by Cait London
He’d decided to take June up on her long-time offer and had turned back toward town in the early afternoon.
Shrimp eyed him with a tsk-tsk expression and Jonah scowled back. Sex with June was the only thing he hadn’t tried to stop the sounds in his head.
“I’m finally here. All this history— fur traders, outlaws and steamboats on the upper Missouri River. And I’m here just in time for Christmas,” Harmony said with excitement lacing her husky tone. “I can almost see the buffalo roaming the prairie—”
Harmony turned to him too quickly and Jonah realized he’d been gritting his teeth. He also realized that his gaze had been taking in the lush curves in Harmony’s gold sweater. A tiny cupid suspended from a gold chain glittered each time she inhaled.
She eased away slightly and stared at the road; her “Isn’t Christmas-great?” excitement slipped a bit.
Jonah closed his lids briefly to erase the sight of her breasts. He shifted into a lower gear, easing the pickup around a wide curve. Harmony’s long, pale fingers gripped her jeans-clad thighs and Jonah wondered how they would feel digging into his back while—
He desperately wanted those soft full breasts pressed against his bare chest. Just bodies pressed against each other, nothing between them but hunger and the momentary relief of his tormented mind. From the look of his female passenger, she’d need a strong man to keep her happy.
Harmony turned quickly to frown at him and Shrimp whined as if begging him not to make a poor showing. A slow blush began moving up Harmony’s cheeks and the gleaming hoops in her ears trembled. The bells on her bracelet jingled when she reached to smooth her spiraling curls. “I hope you have a nice Christmas, too,” she murmured in a very polite tone.
Jonah wondered if her curls would feel like silk as they wrapped around his fingers. Or spilled across his chest. He’d like to bury his face in her scents and forget that he was losing his mind.
Harmony inhaled as if pricked by a pin and Jonah’s whole body tensed, shocking him. At forty-five, he knew his body well; every muscle ached with sensual need, and he could almost feel the steam rise from him to fog the window.
“Pax thinks that the old cabin at the edge of his property will be just perfect for me,” Harmony stated, her cheery tone sliding into one of caution.
Jonah wondered how that husky voice would sound while they were making love…
Harmony looked at him sharply and Shrimp turned slowly to look at the snow outside the window. His collie didn’t want to be associated with him just now.
Harmony shifted restlessly and Jonah’s unwilling glance followed her long legs down to heavy winter boots. She cleared her throat. “Ah… is this an unusually cold winter? I mean the temperature is thirty below zero and the windchill is much lower than that.”
“What the hell were you doing out in it?” Jonah asked sharply, irritated by her scents and his uncertain mood. “Why aren’t you home with your husband and children?”
Her brows arched as she looked at him and Jonah sensed a flash of steel beneath her femininity. “What were you doing out in it? And I don’t have a husband or children.”
“I have a right to be here. I live here,” he stated in a tone as if explaining a fact to a child.
She smiled tightly, quickly, not giving an inch. “I’m moving here.”
“Harmony,” he said, tasting the name grimly and marking it in his mental black book of people to avoid. It belonged in a fairy tale, and to Jonah, life was not flowers and elves. Life was pain and the sound of the child crying.
He tried to think of June’s curves against him, undulating beneath him, taking him to a momentary physical explosion and then peace. Just a few more miles and he could drop his unwelcome Christmas-cheer lady at Pax’s ranch, then he could go to June. She’d be surprised, but she’d welcome him. They’d probably have a drink and then... or she might just reach for him. He hoped she would reach for him because he didn’t want talking tonight. June would know what he wanted and know that he didn’t want commitments. She was that kind of lady. He resented the scents filling his pickup and tangling his senses and he resented the woman beside him. “You should have picked a better time to move.”
She was blushing and glaring at him. She was bristling with tempered anger. “You’re a widower,” she said in a low, hushed tone. “And a lonely man at Christmas time. I understand how a night like this would make you want company.”
“No need to understand anything, lady,” Jonah shot back. Pax must have told her about Jonah’s past. The pickup slid to the edge of the road and he eased it back into the center.
