Chapter Eight
“A
toy
soldier? That’s impossible,” Paxton snapped.
“No. That’s Gussie trying to prove she’s here.” Harmony walked around him, assessing the damage. “You know, judging by its placement, if you hadn’t turned to me when you did, she might have shot you in your man brain.”
Paxton paled, and Harmony put her arm around him. “Is there a nurse on the construction site?”
“There’s a first aid kit. Curt usually takes care of scrapes and bruises, but I’ll be damned if I want him knowing about this.”
“Too embarrassing?”
“Too close to feeding your ghost stories. I don’t want a mutiny, however close I got to abandoning ship for a weird spell there.”
“You gonna yank that bayonet out of your butt yourself, or are you gonna walk around like that and refuse treatment like a real man?”
“You’re enjoying this!”
“Hey, it’s not every day a military man lets a toy soldier shoot him where the sun don’t—”
“Never mind. I need treatment. What did you say earlier? Rather the deep blue sea than the devil?”
“Hah. I suppose I’m the deep blue sea?”
“You got it in one, babe.”
“Call me babe again, and I’ll stick something sharp in the other cheek.”
“Point—ouch—taken. I apologize. Harmony . . . Crap, I can’t believe I’m asking you this, but would you please remove this bayonet from my backside?”
“Okay, here goes.” She rubbed her hands together and circled him.
“Wait!” he shouted, pulling his ass from her reach with a groan. “Not like that!”
“Like what then? Does it hurt bad?”
“It’s just a splinter.”
“Yeah?” She went to the life-sized wooden soldier with the missing bayonet. “He did it,” she said, pointing. Then she measured the length of the bayonet on another rifle, and turned to Paxton, her hands at the same spread. “Your splinter is . . .
this
. . . big.”
“This is
not
a fish story to tell your friends,” he snapped.
“Spoilsport. Your splinter’s a foot long, McBullseye. Hurts more just knowing it, doesn’t it?”
“Could you stop enjoying this and get the first aid kit? Don’t tell Curt why you need it. I’d never live it down.”
“Okay, but you’re a little pale. Why don’t I help you lie on your stomach on one of the sofas in the formal parlor while you wait?”
He walked slowly and painfully to the sofa, and she helped him lie down, while he cursed the castle and his family tree in general.
Harmony towered over him. “Wanna pull down your slacks to let the air get at it until I come back?”
“Cartwright . . .”
“I’m going, I’m going.” Spooked over the toy room horror show, but more so by their magnetic-libido kissing fest, Harmony ran through the tunnel and down the stairs, slowing as she turned to the construction site so no one would be suspicious. She managed a nebulous request, as if she needed the first aid kit for herself.
Curt, being a man, probably thought, Woman trouble—yikes! and handed it over without question.
By the time she got back to Paxton, he had recovered his manly pride, if not his manly stance. “Okay, tough guy,” she said, sitting beside him, thigh to thigh. “Have no fear, your nurse is here. Oooh, nice ass.”
“Harmony, I’m warning you—”
“Sheesh. You’re no fun when you’re a pain in the ass. Oh, sorry. No pun intended. Shall
I
pull down your slacks, or do you want to do the honors?”
He looked back at her. “Shouldn’t you take out the splinter first?”
“If you want me to.” She cleared her throat and looked around the formal parlor. “Wanna bite down on the family saber while I do? If not, I have a topical anesthetic in here that’ll make removing it much less painful.”
“Cut the sarcasm. Are there scissors in the first aid kit?”
“Yep.”
Paxton rested his cheek on the sofa arm. “Cut my slacks out of the way. I have spares upstairs. I’ll change after.”
“Going commando are we?”
He looked back at her. “Are we?”
She raised a brow. “One of us could be.”
“Which one of us?” he wanted to know.
“I’m just screwing with your man brain. Boxers or tighty whities?”
“Cut the slacks, and you’ll find out what to cut next . . . if anything. I can’t believe I’m putting my ass in your hands.”
“Such fine words; such unromantic circumstances.”
“You want romance? Get that stick out of my butt.”
“That’s romantic, all right. But which stick? The
wooden
one or the steel rod? Because I gotta tell you that I think you’ll need a major attitude adjustment, and even then, surgery might be required to remove—”
“Shut . . . up!”
