The sun was already low in the west, and the thought of riding out through the sticky city and all its traffic to find another Shiftertown, where the Shifters would regard him with wariness even as they took him in, didn’t appeal to him. Mason could sleep in the wood shop—he liked wood shops—fix Jasmine breakfast in the morning as a thank you, and head back out again, continuing his search for the healer.
“Sure, I’ll stay,” Mason said. “If you play something for me on that guitar. I’d like to hear how it sounds.”
Jasmine started, then turned to study the instrument. “If you make guitars, why don’t you play it for me?”
“Because I suck at it,” Mason said. “I know how to work the wood, get a nice sound, play some notes and chords. That’s it. I’m not a musician.”
“Neither am I,” Jasmine answered, a little ruefully. “I’m warning you. I only know what my grandmother taught me.”
Mason shrugged. “Whatever. Just strum it or something. I don’t care.”
She was going to refuse. Mason didn’t know why he wanted her to play for him, but he suddenly wanted it with everything he had. A woman, sexy in her limbs-baring clothes, running her fingers over an amazing guitar, her touch as light as it had been on his hand … Oh, wait. Mason knew exactly why he wanted her to play.
Jasmine looked uncertain, but she reached for the Martin. She lifted the strap over her shoulder, smoothed her skirt, and rested the guitar on her lap.
“My grandmother liked old jazz.” Jasmine smiled in memory as she fingered the strings with her left hand and lightly strummed with her right. “That’s why she always called me Jazz.”
Jazz was too short and snappy for this woman, Mason decided. He preferred Jasmine—slower, more delicate.
“She liked blues too,” Jasmine went on. “Loved Albert King. No way can I play like that.” She laughed softly.
Mason watched her transform from a guarded, nervous, and watchful woman, mistrustful of Mason and wishing he’d go away, to nostalgic, smiling, and at ease—simply by setting an old guitar in her lap and smoothing its strings. It was amazing what music and instruments did for people.
Jasmine strummed an A minor, stopping to flick her little finger on a few single notes on the B string, and then she began to sing.
Mason had no idea what the song was. It was slow and sweet, languid like the river flowing past them—or as the river had been before the docks and big tankers had invaded. The song was about a lover waiting in the moonlight, hoping her man would come, and knowing he’d betrayed her. Sad, melancholy, and beautiful.
Jasmine struggled with the chords and shook her head as she kept singing. Her voice, though not trained or perfectly true, was a rich alto that was full and nice to listen to. Mason imagined her voice like that in the night when she turned to him and rested her head on his shoulder.
He abruptly killed the image. What the hell was he thinking? Mason wasn’t here for seduction, something he wasn’t skilled at anyway. He needed information. He doubted Jasmine could help, but he wasn’t here to drag her off to bed then rush away first thing in the morning.
He’d want to savor Jasmine, and he didn’t have time. Maybe when Mason was finished—had found the healer, fixed Aleck, and got his life back—he could drive out here for a visit. Jasmine would play the Martin for him and tell him more about this bizarre old house.
Mason found himself leaning closer as she continued the song. She did smell like jasmine, sweet and strong. He watched her hand move lithely on the fingerboard, the chords more sure as she continued. The guitar sounded as good as Mason had thought it would—low and mellow, its voice aged like the best wine.
Jasmine’s voice matched it. Mason’s urgency dropped away, his errand drifting to the back of his mind. He could sit out here in the evening breeze as twilight fell and listen to her play forever …
The floor shuddered. The windows rattled and the wind chimes began to clang, a rude cacophony to the music of the guitar.
A door slammed somewhere in the house and a voice bellowed, “Jazz? Where are you?”
Mason jumped to his feet, instincts springing to life. He’d been so lulled by Jasmine’s music that he’d never sensed or scented the other human approach. That never happened to him. Never. Not since the day his father had been shot.
Mason was turning to face the danger when a man charged out of the back door and onto the veranda. He was dark haired, large, and moving fast. “Jazz?”
The man saw Mason and immediately halted, fists balling. The fury of a male whose territory had been violated flushed his face.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded. He spoke to Jasmine but glared at Mason.
