“Your breath is . . .” he started.

Yes, she knew: shocking to witness up close rather than from the safe distance of the audience when she was performing onstage. “Do you know what an aura is?”

“No clue.”

“It’s an emanation around humans—an effusion of energy. Everyone has one. Mine turns cold when a spirit or ghost is nearby. When my warm breath crosses my aura, it becomes visible—same as going outside on a cold day.”

“That’s fascinating, but can you get rid of her first and talk later?”

“No need to get snippy.”

He looked at her like she was a blasphemer who’d just disrupted church service, fire and brimstone blazing behind his eyes. “Please,” he said in a tone that was anything but polite.

Aida stared at him for a long moment, a petty but sweet revenge. Then she inhaled and shook out her hands . . . closed her eyes, pretending to concentrate. Let him think she was doing him some big favor. Well, she was, frankly. If he searched the entire city, he’d be lucky to find another person with the gift to do what she did. But it wasn’t difficult. The only effort it required was the same concentration it took to solve a quick math problem and the touch of her hand.

Pushing them over the veil was simple; calling them back took considerably more effort.

After she’d tortured the man enough, she reached out for the Chinese woman, feeling the marked change in temperature inside the phantom’s body. Aida concentrated and willed her to leave. Static crackled around her fingertips. When the chill left the air, Aida knew the ghost was gone.

She considered pretending to faint, but that seemed excessive. She did, however, let her shoulders sag dramatically, as if it would take her days to recover. A little labored breathing was icing on the cake.

“Your breath is gone.”

She cracked open one eye to find the giant’s vest in front of her. When she straightened to full height, she saw more vest, miles of it, before her gaze settled on the knot of his necktie. It was a little annoying to be forced to tilt her face up to view his. But up close, she spotted an anomaly she hadn’t noticed from a distance: something different about the eye with the scar. Best to find out who the hell this man was before she asked him about it.

“Aida Palmer,” she said, extending a hand.

He stared down at it for a moment, gaze shifting up her arm and over her face, as if he were trying to decide whether he’d catch the plague if they touched. Then his big, gloved hand swallowed hers, warm and firm. Through the fine black leather, she felt a pleasant tingle prickle her skin—an unexpected sensation far more foreign than any ghostly static.

TWO

WINTER MAGNUSSON WASN’T SUPERSTITIOUS. IF ANYONE would’ve asked if he believed in ghosts a week ago, he might’ve laughed. He wasn’t laughing now. And after a lousy week marred by one bizarre event after another, he frankly wasn’t sure what he believed anymore.

First, a crazy old woman had accosted him on the street and shouted some hocus-pocus curse at him. After that, a specter began appearing in his study every afternoon—something no one in his household could see but him. Then, during a business meeting tonight at a bar in Chinatown, someone spiked his drink with a foul-tasting green concoction. And before he could spit it out, a prostitute with a gaping hole in her head walked right through a wall from the brothel next door.

Like the specter in his study, no one but Winter saw the dead prostitute, but she’d damn sure followed him from Chinatown to North Beach. All she did was stare at him, but until the spirit medium walked in the room, he’d been questioning his sanity.

Now he was too unsettled to question much of anything.

After the medium’s breath returned to normal, the first thing Winter noticed about her was her breasts, which were respectable. Much like looking into the sun during an eclipse, staring at her breasts would only lead to harm, so he quickly shifted his gaze upward. Slender fingers combed through blunt caramel brown bangs covering her forehead. Straight as a ruler, her sleek hair was styled into a short French bob that fell to her chin in the front and tapered to the nape of her neck. When she introduced herself and extended her hand to shake, it drew his attention to her skin, which was pale as milk and densely covered in bronze freckles. Not the kind you’d see smattered on the sun-kissed face of a child.

Freckles everywhere.

They began in a sliver of pale forehead above arched brows, gathered tightly across her nose and cheeks, lightened around her neck, then disappeared into the dipping neckline of her dress.

