Mountain Mystic (14 page)

“Then I suggest you take your truth with a little coffee.” He motioned for her to follow him to the kitchen. “I know I could use some.”

As he began measuring the aromatic coffee beans into a grinder, he briefly told her about the extensive psi testing in insulated laboratories; about the academic witch hunt that could never disprove his claims but shredded his reputation; about the people who’d used him for his connections and walked away when they didn’t need him anymore. He also told her how it felt to hold history in his hands, to see someone’s life take shape out of the earth.

By the time he was ready to pour the coffee, he’d gotten to the difficult part, the part he dreaded. The part where he confessed to the voices in his head. He paused to fill two cups and took them to the kitchen island, where Victoria was sitting.

Reaching for the coffee, she declined the cream and asked softly, “How can you give it up? How can
you walk away from a career you loved? And don’t pretend you don’t care, because I can hear it in your voice.”

“I gave it up because I didn’t have a choice.” Joshua warmed his hands on his cup, rolling it slightly between his palms. “I’m at an impasse. I can’t go on, and I can’t go back.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked up. “I took a risk. I stepped off the safe and narrow path and found out too late that it’s a jungle out there.”

“Out where?”

“Off the mountain. I can’t control the emotions anymore. They press in on me, hammering away at my mind like an invasion.”

“You hate crowds.” Victoria repeated what he’d said in jest several times.

“I hate crowds.”

“That’s why you came back? Because it was too many people, too many emotions?”

“Yeah. I came back because getting up in the morning was a challenge, because I couldn’t concentrate, and the headaches were unbearable. The doctors called it chronic fatigue syndrome for lack of any better diagnosis. It was more like an emotional overload, and the emotions weren’t even mine.”

He pinned her with a raw gaze. Instead of sympathy or horror, he found hesitation in her eyes. “Go ahead, Victoria. Ask it.”

“That’s why you did the work on the inside of the house, isn’t it?” Victoria remembered her impression
of his decorating as tidy, lifeless. “That’s why everything is so pristine.”

The question caught him off guard. He had expected her to doubt him; instead, she was trying to understand him. “Yeah. Other people’s emotions sometimes leave echoes that I can feel, and I didn’t want any here. I wanted to start fresh. To see if I could desensitize the part of me that reads emotions. The mountain quiet has helped.”

Worry crept into her expression, and she shifted on the stool. “Can you read minds?”

“No.” He knew what she was trying to get at. “I can feel emotions, but I don’t read thoughts. Not in the way you mean, not words and sentences.”

“But you can read emotions,” she pressed. “From anyone.”

“For the most part.”

“From me? Can you read me?” Victoria was horrified at the idea. She never wanted to be that vulnerable again, never wanted to let a man have that much power over her.

Joshua took a swallow from his cup before answering. “No. Not you. You’re different somehow. We don’t share that connection.”

Instead of breathing a sigh of relief, Victoria felt an irrational disappointment. Strangers on the street had a connection with Joshua that she didn’t. With her thumbnail she traced the grout between the ceramic tiles covering the island top. “You don’t get anything?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Does that bother you?”

“No!” She frowned, hoping she hadn’t denied it too quickly. “It just … surprises me.”

Joshua gave her a look that labeled her a liar. “I doubt that. You work too hard at keeping everything bottled up when you’re with me, Vicky.”

Running her fingers through her hair in a gesture of resignation, she admitted, “I guess I do. It’s a habit. Richard liked to push buttons. He never played fair. Always testing me. He loved to find weaknesses. It was open season on anything I cared about. So I learned to stuff everything beneath the surface.”

“I’m still paying for Richard’s mistakes, I see.”

“Wasn’t I paying for everyone else’s mistakes?” she shot back, reminding him that she wasn’t the only one judging people against past experiences. “When you decided to play Clark Kent and hide your alter ego?”

“Touché.”

“Fair is fair. Who do you trust, Joshua?”

Before he answered, Joshua took his cup back to the pot for a refill. “My grandmother.” He blew softly across the steaming cup and added, “And I think I’m learning to trust you.”

She smiled. “Enough to introduce me to your grandmother?”