“Lucas.” Jasmine was on her feet, the guitar in her hand, fear in her scent. “He’s a client.”
“Client?” Lucas glowered. “Like hell he is. You see clients at the store.”
“I called in sick. He had an emergency …”
Jasmine’s words trailed off as Lucas resumed his charge toward the gazebo. Mason got in front of him, snarls forming in his mouth, feeling his eyes go wolf.
The man stared at him, but either the gathering darkness hid Mason’s face and Collar or Lucas didn’t have the sense to be afraid. He swung his balled-up fist at Mason.
Mason caught the hand in mid blow, easily turning it away. Jasmine cried out in dismay, and damned if she didn’t throw herself between Mason and Lucas. Goddess, she was trying to protect Mason.
“He’s a client!” she shouted at Lucas. “Leave him alone. I need the fee.”
“If you’d live with me, you wouldn’t need money,” Lucas yelled back. “So what are you offering him, sitting out here in the dark, singing to him like a whore?”
Before Mason could push Jasmine aside to stop him, Lucas yanked the Martin out of Jasmine’s hands and smashed it over the gazebo’s railing.
Chapter Four
Jazz shrieked. Her grandmother’s beloved guitar fell in pieces, some landing on the veranda floor, the others raining to the flower beds below. Lucas blinked, as though surprised at himself, then his jaw clenched again.
“Lucas, you total bastard!” Jazz’s heart ached while her fury rose.
Lucas recovered his anger swiftly. “Don’t blame me for this, you two-timing bit—”
The word broke off as both Jazz and Lucas became aware of the predator on the veranda with them.
Mason’s eyes had gone so light gray they were nearly white, stark in the shadows. His body rumbled, the noise coming from his mouth as barely controlled growls. He pinned Lucas with a primal stare, one that said the jackal in his sights had just done a bad, bad thing.
Lucas, the man Jazz had once thought so handsome, who’d swept her off her feet when he’d sauntered into the store a year ago, went slack-jawed with fear. Jazz saw Lucas’s true self come to the fore as he gaped at Mason—Lucas was a rather weak man who controlled others to make himself feel better. She had known this in her heart—her psychic senses had told her so—but she’d chosen to ignore the signals in her loneliness.
There was no ignoring Lucas’s self-centered arrogance now, or his terror. His aura became a light puce color, wavering.
Mason, on the other hand, was intrinsically strong all the way through. The aura that had nearly knocked Jazz over was solid, unchanged, unfearing. Mason could reach out right now, wrap a hand around Lucas’s neck, and easily snap it, and Lucas, deep down in his quivering heart, knew it.
Lucas’s voice was a ragged whisper. “Is he … Shifter?”
Jazz didn’t answer. Mason didn’t move, and Lucas drew a shaking breath. “He is Shifter. He can’t threaten me. I’m calling—”
The cell phone Lucas yanked from his pants pocket was dragged out of his hand by powerful fingers. One squeeze and the cell phone became a pile of plastic and chips that pattered to the veranda’s wooden floor.
“Get out,” Mason said, his voice so raw and guttural it was a shock to hear it from a human throat. “Never seek
Jasmine again.”
Lucas stared at him a moment, his mouth opening and closing, then as Mason took a step forward, Lucas turned and fled.
“I’m calling the cops!” he yelled as he ran. “You’re dead, Shifter.”
“No!” Jazz took two steps after him then found herself stopped by a heavy arm around her waist. She swung back to Mason, who was inches from her, his warmth covering her. “Let go. I have to stop him. You can’t be arrested. I know what happens to Shifters.”
Mason’s eyes eased back from furious wolf as he looked at Jasmine in surprise. “It’s all right. I’ll be far from here by the time they come.”
“No.” Jasmine clutched his arm, and Mason’s perplexed look grew. “I mean, you can’t go yet. I need to help you find … whoever he is.”
“Not if it puts you in danger,” Mason said.
Arguments Jazz opened her mouth to spout died as she heard Lucas cry out. From inside the house came a loud thud, then a groan.
