Breaking the Rules (2 page)

“I asked because you don’t look a single day older.” He tilted his head, facing her in suspicious half-profile. “I was here ten years ago. Ten long years that are etched all over my face, and you look exactly the same.” His face was contorted with confusion, his handsome features tight with worry.

“Ten years ago my grandmother would have given the reading.”

“No.” He shook his head, his dark stare so fierce it threatened to knock her off her feet. “No, it was you. You read my future in the crystal ball.” His eyes darted to the sphere and back to hers. “Right here. While I sat in that chair you told me I would meet the love of my life that very night.”

The bile in his words audibly choked him, and for a second she longed to reach out and offer the simple consolation of a touch. But she’d been warned against the dangers of stepping outside the bounds.

She did know him, though. Susana narrowed her eyes again as the memory of that night formed in her mind’s eye.

“It was you,” he said, his words a harsh indictment.

“It was me,” she replied softly. “It was the first reading I ever did.”

“Your first reading?” Aggression twisted his lip. “So you were just making stuff up off the top of your head? How old were you anyway?”

“I was thirteen.”

“Jesus.” Shock flickered in his eyes.

“I was young, but I had experience working with the seeing globe. My grandmother taught me everything she knew.”

A familiar pang of sorrow accompanied the thought of her beloved Granna. Her own skills had now surpassed the older woman’s. Susana’s psychic abilities were stronger, her gift for intuitive readings deeper and more subtle. But she still missed Granna’s supportive strength and reassuring confidence every day.

“So she taught you to make a sucker cross your palm with silver, then scheme up something to get him running out the door with a smile on his face?” His hard eyes bored into her as he stood there, fists clenched, spitting his arrows of accusation.

She held her tongue.
It’s the hurt talking
. Something terrible had happened to him.

Pity stirred in her heart along with something else. Something deeper, sharper. Something invigorating and alarming.

She remembered that first reading as clearly as if she’d seen it in the globe that morning. Two lovers. The fresh-faced young boy he’d been that night, glowing with hopeful optimism and lust for a life he’d barely begun. And a girl.

But not just any girl.

A black haired girl with cat’s eyes and a heart shaped face. A girl who stood in shadow, seeing things no one else could see.

Her.

She’d seen them together in the globe that night. Eyeing each other tentatively. Reaching out a careful hand. Joining those hands and walking together. A slim solemn gypsy girl and the broad shouldered
gadjo
boy who’d sat in front of her.

And she’d never breathed a word of it to anyone.

It had been her first reading for a stranger. She was a young girl, her visions unreliable. Or so she thought.

Now she knew better.

“I told you the truth about what I saw.” Fear tightened her throat.

“You saw me meeting the love of my life that night.” Filled with pain, his eyes searched her face.

Did he want to think she’d been lying? That she’d lie to him now?

Would she? His heavy burden of sorrow and anger frightened her. He was no longer the innocent boy she’d met all those years ago.

A few dismissive words would make him go away, and she doubted she’d see him again.

“I did see you meeting the love of your life that night.”

“But she wasn’t. I thought she was…” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “I thought she loved me.” His voice cracked and Susana’s heart clutched in response.

“I said you would meet the love of your life. But I didn’t tell you who she was. I didn’t describe the woman I saw in the seeing globe that evening.”

She glanced at the globe as icy fingers of apprehension clawed at her gut.

Should she tell him?

“No, that’s true.” His expression softened a little. “You didn’t describe her.” His fists still hung clenched at his sides. His plain white T-shirt stretched over his muscled chest, revealing the raw physical strength coiled and waiting in his hard body.

All that strength scared her.

“Was she blonde?” He spoke hesitantly, suspicion darkening his eyes. “The woman you saw?”

She shook her head.

“What did she look like?” A wary look flickered over his strong features. He didn’t trust her, but he was listening.

She held her head steady, held his gaze as she spoke. “She looked like me.”

He blinked and flinched very slightly. “You?”

“I saw myself in the globe when I did your reading that night.”

