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I knew the houses along here, the changes that had been made in and around them over the years, the names, stories and people who belonged to those houses. Some people don’t like seeing the same faces and places all the time. Take my brother Charlie. He drove a truck for years because he liked staying on the move, always seeing something new. And I’m not sure Annie’s husband, Jack, will ever settle permanently in one place.
That’s hard for a rooted man like me to understand. Did the world’s wanderers have any idea what they were missing? Or were they so busy chasing the horizon they never realized what they’d given up?
I pulled into my driveway, cut the engine and glanced at the woman beside me…one of the wanderers. I shook my head. “If you’re keeping quiet in the hope that I’ll be too tactful to ask why Mrs. Randall Burns hates your guts, you’re out of luck.”
She snorted. “I’m not such a blind optimist. Anyway, you’re due an explanation.” She looked down, plucking at a snag near the hem of her sweater. “Helen Burns hates me for being born. Bad blood, you see. She’s my grandmother.”
I closed my mouth before any more stupid comments could escape. “Inside. We’ll talk about it inside.”
She didn’t quite slam the door when she got out. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
That remark was obviously the product of wishful thinking. “I take it she’s your father’s mother. The father you don’t know anything about.”
“When I told you that I was trying to preserve a little privacy. Not a concept you have a lot of respect for…oh, do slow down, Ben. You’re obviously hurting.”
“I’m okay. So does he live here, too? Here in Highpoint?”
“Yes.” She didn’t wait for me to obey—or not—but moved up beside me and slid her arm around my waist, forcing me to move slower. “And yes, that’s why I came to Highpoint—sheer, bloody-minded curiosity.”
A quick jolt of heat distracted me…and a quieter warmth seeped inside, unknotting muscles I hadn’t realized were clenched. The pain in my shoulder eased to a dull ache.
I frowned at the top of her head. She was looking down, as if the stairs to the porch required a lot of attention. “You wanted to meet him?”
“No. There may be a touch of masochist in me, but I don’t let it take over. I wanted to see him, find out about him, that’s all.”
We’d reached the door. I let her use her key while I tried to sort out the difference between one kind of heat and another. “Wanting to know your father isn’t masochistic.”
“No? And yet you’ve met his mother.” She swung the door open.
I limped inside. “How did she recognize you, if you haven’t had any contact all these years?”
“My mother sent my father school pictures and little notes every year. I suppose he might have shown them to Granny Dearest. Or maybe she recognized me from the last time we met, twenty-four years ago.” She slapped her purse down on the hall table. “Does it matter?”
Twenty-four years ago…“When you were eight? That was the last time you saw your father, you said. That was when you last saw your grandmother, too?”
“Daisy hit a hard patch financially that summer. Things were always tight, but then she had her purse snatched and there went the rent money. My father…” Her voice faltered. “He’d been gone three years by then, but hadn’t yet dropped out of my life completely. She called him, asked for help.”
“Did you go stay with him?”
“Not exactly. He was working toward his master’s and didn’t have a penny to spare. So he said, anyway. I wound up being shipped up here to stay with the judge and my grandmother. My father drove up on weekends, or sometimes we drove into Denver to see him.”
“You didn’t get along with your grandparents.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” She shrugged out of her jacket and opened the hall closet. “Can we drop the subject now?”
“In a minute. Your grandmother knew you were in town. She claimed you’d told her you were leaving.”
“She and the judge ate at the lodge one night. I waited on their table.” She grimaced. “Not a happy encounter for any of us.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Ben! Stop interrogating me. You need to sit down, get off your knee.”
I didn’t want to sit. I couldn’t pace very well, dammit, but I sure didn’t want to sit. “If I don’t ask questions, you won’t tell me anything.”
“Why should I?”
“Why shouldn’t you? Lord, I never knew a woman so good at turning away questions! If I ask a single personal question, I end up talking about my own father. Or the best color for the hall bath, or how to repair damaged plaster.”
Anger waved flags in her cheeks. “You’re exaggerating.” She spun and headed for the living room.
“Am I?” I hobbled after her. “You led me to think you didn’t know anything about your father’s side of the family. If we hadn’t run into your old witch of a grandmother—”
Her laugh was short, sharp and ugly. “Oh, but she’s not the witch. That’s the problem. My other grandmother is. Literally.”