“Okay, playtime’s over. Geez, are you touchy. Wow, your slacks cut like butter. That’s quality. Ooh, yum, black silk.” She knuckled the fabric of his underwear. “But I can’t tell if they’re boxers or briefs. What a waste.”
“My briefs are a waste?”
She looked up. “Yeah . . . those too.” She continued cutting. “Having your ass in a sling is the real waste,” she mumbled.
He craned his neck to see her face. “What?”
“This whole scenario is a sad waste—the sofa, the ambience, your bare ass. I could fantasize all three into a much better situation.”
“C’mere.” He crooked a finger, and she leaned down so far, she practically lay beside him. Not even the sofa’s aged musk nor the brackish scent of low tide at this end of the building calmed her raging hormones.
Paxton caught the under-wave of her natural pageboy and tucked a thick curl behind her ear. The slide of his fingers along her earlobe radiated to her breasts, budded her nipples, and brought her to flower.
She could go to bed with this man, which was saying something. She was particular. Not liking to be touched did that to a woman.
“Go ahead, distract me from the pain,” he whispered, his lips so close she could meet them. “Tell me your fantasy.”
Fantasy? Oh yeah. Well, at least he had a playful side, even if it was only sex play. She wanted the real thing, not the fantasy, but her seducer was too skewered to play the kind of game her body craved after his sensual onslaught.
She
wanted to be impaled . . . by him. “Much good you do me like that,” she said.
“You’re all heart, Cartwright.”
“I try.” She turned her mournful sigh into a sexy one. “Okay, here’s the fantasy . . . I’m thinking your chest is as exposed as your ass—”
“Your word choice sorely lacks fantasy quality. As a matter of fact, it’s flip and annoying.”
“Sorry,” she whispered and blew in his ear. “I’ll try to be dulcet and seductive in tone.” She sat up and turned her attention to his tush.
“Without sarcasm,” he suggested, resting his forehead on the sofa arm.
“Fine. In my mind, I’m stripping you naked, slow and easy, one piece of clothing at a time, and I’m kissing every bit of skin I expose, licking you inch by salty inch.” She picked up the spray can of topical anesthetic. “Then, because I want that hot rod where it belongs, I stand and take off my panties, one side, then the other . . . and you reach up and—” She sprayed his butt.
Paxton yelped.
“I didn’t touch you.”
“That was as cold as your heart.”
“You must’ve made one tough soldier, buster.”
“I never joined the military.”
“Don’t military school grads usually go on to join one branch of the service or another?”
“I didn’t graduate.”
“You didn’t quit. You’d rather be shot than quit. What happened?”
Paxton heaved a sigh. “I was expelled, if you must know. Ouch! Cripes!”
“Splinter’s out!”
“You could’ve warned me.”
“I wanted to surprise you so you wouldn’t . . . ah . . . clench. Maybe I should bruise some southernwood from Gussie’s witch garden and spread it on your ass. Her grimoire says that southernwood ‘draws forth splinters and thorns from the flesh.’ It makes a good worm medicine, too.”
“I wonder how many people she shot with those bayonets, if she had to grow her own remedy.” Paxton touched his temple. “Look at me, talking like there is a—”
“Don’t say it. You can’t afford another hole in your—”
He looked back at her. “Being tended by you is like playing ice hockey bare-assed.”
“Or like being seduced with no payoff?”
Paxton slammed his forehead against the sofa arm several frustrated times.
Chapter Nine
“NOW we have to get you back on the job as if nothing happened.” Harmony cleaned and disinfected Paxton’s wound, applied an antibiotic ointment, and covered it with a bandage. All set.” She palmed, stroked, and slapped his perfect, undamaged cheek. “Soft as a newborn peach,” she said, sliding a roving finger lower, lower . . . but stopping short of giving him—and herself—the sexual jolt his tense body expected.
When she leaned toward him, his expression expectant, he looked shocked to see her. Releasing his breath in a whoosh, his body went limp, except for the tic in his locked jaw muscle.
“You okay?” she asked.
He narrowed his eyes. “
Why
did you do that?”
