Free The Pagan Stone by Nora Roberts

continues to pursue the lifestyle of one—or what she perceives to be the lifestyle of one. As a result, she’s very often broke and can only use her charm and beauty as currency. Since neither has worked on me for a long time, we’re usually at odds.”
    “Does she know where you are?”
    “No, thank God. I didn’t tell her, and won’t, first because as big a pain in my ass as she is, she remains my sister and I don’t want her hurt. Second, more selfishly, I don’t want her in my hair. She’s very like my mother, or as my mother was before this third marriage settled and contented her. People always said I took after my father.”
    “So he was smart and sexy?”
    She smiled a little. “That’s a nice thing to say after I’ve unloaded on you. I’ve wondered if being like my father meant I wouldn’t be able to face the worst life threw at me.”
    “You already did. You broke the window.”
    She let out a breath that trembled in a way that warned him there were tears behind it. But she held them back—major points for her—and turning, looked up at him with those deep, dark eyes. “All right, you’ve earned this for listening, and I’ve earned it for being smart enough to dump it on a man who would.”
    She gripped his shirt front, rose on her toes. Then she slid her hands over his shoulders, linked her arms around his neck.
    Her mouth was silk and heat and promise. It moved over his, a slow glide that invited him in, to sample or to taste fully. The flavors of her wound through him, strong and sweet, beckoning like a crooked finger.
    Come on, have a little more.
    When she started to ease away, he gripped her hips, brought her back up to her toes. And had a little more.
    She didn’t regret it. How could she? She’d offered, he’d answered. How could she regret being kissed on a quiet spring night by a man who knew exactly how she wanted to be kissed?
    Hard and deep, with just a hint of bite.
    If her pulse tripped, if her belly fluttered, if this sample caused her system to yearn, to burn, she chose to ride the excitement, not step away with regret. So when she stepped back, it wasn’t with regret, it wasn’t with caution, but with the clear understanding that a man like Gage Turner respected a challenge. And giving him one would undoubtedly prove more satisfying to both of them.
    “That might’ve been a slight overpayment,” she decided. “But you can keep the change.”
    He grinned back at her. “That was your change.”
    She laughed, and on impulse held out a hand for his. “I’d say our after-dinner walk did both of us good. We’d better get back.”
     
    IN THE LIVING ROOM, CYBIL SAT WITH HER FEET tucked up, a mug of tea in her hand as she relayed the incident from that afternoon for the group, and Quinn’s recorder.
    She didn’t skimp on the details, Gage noted, and she didn’t flinch from them.
    “There was blood in the house,” Quinn prompted.
    “The illusion of blood.”
    “And the flies, the noise. The dark. You saw and heard all that, too?” Quinn asked Gage.
    “Yeah.”
    “The doors and windows were locked from the inside.”
    “The front door opened when I tried it, from the outside,” Gage qualified. “But when we went back in, the kitchen door was still locked, so was the window over the sink.”
    “But it—the boy,” Layla said slowly, “was outside, on the window. It never came in.”
    “I think it couldn’t.” Cybil took a thoughtful sip of tea. “How much more threatened would I have felt if it was locked in here with me? If it could have gotten in, I think it would have. It could cause me to see and hear—even feel things that weren’t real inside the house. It could lock the door, the window in the room where I was when it started. Not the front,” she said. “Maybe it used up that area of its power on the back of the house. It could only make me think the front door was locked. Stupid. I never thought of it when it was happening.”
    “Yeah.”