Instantly she knew she was wrong. His firm, hard mouth slanted across hers in a long, lingering kiss as if savoring. He made her pulse pound harder, her body hum. He made her ache. Worse, he made her think of an old dream, one filled with love.
When he pushed his tongue past her teeth and into the warmth of her mouth, her legs went weak. She was feeling too much. Too much excitement. Too much temptation. An urge to deepen the pressure, to sample more of his taste swarmed in on her.
A soft moan escaped from her throat. She’d imagined nothing. She recognized the danger ahead for her but didn’t pull away. She absorbed every sensation, and as she relished his taste, she hungered with a greediness she hadn’t known before.
With one kiss, he rippled an excitement through her that she’d vowed to stay clear of ever since Seth had been a part of her life. But Colby wasn’t like Seth. At the moment, whether or not Colby believed in her didn’t matter. With a clarity that seized her breath, she knew that if she let them, they would get closer. The hurt would come.
And he would break her heart.
Amazingly, with a kiss, he made bells ring in her head. Silly thought. No, it wasn’t, she mused, working her way back from a sweet lethargy and an urge never to think again, only feel.
Again she heard bells. One bell, she realized. The bell above the entrance door. With a jerk, she shot a look at the door. And saw Leone Burton.
Definitely she didn’t need this. Didn’t she have enough trouble with this woman? She’d need her wits around Leone. A member of the town council, influential, Leone Burton was a mighty opponent. “You need to leave,” Tessa whispered, a bit breathless as weakness still flooded her body.
Colby glanced from her to Leone Burton and back. “I’ll stay.”
“No.” Tessa fired a warning look at him. He needed to leave. She couldn’t deal with him and Leone Burton at the same time. “I want you to leave—now.”
“Hell.” She heard him mutter before he swung around. “Mrs. Burton.” Colby nodded, slowed for a second. “Sure is hot. Everyone is looking forward to it cooling off.”
Leone sent a chiding look at Tessa. “That’s all her doing. You caused all this heat,” she said to Tessa, unaware Colby had stalled behind her in the doorway for a second. As he went out the door, he looked amused. He thought Leone was fooling. Tessa knew better.
Leone had geared up to blame her for anything and everything. Tessa doubted the woman’s hostility toward her was personal, since they hardly knew each other. Possibly Leone viewed anything New Age as too strange. “Is there something you want, Mrs. Burton?”
Dressed in a heavily starched white blouse buttoned to the neck and a gray skirt, she didn’t look fazed by the heat. Her gray hair was sleekly bound in a chignon. She possessed light blue eyes, cold eyes. “I understand you’ve applied to have a booth for this store at Rumor’s Cooling Off celebration.”
Well, here goes. “I hope to become more a part of this community.”
“I thought I made myself clear before this.” Her icy stare never strayed from Tessa. “I plan to do everything in my power to prevent that. We don’t need such nonsense like this on display,” she said with a wide sweep of her arm toward the display of colored crystals. “I will call Sheriff Reingard if you force me to.”
Tessa lifted her chin a notch. She didn’t scare off easily. “I’m—” She paused, distracted by a noise at the back door. Frowning, she looked back. She wasn’t expecting any deliveries.
“Don’t you turn away from me,” Leone reprimanded.
Tessa faced her. She needed to finish this conversation.
“I’m not through talking to you. Stay away from Colby Holmes. Don’t try your spells on him.”
“My spells?” Did this woman truly believe she possessed such power?
“His family is well thought of in this community. You aren’t their kind.” Leone pivoted, not waiting for a response and apparently not interested in one. Head high, she marched toward the door.
You aren’t their kind. Funny. No matter how often she heard those words, they always hurt.
Annoyance stayed with Colby. Each time he was with her, he felt desire growing stronger. Each time he left her, he wanted to turn around and go back to her. No amount of reasoning explained what he felt. There were plenty of women who’d be thrilled if he paid attention to them. She sure as hell couldn’t pretend she’d felt nothing. Her breathing hadn’t been any steadier than his. He could barely think while kissing her. Even now, all he could remember was the taste of her.