“Hey, you see a fine piece of a . . . art, and you wanna touch. I’d ask if I took any of the starch out of you, but—” She sat back to admire his backside, and lower. “But from this angle, you seem generously starched.”
His eyes were no less intense when he looked back at her. “I mean, why did you stop?”
“I’d never take advantage of a wounded man.”
“My luck. How about I lie on my side and give you full permission to take advantage?”
“I think you’re delirious.”
“I
am
. What would you do if I copped a feel of your backside?”
“What did I do when you copped a feel of my boobs?”
With a head tilt, he granted her the point. “I think you purred.”
And she damn near came, if only he knew.
He leveraged himself on his side, his zipper tented with his slacks so loose, and he pulled her down against him. “You’re trouble, Cartwright.” He made another meal of her lips, nibbling her top lip, then her bottom, and when she opened her mouth to return the favor, he Frenched her and surged against her with the energy of a bull out for stud, his man brain primed and thinking
hard
.
“Wow,” she said, coming up for air. “Wounding your pride didn’t hurt your kissing skills. You’re still good at it.”
“Thank you, but I can’t take all the credit. An equally greedy partner helps,” he said, swooping in for another, cupping her bottom, and pulling her pulsing center against his pulsing rod.
When they took to rocking against each other, and Harmony thought she was gonna come just like that, Paxton pushed her away, and she nearly slipped off the sofa.
He saved her and held her, his brow against hers, while he caught his breath. Brow to brow, breath to breath, Harmony tried not to cry, or scream, or rant, or deck him, just for the fun of it.
King sighed. “Help me, will you?” he asked, words she suspected he’d never strung together before. “Another minute,” he said, “and I would have been up to my . . . man brain . . . in trouble.”
“Your point?” she snapped.
“We’d be sorry. Me for taking advantage, and you for letting me.”
Harmony mocked him with a laugh. “That was
mutual
!” She shoved a finger into his chest so he winced. “Look, you brass-ass humanzee. I’m a big girl, responsible for my own sex life and my own orgasms. I’m not some throwback to the dark ages. If I were staying longer, you’d need protecting from me. I’d get you in the sack, sooner or later, and you’d plucking love it. The name’s Harmony. Remember it, because you’d be screaming it in ecstasy under other circumstances. Now shut up before you piss me off.”
She helped him stand, and he was too shocked not to lean on her. She held his pants together in the back, and by the time he took over, he had himself in control, which couldn’t be said for her.
“Harmony?” He put an arm around her shoulder to turn her his way. “For the record, I thought if I took advantage of you, you’d ‘deck me’ or ‘strike me with a sharp object in my good cheek.’ ”
Harmony wilted. “I’m sorry. I have been sending mixed signals. Not intentionally, and not that I haven’t gotten a boatload of those, myself, today. So let’s say we forgive each other and start fresh? The statement I just made stands. This is the new millennium, Paxton, and I’m the queen of my own sex life. Got it?”
She’d gotten through, she saw. He looked at her in a new and more enlightened way, as if she—as a sex partner and a proponent of the spontaneous—might be his equal. An obviously new concept for him. “Thank you,” he said. “For a proud-to-be-awesome seductress, you make a good nurse.”
Okay, he’d changed the subject, but she loved a challenge. “My sisters and I practically raised each other. We’re good at scraped knees and such.”
“There are more like you?”
“You have no idea. Scary thought, isn’t it? But that’s not the point.”
“There was a point to this?”
“There was a point to the toys. A message.”
Confusion furrowed his brow. “Which is?”
Harmony huffed. “Gussie was
toying
with me to show me she could. Then you rescued me and we joined forces, so to speak, so Gussie toyed with us both. Ergo, a bayonet landed too close to your man brain for comfort.”
Paxton winced. “I’m not a cliché. I stopped using my ‘man brain,’ as you call it, when I was in high school.”
“You wore it out?”
“No, I used it for nefarious purposes and got myself screwed in every possible way.”
“Even so, you don’t live like a monk, because the way you kiss—”
“I’m a sane man with a strong sense of self-preservation . . . and a healthy libido. I choose carefully,
nearly
to the point of celibacy.”
“And yet, you just put your ass in my hands.”
“I must have been in shock.”
“You could have gone to a hospital.”
