and ease down the stairs. He avoided the step he’d registered as the squeaker on the way up and crept downstairs to the shop. Now to have a look around and see if he could figure out where Callista might have put her complete customer list.

Surely the woman had kept such a thing. Based on the criminal clientele he’d been told she served, she’d have been insane not to keep the names tucked away somewhere for self-protection, if nothing else. Of course, if she’d had a decent dead man’s switch in place based on such a list, Callista probably wouldn’t be dead now.

He reached the shop floor and looked around in dismay. How did a person even begin searching this maze? He started at the back corner and worked his way around the edges of the surprisingly large space. His mind boggled at the variety of odds and ends. He felt a little like Alice must have when she’d first fallen down the rabbit hole.

He examined an exquisite collection of small enameled boxes. As an art dealer, he would pay double what Lissa had them marked for, and he would mark them up even more for resale. He made a mental note to mention it to her in the morning.

Oh, wait. He couldn’t say anything about her merchandise pricing, lest she figure out he’d been snooping.

He refocused his mind on the client list and resolutely ignored a pair of actually quite nice landscape paintings hanging on the far wall from the stairs. They were oil paintings, the technique modern, and the sensibility for light and movement was top-notch. He would love to take a closer look at them in full daylight. If the color held up to bright light, the paintings and the artist could be quite a find.

But he wasn’t an art dealer anymore. At least not until he cracked the Russian crime syndicate that had swallowed his entire family whole.

Callista’s list, dammit.

He moved to the counter and made a cursory search of the cabinets there. Surely Lissa had already searched this, the most logical place to look for her aunt’s business records.

No surprise, he had no better luck than she’d had at locating Callista’s books. He looked around the store in the darkness. Where would he hide if he were a ledger, journal or notebook of some kind?

Something shifted in a corner near the ceiling, and he did a double take. For a second there, he thought he’d seen a faint movement. Or maybe a flash of light. Hell, if he didn’t know better, he’d say he’d seen a ghost. However, he did know better, and he didn’t buy any of that woo-woo stuff. It must have been cast from a passing car or something.

He glanced around behind the counter and spied a short door tucked back under the stairs to Lissa’s apartment. Hmm. A closet perhaps? He opened the door and was surprised to see another set of stairs, this one leading down. Nobody in New Orleans had basements. The place was built on a swamp, prone to flooding and gradually sinking even farther below sea level than it already was. A waterproof basement would be prohibitively expensive to build, the sort of thing only a bona fide nutball would even attempt.

But as sure as he was standing there, he was looking at stairs leading down. He pulled out the tiny LED flashlight attached to his key chain and pointed it into the dark. A dozen steps led into a low, cramped space that looked for all the world like some kind of vault. The walls looked like steel-reinforced concrete. He felt the nearest one and was startled to register some sort of thick sealant or covering on the surface. Windowless and stuffy, it felt like a prison cell.

Or a secret storeroom. Did the mob move contraband through here? Drugs, maybe? What in the hell was this place?

It was not nearly as cluttered as the shop was. Big wooden crates were stacked along one wall, and several old steamer trunks sat along the opposite wall. He moved to the crates first and was surprised to see everything from wrapped curios to bottles of wine. But not just any wine. This stuff was old, French and had a famous label that would fetch thousands at auction if the dates on the labels were real. The stuff had to be illegal. He was no great connoisseur of wine, but to his knowledge the vineyard itself was the only importer of this brand to the United States. Based on the amount of dust on the bottles, the wine had been there for some time.

He had a look in the nearest steamer trunk. Max opened the heavy lid and was gratified to see the thing filled to the brim with papers. Bingo. This was exactly the kind of place Callista might have hidden her client list. He picked up a fistful of papers and began to read.

A magic spell. A recipe for a love potion of some kind. A ritual for luck described in details. Seriously? C’mon, Callista. Give up your client list already. A chuckle sounded nearby, making him whip around in the dark, swinging his flashlight wildly back and forth.

And then he realized it was the furnace kicking on. This place really gave him the creeps. That haunting face Lissa had drawn must have gotten under his skin more than he wanted to admit. Those eyes—they watched him pleadingly, begging for help. Thank God he’d gotten to Lissa before that bastard had dragged her off to heaven knew where to do heaven knew what and put a similar expression in her eyes.

He shook his shoulders hard, trying to rid himself of the sensation of something or someone watching him. He was a professional, for goodness’ sake. Trained for most of his life in the art of covert operations. He was a man of cool logic and action. He did not do ghosts, and he did not do supernatural. Period.

* * *

Lissa’s eyes opened drowsily as a hand caressed her forehead. She was too sleepy to bother pushing away the spirits tonight. “Is that you, Aunt Cal?” she mumbled to the room in general. “I’m fine—I promise. That lovely man, Max, or whatever his name is, took care of me. Did you send him to me?”

Another whisper of touch across her cheek. She would take that as a yes. “Thanks.” She sighed.

