Seeing is Believing

PRAISE FOR

Heiress for Hire

“
Heiress for Hire
is a must-read.”

—Romance Junkies

“Sexy and fun contemporary romance . . . charged with a sexual energy so intense that it sparks right off the page, making for an enjoyable reading experience.”

—Fresh Fiction

“Readers will be well entertained . . . A sweet, heartwarming story.”

—The Best Reviews

“One of McCarthy’s best books to date . . .
Heiress for Hire
offers characters you will care about, a story that will make you laugh and cry, and a book you won’t soon forget. As Amanda would say: it’s priceless.”

—The Romance Reader
(5 hearts)

“A keeper. I’m giving it four of Cupid’s five arrows.”

—BellaOnline

“An alluring tale.”

—A Romance Review
(5 roses)

“The perfect blend of sentiment and silly, heat and heart . . . priceless!”

—RT Book Reviews
(4 ½ stars; Top Pick)

“An enjoyable story about finding love in unexpected places, don’t miss
Heiress for Hire
.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“Amusing paranormal contemporary romance.”

—Midwest Book Reviews

PRAISE FOR

A Date with the Other Side

“Do yourself a favor and make a date with the other side.”

—Rachel Gibson,
New York Times
bestselling author

“One of the romance-writing industry’s brightest stars . . . Ms. McCarthy spins a fascinating tale that deftly blends a paranormal story with a blistering romance . . . Funny, charming, and very entertaining.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“If you’re looking for a steamy read that will keep you laughing while you turn the pages as quickly as you can,
A Date with the Other Side
is for you.”

—Romance Junkies

“Fans will appreciate this otherworldly romance and want a sequel.”

—Midwest Book Review

“Just the right amount of humor interspersed with romance.”

—Love Romances

“Ghostly matchmakers add a fun flair to this warmhearted and delightful tale . . . An amusing and sexy charmer sure to bring a smile to your face.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Quite a few chuckles, some face-fanning moments, and one heck of a love story.”

—A Romance Review

“Fascinating.”

—Huntress Book Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE FAST TRACK NOVELS

The Chase

“Fun and sexy . . . Pick up
The Chase
.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“I loved
The Chase
 . . . [It’s] sweet and sexy.”

—Fresh Fiction

“A definite scorcher.”

—A Romance Review

Hot Finish

“Sizzling hot, jam-packed with snappy dialogue, emotional intensity, and racing fun.”

—Carly Phillips,
New York Times
bestselling author

“Hilarious . . . Guaranteed to tickle your funny bone.”

—Booklist

“Hot and steamy.”

—Smexy Books

Hard and Fast

“A thrill ride that’s unexpectedly funny, sentimental, and thoroughly entertaining.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Erin McCarthy at her best.”

—The Romance Readers Connection

“This book had my heart racing.”

—A Romance Review

Flat-Out Sexy

“Readers won’t be able to resist McCarthy’s sweetly sexy and sentimental tale.”

—Booklist

“A steamy romance . . . Fast paced and red-hot.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A runaway winner!”

—Fallen Angel Reviews

Titles by Erin McCarthy

A DATE WITH THE OTHER SIDE

HEIRESS FOR HIRE

SEEING IS BELIEVING

The Fast Track Series

FLAT-OUT SEXY

HARD AND FAST

HOT FINISH

THE CHASE

SLOW RIDE

JACKED UP

The Vegas Vampires Series

HIGH STAKES

BIT THE JACKPOT

BLED DRY

SUCKER BET

The Deadly Sins Series

MY IMMORTAL

FALLEN

THE TAKING

Anthologies

THE NAKED TRUTH

(with Donna Kauffman, Beverly Brandt, and Alesia Holliday)

AN ENCHANTED SEASON

(with Maggie Shayne, Nalini Singh, and Jean Johnson)

THE POWER OF LOVE

(with Lori Foster, Toni Blake, Dianne Castell, Karen Kelley, Rosemary Laurey, Janice Maynard, LuAnn McLane, Lucy Monroe, Patricia Sargeant, Kay Stockham, and J. C. Wilder)

FIRST BLOOD

(with Susan Sizemore, Chris Marie Green, and Meljean Brook)

Seeing Is Believing

Erin McCarthy

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

SEEING IS BELIEVING

A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2013 by Erin McCarthy.