“That depends,” he told her seriously.

Surprised, Victoria asked, “On what? I already know who you are, so she can’t spill the beans.”

“It depends on exactly why you want to meet her. I
don’t want her treated like a laboratory rat the way I was, or ripped apart for being different. She deserves respect, not curiosity or ridicule. She doesn’t deserve to be grilled by the medical establishment.”

“The big difference between me and the people who tore you apart is that I’m not trying to make a name for myself!” she snapped at him as she hopped off the stool and crossed the kitchen. When she set her cup in the sink, she added, “And you damn well ought to know that without my having to tell you.”

“I think I did. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

Victoria froze as she felt the impact of his words like a punch to the gut.
Joshua might be a different man, but she was still being tested, still being asked to prove herself.
Were men genetically incapable of taking a leap of faith? she wondered. Was she asking too much of a relationship to expect a foundation of trust?

Before she could answer that question, her common sense reminded her that if Joshua was testing her, he had more than enough reason to be wary. He’d spent the last few years watching human nature at its worst. Unexpectedly, Victoria felt a twinge of empathy as she realized how much it cost him to meet her halfway when she asked for his help as a guide.

Silently she cursed the part of her that understood Joshua. She didn’t want to care about him, but it was too late to walk away. In truth, it had been too late the minute she came up off that cabin bed and saw him standing in the doorway. Her libido controlled the hormones, and the hormones were calling the shots.
They didn’t care whether or not Joshua trusted her. They didn’t care whether or not her heart got broken.

Victoria knew she was waging a losing battle. The hormones would eventually win, but she was going to do everything she could to delay the final surrender. Besides, he said he was beginning to trust her. Wasn’t that a start? He might not have complete faith in her yet, but she could change that. The only question was how to begin.

“Victoria, why are you eyeing me like a used-car buyer assessing my resale potential?”

Snapping out of her thoughts, she couldn’t keep an embarrassed smile off her face. “Was I?”

“Yeah, you were. Care to share?”

“No. Are you going to introduce me to your grandmother or not?”

“I guess I’ll have to. You haven’t left me much choice. Will tomorrow be soon enough?”

“Tomorrow will be perfect. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Joshua watched her as a pregnant silence gathered in the kitchen, creating an awkward tension he couldn’t break. All the secrets were on the table, and there was nothing to do but go forward. Unfortunately, the first move had to be Victoria’s.

“I should go,” she finally said, but she didn’t take a step toward the door.

“You
should?
” Joshua raised an eyebrow, setting his cup down in a very deliberate motion, noticing the way her eyes followed his action. “Why should you?”

You have to give trust to get trust
, she warned herself. “Honestly?”

“Honestly,” he answered as he stood in front of her, hands on his hips.

“Because if I stay,” she told him, forcing herself to tell the truth, “then I might be tempted to pick up where we left off.”

He ran his index finger inside the neckline of her sweater, teasing the warm flesh. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Any number of things,” Victoria said, and tried to hold herself very still as he pulled the edge of the sweater lower. “Your grandmother, for one.”

Instantly, Joshua’s finger stopped exerting pressure, and he stepped away. “What’s she got to do with it?”

“You said she was different.” Victoria straightened her sweater. “How different?”

“She’s … perceptive,” Joshua conceded.

“
Psychic
’s probably more like it,” she told him flatly, and headed for the door. “I would rather not have any fresh intimacies on my conscience when I face her.”

Joshua frowned. “Especially not fresh intimacies with her grandson.”

“Especially not those.”

Walking behind her, he warned softly, “You’re eventually going to run out of excuses to avoid the inevitable.”

“But not tonight,” Victoria whispered, and vanished
out the door without a backward glance or even a good-bye kiss.

Joshua let her go, let her feel safe. When she started her car, he closed the door and said, “Won’t matter much one way or the other what Gran can see in your soul, Vicky. She can see in mine, and nothing is going to change the fact that you’ll be the first woman I’ve brought home to meet her.”

Tomorrow was certainly going to be interesting.