The ghost caressed her cheek again, this time beseechingly. It wanted her to listen. Reluctantly, she woke up more thoroughly, sitting up in bed and speaking directly to the invisible spirit hovering nearby. “Listen, Aunt Callista. About the whole psychic thing. I’m giving it up. I want to know what it’s like to be normal. To live like other people. Maybe find a nice guy and settle down. Have a family. I can’t keep talking to dead people and have a regular life. I know it’s selfish. But I’ve given my whole life to helping dead people. It’s time for me to live a little.”

The ghost of her aunt, if that was who’d woken her this morning, did not deign to answer. There were no more gentle, loving touches on her skin.

Lissa flopped back to her pillow, trying to enjoy the warmth of the morning sun streaming through her window. But that girl’s face from her attacker’s mind still lingered. She’d dreamed of her last night, too.

It had been awful having to endure the girl’s screams and cries for help. Help that had never come. Lissa shoved away the memory of her death, also dreamed about in vivid, high-definition color and surround sound. That was the worst part of dreaming. Lissa had no control over it, and the spirits seemed determined to take advantage of her weakness to torture her.

The nameless, but no longer faceless, girl was dead, and nothing would bring her back. The good news was that her killer was in custody and not likely to go free anytime soon. Lissa could let it go. Justice had been served. So the powers that be could just leave her out of the matter.

She sat up with conviction and threw back the antique quilt that had supposedly been made by a great-great-great-grandmother of hers. She had places to go and things to do. Determined to focus on those, she swung her feet to the cold wooden floor. This room needed a rug. A nice thick Persian one that she could dig her toes into.

What to wear? Max had promised to come back this morning and escort her down to the police station. She wanted to look her best for him, since she hadn’t exactly been in top form last night.

Lissa, my dear, she told herself, you have a crush on Mr. Smith. A big, fat, juicy one. And normal women acted on their crushes. They put out signals and feelers, and maybe even asked the men they liked out for a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. He did say last night that the next meal was on him. That meant he was open to the idea of seeing her again, right?

If only she’d had a more normal life, maybe she would know how to land a man like Max Smith. As it was, she stood in front of her closet and panicked. Then she moved into the bathroom and stared at the mirror over the sink and despaired. She couldn’t do this. He was so out of her league. She was an amateur at romance, and he was obviously a world-class master of the art.

Master of romance didn’t quite capture the raw magnetism of Max Smith, or whatever his name was. The Max part felt right, but the Smith part felt slightly off. Although now that she was living a normal life, she probably should ignore the intuition and just accept his name at face value.

Not that all intuition was bad, though. Last night, as he’d walked her to the store, there’d been a moment. The kind of moment she’d fantasized about. That instant of connection as eyes met and instinctive recognition of true love broke over both parties. As angelic hosts sang and heavenly trumpets blared to announce the miracle. Or something along those lines.

The moment had left her breathless and thinking the kind of racy thoughts she’d rarely had time for before she’d set aside her unfortunate gift.

Resolutely, she picked up a tube of eyeliner and prayed that it would cooperate with her this morning. The makeup gods were capricious demons from time to time.

As she carefully accented the roundness and width of her big dark eyes, she allowed herself to remember her other dream from last night. The one about Max. Who knew a girl could make herself blush just by dreaming about a man she’d just met? Except in her dream they’d known each other—or at least had a connection—for a long time.

She stared critically at herself in the mirror and then down at her pitiful selection of lipsticks. She wanted to come off breezy. Demure but sexy—whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Why was she going to all this trouble for this guy?

She’d always subscribed to the notion that any man worth her love would adore her just the way she was, with no makeup and her curls sticking out all over her head and a smudge of paint on her nose. Apparently that notion had flown right out the window at the first sign of a hot guy. He was not out of her league, darn it! She deserved any man she was attracted to.

But an insidious thread of doubt whispered warnings of what he would think if he knew about the circumstances of her conception and birth. She was tainted. Had bad genes. Her stepfather said once that they would come through in the end. The comment, uttered in anger, had stuck with her ever since. Was he right?

The sun shone a little less brightly through her window.

Max was, of course, punctual to the minute. She waited by the shop’s main entrance, picking at the black widow’s weeds she’d opted to wear. The old-fashioned dress swathed her in gloom and made her look at least a decade older than her twenty-six years.

“Going to a funeral after you make your statement?” he asked drily as he strolled down the sidewalk toward her.

Rendered speechless by his easy elegance in those flannel trousers and crisply starched dress shirt, she could only stare at him. How had she missed these movie-star good looks last night? She’d noticed that he was hot, but not that he was drop-dead gorgeous. She must have been in worse shock than she’d realized.

One of his eyebrows twitched. “Everything okay?”

“Umm, no. Yes.”

“Which?”

“I’m a little flummoxed by how handsome you are today.”

“Oh.” He fingered his jaw. “I shaved this morning. It’s nothing.”

Right. Because a simple shave had peeled back the troll’s face to reveal this prince beneath. She said lightly, “I believe a sincere yowza is in order, sir.”

“Well, thank you. And may I say you make a fetching widow.”

She grinned up at him. “Nice try.”

He shrugged. “Surely you know how beautiful a woman you are. Great bones. Perfect skin. Striking coloring. I have an eye for these things, you know.”