One day he’d kiss her, and she wouldn’t push him away, act as if it meant nothing. It wasn’t a damn crime to have someone see him kissing her, but she’d acted as if they’d be shot. Just because Leone—
Colby stilled in midstride. Damn, but he was dumb. This wasn’t about him. Hadn’t she told him that Leone was determined to make trouble for her? Muttering an explicit oath, he did an about-face.
“Colby.”
He looked up. Feet away, coming out of Sylvia’s dress shop, his mother sent him a wide smile. “Are you on your way to Mystic Treasures?” She had that matchmaking gleam in her eye that always put him on alert.
“That’s where I’m headed.”
“Wonderful.” She drew a tissue from the pocket of her beige tailored pants and dabbed at the perspiration above her upper lip.
More determined to get some answers than give them, he slowed his stride to walk with her. “Did you know Tessa’s mother?”
“We weren’t good friends, but I talked to her. Cassandra was a little wild. I was dull in comparison.” She released a short laugh. “Can you imagine?”
He smiled with her. “Not really.” People gravitated toward his mother because of her bright smile and friendliness.
She turned a speculative look at him. “Why are you asking about her?”
“I wondered what kind of mother she was to Tessa.” In comparison to Tessa’s childhood, he’d guess that his life had been more stable. His parents were steady. Reliable. Loving.
A smile remained on his mother’s face. “I’d only known her briefly.”
“You liked her,” he guessed.
“Very much.”
He liked that about his mother, her ability to see the best in people.
“She was pregnant then, and you were four. So we talked about our children, as most young mothers would, and then I left to be with your father. He was in the marines at that time. I was more interested in a home and being a wife and mother than she was. Though pregnant, she conveyed that she planned to travel. I thought she wasn’t very responsible.”
“Do you think Tessa is like her mother?”
“Of course not. Tessa isn’t flighty like her. She’s a very responsible young woman. She’s a lot like Harriet.”
Now there was a comparison he would never have considered.
“Harriet helped people like the Mason sisters. Only a few people knew about what she’d done. Tessa, too, is like that. She volunteers at Whitehorn Memorial. And weeks ago, she took in a widow with her two children who needed a place to stay until insurance money came through.”
Why hadn’t people heard about that?
“Were you at the sheriff’s office?”
“And Tessa’s.”
“Really?” A speculative gleam entered her eyes. “If you were at Tessa’s already, why are you going back?”
Colby figured she didn’t need to know everything. “Someone came in to see her.”
“Oh, Colby,” she said in a tone so reminiscent of one she’d used when he was a kid that he almost felt guilty without knowing why. “Some other man is already seeing her?”
Since his relationship with Tessa was based on a couple of kisses, he thought it best to remind her. “I’m not seeing her that way, Mom.”
She gave him her best reprimanding look. “I told you about her, told you to get to know her. So who was visiting her?”
“Leone Burton.”
Her reprimanding look turned into
one of good-natured annoyance. “You made me believe it was a man.”
“You made that assumption,” he teased as she climbed the steps of Mystic Treasures with him.
“Sometimes you’re too much like your father,” she said, laughter edging her voice. But her smile slipped quickly. “Leone, you said. That’s not good news for Tessa.”
“I heard she wants the store closed.”
“What she really wants is Tessa tarred and feathered and run out of town.”
He reached around her to open the door to the store. ]“Seriously.”
“Seriously,” his mother said before preceding him inside.
Colby noticed Leone was gone. The soft strains of Celtic music filled the store. Head bent, Tessa stood in the storeroom at the coffee brewer. In response to the ding of the bell above the door, she looked at them.
His mother swept toward her. “Tessa, hello.”
While they met like old friends, exchanging a hug, Colby stayed in the main part of the store.
His mother beamed when Tessa complimented her about her bright orange short-sleeve blouse. “Clothes are why I’m here. There’s an adorable dress that came into Sylvia’s in your size,” his mother said about Sylvia’s Boutique where she was working part-time.