Jazz and Mason exchanged a look then rushed inside, Mason in the lead.
All was quiet in the now-dark hallway, the breeze that blew through the house gentle. Jazz could see Lucas’s truck parked not far from Mason’s motorcycle outside, but Lucas was nowhere in sight.
“Lucas?” Jazz called hesitantly.
No answer. Mason moved to look up the staircase. “You have lights in here?”
“Of course I do.” Jazz flipped all the wall switches, filling the lower and upper halls with light. The chandelier that hung from the top of the staircase glowed. “Help me look for him.”
She began opening doors. The rooms on the lower floor contained furniture either original to the house—well-kept heirlooms or restored finds from the basement—or handmade replicas. These rooms were for the house tours, to show what life on a late eighteenth-century plantation had been like.
Jazz lived on the second floor. Her grandmother had built a kitchen up there so the lower floor could be left in its original configuration, from a time when the kitchen had been a separate building to keep the fires and smells away from the main house. The original kitchen was preserved now, and shown as part of the house tour.
Lucas wasn’t in any of the downstairs rooms. Jazz turned on all the lights and checked every corner of the parlor, dining room, library, music room, parlor-bedroom. She hurried back to the staircase hall, where Mason was busy scrutinizing the wide, polished floorboards.
He pressed his foot to a board that rocked on the studs below it. “These are loose.”
“I know,” Jazz said. “I keep having them repaired, but they come loose again every time. I rope them off on tour days. It’s right below the chandelier anyway.”
Mason directed his gaze straight up to the ponderous wrought-iron chandelier that had hung from that spot for well over two hundred years. The chandelier had never fallen in all that time, even when storms shook the house; however, it chose that moment to sway.
Mason stepped respectfully back, but he studied the floorboards again. “What’s under there?”
“Subfloor,” Jazz said, knowing every inch of the house. When a person kept an old place restored, she came to know it intimately. “Below that, basement—not an underground basement—we’re too close to the river for that. They built the house up higher to turn the space underneath the house into a storage area. The root cellar is just under there.” She pointed to the first step of the staircase.
Mason’s gaze was still on the floor, and Jazz realized he was sniffing. Like a dog. Well, a wolf was kind of a dog, right? “Can you get down to it?” he asked.
“Yes, the door’s over there.” Jazz waved her hand at the end of the hall, where a door inside the back entrance led to a short flight of stairs.
Mason strode past her and down the hall, took hold of the cellar door’s handle, and rattled it. “It’s locked.”
“Shouldn’t be,” Jazz said, surprised. She grabbed the keys from the drawer of the Duncan Phyfe table in the hall and joined him. “I only lock it on tour days.”
She fumbled with the keys, found the right one, and inserted it into the lock. It wouldn’t turn. Jazz yanked out the key and stared at it. No, this was the right one. She tried again. “Damn, what is wrong with this thing?”
Mason turned abruptly and strode back to the main staircase hall. Jazz gave up on the lock and followed him.
She found Mason standing on the loose boards, looking all the way up to the chandelier and the beamed ceiling three and a half stories above them. “Hey,” he said, speaking carefully. “If he disappears, and Jasmine is taken in for doing something to him, she won’t be able to live here anymore.”
Jazz stared at him. “You say you don’t believe in psychics,” she said. “But you’ll talk to a house?”
Mason shrugged his large shoulders. His hoodie was all the way open now, giving her a glimpse of flesh inside his muscle shirt. “My brother had a sword talking to him for a while. Why not a whole house?”
There was a rumble, a creak of wood, and then Jazz heard a muffled yell. “Hey!” Lucas was calling. “Get me out of here!”
Mason dropped to his knees and started pulling away the floorboards. They came up easily, pried apart by his big hands.
In the cramped spaced between floor and subfloor, they found Lucas lying on his stomach, arms outstretched, fingers moving as though he wanted to dig his way out. His eyes were closed, and he kept shouting.
Mason reached down, closed an arm around Lucas’s waist, and hauled him up. Lucas landed on his feet, his eyes still closed, fingers clawing, until Mason shook him.