“And how’s that?” she asked as they strolled down the street.

“I have a good eye for beauty. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll tell you so.” He stopped beside a low-slung, sleek sports car and opened the door for her. Startled, she sunk into the plush quilted leather interior. He was wealthy? She hadn’t seen that coming. It disappointed her a little. She wouldn’t want him to think she found him interesting just because he had money.

“Does your car have a name?” she asked as the vehicle purred away from the curb.

He frowned. “No.”

“Every car has one, you know.”

“A name?”

“Yes. You’re doing this beauty a great disservice by not taking the time to learn hers.”

He grinned over at her before accelerating out into a busy thoroughfare. “What would you call my car?”

She leaned forward to lay both palms flat on the dashboard. She listened for a moment and then broke into a big smile. “Of course. Her name is Lola. She’s Italian.”

“Most Ferraris are.”

“You’re making fun of me,” she accused.

“Are you one of those people who names everything?” he asked, without sounding at all like he was making fun of her.

She shrugged. “Only the things that need names.”

“And I suppose you skip people’s and animal’s given names entirely and make up endearments for them?”

She scowled, sensing that he was subtly poking fun at her. “Yes. And I’d call you Curmy.”

“Like Kermit the Frog?”

“No. Short for Curmudgeon.”

He laughed aloud. “I could live with that.”

“Fine, Curmy. How long till we reach the police station?”

“About...ten...seconds,” he answered as he decelerated quickly and swerved into a parking spot in front of a rather nondescript building obviously built in the modern-utilitarian 1970s.

“Lord, that’s an ugly building.” Of course, it wasn’t just the dreadful architecture. An aura of suffering and human evils hung over the place like a shroud. Hastily, she closed her mind’s eye, snapping it shut like a cheap door.

“No kidding it’s ugly,” Max muttered fervently as he helped her out of the car. “You’d think in a town like this that the builder would have given at least a tiny crap about his building not looking like a three-story wart.”

His hand came up to touch the small of her back as he escorted her into the police station, and her breath caught a little at the way her entire being focused on that light contact between them.

The actual taking of a statement took about two minutes. But then she came to the tricky part. “Officer Leblanc, have there been other girls in the past few years who went missing?”

“Of course,” the handsome Cajun replied.

“I mean any who look like me. You know. Similar height, build and coloring. Close to my age. That sort of thing.”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“My attacker. He...” She searched for the right words that didn’t come right out and say she’d picked a vision out of his brain. “He...indicated that I was not his first victim.”

“What do you mean?” As she’d expected, the cop jumped on her comment aggressively.

“I’m not sure exactly,” she demurred. “I...” Crap. She had no words to get around the truth she was determined not to reveal.

Thankfully, Max dived in and rescued her. Again. “I have to agree with her. I saw the way he was manhandling her. He was no amateur. He knew exactly how to subdue her. Could you just look into other missing persons reports, Bastien, and see if any other petite redheads have gone missing?”

“Fine. I’ll take a look.”

They had to wait around for a while as a lineup was prepared for her, and then Detective LeBlanc put her in a nasty little room with no lights and a big window. She knew the drill from watching television. Five surly-looking men filed into the room on the other side of the one-way glass, and she immediately pointed out suspect number four.

She was led out, and Max was brought into the room. He came out in about ten seconds, as well. She didn’t even bother to ask him which guy he’d picked. They’d both gotten up-close-and-personal looks at her attacker last night. The lineup was purely a formality.

And then they were done. An odd sense of panic washed over her. There was nothing else to tie Max to her life. He could drop her off at the curiosity shop and drive away, never to see her again. She didn’t even have his real name, let alone his phone number. If only she had more experience with men. Maybe she would know a smooth way to ask him for his contact information. Something that would let her keep in touch with him. She had a serious crush on him and craved more of him desperately.

They parked down the street from her shop a little before noon. He did not invite her out to lunch as she’d hoped he would. There was no small talk, nothing to indicate he had any personal interest in her whatsoever. That was what she got for dressing like a mortician. She should have gone with her first impulse to dress up for him.

“Here’s my card,” he announced without preamble. “It has my private cell phone and personal email address on it. If you ever get in trouble, ever need help, give me a call.”

She took the white rectangle despondently. Not a “Call me if you want to have coffee or go out for a drink.” Just a “If you get in trouble...” It was pro forma polite behavior, not a sincere offer to see her again. Well, hell.

She climbed out of the car, insisting he not get out and come around to help her. She watched the sleek black car pull away from the curb and dart into the city. And she was alone once more. Except today it hurt even worse than usual.

* * *

Max watched the small black figure retreat in his rearview mirror, her shoulders slumped in defeat, her entire spirit shrinking in on itself. He was a horrible human being. She’d obviously hoped he would throw her a social bone and show even the tiniest spark of interest in her.

Thing was, he was interested. And, furthermore, he did give a damn about her. And that was exactly why he had to stay away from her. To cut off even the most casual contact between them. He had to break any link between them before she got seriously hurt. For he and his dangerous, fake life would do just that if he let her into it.