Colby waited near a display. Love potions. Did people really buy them? He looked up as his mother wandered out of the storeroom with Tessa.
“Did I tell you that Tessa predicted Sylvia would get married?”
“I thought you didn’t predict,” Colby reminded her.
At his challenge, a frown shadowed her eyes. “No one needed a crystal ball to tell they were in love. And Louise played matchmaker.”
He didn’t doubt his mother had guided her best friend in the direction of Larry, a marine buddy of his father’s who’d moved to Rumor to work with Colby’s dad on the ranch.
“Yes, that’s true. But Tessa knew,” her mother said firmly. Clearly she really believed in Tessa’s power. For a few moments, she shared with Tessa a humorous story about Sylvia and Larry’s first meeting. “I’ll be leaving now,” she announced. “So you two can be alone.”
Colby watched her breeze out the door. “My mother has grandmotherly visions,” he said, moving close.
“You don’t have to explain.” She smiled with him. “I didn’t expect you back.”
“I came back because of unfinished business,” he said quietly.
“Unfinished—” Her eyes met his briefly.
As she started to look away, he crowded her. He wanted her taste again. Teasing both of them, he brushed his lips over hers. He was a second away from deepening the kiss when the bell above the door rang again. Annoyance skittered through him. Under his breath, he muttered a curse at another interruption. What would it take to get time alone with her?
Beaming, Tessa’s assistant strolled in holding hands with a guy Colby had seen around town. A traveling salesman for a tool company, he dealt mostly with the town’s hardware store. Tall, fair-haired, all teeth when he smiled, he probably appealed to women who liked dimples. Colby checked Tessa’s reaction. She wasn’t one of them, he guessed. She shook the guy’s hand and nodded at Marla’s request. She seemed to be forcing a smile.
“So I’ll be back in a few hours,” Marla rattled on. “Thanks a lot, Tessa, for letting me have time off.”
“Go.” She offered another strained smile.
“She’s special to you?” Colby asked the moment they were alone.
“Like a sister.”
“What bothers you about the guy that was with your friend?”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “How do you…?”
“You wear your emotions.”
Frustration edged her voice. “He could hurt her.”
“That’s a chance everyone takes when they meet someone new.”
“This is different.” She stood in the soft, filtered light coming into the window. She looked delicate. Angelic.
Colby bridged the space she’d placed between them when her assistant had come in. “Why is it?”
Shrugging, she wrinkled her nose. “He’s not playing fair.”
“What do you mean?”
“We all start out hoping for the best when we get involved with someone.”
She made more sense than he expected. When he’d been with Diana he’d been so sure they were right for each other. And they’d been so wrong. “What’s different with them?”
As she shook her head, he watched the sway of her earrings. Dangling, gold, they resembled tiny lizards. “I can’t say.”
Had she really felt something? “Will you tell her?”
“No, I won’t.”
“Why not? If you could save her from getting hurt by him, why won’t you tell her?”
“Because she didn’t ask me to find out for her.” In a small show of nerves, she looked down, fiddled with the hem of her black blouse, smoothed it over the waistband of her jeans. “I didn’t mean to intrude on her privacy.”
“Is that a rule you have?” He prided himself on being intelligent, but she confused him as much as she intrigued him. “You said that she’s a friend of yours. Won’t you do anything to warn her?”
She raised her chin a notch. “I’ll try as a friend. A friend would tell her to get to know him well, find out about his family, where he’s from,” she said, offering such a reasonable explanation that Colby was more baffled. “Either he won’t want to tell her. Or he’ll lie. And he’ll trip up on a lie.”
“Why aren’t you suggesting that she read tarot cards or gaze in one of those crystals?”
“That wouldn’t work. She’d only believe what she wants.” She moved behind a counter and picked up a paper. “I don’t want to see her hurt.”
She was trying too hard to look relaxed. Colby didn’t buy it. She wore the same tight expression when she’d opened the florist’s box and seen the dead flowers. Again, she was laboring to hang on to a smile.
