by Foster, Lori
One of her favorite estate sale finds, a polished, curving mahogany countertop with ornate trim, concealed the traditional and quite modem CD player. Tamara clicked it off, killing the sensually stimulating New Age music. It felt like her heartbeat died with the last strumming note. The silence lay heavy in the air.
As she strolled away, feeling lazy and defeated, Tamara trailed her hand over a large crystal ball, wishing it could, indeed, predict the future, wishing she could see if Zane Winston would ever give her the time of day. But the beautiful glass was empty. And she already had all the answers she needed.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Four little words had never hurt quite so much. Each one had felt like a sharp dart piercing her heart, stealing her breath, making her lungs constrict. They’d dashed her dreams, her fantasies. They gave her nothing to look forward to but a continuation of the long, sexually frustrating nights and her endlessly hopeful dreams.
Zane was known for his seduction successes. Out of the four Winston brothers, Zane was the most blatantly sexual, the most outrageous, the most ... wanted. At least by the ladies. There was an earthy wildness about him, a primal masculinity that drew women in, a hot sexuality that kept them coming back.
Intelligent, driven, Zane was, in her mind, the most handsome of the brothers. And that was saying a lot, considering the Winstons were a virile and sinfully gorgeous clan.
Cole, the oldest, struck her as the most somber. He took his responsibilities seriously and loved with a depth of emotion Tamara had never seen before. And she didn’t need to be a mind reader to figure that out. It was there on his face whenever he looked at his brothers, and especially when he looked at his wife or his new baby daughter.
It was a look that made her long for things she’d never have—a husband, a family of her own. A normal life.
Tamara had visited the Winston Tavern a few times, and she loved it there. She loved blending in with the rest of society as if she were just a woman running a shop, just a woman out for a relaxing evening.
Not a Tremayne.
Not a Gypsy.
She had so little time for socializing or frivolity.
Chase, the second oldest, was the bartender, and she’d seen through him right away. Tamara smiled. She wasn’t a true psychic, as her advertisement claimed. She couldn’t read minds, just as she couldn’t predict the future. But she was much more intuitive than most people. Throughout her life, there had been certain people whose emotions were clearer to her. Generally, she thought them to be people with acute feelings: loving with their whole heart, or hating with fanaticism.
The Winstons, with their zest for life and open honesty, were often quite clear to her. Chase gave the impression of being quiet and serene, but he was a deeply sensual person and very erotic, maybe even bordering on kinky. His quiet persona hid some of his fire, but Tamara could see the heat in his gaze, and knew that his thoughts regularly focused on the sexual. Luckily, his wife was the perfect match.
Tamara liked Mack Winston the best. He was the youngest, the most playful, a man who knew how to laugh and have a good time. She’d watched him at the bar, moving from table to table, a smile always on his face. He saw joy in everything and everyone, especially those he called family. You couldn’t be near Mack and not smile, too.
Yes, she liked Mack best, but it was Zane she wanted.
Even though his driving sexuality scared her just a bit—or maybe because it did—she wanted him. She wanted him so much she could barely sleep at night. She’d lie awake for hours, imagining all the ways Zane might want to make love, and all the ways she could enjoy him. Sometimes the dreams were so real, almost as if he were with her, guiding her, telling her what he liked and how he liked it, showing her what she’d like, too.
In her heart, she knew dreams would never compare with the reality.
For the few years that his shop had been there, Tamara had watched Zane open in the mornings, and close at night. She’d watched women fawn all over him. She’d gotten to know his brothers better just by observation, and she’d gotten to know Zane better, too.
He was an overachiever, though he’d never admit it. He preferred the label “playboy.” He was a combination of his brothers’ better traits with a naughty, rambunctious streak thrown in, a man who prided himself on individuality, a man who struggled to be his own boss in all ways—but especially with women.
When she’d turned eighteen, Tamara had known it was time to settle down, to lay claim to a location and make it her own. The old building had appealed to her on several levels: not only was it perfect for her shop, but the living quarters upstairs were quaint and cozy. She’d been there for six years now.
In that time, she’d seen other shops in the adjacent strip mall try to make a go of it, but they were never able to stay afloat for long.
Zane hadn’t let the failures of others keep him from trying. He’d taken the empty store and quickly made a success of a fledgling computer business. He sold products and did repairs, and even built computers to customers’ specifications. He worked long hours, sometimes far into the night. From her bedroom window above the shop, Tamara had seen his lights on past midnight. Yet he’d be there bright and early the next morning, looking sexy as ever and not in the least worn down.
He must have incredible stamina, she thought, then shivered as a lustful fever crept into her bloodstream. She’d never get to know, because Zane didn’t want her at all. Any other woman might have had a better chance. For some reason, he’d taken an immediate dislike to her. Even over the past year, as she’d tried to be friendlier, that hadn’t changed.
Shaking herself out of her melancholy, Tamara pulled a long, thin chain decorated at the end with a silver finial displaying a couple entwined in a sensual embrace. It was another of her finds that added to the mystical illusion of the shop.
