“Raintree.” Hope followed him up the stairs at a run. “What are you talking about?”
He couldn’t get a signal, so he cursed at the phone as they burst from the building and stepped into the sunshine. “Her name is Tabby Ansara. We thought they were down. Defeated and powerless and…dammit. This changes everything.”
While he was moving away from the corner of the building in an attempt to get a decent signal, the phone rang. Instead of giving Hope the phone, as he often had in days past, he answered himself and got an earful of static.
It was Dante. Gideon couldn’t make out every word, but he very clearly heard the two he most needed to hear.
Ansara.
Home.
Gideon turned to Hope. He loved her, and even though she didn’t like it much when he tried to protect her, he wouldn’t put her in the middle of what was coming. Wouldn’t and couldn’t. “I have to go home. The Raintree homeplace.”
Concern was clear on her face, startling in her brilliant blue eyes. Had he ever told her that he loved her eyes? Not yet. When he got back, he would make sure to tell her. He had so much to tell her.
“I’m going with you,” she insisted.
“No.”
Her eyes widened. “What do you mean, no?”
“There’s trouble at the homeplace, or soon will be.” Trouble of an unimaginable sort. Trouble she wouldn’t understand even if he tried to explain it. “I want you and Emma safe.”
“I have a gun,” she said. “I know how to use it.”
How could he explain to her that a gun blazing in each hand wouldn’t be enough in the battle to come? “Stay here,” he insisted. “Please.”
Hope sighed and accepted his order, but she didn’t accept it easily. Would she ever? “Call me when you get there.”
“I will.” If I can.
“I still don’t see why I can’t go with you,” she grumbled. “I already know about your family, so it’s not like there’s anything left to hide.” He saw the unspoken Is there? in her eyes.
He took Hope’s face in his hands. “I love you. I love you so much that it terrifies me. I didn’t expect to ever care about anyone the way I care about you, and it happened so fast my head is still spinning. It’s important, and I want us to have a real chance. One day I will take you to the homeplace, I promise,” he said. “But not today.”
“I don’t understand,” she said softly.
“I know, and I’m sorry.”
He kissed her, long, but not nearly as long as he wanted to, and then he jumped into the Mustang. “Call Charlie and have him take you home. I’ll call as soon as I can.”
Gideon left a confused Hope standing in the parking lot. She wasn’t a woman accustomed to waiting, he knew, but she would wait for him. He didn’t have a doubt in his mind.
Today was the summer solstice; that wasn’t a coincidence. Tabby’s attempts to kill him and Echo in the past several days, also not a coincidence. The Ansara wanted the homeplace, they wanted the sanctuary and the power it harnessed, and they always had.
They weren’t going to get it.
One day his wife and his daughter would discover the beauty and power of the land the Raintrees had always called sanctuary. It was Gideon’s duty to protect the Raintree sanctuary, just as it was his duty to protect Hope and Emma and any other little Raintrees that came along in years to come. It was his duty and his honor to protect what was his, and if that privilege came with ghosts and electrical surges and the occasion battle, then so be it.
Gideon drove as fast as the Mustang would allow once he reached the highway. The wind whipped his hair, and the homeplace grew closer with every second that passed, and when the unexpected storm approached from the south and gathered in the darkening skies over the car, there was no one for miles around to see.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-2252-0
RAINTREE
Copyright © 2008 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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RAINTREE: HAUNTED
Copyright © 2007 by Linda Winstead Jones
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