“They’d have put me on the psych ward if I told them how it happened.”
“Whatever.” Harmony looked toward the toy room. “Warning taken, Gussie,” she called.
“I’m going up to change,” Paxton said. “Want me to walk you as far as the cedar dressing room?”
“No thanks. This parlor’s like a museum. I’d like to look around for a while. Gussie’s too tired to cause any dire mischief. Besides, this parlor is nowhere near as negative as the toy room, plus Gussie likes
me
.”
“I’ll come back for you after I’ve changed and checked on the crew. Don’t go back to the toy room.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“See, that’s where our opinions differ.” He limped away.
The formal parlor emitted an unusual vibe. Harmony was used to different people’s vibes warring for prominence in her mind, but strangely enough, the only warring energy in this room, whatever Harmony touched, belonged to Gussie. Glory, the poor witch even fought with herself.
After the toy room, Harmony understood her better. Mad, sad, and belligerent, Gussie had lived and died to wreak havoc. She caused discord and fed on it, either for fun or to set herself up as both controller and arbitrator, which meant that she had probably been universally disliked, even in life. But why? And while wreaking havoc might have satisfied her in life, nothing seemed to satisfy her in death, so what did she really want?
That new but familiar cold draft and decaying lilac scent entrapped and danced around Harmony while the answer filled her mind:
Vindication
. “Oh boy.” The scorned, mad, dead witch, who for some reason liked her, or thought she could use her, wanted vindication.
Vindication from what? And who had scorned her? Two more vague pieces to an indefinable puzzle.
Harmony thought she should get her twitchy witchy self out, and fast. But despite the psychotic ghost and because of the psychic mandate demanding to be fulfilled, she needed to explore the castle, its treasure of vintage clothes, and its owner, not necessarily in that order. To that end, she wandered the formal parlor, sat on a piano stool with dolphin feet, and played “Chopsticks.” She opened every drawer, searching for the other half of her ring or another clue. Sensing Gussie, she sat in a Queen Anne chair beside a long wall covered by an equally long tapestry.
The chair, or the area surrounding it, vibrated with Gussie’s energy—not simply her malevolent ghostly energy like in the toy room, but her true spirit, as it might have been in life, some of it powerfully
positive
.
Pay dirt. Gussie had frequented this area in good times and bad, and the sum of her energy seemed to boil down to this one wall.
The strains of Brahms’s “Lullaby” reached Harmony, and she turned to see the piano keys moving, with no one playing. If Gussie was playing, the hopeful vibes were out of character. Yet Harmony believed the music was a sign that she should continue, that she was on the right track.
She pushed furniture aside and slipped behind the tapestry, but she found no hidden latch, door, safe, staircase, or tunnel along its length, nothing but an oddly textured surface that reminded her of brushstrokes. Harmony pulled a corner of the tapestry aside to reveal a wall that looked like a dirty canvas, its vibes muted by a strong force.
Gussie puzzled her almost as much as Paxton, the kick-ass kisser, who was returning now to get her.
As Harmony combed her hair with her fingers, Paxton closed the distance between them, his thoughts focused on corn silk that smelled of peppermint—her hair! She felt his yearning and his dogged determination to ignore her from now on, though he’d slipped several sensational times.
Aw, how nice. He thought she was sensational.
In other circumstances,
she’d
work him hard, and he wouldn’t be able to ignore her. She liked her effect on him as much as he hated it, yet he kept returning for more. He believed he should have stayed on the construction site, yet he’d headed her way instead, annoyed with himself over his attraction and his weakness in following his sexual inclinations where she was concerned.
Too bad she couldn’t tell him the truth, that when she fulfilled her purpose—whatever that was—their connection would be severed.
A clock struck three, and she realized the day had passed too fast. She couldn’t possibly examine and evaluate the clothes in the cedar dressing room in one day, never mind in the rooms she hadn’t explored. Neither could she solve the puzzle of her psychic goal.
The closer Paxton got, the stronger and deeper Gussie’s hatred became. For a minute Harmony hated him as well, but she fought the encroaching negative vibes.
“Boy are you in trouble,” she said as Paxton came closer. “Gussie hates your guts. Did you know that?”
“All my relatives hate my guts. Your point?”