“Make your own luck,” she muttered, automatically quoting one of her mother’s favourite phrases. Then she snorted. What else besides the promise of work would bring him all the way out here? She was miles from town.
Instinctively, she looked beyond him to the dark woods that flanked the field across the highway. Her skin tingled and her belly twisted in a tight little knot. The sensation had repeated itself over and over in the past few days, becoming stronger and more frequent. The sixth sense that was her legacy warned her: something bad was coming. She glanced back at the guy in her yard, watched him fold the newspaper and tuck it into his coat pocket, and wondered if he was the source of her unease.
With a sigh, she let the curtain fall back in place. Angling on her crutches, she headed down the stairs just as his knock sounded, hard and bold. She took her time. No sense rushing. It was haste that had landed her in this mess in the first place. She’d taken a tumble down the stairs and ended up with the terrible triad: two torn ligaments and a torn meniscus in her knee. And in Jen’s opinion, they were taking their sweet time about healing, though her specialist disagreed.
“Your recovery is remarkable, Jen. I’ve never seen damage like this heal without surgery. Certainly not this quickly. It’s something for the medical journals.” His comments had made her laugh. Her capacity to heal was nothing compared to some of her relatives.
Setting the rubber tips of her crutches, she leaned her weight forwards and dragged open the front door. The sun was at her visitor’s back, and for a second Jen blinked against the glare. Then her eyes adjusted and she raised her head to meet his gaze. She was 5 feet 10 inches and she had to tip her head back to look in his face. It was an unfamiliar experience. Up close, she saw the dangerous edge to him. It was in the way he held himself, the tightness at the corners of his mouth, the way his eyes - a blue so clear and bright she’d never seen the like - took in every nuance of his surroundings in a glance.
“You here about the job?” she asked, wanting him to say no, knowing he’d say . . .
“Yes. Name’s Daemon Alexander.” He offered his hand.
“Jen Cassaday.” She didn’t see a way around it, so she shook briefly. His palm was callused, his grip pleasantly firm. Something inside her yawned and stretched, an unwanted awareness of him as a man. As though in silent response, his grip tightened ever so slightly. She pulled her hand away as quickly as she could without seeming rude.
For weeks she’d had that ad in the paper and he was the first person to apply. No surprise there. Everyone in town whispered about the haunted Cassaday place, and they were halfway right, only the elements that haunted these walls weren’t the spirits of the dead, but a different power.
Daemon Alexander either hadn’t heard the talk of hauntings, or he didn’t care. He wasn’t from town; she’d have recognized him if he was. In a place this small, you got to know faces if not names, particularly a face like his. He was a stranger passing through, most likely in need of cash. Her gaze slid to the rusted-out clunker in the driveway. Cars weren’t her thing, but she guessed it for something American-built and decades old.
“You have painting experience?” she asked.
“I do.”
“It’s an old house. Some of the walls need repair and I’d like to go with plaster to match the original rather than drywall. I don’t suppose you have experience with plastering old houses?”
“I do,” he said again. “I like old things.” He sounded amused.
She wasn’t getting any sense that he was evil, and she knew that if he were she’d spot it. She always spotted it. Her built-in early warning system had never failed her.
“I have references,” he offered, angling his body so that she’d catch his arm in the door if she decided to slam it, as though he sensed her hesitation and wanted to hedge his bets. But he didn’t infringe on her space, didn’t step inside. She caught the faint scents of leather and citrus shaving cream. They lured her to lean a little closer, breathe a little deeper. “I spruced up Mrs Bailey’s porch last week. And Doc Hamilton had me paint his office the week before that. You can give them a call.”
“How long have you been in town?”
“Two weeks.”
“How long you planning to stay?”
His eyes narrowed. “Till the job’s done.”
For a second, she had the odd thought that he wasn’t referring to a job working for her. He was talking about something else entirely. The air between them crackled, an electric sizzle, and she let her senses reach for him. Not sight or smell, but her inner senses, the ones that knew things most people didn’t.
She came up empty. There was no good reason for her to turn him down. She wasn’t getting any sort of bad vibe from him. He had references and she desperately needed the help, especially with her knee torn up. Still, she almost told him no.
“Eight tomorrow morning,” she said at last. “If your references check out, you can start then. If not—” she shrugged “you can head back the way you came, Mr Alexander.”
“Daemon,” he said, softly. “Call me Daemon.” He studied her with those clear, lake-blue eyes, and something hot flared in their depths. She felt the lure of that heat, and already regretted her offer. The last thing she needed was a to-die-for handyman hanging around and turning on the charm.
Either he sensed her preference that he not look at her like he wanted to take a taste, or he had similar thoughts to hers about mixing business with pleasure, because his gaze shuttered and he stepped away.
“See you at eight.”
Jen hobbled out onto the porch as he walked to his car and drove away. Even then, she didn’t go back inside. An odd sense of expectation held her in place. The air felt . . . wrong. Deep inside, restlessness stirred, an edginess that coiled tight and left her feeling that something was trying to crawl to the surface. Her every sense tingled as she looked again to the thick forest that banded the flat field across the road.
The sun was warm and bright, but a chill slithered through her. Because there was someone out there, in the woods. Watching.
Three days later, Daemon was up on a step stool in the parlour, putting blue paint up the wall to the ceiling, when the stumping of Jen’s crutches announced her arrival. The air hummed with an electric charge, a zing of power that ramped up a notch the closer she got. He knew that hum. It heralded magic, and right now it was purring like a stroked cat.
Which made no sense, because Jen Cassaday wasn’t a sorcerer or a demon or anything in between. She was a human woman. An incredibly attractive one with her long runner’s legs and her pretty brown eyes, her sleek, dark hair that hung to her shoulders in a heavy curtain and the freckles that dusted across her pert nose. He had an urge to kiss those freckles, to peel her white T-shirt over her head to see if they sprinkled her chest and the tops of her breasts. And those thoughts were way off limits.