Her Secret Spy. Cindy Dees

And this time when she wasn’t scared out of her mind.

      “Afraid to kiss me?” he teased her.

      “You have a sister, don’t you?” she accused.

      He glanced at her a shade too quickly. “Did your psychic powers tell you that?”

      “No. That annoying big-brother tone you just took with me told me,” she retorted.

      Grinning, he lifted his orange juice to her. “Touché.”

      An urge filled her to know this man, to understand what made him tick, to know how he’d become the confident, self-contained man seated before her today. “Tell me the three most important things that have ever happened to you,” she asked impulsively.

      “You first,” he returned.

      “Fair enough.” She thought for a moment. “In no particular order, the circumstances of my conception—”

      He interrupted her. “Elaborate on that.”

      “My mother was drugged and raped at a party when she was nineteen. Her attacker was never caught. I was the result of that event. But it means I never knew my birth father.” She added reluctantly, “And it means my mother was plagued by conflicted feelings about me and my existence throughout my entire upbringing.”

      Which was the understatement of the century. No matter how hard her mother had wanted to love her, some part of her had never been able to break through the trauma of the rape to truly, unconditionally love Lissa. Her mother’s head was willing to love, but her heart was not entirely.

      Max looked as though his mental wheels were turning a hundred miles an hour, and she continued hastily before he could ask her any more probing questions about that exceedingly unpleasant detail about her past.

      “Number two most important life event—inheriting the shop from my aunt. It gave me an excuse to move across the country and start a new life.”

      “Why didn’t you just sell the shop and stay where you were? That building has great bones and is in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying fast. You could turn a nice profit if you sold it.”

      “I needed the new start more than I needed the money.”

      “Why?”

      She was careful not to even think about her real reasons for the abrupt move, lest they show on her face and Captain Perceptive Pants pick up on them. “My life wasn’t heading the direction I wanted it to in Vermont.”

      “And what direction would that be?”

      She shrugged. “The normal one. A decent living, some friends, a nice guy. Maybe settling down someday.” Suddenly panicked that he would think she was making a pass at him, she added in desperation, “You know. The whole 2.1 kids, dog and a Volvo station wagon routine.”

      He smiled gently at her attempt at humor. “And the third most important thing to happen to you?”

      “I’m still waiting for it.” She wasn’t about to admit that meeting him was rapidly climbing its way onto the list. And she bloody well wasn’t confessing that talking with dead people was the real third thing on her list. “Okay, your turn,” she blurted.

      His facial expression went stone cold, locked and barred, no entrance. When he spoke, it was with great reluctance. “My parent’s divorce changed the course of my life. My father tried to steal my loyalty away from my mother, and the result was that he and I spent a lot of time together when I was a kid. He tried to teach me to be like him.”

      She sensed darkness in that statement. Were she still a practicing psychic and he a client seeking a reading, she would dive into that darkness and explore it, but she was not and he was not. “Did your father succeed in making you like him?” she asked quietly.

      “That’s an excellent question.”

      Good grief. Wave upon wave of darkness shrouded that answer. Clearly Max was deeply conflicted about his father and not at all enamored at the idea of being like him. She noted that he declined to answer her. He continued with his list.

      “The car accident that almost killed my mom and little sister was the second big milestone. It left my mother paralyzed from the neck down. I had to move back home from college and care for her around the clock for four years until she died of complications.”

      “Oh, Max. I’m so sorry.”

      He shrugged casually, but she didn’t have to be psychic to feel the pain in the gesture.

      “And the third event?”

      He opened his mouth. Started to say something but stopped. A voice in her head filled in his unspoken words. Meeting you. Was that for real, or was that just her own desires whispering what she wanted to hear?

      “My work, I suppose.”

      “And what exactly is it that you do?”

      “I’m a finder. I locate things for people with a lot of money burning a hole in their pockets. Art, antiques, furniture, information, you name it. I make connections and fulfill wishes.”

      Interesting. “Tell me more about yourself, Max.”

      “Nope.”

      She blinked, startled at the bluntness of his reply. He sounded like he meant it, too. “Gonna make me discover more the hard way, huh? Pass me your hand, palm up.”

      Smirking, he held his hand out to her. She studied the lines on his hand for a long moment. Oh, dear. There was much more than just a split family in his childhood and the tragic loss of his mother. Suffering. Loneliness. Hatred. Hatred? That was interesting.

      His money line was strong. However, his love line was all but nonexistent. She saw a radical life change in his near future. Love was possible, but at great personal cost. And where his passion mound should be, there was only a hard callus at the base of his thumb. She knew from entirely mundane means, namely, working with the FBI for the past decade, that it meant he shot handguns on a regular basis. The irony of a callus over his heart line was impossible to miss, however.

      “See anything interesting?” he finally asked.

      “I see lots of interesting things. That doesn’t mean I plan to share any of them with you.”

      “Hey!” he protested.

      “I thought we already established that all that psychic mumbo jumbo is pure poppycock,” she declared.

      She was saved by the arrival of breakfast dessert crepes, which were as scrumptious as they sounded. She and Max dived in to the clotted-cream-and-strawberry-filled confections in companionable silence for the most part. And what conversation there was stayed safely on small talk.

      She was stuffed when Max finally held her chair for her to stand up. She was going to have to diet for a week to work off that meal. But it had been worth it to get to know Max a little more.

      He drove her back to the shop and dropped her off, and she commenced the tedious process of cleaning up after the damage done by what must have been baseball bats or steel pipes. The vandal or vandals had been thorough. Even the walls had gaping holes in them.

      Once the debris was swept into a single pile, she began the even more tedious process of inventorying everything that remained and then guessing at what had been broken based on the bits she sifted through. If only she knew the inventory better. She was sure to forget something, and without a list of merchandise made by her aunt, she was bound to lose a fortune in any insurance claim she filed.

      Where had Max run off to, anyway? Hopefully, their conversation over breakfast hadn’t scared him. She’d gotten the impression that he liked kissing her nearly as much as she liked kissing him. But he’d driven away from the shop a couple of hours ago like the devil himself had lit a fire under him. Like things were moving too fast for him. Like she’d spooked him.