The mellow, overhead light flicked off, leaving the shop in moonlight and shadows as she made her way to the back stairs and her apartment above. There was also an outside entrance, but Tamara rarely used it unless she went out at night. Tonight, all she wanted to do was shower and go to bed and try to figure out where she’d gone wrong with Zane. The software manuals she usually worked on in the evening to give added income to the family and to help add balance to her crazy lifestyle, could wait. It looked like she might have the whole weekend to sit home and work on them.
She wanted to read the journal again, to see if she’d somehow mistaken the instructions. It had seemed so clear-cut, almost guaranteed to work. But not for her. Not for a Tremayne.
Even before Tamara had opened the door at the top of the stairs, she knew the book—and all her fantasies—would have to wait.
The family was there to visit.
She had given Olga a key ages ago, to be used only in an emergency. To the Tremaynes, everything constituted an emergency, and now they felt at ease to let themselves in whenever they wanted. With her family of self-proclaimed black sheep, counterfeit clairvoyants, and bona fide con artists, visits were seldom a casual thing. They usually meant that the family had ganged up on her with the intent of making her change her mind about something.
Not that they could. She’d been running the family since her sixteenth year, but not necessarily by choice. Someone had to do it.
Pinning a fat smile on her face, Tamara pulled the door open and said with false enthusiasm, “Uncle Thanos! Aunt Eva! Aunt Olga!”
Aunt Eva, at age seventy, the oldest in the group, and the most dramatic by far, was the only one who didn’t still help out in the shop on occasion. She visited it, but usually just to criticize. She said, “So we are selling. We’re being run out by demons!”
Uncle Thanos, his voice booming to match his great size, disagreed with Eva’s sentiment. “It’s a good thing to sell! Things’ll be changing again. Finally, adventure, excitement, new travels. I’m more than ready.”
Both Eva and Olga nodded, and Olga admitted, “It’s for the best. We’re not meant for th
e dormant life.”
Tamara shook her head as she began removing all her jewelry and placing it on the small mahogany entrance table. So Thanos wanted to move? Ha! Getting the three of them packed up and mobile again would be a chore. Just thinking about it gave Tamara a pounding headache.
Despite the image they liked to project, her relatives were no longer the wandering Gypsies of her youth. As a child, she’d lived in more places than most people did in their entire lives. Tamara had always been grateful to them for raising her after her parents had died. They’d taken her in without hesitation, given her love and laughs, if not stability. Living with them had provided an interesting education.
But Tamara knew for a fact that they liked the settled, mostly sedate lifestyle she’d been able to give them since she’d become an adult. They took turns working with her in the shop, mostly on the busier weekends, and that was about as much excitement as they could handle these days.
Thanos now preferred to tend the tiny garden behind the house she’d bought for them, and amazingly enough, Eva and Olga knitted. They hid their projects from her, but Tamara still knew. She always knew what was going on when it came to her family.
Just as she knew their visit was for bluster. They didn’t want to move, but they tried to hide that from her. And Tamara loved them all the more for their consideration.
Aunt Olga, so thin she looked like she could be folded away, announced in tones of premonition, “It’s Uncle Hubert. He hasn’t forgiven us for not forewarning him of his imminent death.” Her frail hands covered her face. “Now we’ve angered him. You’re right, Tamara. We must go. Before it’s too late.”
Tamara dropped back against the wall, so tired she wanted to collapse. Her colored contacts were starting to bum, and the ridiculous sandals pinched her beringed toes.
In as reasonable a voice as she could muster, she said, “Uncle Hubert died months ago. It was a freak accident, certainly not something we could have predicted.”
“It was an omen,” Olga cried.
If it had been an omen, Tamara thought with a smirk, someone had a warped sense of humor, because Hubert had expired at an outdoor concert when a vicious storm had overturned the portable toilet in which he was seated. He’d sustained a hard hit to the head and a true blow to his dignity, considering his pants had been around his ankles at the time.
“He was on the West Coast,” Tamara reasoned. “We’re in Kentucky. It wouldn’t make much sense for Hubert to come all this way just for a little haunting over something we had no control over. Besides, it’s not like we hadn’t all warned him that he needed to quit partying so much. One less concert, one less drink, one less groupie, and he might have still been with us.”
The wig tickled and without caring what her relatives might think, Tamara pulled it off and vigorously ruffled her short blonde hair. Immediately her head began to feel better.
At least it did until Aunt Olga objected to Tamara’s rationale.
“Mind powers,” Olga insisted, “aren’t affected by distance. Ghosts can damn well go wherever they please!”
Throwing up her arms in a display of frustration, Tamara stalked away. None of them had mind powers, much as they’d like to convince themselves otherwise, so there was no way they could have warned Hubert. Hubert knew it, so he had no reason to haunt them.
No, their troubles were rooted in a flesh-and-blood human, not a ghostly manifestation. But not knowing why anyone wanted to cause them trouble was what really bothered Tamara. So far as she knew, she had no enemies, and neither did her relatives. They were cons, but they were harmless cons. And it wasn’t like the shop would be of value to anyone but a group of sentimental, aging Gypsies.