Harmony leaned forward, ignoring him as she peered into the darkness. “The snow is worse. Please don’t go out of your way to take me to Pax’s. I can stay at the first place we come to. I’ll call him from there.”
“Uh-huh,” Jonah agreed without enthusiasm. The first place was his ranch and she wasn’t staying there. He’d get her to Pax’s if he had to pull the pickup through the snow like Humphrey Bogart pulled the African Queen boat down the swamp. But then, loaded with all that Christmas cheer, maybe Santa and his flying reindeer would take her off Jonah’s hands.
They drove in silence, snowflakes hurling at the windshield. Then Harmony said quietly, precisely, “Your aura is very dark, Jonah. Ending your life on a night like this won’t help. Neither will an athletic woman and sexual medication.”
“‘Aura... sexual medication’,” he repeated. “Are you my mother?” he demanded roughly, shaken that she had exposed a thought he had buried from himself. Hidden beneath layers of control, Jonah had wondered if he should have died with his daughter.
When he suddenly realized he’d said nothing about June and his needs, he glanced at her sharply. “What made you say that about an ‘athletic woman and sexual medication’? And what do you know about my aura?”
“I just know.” Her amber eyes were very soft, overpowering the pale contours of her face and glowing in the light of the dashboard. “I know you’re hurting and striking out at what you don’t understand. Why don’t you try focusing on Christmas?”
“Leave it,” Jonah ordered harshly. He’d had enough of do-gooders to last him until forever.
~**~
Harmony inhaled sharply. Jonah Fargo was tough, scarred and rude. His aura was that of a wounded lone timber wolf, striking out at his pain.
She shifted abruptly, startled by the sense of heat and need swirling from him. She eased her leg away from his hand as he shifted into a lower gear. This cowboy’s hands were big and could possess what he wanted—
Her intuitive senses told her that Jonah Fargo wanted a woman; he wanted the red-hot desire to empty his mind, the physical strain to ease his tension so that he could sleep, even for a short time. This Jonah Fargo was walking a tight line and feared falling into darkness—
Harmony shivered slightly despite the warmth of the pickup. The tall, lean Westerner resented her presence, and frankly she wasn’t exactly happy with him, though he had probably saved her life. Between his worn western hat and his turned-up shearling collar, she noted his weathered skin covered by the day’s growth of dark stubble. His mouth was grim, bracketed by lines of pain.
She wanted to touch and soothe those harsh lines, to heal them. She placed her hand over the bells on her other wrist. They reminded her not to reach out too quickly, to act as her heart dictated. She had been very careful to listen to her warning alarms and to focus her life away from her psychic powers.
Harmony studied her long, pale tapering fingers. She did have the power to heal, but she had learned to suppress it. She could take the pain of others into herself, relieving them, and healing. If the wounds were deep, the danger to her was strong.
She also could read thoughts. What she was, who she was had frightened Mark so much that he couldn’t bear to be near her— unless she would help him in high-stakes gambling. She’d refused to use her abilities to his advantage; Mark had been outraged and had struck her for the firs
t and last time. “A freak,” he had called her before their divorce. “I’m glad we didn’t have kids. They might have been freaks like you.”
At twenty-five she’d been shattered. Now at thirty-nine, she had come to terms with who and what she was— a top-rate coppersmith, who did not allow her impulses or her powers to rule her.
She glanced at the frozen countryside and knew that the cheery holiday season always tossed unhappy memories at her. At twenty-six, she had barely survived, licking her wounds after her marriage failed. Then she’d stopped by a terrible auto accident and worked desperately— using her powers, straining to make a small boy and his mother live. The small town had been cruel and disbelieving in her psychic powers, her ability to heal. Then she’d moved to Des Moines and had wrapped the city around her. She’d learned to be very cautious, healing quietly, unobtrusively when she could.
She’d learned to shield her impulses and to forget Mark.
Now, if a nice, easygoing, intellectual man crossed her path, one who understood the possibility of psychic phenomena and one whose company she enjoyed— a companionable, soothing man— she might be receptive. With like interests, gentle conversation and his acceptance of what she was, Harmony might consider an arrangement. She wanted a balanced, smooth-flowing relationship with lots of space on both sides. She wanted a balanced, mutual, scheduled interaction between friends who respected each other.
