Witchy Woman Read Free Page B

scramble for safety, a hot wind that brought near death and—
    A sharp tap on her door and
pop!
The vision was gone.
    The door opened and Judy stuck her head inside the office. “Aren’t you ready to go home yet?”
    Tess glanced at her watch. It was already five-twenty. Quickly she thrust Nate’s business card back into her purse. “Come on in. I was just finishing up.” She began stuffing papers into her briefcase, papers she probably wouldn’t even look at once she got home. But executives at her place of employment always carried briefcases. It was part of the uniform, as were the conservative suit and low-key jewelry.
    “Hey, Tess,” Judy began in a low voice, “I’m sorry about hassling you today.”
    “Hassling me?”
    “Outside the antique store. I realized, too late, why you were upset.”
    If Judy knew why she was upset, Tess would have to give her friend credit for a few psychic abilities of her own.
    “That panther statue,” Judy continued. “Did it remind you of something from your past?”
    Hmm, not a bad guess. Judy was Tess’s closest friend, and thus one of a select handful who knew about her past as Moonbeam. But even Judy knew only the barest facts about Tess’s nightmarish childhood. The only people who had known the whole truth were a social worker, since transferred to another city, a kindly judge, who had died years earlier, and the psychiatrist she had seen during her teenage years.
    And her mother, of course.
    Even her aunt, who’d ended up as Tess’s dutiful but distant guardian, didn’t know how bizarre life with Morganna had become toward the end.
    “Yes, it did bring back the past,” Tess answered. “I know my behavior must seem irrational to you.” Judy, while entirely sympathetic to the hardships Tess had endured, didn’t believe in anything remotely supernatural. That was one of the reasons Tess liked her so much. She didn’t have to hide her abilities around Judy, because Judy would never believe in them anyway.
    “It’s okay,” Judy said, dismissing the apology with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, you were right. Aunt Dora doesn’t even like cats. Come on, let’s get going. I have an aerobics class to get to.”
    Per long-standing arrangement, Tess walked Judy to her car, then Judy dropped Tess off at the Copley Square T station.
    As soon as Tess pushed her way through the turnstile, it hit her. The subway! That was the atmosphere she’d sensed in her vision. Now she wished she had taken the time earlier to relax with Nate’s business card. Maybe she could have encouraged him to take a cab or something. Because what she’d seen in her mind’s eye had already taken place. She knew it.

TWO
    Tess breathed a sigh of relief after she closed and bolted the front door of her condo in South Boston, her personal refuge. The vibrations she’d dealt with during the day had been particularly taxing.
    Most unsettling had been her run-in with Nate Wagner—both physically and mentally. His bodily presence had done wild things to her restless hormones. But the vision she’d experienced when holding his business card … Just by closing her eyes, she could vividly relive those fleeting, exquisite images that suggested a future sexual encounter.
    She kept her eyes resolutely open as she hung her purse on a hook by the door and kicked off her shoes. She ordered herself to focus instead on the pleasure of being home.
    She had scrimped and saved for years to buy this two-bedroom, split-level town house. The building was brand-new, made of clean stucco with a Spanish-tiledroof, oddly out of place in Boston, but she liked it anyway—especially the commanding view of the ocean.
    She wiggled her stockinged toes against the plush white carpet. Most everything she owned had been purchased new when she’d moved in, from the white furniture, to the pictures on the white walls, to the snowy sheets and towels that touched her body so intimately. She hadn’t yet found a place