He parked in front of his restored French Quarter condo, pulled out his cell phone and placed a call. In rapid Russian, he said, “Hey, Peter. It’s me. There was some trouble last night.” Peter Menchekov was his boss nowadays, ever since the mobster who’d controlled Max initially had been killed in a government raid a few months back.

At least he no longer worked for the more violent psychopaths who populated the lower rungs of this crime syndicate. He’d finally moved up the ranks to quiet, thoughtful men who wore expensive suits and weren’t prone to fits of temper. But he sensed that he was still far from the top of this sprawling organization. There was someone hiding at the apex of the pyramid. The ultimate predator and mastermind of the whole organization. Until he learned that person’s identity, his work was not done.

“What kind of trouble was there, Masha?”

He winced at his childhood nickname. It was the common Slavic shortening of his full name, Maximillian. “The girl, the one whose store you wanted me to watch, is not the person we thought she was. The store’s owner died a month ago, and this girl is the new owner. She just came to town. She knows nothing.”

“The order I got was to watch the store. Not to watch the store’s owner,” Peter correctly observed. “Continue the surveillance.”

“There’s a small problem with that. The store’s owner met me last night. It was an accident. A guy mugged her, and I had to stop him from killing her.”

A pause while his boss considered that. “All the better. Infiltrate her store. Find out everything she knows about what goes on in the store and whether she plans to continue running it the same way as her aunt did in the past.”

An interesting word choice, that. Infiltration, huh? That smacked of military training. Or espionage school. Who was Peter, really? Max made a mental note and added it to his growing list of suspicions that this was no simple Russian crime gang.

Why was the crime syndicate so interested in this silly little shop, anyway? What was so special about it?

He’d figured his boss would want him to stay in direct contact with the store owner, now that he’d met her. Which was why he’d put off making this call. The last thing he wanted to do was play Lissa Clearmont. She struck him as a kind and decent soul, innocent and deserving of an honest man. Not a con-man schmuck like him messing with her for his own nefarious ends.

“Understood,” he replied shortly. He couldn’t bring himself to say any more politely, and he dared not say any more impolitely.

“Good hunting,” Peter said briskly, ending the call.

Max jammed the phone in his pocket. Good hunting, indeed. He’d be hunting a babe in the woods. This was going to be a massacre of that poor girl’s heart.

Chapter 3

People had a tendency to underestimate her, and Lissa used it to her advantage from time to time. Like the older man in a suit who walked into her store that afternoon, asking after an obscure African fertility statue, almost as though he didn’t expect her to have any idea what he was talking about.

She’d seen it in the showcases somewhere, but couldn’t remember exactly where off the top of her head. Aunt Cal’s ghost was usually around and happy to point out where to find some trinket or another. Not that Lissa particularly wanted any ghost’s assistance, no matter how helpful it might be. Sure enough, a light hand nudged her down the second aisle and to the right.

She left the man happily examining the foot-high statue, which she personally considered one of the ugliest items in the entire shop, and returned to the cash register. She was a little disappointed when he didn’t buy it but was encouraged when he said he would send his grandson in to look at it the following day to see if it was the one the younger man had been looking for. She could use the sale.

Finishing the renovation that Callista had started upstairs was costing a great deal more than she’d anticipated, and she hadn’t even started hiring the various contractors she now knew she would need to finish the job and pass the city building inspection. Yet again, her tendency to leap before she looked had bitten her in the tush.

Business was slow today, likely on account of the football play-offs, and she closed up early. Mr. Jackson shared a TV dinner with her as she settled in to watch an old black-and-white film noir.

Which turned out to be a bad choice. When she had herself properly scared and deliciously tingling, the spirits tended to come to her, whether she wanted them to or not. They were different here in the South, whispering of different pasts and different secrets than the ghosts in her art studio in Vermont had. Not that she wanted to hear any of them.

Desperate to do anything to stave off the insistent murmurs in her mind, she gave in to an urge to read tarot cards. She didn’t consider herself particularly skilled with these sorts of readings, but shuffling and laying out the cards gave her restless hands something to do. She cleared the folding table she currently used for eating, painting and balancing business ledgers. The cards all but leaped out of her fingers into a traditional spread. They spoke of four men in her immediate future. A lover. A trickster. A villain. And a hero. But the cards stubbornly refused to tell her which one would win out in the end.

And that was why she didn’t like using cards. She couldn’t bully them into answering her the way she could stubborn spirits. She tried again, doing individual card turns. She turned over the Prince of Cups from the top of the deck. Then she pulled the Prince of Wands out of the middle of the deck. Then the Prince of Pentacles. She chose a fourth card with great reluctance.

No surprise. The Prince of Swords. What on earth? She would end up with all four men? That didn’t sound like her. She would be thrilled to land one man, let alone four. Although she supposed she could do without a trickster or a villain in her life. She’d already had enough of the influence of those affecting her, compliments of her birth father, whoever he might be.

Her mother never had remembered anything about the night she was drugged at a party and raped, resulting in Lissa’s birth. Or maybe her mother hadn’t wanted to remember. Not that Lissa blamed her. And not that she actually wanted to know who her birth father was.