Sex. The image ripped across her mind, laying a scene of a man and a woman desperately tangled together. Realizing instantly that Jonah’s thoughts had leapt into her mind, she refused to look at him. Hunger and the desire smashed at her in hot, tight waves.
Though she had tasted desire with her ex-husband, the vision and the mating stunned Harmony.
Images pounded at her senses… Mating. Bonding. Two hearts becoming one, melded by the white-hot fires of desire. Then there was the softness, the soothing of hearts and bodies, the sweetness...
She saw Jonah’s hard expression ease, his blue eyes soften with tenderness. The woman’s face was shadowed, her body pale and soft against his dark, hard length. Though their moment had passed, Jonah kept the woman close to him, protecting her, soothing her. He was caressing her then, a lover’s touch. There were old-fashioned western phrases spoken in a deep, tender tone. Gold flashed as the woman removed her necklace to place it around his neck. Then the boyish, sweet Jonah was teasing his best girl and beginning to love her all over again…
Harmony swallowed tightly and blinked away the image. She had never known sex could be that heated, nor that tender. She realized now that she had never bonded, never truly mated with her ex-husband. Not like Jonah and the woman in his arms. They had tested the softness and the steel of each other, hungrily caressing, sharing, giving… This ancient mating dance of a man and a woman was a marriage and a bonding forged by becoming one body, one heart, one soul—
Mark had taken— Harmony inhaled sharply, refusing to review her failed marriage. She glanced at Jonah, who was concentrating on the road. The man’s desperation wrapped around her and she attempted a psychic reading, probing his thoughts. Perhaps the woman in his arms had been his wife... perhaps the woman he sought, June.
Harmony’s fingers tightened on her crossed arms. She had feared releasing her desire for Mark. Or did she ever have intense passions for him? She tossed the thought away. Long ago, she had realized that her powers prevented her from releasing the depths of her desire. Long ago, she had dismissed the notion that she could bond with the other half of her heart— a man who could understand and not fear her. The relationship wouldn’t be playful or teasing or especially dramatic, a grand passion, but comfortable and gentle.
From the shadows of his western hat, Jonah’s startling blue eyes shot down at her. “Did you say something?”
Shrimp barked lightly and licked Harmony’s cheek as if apologizing for her master’s poor manners. Harmony sensed the collie’s love and concern for Jonah.
And Shrimp’s longing for Roderegas.
“I asked, ‘Who’s Roderegas?’” Harmony lied, then added cautiously, “Pax said something about him.”
“A dog that led his master through a blizzard. Thorville placed a statue of him on the Missouri riverfront.” Jonah rubbed his temple impatiently.
“Do you have a headache?” Harmony knew he would resist her touch, the ease she could give him if only for a short time.
“Now I do,” he said roughly. “I like quiet.”
While Harmony liked solitude and quiet, too, she also liked gentle, considerate men with polite manners. “And a Merry Christmas to you, too,” she muttered as Shrimp licked her cheek again and moved closer as if to console her.
Jonah glared at Shrimp. As if returning an answer, he said, “You behave.”
To shield her grin, Harmony lowered her chin into her collar. Unless she was mistaken, the collie had just put her mental paw down on Jonah’s poor manners.
“I make cupids,” she offered cheerily, sliding her happy little cherubs into Jonah’s ominous mood. He wasn’t darkening her Christmas cheer. He was already angry; she might as well toss her cupids where she wanted. Harmony pictured the chubby cherubs fluttering around the tough cowboy’s black hat and tumbling on the worn denim covering his thigh. The scene consoled her taut nerves.
Harmony was used to people flowing easily through her life, and Jonah was like the huge black rock landmark she had passed before the wreck— immovable and shrouded in gloom.
To avenge his interference with her excitement and his lack of Christmas cheer, she threw another mental cupid at his hat.
Jonah brushed his leather glove through the air by his hat as if disturbed by an insect. He briskly rubbed his thigh, where Harmony had pictured cupids playing.
