“Give it your best shot, Witch Whisperer.”
“There’s a challenge I can’t refuse. Don’t worry, pulling down your walls won’t hurt a bit.”
“You leave my walls where they a—I don’t have walls. Loosening up is one thing; giving up control is another, and I won’t.” Paxton snatched at the doorknob behind him, and it came off in his hand.
On the opposite side of the door, the knob’s mate hit the floor and bounced—an echoing reminder of his stupidity—an unnaturally lengthy echoing reminder. Gussie must be helping it bounce.
Paxton threw the crystal doorknob on the bed. It rolled off and bounced as well—like a rubber ball, it bounced—and he growled.
Harmony imagined the growl deep in his throat during sex, him deep inside her, and . . . Withering witch balls, she needed to get a grip.
“Do it again,” she said when the knob stopped bouncing.
“You really piss me off, you know that!”
Harmony raised her chin. “So why did you come looking for me?”
“Hell if I remember. Oh yes. I was wor—I thought you might need protecting. Hah!” He charged the door with his shoulder.
It splintered and slammed open with a resounding crack.
Paxton straightened, slipped his hands in his pockets, and left, whistling.
Hot. He looked hot walking away. Damn it. He looked hot going and coming. Oh man, she really wanted to watch him coming.
“I’m gonna unstarch you, Ramrod,” she called after him, “whether you want me to or not!”
Chapter Six
HARMONY thought Paxton was beginning to seem human. But she wasn’t here to pick up men, or she didn’t think she was. Who knew?
Harmony turned back to the room. “Okay, Gussie. Vintage clothes; lead the way.”
A door on the far side of the room opened and Harmony stepped into a cedar dressing room containing sheet-covered racks of something that might very well be vintage clothes.
“Thanks, Gussie.”
I think. Hmm, wha’d’ya know?
Gussie liked her. Oh, oh. A friendly but negative ghost might be a ruse to get the ring, or whatever the heck had kept the poor thing wailing for a century.
When the air warmed, Harmony figured Gussie retired to replenish her energy, and she shed her layers. She wished she could read her dead hostess the way she read her bigger-than-life host. Then again, there was a lot about Paxton she couldn’t read. Hell, his walls had walls, which she was gonna pull down, brick by sexy brick.
In a dressing room lit by electrified dolphin gaslights, Harmony caught the faint aroma of herbs in addition to the cedar. An amazing dressing table called to her. The top wore a playful spray of red tulips, with stems growing up its legs and leaves flowing around its mirror. Once upon a time Gussie had had a playful side.
Harmony felt cold air on the back of her neck again, smelled the dead lilacs, and saw a woman in the mirror behind her—Gussie, forty years old, maybe, and expressionless, wearing a purple crepe gown, diamond necklace and earrings, and a dolphin brooch. She looked . . . lost, or she felt lost, or lonely, and angry, and she wanted . . . out? Then she was gone.
In Gussie’s day, purple had been the purgatory color between the black dress of mourning and the release from mourning colors. Was that what she meant by wanting out? Or did she want out of the castle?
Not a little jarred by the encounter, Harmony looked through the dressing table drawers for the other half of the ring with no luck. But she did find Gussie’s grimoire and leafed through it. Finding no spells of import, she lifted a couple of sheets from the clothes racks.
In recent years—well, maybe not terribly recent—someone had put the dresses and gowns on padded wooden hangers and covered them with linen sheets. The gowns were plentiful and awesome. Harmony wished time wasn’t an issue.
Several old trunks held accessories, nightclothes, and bed linens, and between the layers, dried sprigs of southernwood, or garderobe, kept the moths away while lavender kept the linens smelling fresh. Most were in decent shape because of the conservation attempts and low temperatures. But the place wasn’t air-conditioned.
Harmony followed the draft to a glass-fronted corner curio full of jewelry, trinkets, and scrimshaw, some with dolphins, but no Celtic rings. Feeling along the outer edges of the cupboard, she found a trip latch. The curio swung out as a whole, leaving a gaping entrance to a dank and chilly tunnel with a ray of natural light at the far end.
She followed it, ignoring the occasional squeal and clickety-click of teeny toenails, the owners of which she refused to identify. If she ever came this way again, she was bringing reinforcements.
The scent of brine told Harmony she was headed toward the sea. A red lacquer door opened to an overfurnished, overlarge, formal Victorian parlor, with Oriental rugs and enough treasures to make an antiques dealer salivate.
She cut through the musty parlor. She’d explore here later, but right now, she was called toward a door behind a small tapestry—as seduced toward it as she’d been by the gold linen yard sale gown.
The door opened to a tower room—octagon, with seven more doors inside, each a different bright color, the walls between painted with clown faces, all eerie and unique.
The sights, colors, and scents of . . . cotton candy and candy apples . . . fascinated her. But Gussie’s energy ran rampant here, despite the room’s masquerade as a toy room with sweet scents to seduce.
The toys stood abandoned, sad, silent, solitary, sinister. Harmony propped the door open with a heavy, cast-iron tricycle before she went inside.