Some people argued that Lissa’s gift was a result of the great trauma in her genetic past, and others said it was a curse visited on her. No matter its source, she would be glad to be rid of it.

Sometimes, when she’d been little, she’d been able to conjure a shadowy image of a man’s face when she thought of her birth father, but she’d never been able to see more than that. The fates had long made it clear that further knowledge of the man was not for her.

As she stared down at the four tarot cards on the table, another man’s face swam into view in her mind—this time as sharp and clear as her father’s had been indistinct. He had short blond hair, light green-gold eyes that were reluctant to smile and a world of hurts accumulated on his handsome brow. She would love to know what had added such weight to Max Smith’s spirit at such a young age. He couldn’t be much more than thirty years old. Either that, or the man had the moisturizing regimen of a god.

His face still lingered clear and strong in her mind’s eye when she fell asleep. It even followed her into her dreams, promising to protect her and keep her safe.

And maybe that was why she didn’t scream when she woke up and heard the noises coming from downstairs.

* * *

Max woke groggily as his cell phone exploded into sound. Cripes. What time was it? The face of the phone said it was nearly 3:00 a.m. The caller ID named L. Clearmont as the caller. What the hell?

“Lissa? What’s up?”

A frantic whisper replied. “There’s someone in the shop. And it sounds like he’s busting up everything.”

Max lurched fully awake. “Go into your bathroom. Lock the door or barricade it with a chair. Crawl into the bathtub, cover yourself with a white towel if there’s one in there to make yourself harder to see and be very still and quiet. I’ll call nine-one-one. Don’t come out until the police identify themselves. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

He leaped out of bed and yanked on jeans and a T-shirt, still rattling off instructions to her. “If you have something heavy like a hammer or a wrench at hand, take it with you. Pound the crap out of any bastard who tries to lay a finger on you. Fight like a wildcat if they try to drag you out of there. And scream your head off. Wake up the whole damned neighborhood.”

He grabbed his car keys and sprinted for Lola. “I’m getting in my car now. Hang on, Lissa. I’ll be there as soon as I can and will kick their asses for you.”

He tossed the phone, on speaker, onto the car seat beside him and peeled out, leaving expensive Italian racing rubber on the pavement. It was a fifteen-minute drive normally, but he made it in a shade under eight. The cops were still not there, the bastards.

The Saints had won their play-off game, and the partying on Bourbon Street had to be worse than usual, but still. Lissa lived in this town. She deserved a fast response from the NOPD to a break-in. Especially after the violent attack on her the day before. He’d no sooner had the thought than a pair of squad cars careened around the corner, sirens and lights screaming.

The cops advanced on the store, guns drawn, and he wasted no time moving up behind them.

“I’m a friend of the owner. She’s locked in the upstairs bathroom. While you gentlemen clear the main floor and the basement, I’m going for her.”

“Sir, we need to clear the entire building before you enter the premises—”

“Just don’t shoot me,” he tossed over his shoulder, his own pistol drawn from its shoulder holster and at the ready before him in a trained shooter’s grip. “I’ve got the left quadrant and stairs.” And with that he spun through the smashed front door.

The cops must have recognized a trained operative, for they let him precede them and ceded the left third of the store to his search.

“Clear!” he called after racing up and down the first few rows of smashed curio cabinets and overturned display cases. “I’m going upstairs.”

“Roger that,” one of the cops called back. “Holler if you need backup.”

“You’ll know if you hear gunshots,” he bit out. If whoever had trashed the store had laid a hand on Lissa, there would be no fight. There would be lead flying and dead bastards bleeding out on her floor.

He moved quickly and silently up the stairs and spun into her living room, low and lethal. No movement. He pointed his weapon at each dark corner of the room, searching quickly for man-size shadows or any hint of movement. He’d told her to take Mr. Jackson with her into the bathroom if she could find the cat without having to go looking for him. He’d also suggested that she use the cat as a weapon, to throw it at anyone who tried to break through the bathroom door.

The living room was clear. He spun into the guest room and her bedroom, pausing to check under the bed and behind the armoire before moving to her bathroom door.

“Lissa, it’s Max. The police are here, and the intruders have left. It’s safe to come—” The door flew open and a soft, slight body flew into his arms, knocking him back a step with the force of her rush.

“I knew you’d come for me. I knew you’d save me. You were there in my head, both of your faces smiling down at me and telling me everything would be fine...”

What the hell was she talking about? Both of his faces?

“We clear up here?” someone called from over by the staircase.

“All clear,” Max called back to the cop. “I’ve got the owner of the store with me, and she’s fine. She’ll be down in a second to make a statement.”

But for now he was just going to hold her and let their mutual panic subside a little. He was startled to realize his heartbeat was galloping madly and adrenaline screamed through his veins. He hadn’t gotten this rattled since he was a kid, before his father starting training him seriously in how to be an undercover field operative. Spies didn’t have strong emotions. Or if they did, they certainly didn’t let those emotions get the best of them.

Damned if Max’s knees didn’t feel a little wobbly, though. Was he really that smitten with this woman he barely knew? He lifted his chin off the top of her head to stare down at her, and she leaned back enough to stare up at him. There it was again. That rope of electric attraction hovering right at the edge of his vision, drawing them together.