“Cupids,” Harmony repeated, smiling. “I’m a coppersmith really, but I work in other metals like tin. The market now is great for cupids. I can work anywhere and ship them to buyers. That’s why staying close to Pax is so great—”
“Lady, I am trying to keep us on the road. Would you mind shutting the hell up?” Jonah asked tightly.
Sex with June won’t help you, Jonah. Harmony crossed her arms over her chest and settled back with her thoughts. She wasn’t any happier than Jonah was, her mood unfamiliar and unwelcome. She probed Jonah’s mind and hit by his mood, stopped abruptly. He was bitter and frustrated and cursing his poor luck to have a “dingbat heifer” dropped on him by fate. Shrimp’s Jonah was a chatty cowboy after all, though no one would know it.
A mental curtain slowly, firmly, lowered and Jonah’s thoughts were sealed from her.
Harmony tensed. The cowboy had powers; they weren’t strong, but they were emerging. “Reading” him— concentrating on his emotions, his thoughts— and translating them would be impossible if he decided to block her. His abilities hovered on the edge; he had inherited them, just as she and her brother, Pax, had received theirs. Jonah’s powers had come from an ancient line, too.
Jonah Fargo had undeveloped abilities to act as a sender or a reader. He had blocked his talents with disbelief in the paranormal.
A flame lashed at her— within it a man and woman, pulsed deep in the act of lovemaking. Jonah’s driving need for sex leapt at her, shocking her. The sensations weren’t those of a loving tender relationship, but mind-blanking, hot sex with a woman he had put off for years. She was a last effort to grip reality. He should feel guilty about using poor June—
“You’re irritating me,” he said aloud in a low, dangerous tone. “Whatever you’re doing to get my attention, stop it.”
“Stop! Let me out. I refuse to ride with you, no matter how cold it is or how deep the snow is,” Harmony ordered instantly, her anger rising. She shot out a hand to grip the door lever. She trembled, realizing that no one, not even Mark, had caused her to react so sharply.
Mark had hurt her deepest, most private feminine soul. If Jonah Fargo had one good point, it was that she didn’t sense she needed to hold back her anger or her
emotions with him. She wanted to rip into him without her usual sensitivity, she wanted to bare her anger and confront the arrogant, impolite—
She met Jonah’s thunderous dark blue gaze. “You are rude, cowboy.”
“So what?” he asked uncaringly, and began to ease the pickup off the road. They passed between two posts supporting a huge metal sign. “That says ‘Fargo’. This is my ranch. There’s no way I can take you to Pax’s place tonight You’ll have to stay at my place until he can come get you. You can call him and talk all you want to him,” he said in a defeated, gloomy tone. “I’d just appreciate it if you didn’t talk me to death.”
Shrimp whined and looked at Harmony with big, liquid brown eyes, as if begging for her company.
From the shadows of his hat, Jonah eyed the two females looking back at him. He groaned mentally, longing for June’s warm bed. The thought rasped across Harmony’s taut nerves.
“If you think I’m happy about the arrangements, you are very much mistaken, mister,” Harmony stated tightly.
~**~
Chapter Two
When the door to Jonah’s small house swung open two hours later, Harmony was just sampling her beef-and-barley stew. Earlier, Jonah had pointed her toward the house and mumbled that he had to take care of the stock in the barn. She doubted horses and cows were the reason he hadn’t returned sooner.
The house was littered with magazines, shelves of Native American artifacts and petrified prehistoric shells. Dinosaur teeth, huge rocklike objects, were obviously treasured, placed in an exact row over magazines on Jonah’s coffee table.
Jonah entered the kitchen in a flurry of snowflakes, his longish hair whipping around his face. The bald ceiling light caught the strong features of his face as his blue eyes swung to her. His gaze pierced her accusingly for invading his domain— an empty house with battered furniture and lighter squares on his paneled walls where pictures once hung. A saddle was propped where a Christmas tree should have been, and he’d clearly been sleeping on the sagging couch when there were beautiful, antique wrought-iron beds in the three rooms.