A wooden box, about seven by seven feet square, centered the room, its painted sides showing a colorful sea floor, dolphins and a mermaid swimming above it. Harmony touched the mermaid’s face and could have sworn it was Lisette. She closed her eyes as she kept her hand on the depiction, and saw Lisette wearing the gold linen gown and kicking her way up from the depths of the sea.
Harmony coughed like when she’d undone the hem, as if the sea was trying to swallow her whole. Whisking her hand from the image, she caught her breath and calmed. Lisette had not drowned, or the dress would never have come into her possession.
Relieved and holding her chest, Harmony turned to the room at large. An antique wicker doll carriage, or perambulator, remained pristine, as did a regiment of life-sized windup toy soldiers, arranged in rows and standing at attention, bayonet rifles at the ready.
In a life-sized red mechanical fortune-telling box, a wooden marionette gypsy wore too much makeup.
Welcome to nightmare alley. Next stop: psychotherapy.
This place was neither for children nor for the faint of heart. Harmony knew it in her bones, and she’d better control her unease, or her sisters would come running.
Before she could calm, her left arm got cold, and the Celtic ring went icy again. Harmony closed her hand to keep the ring on and stepped away from the frigid source, until she backed into the giant mermaid box, accidentally elbowing a crank on its side. The nudge was all it took, and the crank began to turn, gain speed, and spin out of control.
Music filled the air, movie music, like when an ax murderer waits at the bottom of the dark stairs for the heroine to come down in her nightgown.
Harmony’s heart went into overdrive, and the box popped open.
She screamed, then the face of the giant jack-in-the-box lunged her way.
Something hit the back of her knees, and she turned, her arm raised in self-defense, but it was just the doll carriage . . . with a headless doll inside.
The sinister music slowed, and Jack went limp, bent over double, and stared into her eyes, his smile garish.
The dappled gray hobby horse started rocking, then the windup soldiers took to marching in place, and the fortune-teller dipped a wooden eyelid in a macabre wink.
Harmony ran . . . straight into Paxton’s arms. She screamed while he tried to hold her and didn’t stop until he kissed her.
She fell into the kiss to erase the horror and because it felt so blooming good to be safe. “Oh,” she said, coming up for air. “It’s you.”
“How many men do you kiss with that much passion?”
“I haven’t kissed a man in three years.”
“Liar. You kissed me an hour ago.”
“Yeah, well, I’m up to my ass in alligators, so forgive me if it slipped my mind. How long have you been standing there?”
He gazed furtively about the room. “Long enough to need a shrink?”
“That makes two of us. I have to go home now.”
Pulling her along, Paxton stepped into the room with the same morbid curiosity that had kept her glued to the floor in the midst of the nightmare, his arm so hard around her shoulder, she couldn’t tell who was protecting who. He looked down at her. “You’re not going anywhere. You’ve already proved you’re not easy to get rid of. I mean—”
She elbowed him. “You’re right. I don’t give up easily. My staying power has been tested and honed. And I’ve seen my share of ghostly activities, but this about blew—”
“Enough with the ghost, already. You probably tripped some old switch. Nicodemus Paxton, the old pirate who built this place, was into eerie midway horror house tricks. You should see the funhouse mirror room upstairs. I’m telling you, we don’t have a ghost.”
The tricycle she’d used to hold the door open rolled into her line of vision, and Harmony ran to catch the door, but it slammed shut and clicked, as if it locked. Around the room in turn, came one click after another. Eight doors. Eight clicks.
Harmony tried the door to be sure. “Locked.” She fell against it and watched Paxton, across the room, trying one of the others. “Don’t bother,” she said. “She locked them all.”
“She, who?”
“The ghost.”
“There . . . is . . . no . . . ghost.”
The lights went out, throwing the room into a pit as black as the one into which she’d fallen when she passed out at home.
Except this time, she was awake.
Chapter Seven
TRAPPED, and at the blind mercy of terrorizing toys, panic gripped Harmony with a ghostly hand. “King, I can’t see you. Talk to me.”
“I’m here.” His voice like a blessing echoed in the darkness. “Keep talking so I can find you.”
“Uh, okay . . . my shirt. You hate it, but I have snarky and suggestive ones that you’d hate more, like—”
Paxton’s searching hands found her . . . breast first. “Oh I don’t know,” he said. “This one is starting to . . . grow on me.”
A flirting brass-ass technocrat whose walls went down with the lights. What
couldn’t
she do with one of those? She grinned into the darkness as he lingered and found her other breast—and now that he had both hands full, and his touch could hardly be called accidental, she raised a brow. “What are you doing?”
He stopped fondling, but his hands remained where they were while her breasts peaked and swelled to better fill them.
Paxton cleared his throat. “I’m . . . reading your shirt . . . by Braille. I wanted to be sure this was really you . . . not a ghost.”
“It’s really,
really
me.”
He fingered a nubbin. “And you’re really, really happy to see me.” The banked amusement in his voice failed to hide his intense sexual interest. “You stopped talking,” he said, his voice soft.
The heat from his touch warmed her to her core. “I uh . . . forgot what I was saying?”
“Suggestive shirts,” he prodded.
“Right. Two come to mind: Fast Girls Finish First, and Bad Girls Finish Often.”