“Kiss me, Max.”

“I don’t take advantage of women under duress—”

“Kiss me, dammit, or bend down here so I can kiss you.”

“You’re bossy for a little thing—”

She looped her hands around the back of his neck and tugged his head down to hers while she stood on tiptoe. And then she kissed him.

He’d had some fine kisses in his day, but this was something else altogether. A movie of their future life together unfolded in his head almost too quickly to process. An entire symphony sound track played in the background, and his soul left his body, joined hers, twined with it. Then both leaped back into his body in the space of time it took to blink once.

Laughter. Love. Loss. Generations before and generations to come all crowded into his brain and then fled again, consumed by the fiery passion that exploded between him and Lissa the moment their lips touched.

She groaned and pressed herself closer to him as his arms tightened around her delicate frame. Although she didn’t feel delicate right now. She felt like an untamed tiger in his embrace. And he felt like the one being consumed as she inhaled his soul into herself, stripping him bare and leaving him wide-open to her.

She staggered back from him with a gasp. “I... I’m so sorry... I know better than to cut loose like that.”

“What are you apologizing for? Laying the hottest kiss on me I’ve ever experienced?” He blinked down at her, stunned. “That was incredible.”

“You’re not scared?” she asked in a small voice.

“Should I be?”

“Well, most people would be a little freaked out by the...intensity...of that.”

“Passion is nothing to be afraid of. I mean, I could see some guys being afraid of it. But it takes a lot to scare me...” He trailed off, not entirely certain what they were talking about.

“You have a point.” She sounded bemused. A little distracted even, as if she was pondering something else altogether.

“What’s going on in that complicated head of yours?” he asked lightly, even though the question was dead serious.

“That’s the second time the floodgates have opened around you.” She didn’t explain her comment.

“Should I know what you’re talking about?” he asked.

“No, of course not. I’m just rambling on about nothing.”

“What floodgates?” he persisted.

A police officer’s voice interjected from by the stairwell. “Ma’am, if you could come downstairs, we need you to make a statement.”

Thank God. Saved by the cops.

“Yes, Officer, I know the drill. I was attacked last night on the street.”

“Someone got it in for you, ma’am?”

Max froze at the question. He’d been too panicked on his way over there to make the obvious connection between the two attacks. He looked down at her, still nestled in his arms. “Who wants to hurt you? Do you have enemies?”

“Not here. I just got to New Orleans.”

Did that mean she had enemies elsewhere? Mad enough to follow her and take their revenge on her in the Big Easy? “We need to talk,” he murmured.

She nodded once, reluctantly.

The vandals had been kind enough to leave a calling card in the form of gang symbols spray painted on the walls and windows of the shop. This was retaliation for Julio G.’s capture. Max’s jaw went hard as he stared at the damage. Julio G. wasn’t the only guy in town who could call in muscle to make a point.

He asked the police tersely, “Do you know where this gang has its headquarters?”

“Hey, now, buddy. We don’t want no retaliation from the likes of you. Besides, these punks are a big, powerful gang. Lots of guys. Lots of guns. You stay away from them. Ya heah’?”

“I hear,” he replied evenly. He ignored, but he heard. Julio G. and his boys were about to deeply regret messing with one Lissa Clearmont.

Tonight’s police interview took considerably longer than last night’s. Not only were the police less concerned about her mental well-being, since she hadn’t been physically attacked this time, but they were highly suspicious of two attacks by a notorious gang in such quick succession. They probed at length for some connection between her and a gang member, some enemy, some ex-lover or disgruntled customer who could have caused Julio G. and his boys to target her.

Dawn was breaking by the time the last law enforcement professional packed up his tools and left. Max carried down a sheet of plywood from upstairs and sawed it to fit in the frame of the broken shop door. “You’re going to need a new door. While you’re at it, you should upgrade to something with a wrought iron security grill.”

“I’d have no idea how to go about finding something like that.”

“Then you’re in luck. I know every antique and secondhand dealer in town. We’ll find you something. But first, breakfast.”

* * *

Lissa looked around the interior of one of New Orleans’s most famous restaurants in dismay. They were the only customers. “Is this place even open for breakfast?”

“It’s open for us. I did the owner a favor a while back.”

“What kind of favor?”

Max grinned across the white linen tablecloth at her. “A big one, chère.”

She subsided, knowing an evasion when she heard one. Max ordered eggs Benedict, bacon, sausage, grits and fresh fruit for two, and then leaned back to study her intently enough that she started to squirm a bit.

“About that kiss last night,” he started.

Oh, Lord. She’d been hoping he wouldn’t bring that up. She had no idea why such a massive flood of impressions, images and information had come over her when they’d kissed. Her big visions were always tied to violence, not to hot kisses.

Maybe it had been her own fear that triggered the sudden onslaught of psychic emanations in her head. She’d probably just been too scared to put a lid on the vivid emotions that had flooded her. That was all it had been—emotion. Physical attraction and arousal. Not anything psychic. She was done with opening herself to those energies.