Excerpt from
True
by Erin McCarthy copyright © 2013 by Erin McCarthy.

Excerpt from
Full Throttle
by Erin McCarthy copyright © 2013 by Erin McCarthy.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

BERKLEY SENSATION
^®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-0-425-26173-6

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-58977-9

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Sensation mass-market paperback edition / March 2013

Cover photo composition by S. Miroque. “Couple” by Miramiska/Shutterstock. “Dog” by Sundeep Goel/Shutterstock.

Cover design by Rita Frangie.

Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For all the readers who loved Piper in
Heiress for Hire
, this one is for you.

Chapter One

THERE WAS A GHOST REACHING OUT FOR HER.

Again.

Piper Tucker had heard the footsteps on the hardwood floor of the parlor and smiled. “Lilly or Emily, whichever twin you are, it is bedtime. No more glasses of water, no more back rubs, no more excuses.”

She turned, expecting to see one or both of her eight-year-old cousins she was babysitting. Well, they technically weren’t her cousins, since they were the children of Piper’s father’s ex-wife and her second husband, but that was too complicated for a town like Cuttersville, Ohio. They just called each other cousins.

Only it wasn’t cousins coming into the room, biological or otherwise.

It was a ghost.

Dang it. Piper had been hoping to spend the whole weekend in the house without seeing a single dead person, and here she’d been there for only three hours and already a spectral woman was staring at her. The entity wore a poke bonnet, a dusky mauve gown with a braided pelisse, and button boots. Young, her shadowy face was free of lines or blemishes, and the eyes set in that pale, ethereal frame were deep, thick black. Funeral black. Filled with sorrow. This ghost was Rachel, a woman who had died nearly a hundred and fifty years before of an opium overdose after bludgeoning her indiscreet fiancé.

Piper knew the story about Rachel from her aunt Shelby, her father’s ex-wife and the owner of the house. Piper knew that was who she was seeing because she’d encountered the murderess a half dozen times or more since childhood.

“Hi, Rachel. Is there something I can do for you tonight?” Piper fought a sigh. Seeing the pain on the vision’s face, sensing her sorrow and confusion, always made Piper feel a little sick to her stomach. Guilty that she was the one ghosts came to, and yet she didn’t know what to do to help them.

Rachel didn’t move, but the sound of a foot stamping on the floor echoed around the room, ringing loudly in the quiet dark. The one lamp Piper had been using to read a gardening magazine flickered off and back on.

“What’s the matter? If you’d tell me how to help you, maybe I could.” When she was a kid, ghosts had actually talked to her, unless her memory was playing tricks on her. But she could swear she’d had whole conversations with the people who had appeared in front of her randomly and without warning. But now they never said anything, not Rachel, or the other various spirits she saw around town.

In her teens, Piper had taken to begging them to leave her alone, to go away and bug someone else, but now that she was older, she couldn’t bring herself to shoo a soul who’d been restless for more than a century. Piper still wanted to be left alone. She still wanted to be normal, to blend in to the town and in to her family, until no one remembered she had ever lived anywhere but Cuttersville.

Seeing ghosts was her secret. But she didn’t yell at them anymore.

Arms stretched out, reaching for her. Eyes beseeching with aching intensity.

“Tell me how to help. I don’t understand what you want.” Piper gripped the back of the sofa she was sitting on, her throat closing up. She remembered what it was like to feel lonely, vulnerable. Before her father had taken her in when she was eight, she had been unwanted and unloved by her stepfather, and sometimes it didn’t take much to drag all those feelings right back up to the surface.

“She did it.” The words came from Rachel even though her lips didn’t move. Even though the sound seemed to flow and ebb and surround Piper like a cloud, misty and shifting.

A clap of thunder made Piper jump on the couch. It had been threatening to rain all day, and she figured this was appropriate timing. “Who did what?” Was Rachel really talking to Piper or had she imagined it? Now she wasn’t sure.