“I’m going to shower,” she called over her shoulder, needing a few minutes of solace to shore herself up for the rest of the visit. She knew the relatives were night owls, and they wouldn’t think twice about keeping her up so they could continue to lament the supposed haunting. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
More objections followed her down the short hall. Her living quarters consisted of a family room that opened to the outside stairs on one wall, and to the stairwell leading down to her shop on another. Next to that, separated by an arched doorway, was the kitchen, which also opened onto an L-shaped hallway. To the right was the part of the house she’d closed off. To the left was another short hallway that led to her bedroom and the bath.
Tamara could hear the buzz of the aunts grumbling, along with Thanos’s booming contribution, but the closing of the bathroom door mostly drowned them out. Despite her dejection over failing with Zane, a small smile touched Tamara’s mouth. Her demented family. She should have known they’d find a way to dramatize the problems with the shop and their grief for Hubert. They lived to put on a show.
She loved them so much, even if they were all nuts. And perhaps their visit was propitious after all. She certainly couldn’t pine for Zane while dealing with her relatives’ extravagant tales of vaporish ghosts and spurious hauntings.
But even as Tamara tried to convince herself of that, her body warmed with the mere thought of Zane. She wanted him, needed him.
One way or another, she’d have to figure out how to have him before the house sold and she left town. She’d study the manual in minute detail until she found a way to win Zane over.
She deserved at least that much.
Two
Twilight had come and gone by the time Zane locked up the store for the night. It had been a great sale, very successful, and he was pleased. So why did he still feel so on edge?
Little Gypsy.
The large, ancient building housing her shop on the ground floor sat across the alley from the newer, more modern strip mall. Zane turned and, as usual, there was a light on in her upstairs window, the room he somehow knew was her bedroom. His stomach tightened, his muscles loosened, his body warmed.
They were extreme reactions that he couldn’t control, and he hated that. In part, he’d avoided her for that very reason. She got close, and he felt it in his every nerve ending. He couldn’t bear it; it smacked of a weakness he refused to accept.
Even as he told himself that he wouldn’t allow her to get to him, he wondered what she’d look like stripped of those ridiculous long skirts and colorful blouses. Her hair was so long, it could easily cover her nudity. And that in itself was hotly erotic.
Except that he didn’t like her hair. Normally long hair was a turn-on for Zane, the ultimate in femininity. But on the Gypsy, it seemed overdone, too much along with everything else. Her hair was thick and straight and inky black—and didn’t suit her at all.
Without intending to, he walked toward the building, his hands on his hips, his head tilted to stare up at that lit window. He was diagonal with the front of the shop when he noticed the sign.
Zane stared at the bold black words FOR SALE for a long minute, refusing to believe what his eyes told him. She was moving away? Leaving for good?
“Shit.” He stood there, feeling dazed and angry as the night breeze drifted over his heated skin, ruffling his hair, fogging his breath. He shook his head, a sharp, decisive movement. “No!” His voice sounded ominous in the quiet of the night with all the shops closed, the street mostly empty. It was an apt reflection of the turbulence smothering him. “Hell, no. ”
With a hard stride, Zane started toward the stairs at the side of the house. He’d prove to himself and to her that he was in control; no curse or spell—no small Gypsy—could make him do things he didn’t want to do, or feel things he didn’t want to feel. He wouldn’t allow it.
Determined, even a little anxious, he took the metal steps two at a time. What he’d say to her, he had no idea, but by God she wasn’t going to walk away without a few explanations.
Like how the hell she’d managed to get into his head when he didn’t even know her name.
And how she could dare to proposition him in the middle of a busy sale, as if she’d been asking what time it was. He’d known
a lot of bold women, and appreciated them for that very quality. But what the little Gypsy had done really crossed the line.
And now she dared to invade his dreams, to the point that he couldn’t sleep anymore for craving her.
If she had cast a spell, she could damn well uncast it. That’s what he’d tell her. That and a little more, like how she was far too brazen, and how she grated on his nerves even from a distance.
And how he wanted her, too.
Each footfall on her steps clanged louder and louder, until Zane was literally stomping up to her door, the stairs rattling and shifting beneath his feet. He lifted one fist, rapped hard, and waited. He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he saw the curtain covering the door window move, and a pale face peeked out.
The curtain dropped immediately.
Anticipation, charged and smoldering, sizzled in the humid evening air. It shot through his veins and made his skin prickle. Zane sucked in a deep breath, and he was just about to knock again, through with waiting, when he heard the lock click.
The door opened a crack and a thin, small, blonde woman slipped out, pulling the door shut tight behind her. The landing at the top of the stairs was narrow, partially covered by a thick welcome mat. They stood close by necessity, her nose even with his throat, her hands still behind her, clutching the doorknob.
In utter silence, Zane looked her over. She wore slim jeans faded nearly white, a loose, untucked shirt, and no jewelry.
He didn’t understand, didn’t know who she was or why she was staying with the Gypsy—and then the breeze shifted and her scent, hot and sultry and compelling, filled him up and he went rigid.
The sweet smell of incense was gone, but the more basic aroma of woman remained, unique and tempting. Like any alert male animal, Zane drew it in, savored it, and recognized her by scent alone. Confusion swamped him, and then she looked up at him.