Max leaned forward curiously. “What happened? Is that what it’s always like to kiss you?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never kissed myself.”

“Something happened when you kissed me, Lissa.”

He hadn’t picked up on some of the visions that had shot through her when they’d kissed, had he? “You mean the earth moved under your feet?” she joked.

He frowned across the table at her. “I’m serious.”

She really wished he would drop the line of questioning, but she sensed there wasn’t a chance in hell he would do that. Instead she asked, a shade shortly, “Describe something.”

“It was like my imagination went crazy. I saw all kinds of images and felt all kinds of feelings. Hell, I even thought I heard music. But it all happened in, like, a millisecond.”

She swore under her breath. Did he have a gift of his own, then? Most mundanes were lucky to catch tiny snatches of her vision flow. Nobody saw the whole unedited show inside her skull. She leaned forward. “Has anyone ever told you you’re empathic?”

He frowned. “As in the woo-woo kind? An empath?”

She smiled broadly. “That, or merely that you have a talent for picking up on other peoples’ emotions.”

He leaned back hard in his chair. “I’m a—” He broke off and started again. “I have some experience in watching other people’s body language. Reading facial expressions. But that doesn’t make me some kind of psychic.”

He said the word as if it were filthy. A momentary knife of pain twisted in her gut. No. It was all right. She wasn’t part of that world anymore. He could despise it and not despise the most important piece of her.

“Are you a cop?” she blurted.

“No,” he answered promptly.

He wasn’t an FBI agent, was he? That would be disastrous. He’d be an easy phone call away from talking to the feds she’d worked with in the Northeast, finding kidnapping victims and murder victims over the years. Heck, he would probably already know some guys out of the Boston office.

“Are you FBI?” she asked reluctantly.

“Nope.”

Thank goodness. But then her confusion returned, bigger than before. “Then how did you know how to drop Julio G., and how did you know all that stuff you told me to do on the phone last night? And now that I think about it, you came into the store at the same time as the police. How did they let you do that?”

“I got to your place first. They just followed me in.”

She sensed evasion in his voice. “And the other stuff? About how I should hide and defend myself from an intruder in my house. How did you know about all that?”

He grinned at her. “Easy. I watch a lot of cop shows on TV.”

That was totally more evasion. She started to challenge him but was interrupted by the arrival of their breakfast. The food was beyond delicious, and she dug in with gusto.

Eventually Max said, “Tell me more about your aunt. I gather she was some sort of psychic? What’s up with that? That stuff’s not real, is it?”

She’d had this argument so many times over the years that she’d long ago learned just not to go there in conversation. “I am no scientific authority and can’t comment on that one way or another. Each person sees and believes whatever they want to regarding psychic phenomena. As for my aunt, most people who knew her believed she was not only psychic but very psychic.”

“And you? Do you believe that?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “She knew some stuff that was awfully hard to explain any other way.”

“There’s always an explanation. Scientists can always successfully debunk anyone who claims to be psychic.”

She stared at him intently, willing him to understand. “Many people use mundane skills to pass themselves off as psychics. The technique is generally referred to as cold reading. I do think that some people who actually cold read believe themselves to be genuinely psychic. In point of fact, they’re picking up on subtle body language signals from their subjects.”

“Like your aunt?”

He sounded as if he was trying to make a joke, but she answered seriously. “Most people who saw her in action believed she had a genuine gift. It’s not possible to cold read the future, but she could predict it spot-on. She could give uncannily accurate readings to people she’d never met, over the phone, in a different part of the country from her. And she never did it as a parlor trick or for financial gain.”

To his credit, Max didn’t make any snarky comments. He actually seemed to take her at her word when she claimed her aunt had possessed out-of-the-ordinary skills. At least he didn’t disbelieve her outright. That was more than she could have asked from him.

“If you’re not psychic,” he remarked lightly, “then I guess you’re simply a spectacular kisser.”

She shot him a damning look. “You don’t believe that.”

“I dunno. That was a pretty hot kiss you laid on me. Perhaps we ought to try it again and see if the same thing happens.”

“We’re in a restaurant, sitting in front of the window on a crowded street!”

“All those folks out there have seen kissing before.”

“I’m still hungry,” she declared, her stomach doing flip-flops at the idea of kissing him again. And this time when she wasn’t scared out of her mind.

“Afraid to kiss me?” he teased her.

“You have a sister, don’t you?” she accused.

He glanced at her a shade too quickly. “Did your psychic powers tell you that?”

“No. That annoying big-brother tone you just took with me told me,” she retorted.

Grinning, he lifted his orange juice to her. “Touché.”

An urge filled her to know this man, to understand what made him tick, to know how he’d become the confident, self-contained man seated before her today. “Tell me the three most important things that have ever happened to you,” she asked impulsively.

“You first,” he returned.

“Fair enough.” She thought for a moment. “In no particular order, the circumstances of my conception—”

He interrupted her. “Elaborate on that.”

“My mother was drugged and raped at a party when she was nineteen. Her attacker was never caught. I was the result of that event. But it means I never knew my birth father.” She added reluctantly, “And it means my mother was plagued by conflicted feelings about me and my existence throughout my entire upbringing.”