This was why she hated being the weirdo who attracted more ghosts than a graveyard on Halloween. Most days she didn’t even do all that well with people who were still alive. She certainly had no social skills when it came to the dead. And she couldn’t exactly invite Rachel to sit down and have some iced tea and tell her all about it.

“She did it.”

Okay. Piper needed a little more to go on than that.

Before Piper could ask for clarification, a knock on the front door had her sitting straight up. “Geez, oh Pete.” Would anyone else like to startle the heck out of her? She was not a jumpy sort, but she didn’t like being caught unaware.

Clutching her chest, she stood up, patting her pocket to make sure she still had her cell phone. Rachel was already dissipating. The spirit didn’t like Shelby’s husband, Boston, and made a hobby out of tossing plates at him from time to time, but as far as Piper knew, no one had actually seen the ghost but her. Rachel wouldn’t appreciate a visitor.

The clock on the wall read 10:03, and Piper hesitated as she headed for the door. It was awfully late for anyone to be stopping by, and Boston and Shelby had gone to Cincinnati for the whole weekend.

A quick glance through the peephole showed a man’s head, too distorted for Piper to identify him. His head and shoulders looked rain soaked, which earned some sympathy. But while Piper was compassionate, she wasn’t a complete idiot.

“Can I help you?” she called through the door, hand on her cell phone button in case he axed his way through to her and a call to 911 was needed.

“Shel, it’s Brady. Let me in, damn it. I’m drowning out here.”

Brady
. The name brought a rush of pleasure she wasn’t all that sure she was entitled to.

“Brady?” she said in astonishment. Glancing down at her pajama shorts and tank top, she grimaced. Not exactly what she wanted to be wearing when encountering the man of her childhood dreams, but she opened the door anyway. “What are you doing here?”

“Standing on the damn porch . . .” Brady Stritmeyer locked eyes with her, his expression surprised. “Hi, uh, sorry. I thought you were Shelby. Is she or Boston here?”

He didn’t recognize her. That was a little deflating even as Piper reasoned Brady hadn’t seen her in twelve years, since she was all of eleven years old and he had been eighteen, preoccupied with getting out of Cuttersville.

“They’re in Cincinnati for the weekend and I’m babysitting the twins. I don’t think they were expecting you.” Piper moved to the side. “Come on in out of the rain.”

It had been more than a decade since she’d seen him in person, but over the years she’d seen photos of him from visits Shelby and Boston and the kids had made with Brady in Chicago. She’d always had a crush on him. Always thought he was good-looking. But in the flesh he had a presence that a picture couldn’t express.

A couple of heads taller than her, he had short, dark brown hair and a rangy, muscular frame. Droplets of water trailed down his temple and dripped off his stern chin. She couldn’t see his eyes in the hazy darkness of the porch, but she knew they were green. Many a pubescent fantasy of hers had been built around those green eyes.

“This is really embarrassing,” he said with a half smile. “But you obviously know who I am and I don’t recognize you.” He stepped into the house, glanced around the hallway, turned back to her, and shrugged. A charming grin flashed at her. “I was thinking about faking it, but you look like you’re already onto me.”

“That’s okay. You’ve been gone a long time.” And never once in twelve years had he come back to visit. Piper wondered why he did now, without even calling his family first.

She tucked her long hair behind her ear and leaned on the door she’d closed. “I’m Piper Tucker.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Little Piper? Danny Tucker’s daughter?”

When she nodded, he ran his eyes over her, looking a little more closely than she was comfortable with. He smelled like rain, his shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor, and God, she did not want him to see in her face that she’d once cared about him. That she’d wanted him to sweep her off her feet and make her his wife, with the sort of vagueness towards details that thirteen-year-olds are so good at.

“Damn,” he said. “You’ve done some growing since the last time I saw you.” He held his palm out in front of his waist. “You couldn’t have been much more than this tall when I left.”

Plucking at her tank top, trying to pull it lower over her stomach, Piper gave a nervous laugh. “Well, I was only eleven and I was always kind of short.” Puberty had come late for her, which the pediatrician had speculated could have been the result of poor nutrition in her early developmental years.

“It looks like it all worked out for you in the end. You turned out just fine, Piper.”

