Gone With the Witch (16 page)

Aiden put an arm around her. "You're amusing com
pany, Snapdragon McGee"

Change of subject. She got the message.

"Where to after this?" he asked.

"Merry-go-round, Tilt-A-Whirl," she suggested. "I get the feeling that we can't go back to the coach until well

after
dark"

"I mean, where to when we get on the road again?”

“
Who knows? We're on the right track. The sound of the
baby is strong. 'I say we try to get in a few hours' driving

before
we stop to sleep."

"We'll need to find a campground tonight. Time to hook

up
."

"Star showers later tonight," she said. "Want to watch

them
with me?"

"Will you be waving a wand?”

“
No. Will you?"

c
hapter
twelve

AIDEN sat in the passenger seat several hours later knowing that by failing to d
ri
ve them back to Salem he'd agreed to go looking for a baby he didn't believe existed, which probably made him as crazy as Storm, except that she was
a good kind of crazy, and funny, and smart, and he liked
the lunatic a whole lot more than he should.

Plus he had a two-week vacation, which he hated, be
cause, well, being alone got old, and working helped fill
the void.

"I'm glad you've made up your mind to come along,"
she said.
"Even if it is to prove me wrong.
Do you realize how often you've tried to
ru
n, figuratively, and literally, in the past twenty-four hours?"

"You're reading me again."

"You don't seem to mind as much"

He felt pretty good not being in hiding. "I can live with it, especially with you anticipating my every sexual need, you nymphomaniac, you"

"They did not get that word from me."

"No." He grinned. "They got that impression from you, and I gotta say, I think they're close enough to the mark to
make this an interesting journey. Makes me glad 'I decided to
come ... along. Gives me an incentive for sticking around"

"We all have our reasons for running and for sticking. I'll bet the reasons behind my determination to follow through on my psychic mandate would surprise you."

"Care to elaborate?"

"Not all at once, okay? I'm private by nature. Surprises
you, doesn't it? And I'd get the bends if I laid all my se
crets bare in one sitting."

"I might suspect some of them, but never mind that.
Let's not dig too deep for a start. What's the first reason
that pops into your head for almost letting me run you
down? Hell, 'I need a tranquilizer just remembering."

"First reason that pops into my head?
That's easy. My sisters and I are illegitimate. We hate it. So, 'I hate the thought that you might have an illegitimate child somewhere. 'I hate that the child might
need
you."

"What makes you think this supposed child needs me?”

“If life was good and everything okay, she wouldn't be crying loud enough to reach me."

For a minute, Aiden had taken her statement as if it
were a birth announcement. Could he have a
daughter?
Naming the sex of the crying child made it feel so damned real. Heaven help him, was he buying into this?
"She?"

"I don't know. I'm new at this. I never followed one of the crying kids in my head before today in the mall, and look how that worked out."

"It worked out great."

Storm grinned at him from the driver's seat. "It did,
didn't it? Be honest with me. If you did have a child,
wouldn't you want to know?"

"I reiterate: It's not possible, but, yes, if ... and that's a
big if ... 'I had a daughter ... who needed me ... I'd want
to know, by damn" The thought of claiming an unknown figment of Storm's gothic imagination was as crazy as this search. "You're a nutcase, you know."

"I know you think I am."

"A cute nutcase"

"Cute is pretty bland."

"You, Snapdragon, are not bland. You're hot and smokin',
and workin' it even when you don't know
you're
doing it. You're ... irreverent, rude, sassy, prickly, passionate, im
pulsive,
seductive ..
" She
was, in fact, everything he
wanted in a woman ... oxygen, please ... if he wanted a woman.

"Here!" Storm hooked a left, almost too late, into a campground on freaking campground row.

"Effin' A!" he snapped when all four wheels were fi
nally back on the ground. "There are campgrounds for fifty
miles in both directions, and you lay rubber to bring us into
this one? What the hell is wrong with you?"

Storm considered the question. "This is the right campground?"

Aiden tried not to go for her throat, because killing her
would put a distinct crimp in the sexcathlon he planned for
tonight, which should scare him, because he really liked Storm ... the first crack in the structural collapse of a .. .
great
friendship ... if ever he heard one.

Midnight had come and gone by the time they pulled into their spot and he got the coach hooked up to the
amenities. Then he needed a shower, and when he came out
of the bathroom, the coach was empty.

He pulled on a pair of jeans and found Storm outside,
sitting on a quilt Claudette made, wearing her new
watermelon sports bra—be still, his heart—and a matching
pair of watermelon lady boxers, which could easily be
taken for sportswear. She also wore Claudette's old copper sea horse pendant, which she found in a kitchen drawer. Yes, he'd said she could have it, but now the hair on the back of his neck stood and saluted.