God help me. I leaned my stick carefully against the wall. “Your mother’s mother is, uh…”
“A witch.” Mockery gleamed in her eyes.
“Okay.” I nodded slowly. “I got that part. You mean like Wicca and all that?”
“That’s what people call it nowadays. Granny doesn’t, and really, I’m not sure how much a New Age witch would have in common with Granny’s brand of the Craft.”
She believed this. She honestly thought her grandmother was a witch. “And do you think…uh, are you one, too?”
“The word is witch, Ben. And no, I’m not. But I’m the granddaughter of one, which makes me Satan’s get in the eyes of Mrs. Randall Burns. Didn’t you hear the part about me being a devil child?”
“Somehow that didn’t immediately bring witchcraft to mind.” Muddy floors, yes. Witchcraft, no.
“I suppose not. Will you get off that damned knee?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard you curse before,” I observed.
“You could make a saint curse!”
“I’ll sit down if you’ll tell me about your grandmother. Your other grandmother, not the one I just met.”
She muttered something unflattering about my antecedents, then flung up her hands. “Okay. Her name is Alma Jones. She’s eighty-four and the top of her head barely reaches my shoulder. She lives…sit, Ben!”
“I’m sitting.” I lowered myself onto the couch.
“She lives in a tiny cottage in the Appalachians and makes the world’s best chicken and dumplings. Fresh chicken, mind, from her henhouse. She also makes simples, little charms and cures to sell to her neighbors, and she has the Sight.”
“Ah…the Sight. That’s a Celtic thing, isn’t it? Irish or Scottish?”
“Her maiden name was Sullivan.” The laid-back woman I’d known for a week fairly bristled with feeling. Even her hair seemed agitated. She began pacing. “She’s a darling. She’s helped people all her life. She didn’t ask to have the Sight. Who would? But it runs in our family. Like the curse.”
The curse?
Seely reached the end of the room and spun around, making her hair fly out like a curly cape. “Do you know what that self-righteous old prune called her? A bride of Satan. My granny! She taught Sunday school for thirty-two years!”
A Christian witch. Well, if you could believe in witchcraft in the first place, why not? “What curse?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t mean to mention that.”
“Too late now. What curse?”
“The one another witch put on my great-grandmother for stealing her man about a hundred years ago.” She flung up her hands. “Why am I telling you all this? You don’t believe a word of it.”
“I believe several parts,” I said cautiously. Her granny probably was a good, loving woman who’d taught Sunday school and made up little herbal remedies for her neighbors. And thought of herself as a witch.
Seely’s expression softened as the corners of her lips turned up. “Poor Ben. You’re trying so hard not to tell me that I’m nuts. If it’s any consolation, I don’t believe in the curse, either.”
“Okay. The curse doesn’t count. But you said it was passed down in your family like, uh, the Sight.”
“I’ve heard about it all my life. I don’t really believe in it, but…” She shrugged, which gave her breasts a gentle lift.
I wanted to tell her how much I liked that sweater. I didn’t even let my gaze linger, an act of willpower for which I deserved a lot more credit than I was likely to get. “I know how family stories stick with you. We learn things when we’re kids that cling like burrs long after we’ve figured out they aren’t really true.”
“Yes!” Her laugh was shaky. “That’s it exactly. I don’t really believe in the curse, yet I can’t completely forget it, either. Daisy believes it.” Her feet started her moving again. “She thinks my father left us because a witch cursed the women in my family to unhappiness in love.”
“Hmm.”
She paused by the window, shrugged. “I guess it’s easier to believe in a curse than to think that he didn’t really love her. Or that he’s a noodle.”
“Cooked, I take it.”
She nodded and ran her fingers along the edge of the drapes, as if she found it easier to talk to them right now, instead of me. “I made it sound like I don’t remember anything about him. That isn’t quite true. He read me bedtime stories. He used to take me out in this little sidecar attached to his bicycle. I remember the way the fields smelled, the tug of the wind in my hair.” She swallowed. “The sound of his laugh.”
