Taming The Hunter

He shrugged. “I think I could handle Minnesota once in a while.”

Eryss lifted a questioning brow.

“Mostly. Probably. In the summer, for sure.”

“Does surfer guy miss the waves? Do you surf this time of year?”

“Oh, yeah. Some of the best swells roll in during January. Put me in a heavy wet suit and I’m good to go.”

“But even with a wet suit, the water must be cold.”

“In the fifties. So you see?” He pounded his chest with a fist. “I’m hardy.”

“Then I challenge you to do the polar plunge. I think that’s happening sometime next week over in Saint Paul.”

“Is that what it sounds like?”

She nodded. “Jumping into the lake through a hole cut in the ice. But don’t worry, there are towels and hot beverages waiting to warm you up after.”

“I think I’ll stick with fifty degrees and epic surf.”

Eryss’s giggle lifted her breasts in a jiggly don’t-look-away come-on. The water glass Dane held tilted, and cool liquid splashed his wrist.

“Whoa!” She grabbed the glass and pressed a towel to the spill on the table. “Got it.”

“Sorry.” He reclaimed the glass and set it carefully before his plate. Even a child could manage such a skill as lifting a glass to drink. Of course, children’s distractions were far different from a grown man’s. He smirked at Eryss’s darting look. So he confessed. “You distract me. Your cooking distracts me. The warmth from the hearth fire is distracting in a good way. And everything about you and this house is distracting. I’m normally much more pulled together.”

She stroked a finger along his wrist. “And here I thought I was the only one having a hard time concentrating on the pasta. You know you have a few silver hairs in your beard stubble and above your ears that are devastating to a woman’s better judgment.”

Dane rubbed his stubble, which was trying to become a beard. He wasn’t that old, but indeed, he did have a few silver strands. Had he inherited them from a father he’d never known? The only photo his mother had ever saved of Edison had been taken from the side, and was blurry. He had dark hair in it, but it was hard to tell if gray had yet invaded. “They say a few gray hairs give a man a distinguished air.”

“I’d call it downright sexy. But I assumed you were about my age.”

“Which is?” He managed to fork in a bite of pesto without spilling. Points for the distracted scientist.

“I celebrate my thirtieth in a week. What about you?”

“I’m a January baby, as well. My day is the twenty-eighth. We’re both looking at thirty.”

“That’s interesting! I’d love to read your cards.”

“My cards? You mean like tarot? Wait. Don’t tell me.” He cast his gaze about the kitchen, seeing what he’d seen once before, but this time really taking it in. “You’ve got all the plants, the minerals and crystals sitting everywhere, and you told me you believe in magic. Of course you do tarot.”

“Tarot is not done. It’s read. And yeah, I’ve got skills.” She licked her fork clean, and the sight of her tongue dragging along the silver tines disturbed Dane’s sense of propriety. “I just find it interesting that two people born one day apart have found one another. Our souls are clinging to each other.”

“Souls, eh? Tell me you don’t believe in the afterlife and reincarnation and all that blather.” A necessary rebuttal. He had made the comment to her yesterday about witches being silly. It was a standard reply in his line of work. Couldn’t let anyone actually know he believed in real witches.

“I innately know that I have lived many lives. And your lack of belief in an afterlife, or that souls exist in many forms for many lifetimes, doesn’t bother me. You are a scientist, after all. You’re designed not to see the greater picture.”

“Is that so?” Dane pushed his plate forward to lean an elbow on the table. “All scientists do is seek the greater picture.”

“Unless you’re a microbiologist.”

She had him there. They tended to study the small stuff. But still, there was a vast and greater world within their study.

And Dane’s sudden rising indignation settled. He didn’t want to start a fight debating science and fantasy with this beautiful woman who had successfully plied her seduction skills on him. Not when his eyes again strayed to her cleavage and he suddenly wondered what dessert she would offer.

“You mentioned you’re also a geologist,” she stated. “Besides the debunking stuff, you study rocks, right?”

“That’s a vague and expansive way to summarize what I do. But sure, I study rocks.”

“So if I tell you I use crystals to gain insight and heal myself, then where do you stand on that?”

He chuckled, then saw her nodding as if she’d expected him to react that way. “Well, seriously. Rocks don’t heal.” And that wasn’t a line; he simply knew it to be fact. “And people who claim to read stones or get some kind of voodoo vibrations out of them are...”

“Are?”

He was not going to answer that one, even if she threatened to have him stomped on by a thousand elephants. He might stand on the side of logic, but when a man was trying to impress a woman it was far better to plead the fifth at times.

“Everything is energy, right?” Eryss said.

“Of course. We are all atoms bouncing up against one another.”

“Including this table, the chairs we are sitting on, the rocks on my kitchen windowsill, the ones in the copper bowl down the table there, and those outside hidden under the snow. Yes?”

Whatever point she was trying to make, he sensed he would not agree. But again... “Yes.”

“Energy vibrates those atoms and makes all things living entities. Why is it so hard to believe that two energies can combine to work with each other? The rock and the healer?”

Dane blew out through his nose. She had an infinitesimal point there. But if given time, he’d refute it with ease. More often than not his job did not result in protecting the masses, but rather a mentally unbalanced individual. Eryss was not one of those.

He hoped.

“Will you let me show you something?” She leaned forward, an eager look sparkling in her eyes.

“Always and ever,” he replied without thinking.

She stretched to the side to grab a stone from the copper bowl she had just mentioned. It was an egg-sized piece of rose quartz, roughly cut and unpolished, yet it gleamed in shades of pink and white under the subtle candlelight.

She held it between them. “This crystal is one of my favorites. I use it often on my heart chakra. The energy it puts out is tangible.”

Uh. Huh. Okay, so perhaps she was a kitchen witch of sorts? That was the only explanation Dane had for those women who were involved in such things as chakras and souls and crystals with energies. A ridiculous enterprise. But a harmless hobby, all the same.

Still, it annoyed him.

“Take it.” She held out the crystal.

He decided to amuse her and took the rock. It had a good weight and he couldn’t deny it was a lovely specimen. But it was simply a rock mined from the earth. His studies tended to ignore the beauty and instead read the history within the striations and deposits that the millennia had formed.