What did Storm like to say about paying attention to the signs? If he believed in signs, he'd think that Claudette was
trying to tell him something.

Aiden rubbed the back of his neck and dismissed the possibility as ludicrous.

"C'mere, Big Boy." Storm patted the spot beside her. "Let's watch the star showers and let the heavens sprinkle us with tranquility while the crickets lull us to sleep."

He'd expected to find her in bed wearing something like
that powder blue babydoll cami and matching G-string,
and maybe her new leather boots, though if he'd found the
nympho waiting for sex, it would have been time for him to
fess up, so he guessed this was better. He lay beside her,
put his head on her pillow, and she slipped her hand in his.
For half an hour, she pointed out the clusters of shooting stars—the view
was
spectacular—and she talked about anything and everything except sinsational wildebeest sex.

"You're really ticking me off," he said.

She rolled his way and winked. "Hey, McGrumpy, 'I can
off
you in a lot of ways. Is that your problem?"

"I don't have a problem."

She chuckled, unzipped him, and slipped her hand in
his jeans to find him primed and ready.

"You sure do have a problem," she said, and
as
his
blood turned south and his man brain—as she liked to call it—took over his thinking, he was glad he wasn't going to have to reveal his problem tonight after all.

Determined to give as good as he got—and he was
getting him somethin' grand—he found her wet and ready, and it didn't take long before a star shower lit the earth as well as the sky.

A short time later, Aiden woke and saw that the stars
had continued showering without them. Storm lay curled
around him, her hand in his jeans, him rising to fill her
palm, one leg over his, her face in his neck, a different sort
of heaven than he'd expected tonight, but one he could get used to.

He moved close and made her more comfortable by
slipping his arm beneath her head. She mumbled some
thing about crying babies and went back to sleep.

What a
witch,
and he meant that in a good way. He
shouldn't be in lust or serious attraction. In the last day and a
half, the sexiest triplet witch east of the Mississippi—one
who could assault him without touching him, if he wasn't careful—had seduced, undressed, handcuffed, and kidnapped him. Yet—he should face
th
e
facts—he'd stupidly
agreed to this no-destination road trip ... just to be with her.

Her ability to psychically assault people was some
witchy power,
an
d
he sure hoped that raging passion didn't
take hold of her often, unless, of course, she could use it in
the sack. He wasn't sure she'd been honest about that ear
lier when she was fighting to get her way. If she could turn
his wheel ... maybe she could, actually ... turn his wheel.

But he was being selfish. The parts of her past that she'd
shared made him suspect
th
e
depth of her pain. Storm the cryptic cynic was bruised, deep down, but he wouldn't
change her; wouldn't want to. He could only try to make
her happy with the means at his disposal. He'd show her that he cared, because someone should—besides her sis
ters. The trick would be to keep an emotional distance at the same time.

Storm wrenched from his arms, nearly ripping his dick off at the root, and she shot to her feet. "She's lost!"

Aiden shook her to make sure she was awake, and when
she focused on him, she sucked in a breath and ran to the coach. She nearly knocked him over running out the door in jeans, T-shirt, and Doc Martens,
then
she started banging on the camper door one site over.

Aiden slipped into his shoes and shirt and followed her.

When their neighbors opened their camper door—in
their sleep—she asked if they had a child missing, even though they were about ninety-nine years old.

When the answer was, of course, no, Storm ran to the next campsite to wake a family of tenters. By the sixth invasion, a few vocal souls were talking about a lynching.

Eventually, the campground lights came on, and a police car pulled up.

This time, she was gonna get them both arrested.
it

Chapter twenty- four

•

AIDEN tried to stop her. "What are you doing?"

"A lost child ...
crying."
Storm said running toward
th
e
next campsite.

Conundrum.
She'd already saved a lost child. Could he afford to ignore this? Would the police put him in a strait
jacket when he tried to explain?
Because Storm wasn't
about to stop long enough to tell them anything.

When they couldn't talk her out of knocking on doors, two police officers physically detained her. Storm took a deep breath and screamed, "One of your children is missing!" loud enough to alert the campers.

A few minutes later, a woman came running their way.
"Leslie! My daughter's not in her bed. It's my daughter,"
the woman told a police officer. "Have you found her?" she
asked Storm. "Is that why you've been shouting?"

The officers let Storm go.

She gave them a dirty look and adjusted her shirt. "I
needed to know
who
was missing. Do you have a picture of
her?" Storm asked
th
e
woman.

With
th
e
officers, she followed the woman to her camper.

Storm studied the snapshot and handed it to an officer.
"Call for a search party and an ambulance!
Chop-chop!"

The campers formed their own search party and headed
toward a nearby quarry, but Storm asked the campground owner to point her toward water, a lake or a pond, maybe, and he sent them in a different direction.