Which was the understatement of the century. No matter how hard her mother had wanted to love her, some part of her had never been able to break through the trauma of the rape to truly, unconditionally love Lissa. Her mother’s head was willing to love, but her heart was not entirely.

Max looked as though his mental wheels were turning a hundred miles an hour, and she continued hastily before he could ask her any more probing questions about that exceedingly unpleasant detail about her past.

“Number two most important life event—inheriting the shop from my aunt. It gave me an excuse to move across the country and start a new life.”

“Why didn’t you just sell the shop and stay where you were? That building has great bones and is in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying fast. You could turn a nice profit if you sold it.”

“I needed the new start more than I needed the money.”

“Why?”

She was careful not to even think about her real reasons for the abrupt move, lest they show on her face and Captain Perceptive Pants pick up on them. “My life wasn’t heading the direction I wanted it to in Vermont.”

“And what direction would that be?”

She shrugged. “The normal one. A decent living, some friends, a nice guy. Maybe settling down someday.” Suddenly panicked that he would think she was making a pass at him, she added in desperation, “You know. The whole 2.1 kids, dog and a Volvo station wagon routine.”

He smiled gently at her attempt at humor. “And the third most important thing to happen to you?”

“I’m still waiting for it.” She wasn’t about to admit that meeting him was rapidly climbing its way onto the list. And she bloody well wasn’t confessing that talking with dead people was the real third thing on her list. “Okay, your turn,” she blurted.

His facial expression went stone cold, locked and barred, no entrance. When he spoke, it was with great reluctance. “My parent’s divorce changed the course of my life. My father tried to steal my loyalty away from my mother, and the result was that he and I spent a lot of time together when I was a kid. He tried to teach me to be like him.”

She sensed darkness in that statement. Were she still a practicing psychic and he a client seeking a reading, she would dive into that darkness and explore it, but she was not and he was not. “Did your father succeed in making you like him?” she asked quietly.

“That’s an excellent question.”

Good grief. Wave upon wave of darkness shrouded that answer. Clearly Max was deeply conflicted about his father and not at all enamored at the idea of being like him. She noted that he declined to answer her. He continued with his list.

“The car accident that almost killed my mom and little sister was the second big milestone. It left my mother paralyzed from the neck down. I had to move back home from college and care for her around the clock for four years until she died of complications.”

“Oh, Max. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged casually, but she didn’t have to be psychic to feel the pain in the gesture.

“And the third event?”

He opened his mouth. Started to say something but stopped. A voice in her head filled in his unspoken words. Meeting you. Was that for real, or was that just her own desires whispering what she wanted to hear?

“My work, I suppose.”

“And what exactly is it that you do?”

“I’m a finder. I locate things for people with a lot of money burning a hole in their pockets. Art, antiques, furniture, information, you name it. I make connections and fulfill wishes.”

Interesting. “Tell me more about yourself, Max.”

“Nope.”

She blinked, startled at the bluntness of his reply. He sounded like he meant it, too. “Gonna make me discover more the hard way, huh? Pass me your hand, palm up.”

Smirking, he held his hand out to her. She studied the lines on his hand for a long moment. Oh, dear. There was much more than just a split family in his childhood and the tragic loss of his mother. Suffering. Loneliness. Hatred. Hatred? That was interesting.

His money line was strong. However, his love line was all but nonexistent. She saw a radical life change in his near future. Love was possible, but at great personal cost. And where his passion mound should be, there was only a hard callus at the base of his thumb. She knew from entirely mundane means, namely, working with the FBI for the past decade, that it meant he shot handguns on a regular basis. The irony of a callus over his heart line was impossible to miss, however.

“See anything interesting?” he finally asked.

“I see lots of interesting things. That doesn’t mean I plan to share any of them with you.”

“Hey!” he protested.

“I thought we already established that all that psychic mumbo jumbo is pure poppycock,” she declared.

She was saved by the arrival of breakfast dessert crepes, which were as scrumptious as they sounded. She and Max dived in to the clotted-cream-and-strawberry-filled confections in companionable silence for the most part. And what conversation there was stayed safely on small talk.

She was stuffed when Max finally held her chair for her to stand up. She was going to have to diet for a week to work off that meal. But it had been worth it to get to know Max a little more.

He drove her back to the shop and dropped her off, and she commenced the tedious process of cleaning up after the damage done by what must have been baseball bats or steel pipes. The vandal or vandals had been thorough. Even the walls had gaping holes in them.

Once the debris was swept into a single pile, she began the even more tedious process of inventorying everything that remained and then guessing at what had been broken based on the bits she sifted through. If only she knew the inventory better. She was sure to forget something, and without a list of merchandise made by her aunt, she was bound to lose a fortune in any insurance claim she filed.

Where had Max run off to, anyway? Hopefully, their conversation over breakfast hadn’t scared him. She’d gotten the impression that he liked kissing her nearly as much as she liked kissing him. But he’d driven away from the shop a couple of hours ago like the devil himself had lit a fire under him. Like things were moving too fast for him. Like she’d spooked him.

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