Raintree: Haunted (Raintree 2)

“Do me a favor,” Gideon said gently. “Don’t take it off.”

Hope nodded, then returned to her previous and very comfy position. Everything she had ever dismissed as fantasy was apparently all real. She should be screaming in denial, but instead she felt oddly calm.

“You say the Raintrees have been around for a long time.”

“Yeah.”

“When your ancestors married normal people, why weren’t the…the…Crap, I don’t know what to call it. I don’t believe in magic, but for lack of a better word, it’ll do. If your family has some kind of genetic magic, why hasn’t it been phased out as you’ve bred with the common folk?”

Something about the word bred made them both squirm. From the beginning there had been sexual energy between them, even when she hadn’t been entirely sure he was a good guy. Still, it was too soon for energy of this sort. She never should have leaned close and touched that charm on his chest, and he never should have looked her in the eye that way.

“Raintree genes are dominant,” Gideon explained.

“So, if you have kids…” She opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him, curious once again. “Do you?” she asked. “Are there little Gideon Raintrees out there somewhere drawing in lightning and talking to dead people?”

“I don’t have any children,” he said, his voice more solemn than before.

“But when you do…”

He was shaking his head before she had a chance to finish the sentence. “No. It’s hard enough to raise a kid in this world without teaching her that a part of who she is has to be hidden away. I won’t do that to a child.”

“Her,” Hope repeated, closing her eyes again.

“What?”

“You said her. Not it, not him. Her.”

He hesitated, briefly. “I have a niece. She’s the only kid I’ve been around for a while. That’s why I said her.”

She didn’t believe him, but there wasn’t any real reason for her reservations. Just instinct. But she didn’t believe in instinct, did she? She believed in fact. Concrete, undisputed proof. That had been pretty much blown away tonight.

“You shaved,” she said, turning the conversation in an absurdly normal direction.

“I woke up feeling like the drug Tabby used was still there. It wouldn’t wash away.”

She should’ve heard him moving around in the bathroom, but the house was so big…and she’d been so distracted…“I like it.”

He snorted, and she smiled.

“I’m gonna sleep now,” she said, her mind and her body falling toward oblivion. She was much too tired to even think about driving home, and if she did, she would only get there in time to take a quick shower, grab a bite to eat and start a new day. Here, she could sleep for an hour or two. “We’ll have to get up in a couple of hours and start the Clark investigation.”

“It was Tabby,” Gideon said. “The blonde who killed Sherry Bishop and stabbed me.”

“Yeah,” Hope answered, her speech slightly slurred. “I believe you.” And she did believe him. Every word he said was true. What a kick in the pants that was. “Tomorrow we have to find a way to prove it.”

NINE

Gideon lifted a sleeping Hope gently, and she didn’t even stir. He could leave her on the couch, he supposed, but the leather wouldn’t be pleasant to sleep on for very long. He laid her in his bed, instead, and she immediately rolled onto her side, grabbed a pillow and sighed.

She could sleep in her clothes, but, like the couch…not very comfortable. He unfastened her trousers, waiting with each second that passed for her to wake up and slap him. But she was a deep sleeper, or else the day’s events had exhausted her. She slept on, barely moving while he removed her once-crisp gray trousers and tossed them aside.

The blouse would have to stay. He really wasn’t up to getting her completely naked and then turning away. Without the bra, which still sat on the living room couch, she would be comfortable enough.

When Hope was down to blouse and panties, he covered her with the sheet and walked on bare feet to the window. Before closing the drapes, he stood there for a few minutes and watched the waves crash onto the beach.

He’d told her more than he’d ever told anyone else. One woman had seen a glimpse—a tiny glimpse—of what he could do, and she hadn’t been able to get away from him fast enough. That had been a long time ago. He’d run into her once, a couple of years after the split, and she had apparently forgotten all about the reason for their breakup. People did that. If they couldn’t explain what they saw, they simply forgot. It was an amnesia meant to protect the mind from things that could not be accepted, he imagined, no different than forgetting the details of a car crash or any other traumatic event. Happened all the time.

Would Hope forget everything come morning? Maybe. She was a no-nonsense woman who wasn’t given to believing in anything that rocked her neat little world. He could most definitely rock her world—in more ways than one.