There. She’d said it. She stiffened, bracing against any number of possible reactions: rage, disgust, disbelief, violent retribution.

But he looked curious. His broad shoulders shifted a little, as if he could rearrange the heavy burden they carried.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

She shrugged, trying to lighten her own burden of responsibility, the obligation she’d shirked when she told him only half the reading. “I was young. I didn’t have faith in my ability to read accurately. I thought perhaps I was seeing what I wished to see.”

“You wished to see yourself—with me?”

“Perhaps.”

What thirteen-year-old girl didn’t dream of walking arm in arm with a handsome boy? A carefree, healthy young man in a white sailor suit. He’d been the stuff of teenage fantasies back then, with his dark hair buzzed short, his handsome face shaved clean and his dark eyes shining with youthful optimism.

Different from the man who stood before her now. The man whose lips parted as he struggled for words. The youthful optimism gone, replaced by a hard stare of accusation leveled at the world and at her in particular. His striking features marred by a semicircular scar that pierced one eyebrow, and the dark stubble shadowed under his jutting cheekbones.

“Thirteen years old!” He shook his head. “And I listened to you as if you were the Oracle at Delphi. Don’t know why I did. I came into the storefront on a dare. I guess you told me what I wanted to hear, so I chose to believe it.”

“You wanted to find love?” She spoke so softly her words almost disappeared in the smoke from the incense burner.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Who doesn’t?”

“Do you still want to find love?” The words slipped out of her mouth before she had a chance to catch them. What was she doing?

His reply was a dismissive snort. “No, no, no. I’m all done with
love
. No more for me, thanks.” He shook his head again, and a bitter, silent laugh racked him. “Love, hate and everything in between. I’m done with it. I’m not going to marry anybody or fight anybody ever again.”

The glint of dark humor in his eyes surprised her. Susana struggled to keep her confusion from showing on her face.

“Funny thought, isn’t it?” He let out a sharp choke of laughter. “I had the hots for you that night. While you were sitting there reading my fortune, I was thinking about your breasts.”

Her breasts stirred under her black T-shirt as his eyes boldly dropped to survey them.

“I’m thinking about them right now. Guess I don’t have any shame left any more.”

Susana swallowed hard, trying to shove down the very unfamiliar sensation building underneath her baggy shirt, sliding hotly down into her long, black skirt.

He glanced up and raised his eyebrows. “Do I disgust you?”

“No.” She shook her head. She didn’t know what she was feeling, but disgust didn’t play any part in it.

“I should have disgusted you back then. A big, horny twenty-year old boy eyeing a thirteen-year-old girl. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.” Bitter humor flashed in his eyes again. “Then again, maybe a jail term would have saved me some of the other trouble I had instead.”

His eyes fell to her breasts again. Her nipples tightened, heating under his gaze.

“What would you have said if I’d asked you out that night?”

“I’d have had to say no.”

“Why?”

“I was engaged to be married.”

“At thirteen?” His expression of shocked surprise almost made her smile.

“It’s not unusual among my people.”

“So you’re married?” His forehead creased as he asked the question.

“No.” She shook her head. “The engagement was cancelled. My grandmother needed me to stay with her, to develop my gifts.”

“And I was the lucky man you tried them out on for the first time.” He nodded grimly, a smile struggling to break across his lips. His body still taut, emotion and motion reined tightly as he watched her.

“It wasn’t planned.” She shrugged, again trying to absolve herself of the growing sense of responsibility gnawing at her. “My grandmother was smoking a cigarette out back. She told me to step in for her.”

“You were nervous, weren’t you?”

“A little.”

“I could see that. It made me like you. Made me see you as a person. Now I can see it should have made me nervous too.”

One fist unclenched, and he rubbed a spot on his chest with the extended fingers. The action pulled his thin, white T-shirt tight across the thick curve of his pec, and again Susana’s body responded with an alarming flare of heat.

“You were anxious, too.” A smile flickered across her lips at the memory of the strapping young man in his white sailor suit, shifting from foot to foot, waiting for her to emerge through the door.