“Stop it. You’re all right.”
Lucas peeled open his eyes. He looked at the floorboards then at Jazz and Mason, and then his knees buckled.
Mason caught him before he fell. He stoically lifted Lucas, half conscious and babbling, over his shoulder, and strode out of the house with him. Jazz watched through the open front door as Mason set Lucas in the driver’s seat of his truck then stood back and said something to him.
Jazz tried to lift one of the boards into place, but it was heavy, and she dropped it. Mason had moved it as though it weighed nothing. She’d have to call the contractors to fix the floor—again.
Suddenly weary, she wandered outside to the veranda. She walked down the steps and retrieved all the pieces of her beloved guitar then returned to the gazebo and sat down, setting the remains of the guitar on the table. The neck had come off, the top and bottom smashed. The strings hung limply from the tuning pegs, and the bridge, detached from the body, dangled on the ends of the strings.
Tears filled her yes. “Damn it.”
“Hey.”
Mason stood over her. Jazz hadn’t heard him come back to the house, not even his step on the veranda. He regarded her with eyes the gray of storm clouds, the wolf fading.
“He’s gone,” Mason went on. “He won’t be bothering you anymore.”
“He was my boyfriend!” Jazz said loudly, her anger rising. “All right, so he was a douchebag. My friends all say I have the worst taste in men, and they’re right.” Her throat ached. “Why would he do this?” She touched the guitar, a broken, dead thing.
Mason crouched down on his heels. He was a big man, so even in that position his head came to her shoulder. He put his fingers next to hers on the guitar. “I’m a luthier. I can fix it for you. It won’t be worth as much repaired, but you’ll be able to play it.”
“I don’t care how much it’s worth.” Jazz glared at him. “It was my grandmother’s. I loved that guitar.” She let out a sigh. “I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to help …”
“Don’t be sorry,” Mason said in a hard voice. “It’s that dickhead’s fault, not yours. Don’t take other people’s idiocy onto yourself.”
Jazz opened her mouth to answer, but her words died as Mason leaned to her, coming right into her personal space. Shifters did that, Jazz had come to know. They were much more at ease with bodily contact than humans, and they didn’t realize
when they were too close for human comfort. Nearness was good for them, apparently. It helped soothe them, let them know that they weren’t alone.
Jazz was definitely alone. Mason’s presence was nice, cutting the loneliness of the place. Long ago, this house had been alive, people running in and out all the time, children playing, the house full of voices and laughter. One of Jazz’s ancestors had been an abolitionist when it hadn’t been fashionable to be, gave his slaves papers that said they were free, and rented out the slave quarters to farmers, thus reducing the aura of human misery the place could have had.
But it was lonely. Now that her grandmother was gone, the tourists and Jazz’s friends only made so much of a dent in the house’s emptiness.
Mason watched her closely, his eyes framed with dark lashes that matched his unruly hair. His lips were firm in his strong face, his jaw brushed with dark whiskers that spoke of his many-hour journey from Austin.
Jazz realized she wanted to kiss him. She tried to rein in the urge, but it wouldn’t go away. He smelled of dust and exhaust—road scents—of warmth and the fabric of his jacket.
No more Shifters, she told herself sternly. Never going through that heartbreak again.
Her body wasn’t listening. Shifters did this, drew a person in despite their best efforts, broke down defenses before they could even be raised.
Jazz leaned down and lightly kissed his lips.
* * *
Mason jumped. Jasmine’s mouth was warm and soft, her lips sweet and enticing. Her breath brushed his cheek, her hair satin smooth against his skin.
Mason’s body temperature, already high, jumped to searing. The light pressure of her lips did things to his insides and hardened every muscle. He remained rigid, willing himself not to grab her and yank her to him.
Human groupies had kissed him before, wanting him to wrestle them down and have at them. Jasmine wanted … something else. Mason wasn’t sure what, but a quick shag wasn’t what she had in mind. He didn’t have to be psychic to know that.
Before he could decide how to respond, Jasmine pulled back, her face bright red.