“I find both inspiring, but I’m glad you didn’t walk into the great hall wearing one of them. I would’ve had a mutiny. I know, because I don’t give a damn about the project right now, and I’m the freaking boss.”
“Positive words, please. You’re the aroused boss. Aroused is good, and it’s positive.”
“In that case, I’m a
very
good boss.” He licked her ear.
Harmony tilted her head so he could nibble at will, his warm breath and roaming lips and hands sending shivering shock waves though her system. He brought her close, as if she needed warming.
She needed cooling, but who was she to quibble?
She’d been too long without a man when Brass Ass McShaft seemed the warm and cuddly type.
Cuddly being a momentary lapse, as McShaft pinned her against the wall in a me-man/you-woman move, cupped her head in his hands, opened his mouth over hers, and silenced her good sense. One big hand sleeked from her shoulder to the small of her back, where he pressed her flat against him.
Harmony about melted when her warm and willing center met his hard, probing man brain, and the darkness became her friend. No light needed to feel, touch, taste, as he incited a series of trembling minishocks, arousing an answering need in her to return the pleasure. In addition to the gift of his firm muscles and firmer rod, he tasted of spice, cinnamon, and coffee—exotic and arousing—and he dominated the kiss with a world of experience.
This man didn’t just kiss; he made love with his mouth in the way an ice cream addict approached a fresh cone, delighting in that first lick of cool and creamy froth, wallowing in every subsequent, satisfying tongue swirl, the ultimate in sweet, sensual pleasure that ended in a burst of satisfaction. An exercise to gratify a deep, abiding hunger. And while Paxton’s tongue made a sensual dessert of her mouth, spirals of need licked along Harmony’s inner thighs, tonguing her higher, so high, she whimpered and flowered in ready welcome.
With the onslaught of desire, she worshipped his mouth in return with a zeal she’d never experienced. Paxton’s tongue should be registered as a lethal weapon. What kind of man made you wet your panties with his tongue . . .
in your mouth
? She nearly came at the thought.
This man. The King of Paxton Castle.
“You know what we’re doing?” he asked, his voice jarring in a world of mounting pleasure.
“Doing?” she repeated. “Oh. Losing our minds?”
Our clothes, next,
she hoped,
our grips on reality, please.
Paxton sighed against her ear as if he heard her treacherous thoughts, which would be seriously scary.
“There
is
a lot of mind loss, mind bending, and mind blowing going on,” he said. “But I wanted to make sure you were with me. I’m not alone feeling this . . . this . . . instant and overwhelming . . . draw, pull—”
“Magnetic attraction?” she suggested.
“Exactly. I needed to be sure you were aware and on the same page as I am. Getting hit upside the head with an industrial-sized magnet is rarely mutual and often harmful.”
“Oh, it’s mutual.” Just to prove it, and because she wanted to, Harmony slipped her hands beneath his shirt, appreciating the increased pace of his heart and the catch in his breath. His skin and its nap of chest hair were softer than his shirt, the silkiest she’d ever run her fingers through—Egyptian-cotton soft—and so hot it should come with a warning label. Warning: Might Cause a Fiery Swell of Orgasmic Insanity.
Paxton’s sigh turned her to liquid honey as she resumed her tactile exploration and regularly scheduled sexcathalon—a gold-medal hands-and-mouth competition, fired by endurance and determination—a race they both wanted to win.
He slid both his hands down her back to cup her bottom and pull her up into his arms. Instinctively, she wound her legs around him, and he turned them so he leaned on the wall and slid them down to the floor, where she straddled him.
“I don’t care why the lights went out,” he said, “this is absolutely—”
Harmony fingered his man nips to hard little pebbles so he stopped talking. “It is amazing, but haven’t you figured Gussie out by now?”
“Gussie?”
“Every time you deny her existence, she does something to prove she’s here.”
Chuckling, Paxton slid his hands beneath her shirt and stopped. “What do you have between your breasts? It feels like a . . . pouch.”
“It’s a sachet of perfumed herbs,” she said, telling the truth.
He unhooked her bra in half a beat. “You know,” he said. “If the ghost does exist, this is the nicest thing she’s ever done for me. I’ve never been happier about anyth—”
The lights came on with a flash that half blinded them, and with the light came clarity of mind.
They couldn’t look each other in the eye, but they retrieved their hands so fast, their fingers tangled. A second later, Harmony stood to dust herself off and give Paxton time to stand and lose his boner. The locks clicked, eight in a row. “The doors are open,” she said.
“If the ghost exists,” Paxton said, turning her way, “she’s a mean old bat.” He shouted as if in pain, lurched, and knocked her on the floor.
“Hey!” she snapped.
“Sorry.” Paxton bent to give her a hand up, but straightened with a shout, before he could.
“Did you throw your back out?” Harmony rose on her own, watching Paxton turn to look behind him, and as he did, she saw the cause of his discomfort. A huge honking splinter, and not just any splinter.
One life-sized toy soldier’s rifle was missing its bayonet.
“What is it?” Paxton asked, trying without success to see his own backside.
“I really hate to tell you this, but you’ve been shot in the ass by a wooden soldier.”