Free The Haunting of Josie by Kay Hooper

try to forget you’re a lawyer when you’re with the lady, okay? She might not like being on the witness stand.”
    “I never—”
    “Sure you do. You always do. Bye, Marc.”
    He listened to the dial tone for a moment, then turned the phone off and set it on the end table, frowning.
Did
he tend to pounce on people, automatically probing for the truth even in a casual situation? It was an unsettling possibility.
    Resolving to try to watch that, Marc turned his attention to the problem of Josie. The problem of how to get closer to Josie. His intuition told him that if he pressed her to confide in him before she was ready to do so, she would simply fold up her tent and leave; she didn’t trust him. In fact, a reluctance to trust anybody might well turn out to be one of her problems, and only time and knowledge would prove to her that he was trustworthy.
    So he would have to walk a fine line, refusing to be frozen out while at the same time fighting his instincts to dig for the truth.
    Great.
    He looked down at his left arm, absently flexing his fingers. Maybe being forced into patience was a good thing, he thought. With this awkward plaster weighing him down, he felt like a bird with a broken wing, and no man liked to feel that way with a lovely woman about—unless, of course, he wanted to appeal to her maternal instinct.
    Marc grimaced. No. The last thing he wanted from Josie was mothering.
    So—in eleven days, the cast would be off and he’d be virtually back to normal. Sometime during those eleven days, Tucker would probably have at least some information about Josie’s background, information that Marc could use to get through her frozen shell.
    She was not going to like finding out that he’d had her background researched, he knew that. But he wasn’t doing anything unscrupulous, he told himself, since whatever information Tucker found found—most of it anyway—would be a matter of public record, available to anyone who wanted to look for it. And it wasn’t as if he meant in any way to hurt her or shout her secrets to the world. No, he only wanted to understand.
    Already rehearsing my defense.
That alone told him he wasn’t comfortable with what he was doing—but he couldn’t pull back now. Having once chosen a particular course, Marc tended to stick with it all the way.
    He looked up to find the big black cat watching him intently with Siamese eyes, and almost unconsciously spoke aloud to his feline companion.
    “I have a feeling I’m going to risk frostbite again unless I can convince her I don’t believe she imagined seeing the ghost of my illustrious ancestor. So…how do I convince
myself
that she could have seen him? I don’t believe in ghosts.”
    “Yaaah,” Pendragon commented succinctly.
    “Well, that’s probably excellent advice, but I don’t happen to speak cat,” Marc told him dryly.
    Pendragon uttered a throaty murmur and jumped down from his chair. He stretched languidly, unexpectedly distinct muscles rippling under the glossy black coat, then yawned. He looked at Marc for a moment, then abruptly pounced on nothing at all and began to play with it.
    Marc had observed other cats chasing figments of their imaginations, a pastime that seemed to provide exercise as well as entertainment, and he watched Pendragon absently as the cat batted his invisible prize here and there. Around a leg of the coffee table, under a chair, even bounding over the couch in an athletic leap, Pendragon happily chased his figment. He cornered it at the bookshelves by the window, and a moment later a thud announced that in wrestling with his figment, he had somehow dislodged a book.
    Curious, Marc went to see, and found the cat innocently washing a forepaw with his other one planted firmly on the book lying on the floor. Nothing else on the shelf had been disturbed, and Marc frowned as he bent down and picked up the book.
    It was an old book, long out of print, since it had been published in the forties. It