“Sounds like a noodle, all right.” I came up behind her and rested my hand on her shoulder. “He loved you. For some reason he wasn’t man enough to be responsible for you, but he loved you.”
“You aren’t on the couch.”
“Nope.” I folded my good arm around her and eased her up against me.
She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’trelax, either. “Ben…”
I had a hunch she’d like it better if I made a pass. She’d know what to do when a man crossed that kind of boundary. Comfort was harder for her.
Tough. I stroked a hand down her hair. “So what’s the noodle’s name? Burns for the last half, I guess. Zebediah? Ezekiel?”
My hand was resting against the side of her face, so I felt her smile even though I couldn’t see it. “Well, it is biblical.”
“Mathew? Mark?” She’d relaxed against me, slightly sideways because of the sling. Her hip nestled into my groin. I wondered how long my brain could survive without oxygen, seeing that all of my blood was tied up in one part of my body. “Do I need to run through the rest of the Gospels?”
Her low chuckle delighted me. “Old Testament. Think lions.”
“Lion’s den. Daniel.”
“Bingo.” The top of her head was even with my eyes. Her hair was so soft…. I didn’t nuzzle it. Surely some celestial scorekeeper was pasting all kinds of gold stars next to my name. “I’m glad Duncan turned me down. Better to hear all this from you.”
She went stiff. “What do you mean, he turned you down?”
Uh-oh. Too much distraction. “Let’s pretend I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, no.” She turned, pulling out of my arms, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “I want to know what you meant.”
“You weren’t telling me things. Important things. So I…hell.” I ran my hand over my own head this time.
“So you had me checked out? You had your brother check me out?”
“No, I told you—he turned me down.”
“Oh, that’s different, then! You wanted the cops to investigate me, but your brother wouldn’t do it, so everything’s fine!”
“I needed to know about you, okay? I didn’t want to know. I needed to. And if that doesn’t make sense, well, tough. Tough on both of us,” I said, my voice getting louder, “because I’m used to making sense, only here you are, and I keep doing stupid things and I don’t know why! I don’t make sense at all anymore!”
For a second after my outburst, there was silence. I scowled at her. She was smiling, dammit. “And you like that.”
Her smile just got wider. Then she lifted up onto her toes, put her hand on my good shoulder and her mouth right smack on mine.
“You…” Hard to form words with my head buzzing this way. “Why did you do that?”
“Impulse.” She skimmed smiling lips across mine. “Very poor impulse control I have at times.”
I, on the other hand, was great at self-control. I proved it by not grabbing her.
“Oh, dear, here comes another one. Help,” she said, sliding her arms around my neck and tickling my nape with her fingers. “They’re coming pretty fast now. Can’t seem to stop them.”
“Stop…” Her body brushed mine, scattering what passed for my thoughts. “Stop what?”
“Impulses. Wicked ones. Whoops.” She slipped the top button of my shirt from its buttonhole. “See what I mean?”
“Ah…” I ran my fingers down the whole, wiggly length of her hair, then slowly wrapped my hand around a hunk of it. “This sort of thing, you mean?” And I bent my head and licked her bottom lip. “I’m not supposed to do that.”
“Exactly.” That word glided out on a puff of breath. “I guess they’re catching.”
Another button met the fate of the first. And I snapped.
My left arm clamped around her waist—and damn that sling! I couldn’t snug her against me the way I wanted. But I could crush my mouth down on hers. I could catch her sigh as her lips parted and send my tongue to steal her taste, take it inside me.
I needed two hands. Hell, I could have used three or four, there were so many places I wanted to touch, but I made do with what was available. She’d fitted herself up against me as closely as possible, so I turned my left hand loose to wander.
It liked the taut shape of her thigh, the flare of her hip, the muscle and flesh of her bottom…but that sweater. I’d been looking at that sweater all day, imagining what lay beneath it. I nudged her legs apart with my knee, making a space for my leg between hers. And slid my hand up under her sweater.
“Lace,” I groaned as my hand found the warmth and weight of her breast. “This damned sweater made me crazy enough. If I’d known there was lace beneath it…” I rubbed her nipple with my thumb and pressed up with my thigh.
She moaned into my mouth. Then bit my lip.