“Yeah? I guess most people are when they’re about to hear what the future has in store.”

“Only if they plan to believe what they hear.”

“Like I said, I just came in on a dare. I sat in that chair”—he gestured toward it—“and I wondered about your breasts.” Again his eyes flicked over them, and goose bumps rose over the swollen flesh. Susana tossed her head, lifting her chin, defying her body to respond to his crude gawking.

“You misinterpreted the information I gave you.”

“You withheld the information I needed.”

He fixed her with his hard stare again, dark eyes holding hers as if a beam of black light shot between them. She faltered, wilting under the heat of his gaze.

He was right. She had cheated him. Committed a sin of omission.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? Yeah? Well, I’m sorry, too.” He paused, unclenched his fists and settled his hands on his hips. The gesture enlarged him visually until he seemed to fill the entire space of the small storefront. “And I think you owe me.”

He hissed the words quietly, and they slid into Susana’s ears, ruffling her nerves, undermining her carefully cultivated professional demeanor.

“I owe you another reading?” She shivered. She didn’t want to do a reading for him now. Changed as he was, twisted and tormented by circumstance, she was afraid of what she’d see.

Especially since his future had once been bound up with hers.

“Hell, no. No more readings.” He held his head high, dark eyes unreadable in the smoky gloom. “You owe me my life back.”

“Only you can shape your own life.” The words emerged with a quiver of apprehension. People always wanted more than she could give. She could only read the future, not make it happen. And fate was not a hard, immutable thing, but a frame of possibilities, constantly shifting, changing, as destiny and circumstance writhed together in their unscripted dance.

“You owe me one night, then.” His low voice rumbled through the smoke and darkness, setting off a vibration that echoed deep inside her.

“No.” She choked the word, hands fisting into her skirt. Smoking trails of heat simmered through her body where his eyes danced over her.

“An evening. Dinner.” He tilted his head slightly, thoughtfully, as if contemplating an unfolding scroll of possibilities. That bitter laugh shook him. “Dinner and a movie, just like regular folks.”

“It’s not a good idea.” Nerves all on edge, she resisted the urge to shrink away from him. Her nipples strained against the fabric of her shirt. Her fingertips hummed with unwelcome anticipation as she buried them in the folds of her skirt and struggled to stay totally still. To resist his power.

“I don’t care if it’s a good idea. I did everything right and look where I am now. A bad idea is as good as any, as far as I’m concerned. Are you afraid of me?”

Yes
.

“No.”

“Then why not? You’ve got to eat. I’ll buy you a good dinner. I’ve got to eat, too. I guess that’s one thing we have in common.”

Her nerves shrieked an alarm of warning. But woven through the wail of fear was an opposite call—a siren song bidding her to taste the dangerous and forbidden fruit of dinner with the handsome boy she’d seen in her globe so long ago.

To taste the freedom she craved.

She consulted her sixth sense—her bread and butter, the precious gift she’d cultivated until it was stronger than her other senses.

Silence and darkness. No answers forthcoming.

“Come on.” He reached out a hand. Her eyes fell to the thick muscles of his forearm, the tan skin sprinkled with tiny dark hairs. Warm human flesh reaching out to her.

“Okay.”

CHAPTER 2

T
he rumble of the corrugated metal awning shuddered through Susana’s body. It clanged to the ground with grim finality. She pulled the key out of the padlock with an ominous sense that she was leaving behind the safe little world she inhabited and stepping out into a fearsome new universe of possibility.

She tucked the key into her pocket.

Joe stood there, features thrown into relief by the harsh glare of the streetlights, hands shoved in his pockets, oblivious to the strangers pushing past him.

“Ready?”

She nodded. And swallowed. She’d never been to dinner with any man other than her cousins Janus and Roman. If they knew she was about to have dinner with a complete stranger–worse, a
gadjo
…

They’d better not find out.

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Where do you want to go?” Joe offered her his arm. The gesture startled her–formal, and yet so intimate. An invitation to touch him right there in the street. She lifted her elbow and cautiously threaded her arm though his.