When she ambled toward the storeroom, he followed. In the middle of the room, she stopped, and for a second, she stared at the back door. “Was the fellow with you at Joe’s Bar a good friend of yours? The dark-haired cowboy with the sneakers?”
“Garrett Hudson.” Colby scanned the door. What was wrong with it? “He’s been as close as a brother could be.”
She turned an interested look on him. “Have you known him long?”
“Since I was five. We met in kindergarten.”
“That’s so great. And you’ve been friends ever since?”
“We had a mutual interest. We both liked bugs.”
She laughed, but the sparkle wasn’t in her eyes. “Quite a common interest.”
Feeling concerned for her, he leaned against the closest counter. He wasn’t leaving until he learned what was wrong. “It worked for us. We were both from ranches, both as comfortable on a horse as most kids were on bicycles.”
“How wonderful to have such a relationship.” She perched on the edge of her desk. “Did you go to high school together, too?”
“We both barely finished. I wanted out, I wanted to go on the rodeo circuit. At sixteen I was hooked. I was in junior rodeo, won a few events, but no one took me serious. They all had trouble with this kid who went everywhere on his Harley.”
“Hardly the cowboy image.”
“They changed their minds when I got on my horse. I kept winning, and no one doubted me then.”
“And the motorcycle?”
“I sold it. I couldn’t pull a horse trailer with it.”
“Ah, the action of a sensible man.”
He eyed the open box with the brown flowers. Had something else happened? He was tempted to pull her close, give her some kind of assurance that would explain why she received dead flowers, but he doubted she’d believe the florist had screwed up on the order and delivered the flowers too late. “Who do you think sent the weeds? Leone?”
She directed a frown at him. “I’m surprised that you’d make such an
accusation. Do you think she would?”
“Not really,” he admitted. “Leone Burton is more direct. If she doesn’t like something, she says so. What was her problem earlier?”
“I’m causing all this hot weather.”
He laughed, brushing the comment aside as silly. “Right.”
“Really.” Her lips curved in a half smile, a sad one. “She’s certain I’m responsible for the heat.”
Colby shook his head. She was having a laugh at his expense. There was no way Leone Burton would believe that. She was too intelligent to make such a dumb assumption. “What’s the real problem between you two?”
“I wish I knew.” As if to banish the unpleasant moment from her day, she ceremoniously dumped the flowers in the trash receptacle behind the counter.
Colby sidled closer. He was taunting himself. He could feel the heat of her body. He smelled her scent. It drifted over him, making him remember the kiss. He needed to find out what was wrong, but she smelled like fresh wildflowers. She enticed.
To his satisfaction, she sighed when he kissed the curve of her ear. “Colby, you’re making nothing easy.”
“Sounds fair. You haven’t made it easy for me.”
Her body softened against him. “I can’t do this.”
He couldn’t say what clued him in. But he knew she wasn’t being coy or playing hard to get. “There’s more wrong, isn’t there?”
She heaved a breath as if something too weighty was resting on her shoulders. “Yes.” In the manner of someone about to face her executioner, she slipped out of his embrace and led the way to the back door. Not saying anything, she opened it wide.
Colby stepped forward. Tacked to the back door was a white sheet of paper. He eyed the simple note. It contained four six-inch-high letters.
M.Y.O.B.
Chapter Five
“Dammit!” Colby swung a look at her. She hugged herself and stood away from the door as if it were booby-trapped. Was she scared? This was all his fault. He’d been too public about contacting her, getting her help. He’d alerted Harriet’s killer. While he had doubts about her gift, someone believed Tessa might see the killing.
From the moment Colby had heard about her, he’d scoffed at the idea of her being a visionary. He figured any success rate she had was because she had a knack for guessing. But personal feelings were mingling with his logic, and while he had doubts about her, he was convinced that she believed in her ability to conjure up images of what wasn’t visible. “When did this happen?”
Big Sky Cowboy Page 6
