Chapter Ten
DETERMINED to get Hellcat Harmony to hang around for a few extra hours, King followed her back through the tunnel toward its termination in the cedar dressing room.
She’d had a nasty look on her face for him when he got to the parlor. Odd that. A few times today, she’d reminded him of a small wildcat—a lynx or a bobcat—graceful, beautiful, disarming, a feline who could close in with stealth and feed off you before you knew how deadly she was.
She hadn’t felt deadly when he was driving himself crazy kissing her in the toy room. He’d disarmed her, not the other way around. Not that she’d fought him.
Neither had she fought the sexual pull when she was bandaging his wound and frustrating the hell out of him with her teasing. Everything that happened between them this afternoon would make keeping her at a safe distance more difficult. But keeping his distance would be safer than the unwanted fantasy she inspired of the two of them together. Very together. Very bad.
What they’d shared, which had seemed fine for a day out of time, now endangered the scheme forming in his mind. Okay, the scheme his men had just planted, and not gently, in his mind—damn them and damn her. But that arrangement would only work if he could keep his distance. Not easy when she could seduce him with a look.
Before he took steps to put the scheme in motion, however, he needed to know the enigmatic interloper better, and the best way to do that would be to keep her around for a few more hours, after the crew left, no construction issues to distract them.
Back in the dressing room, he gave her some space.
“Something’s stuck in your craw,” she said. “You wanna tell me what?”
“Your acuity is alarming, but if you must know, I almost did have a mutiny, because of your ghost stories. My workers all want to quit, and that’s the first time they’ve ever agreed on anything, thank you very much.” King tested his five o’clock shadow and examined the wildcat’s flawless features. Full lips, pouty, kissable—eminently kissable, he now knew. Hair of spun gold, eyes as big as saucers, aquamarine, and deceptively innocent. “Call me crazy,” he said, “but I’m determined to complete castle restorations, despite Paxton generational failures to do so . . . and despite the fact that you think I’m being hampered by a ghost.”
“I think? Have you sat on your punctured butt in the last hour?”
“All right, so maybe I’m beginning to suspect you’re right. So what? I still have to finish the job I started.”
“Which is?”
“To get this hellish place off my hands and sell it to the highest bidder.”
The familiar wail came from so close beside them, he jumped almost as high as the sexpot, which hurt like the devil. Pissed by his startled surprise, and by the pain in his ass, he took Harmony’s hand to lead her from harm’s way.
In Gussie’s room, she pulled him up short. “Wha’d’ya know, there’s a gentleman hiding behind those invisible fatigues, but I hardly need protecting.”
“You’re slipping, oh mighty mediator. That wail just now sounded more like a war cry than a peace offering, and did you already forget the toy room? Peacemaker, my . . . ass.”
“Now you’re just being mean.” Her full lips at rest fell into a natural pout, but when she all-out tried, like now, he wanted to make a meal of her, starting with her mouth, and ending with her mouth, but stopping at some amazing places in between.
“Unkind, perhaps,” he said, pulling himself from his fantasies, “but honest and practical, too. I have no choice. Getting this place off my hands is serious business.”
“More serious than you know. You heard Gussie’s wail of protest. She wants you to keep the castle in the family, and I think she has some serious persuasion in mind.”
“What do you care?”
“I . . . it’s complicated,” Harmony said, sounding to him like she was hiding something, then she bit her lip for a pensive, and seductive, minute. “I thought I heard in Salem that the castle can’t leave your family,” she added.
“Legally, it can, and local gossip never gave my family anything but grief, so your sources are as suspect as your motive for being here.” King took down the empty picture frame with the cracked glass and waved it under the hellcat’s nose. “Off-loading this albatross, lock, stock, and bad luck, is good business. Excellent business.”
“For who?”
“Me. My heirs—the next generation of Paxtons, and the generations who come after them.”
“Since you told me you stopped thinking with your man brain—which, if you ask me, is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts—I didn’t expect you to produce any heirs.”
“You know nothing about me.”
“You did mention celibacy.”
“In the present tense, and nearly so.”
“So the future’s up for grabs? Pardon the pun.”
“No, damn it.”
Her eyes got so big and deep, he could fall in and die happy. “You already have an heir!” She spoke with such certainty, the hair at his nape stood and saluted.