When he telephoned, his grandmother had been delighted by the idea of having a visitor Sunday afternoon. Joshua wished he shared the excitement, but he didn’t. Since waking up that morning, he’d felt a nagging uneasiness that wouldn’t let go of him. When he pulled into the driveway of Victoria’s cabin, the tension inside him settled into a knot in his stomach.

He realized he was waiting for the other shoe to drop; waiting for Victoria to realize she’d made a big mistake last night in so easily accepting what he was; waiting for her to look at him with either speculation or uncertainty. He wondered when he’d begun to care so much for Victoria’s opinion.

Before he brought the midnight-blue BMW to a full stop, she appeared at the door of the cabin, gave him an easy smile, and waved. She closed the cabin door behind her and walked out on the porch as he got out of the car. When he couldn’t find anything
different or missing in her eyes, the tension magically dissolved. He still couldn’t read her emotions, but the smile was genuine. Victoria hadn’t changed because of what she’d learned last night.

The carefully camouflaged shyness that he found so sexy was still there, lurking beneath the surface. Instinctively, he knew she’d been watching for him, ready to walk out on the porch so she could avoid asking him inside. Not because he was a psychic. Not because he’d omitted a few details of his past. But because the physical tug-of-war going on between them scared the hell out of her. It had taken a midnight motorcycle ride to shake her reserve last time; he wondered what it would take this time.

“I see you got your wheels back,” she commented.

“This morning. The mechanic dropped it by on his way to church.”

“How convenient,” Victoria murmured, wondering if he’d arranged Friday night’s jaunt on the motorcycle on purpose.

“I thought so,” he agreed, and opened the passenger door for her.

“How far is it to your grandmother’s?”

“About twenty minutes,” he estimated as he watched her slide into the car, pulling her stocking-covered legs inside much too slowly for his peace of mind. Quietly, he cleared his throat. “You didn’t have to dress up.”

“Yes, I did. I want to make a good impression.” Victoria adjusted the simple but classic dress she wore so that the skirt wouldn’t crease from being sat upon.
“Your grandmother had the job before I did. I don’t want her to think I am sloppy or dirty.”

Joshua shut the door and rounded the car. As he scooted behind the steering wheel, he told her, “Gran doesn’t judge people by what they wear.” Silently, he added,
She goes a bit deeper than that.

“Good, because I look like a Sunday school teacher in this,” Victoria complained.

“If you’re what today’s Sunday school teachers are like”—Joshua started the car and put it in gear—“I’m going to have to start going to church again.”

“You don’t go?” Victoria asked in surprise. He had impressed her as the kind of man who held deep convictions.

“Not for years.”

“Not at all?”

Joshua waited a second or two and simply said, “I don’t like crowds.”

Victoria sucked in a breath and realized her error. The fallout from the highs and lows of people’s emotions would have been terrible for him. She stumbled through an apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“No, you didn’t.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to exchange a brief glance. “So don’t worry. Enjoy the scenery instead.”

Grateful for his understanding, Victoria stopped agonizing over her blunder and paid attention to the mountains. The trees were beginning the final surrender to autumn, forming a tapestry of evergreen, gold, and deep red. Sycamores splashed a rich yellow-orange onto the canvas of fall; the basswood trees
added a shiny bronze. Each day brought more color to the landscape. By the end of the week she knew the views would be spectacular. All she had to do was wait.

As they drove, Victoria confessed, “One of the things I like about the mountains is the sense of order. The sense that everything that should happen will happen—in its own time.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” Joshua looked sideways at her to be sure she understood the subtext of his remark. She turned her usual shade of pink, and Joshua wondered exactly how much of her turned pink when she blushed.

Victoria chose not to say anything else, letting the conversation drift into a companionable silence. When Joshua turned off the highway onto the road leading to his grandmother’s house, Victoria leaned forward in her seat. She felt like a kid about to meet Santa Claus.

Through the trees she could see the large house which was board-sided and unpainted. Shake shingles covered the roof instead of tin, and the porch was nearly covered with plants. It wasn’t until they were quite close that Victoria realized the hanging planters were aluminum buckets in various sizes. An old woman with short-cropped white hair stood on the front step to greet them, and her eyes were piercing even from a distance.