Well. That was probably meant to be a compliment, but it landed on her ears offensively. Like while he wouldn’t go so far as to call her pretty, she should be lucky she hadn’t turned out plain old ugly either. Piper had never had any illusions about her attractiveness. She’d always been gangly and awkward, with eyes too big for her head. A head that had been bald from age six to nine, with hair long enough to ruffle not appearing until she was nearly eleven.

No, she’d never been beautiful like her stepmother, Amanda, but hearing Brady’s offhand remark drew out a vulnerability she hated. It lived in her all the time, those deep-rooted childhood insecurities, but most of the time, she ignored them. Having them arise now made her frustrated.

“Thanks,” she said briefly, afraid to say anything more.

Brady popped his head into the parlor. “Damn, this place hasn’t changed one bit. A new couch, maybe, but everything else is the same. So, the kids all asleep? Is Zach in his room watching TV? I’ll go hang with him for a while.”

“He’s actually at a friend’s house. At fourteen, the idea of spending the weekend with his little sisters and a babysitter was just too mortifying, I guess. He’ll be around during the day tomorrow but he won’t be sleeping here.”

Brady was wandering into the parlor, so Piper followed him. He had pulled a doily off an occasional table and was twirling it around on his finger. “Well, at least this way I won’t have to sleep on the floor.”

Piper crossed her arms over her chest, distracted by the way his jeans clung to his backside. “What do you mean?”

“I can sleep in Zach’s bed tonight.”

It took her a second, but when his words filtered through her brain, Piper bit her lip nervously. “You’re spending the night?”

“Yep. It’s too late to go to my grandmother’s. I don’t want to wake her up. And I don’t get along with my father, so I’m not exactly welcome there. My sister Heather moved to Cincinnati when her husband couldn’t find a job here.” He held his arms out, doily included, and smiled, a charming, confident smile. “Sorry. You’re stuck with me.”

Oh, Lord. That’s what she was afraid of.

A completely innocent slumber party with Brady Stritmeyer.

That was called a cruel irony.

* * *

BRADY SET THE DOILY DOWN AS PIPER GAVE HIM A
very forced smile. Clearly, she wasn’t thrilled about the idea of him spending the night. He wasn’t sure why it mattered. He was thirty-one years old—it wasn’t like he needed her to cook for him or anything. Maybe she’d planned on painting her nails or waxing her bikini area and couldn’t if he was hanging around.

But even if he had another place to stay, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go anywhere. It was fascinating to watch Piper, to study all the changes twelve years had brought to her face and her body.

Jesus, her body. She had just that right combination of curves that told a man this was definitely a woman, without being overblown and distracting. Her little cotton shorts were hugging her round ass, and despite the fact that she kept crossing her arms over her chest, he had seen the outline of her full breasts. Caught a glimpse of her taut nipples.

And when she’d first opened the door, and the light from the hallway had hovered behind her, all that hair had tumbled down over her shoulders and breasts and he’d felt a kick of sexual awareness. An instant attraction.

Now that he knew it was Piper Tucker, the hair amazed him even more. He remembered her as a shy little girl clinging to her father, her bald head covered with a hat all the time. No wonder he hadn’t recognized her.

Piper was a sensual, exotic woman now.

“Sit down with me, Piper, and tell me what you’ve been up to for the last twelve years.” Brady dropped onto the couch and patted the seat next to him. He would behave himself now that he knew who she was. He was confused enough about his life without dragging someone else into it, and Piper was too young for him anyway.

Not to mention that her father was bigger than he was.

Yet it annoyed him when she sat in the chair across from him, instead of on the couch. She crossed her legs and hugged them to her chest and shrugged.

“Well, you know, there was middle school and high school. Then college. Now I’m one of the two kindergarten teachers at the grade school.”

“Hey, that’s cool. You must like kids if you teach school and still babysit on the weekends.”

“Well, Boston and Shelby are like family, and I love Emily and Lilly. I like spending time with them. And it’s only the first week in September, so school’s only been in for two weeks. I’ve had all summer to rest.” She gave him a shy smile that challenged his decision to be nothing more than an affectionate cousinly sort to her.