Winter’s gaze raked over her breasts again—still respectable—down her dress to the jagged handkerchief hem below her knees. He followed the path of the spotted skin around her calves, half hidden by pale stockings, to the T-bar heels on her feet. Freckles on her legs—how about that? For some reason, he found this wildly exciting. Increasingly lurid thoughts ballooned inside his head after he wondered exactly what percentage of her skin was speckled. Did freckles cover her arms? The curving creases where her backside ended and her legs began? Her nipples?

He pushed away the enticing reverie, shook her hand, and successfully remembered his own name. “Winter Magnusson.”

Her enormous brown eyes were ringed in kohl like some exotic Nile princess. A strange heat washed over him as their gazes connected.

“Good grief, you’re a big one, aren’t you?”

He stilled, rooted to the floor, unable to think of a response to that.

If he was big—and at four inches over six feet, he definitely was—then Miss Palmer was very small. Average height for a woman, legs on the long side, but there was something petite and slender about her frame. Graceful. She was also unusually pretty—far more attractive than the sketch of her on the poster outside Gris-Gris’s entrance.

“I suppose everyone jumps when you snap your fingers.” The way she said this, in a calm manner, almost smiling, made him think it wasn’t a criticism as much as an honest assessment. Maybe even a compliment.

“They jump when I snap my fingers because without me, they have no income.”

“Aha! I knew I’d heard your name around here. You’re Velma’s bootlegger.”

She had such a disarming, casual way about her. Very straightforward, which was off-putting and exciting at the same time. Women didn’t speak to him this way—hell, most men didn’t speak to him this way.

“Not Velma’s alone,” he said. “And on the record, I’m in the fish business.”

And he was: fish during the day, liquor at night. Both were considered some of the best in the city. Quality is an unusual thing to specialize in when your enterprise is illegal, but that was his niche. Winter’s father owned boats before Volstead and fished up and down the coast, from San Francisco to Vancouver. His old routes and the contacts he’d collected made it easy to set up bootlegging from Canada. And like his father, Winter sold no bathtub gin—nothing cut, nothing fake—which allowed him to cater to the best restaurants, clubs, and hotels.

It also earned him the status of being one of the Big Three bootleggers in San Francisco.

Aida nodded as if it were of no consequence, then said, “They’re different colors.”

“What’s that?”

“Your eyes.”

Strangers never had the nerve to comment on his maimed eye or the hooked scar that extended from brow to cheekbone. Either they’d already heard the story behind it, or they were too intimidated to inquire. He wasn’t used to explaining, and even considered ignoring the medium’s questioning tone altogether, but her curious face swayed him.

Or maybe it was the freckled ankles . . . and what he’d like to do with those ankles, which started with licking and ended with them propped on his shoulders.

He cleared his throat. “One pupil is permanently dilated.”

“Oh?” She stepped closer and craned her neck to inspect his eyes. The sweet scent of violet wafted from her hair, disorienting him far more than the foul drink and the damned ghost already had. “I see,” she murmured. “They’re both blue. The big pupil makes the left eye look darker. Is that genetic?”

“An injury,” he said. “I was in an auto accident a couple of years ago.”

God, how he detested the disfigurement. Every time he looked in the mirror, there they were, wounded eye and scar, reminding him of the one night he wanted more than anything to forget: when his family was brutally snatched away from him, crushed by the oncoming streetcar. Dumb luck that he survived, but some days he truly believed his continued existence was really a curse in disguise.

The medium made no comment about the scar; though, to her credit, she didn’t appear to be revolted or frightened by its presence, nor did she politely pretend it wasn’t there. “Can you see out of the wounded eye, or does the dilation affect your vision?”

He smelled violets again. Christ alive. She was intoxicating, standing so close. A pleasurable heat gathered in his groin. Any more pleasurable and he’d be forced to hide a rampant erection. He pulled his coat closed, just in case.

“My vision is perfect,” he answered gruffly. “Right now, for instance, I see a tiny freckled woman in front of me, asking a lot of questions.”

She laughed, and the sound did something funny to Winter’s chest. Maybe he was getting ill. Having a heart attack at the age of thirty. He hoped to hell not. He’d rather be burned alive than tolerate another wretched doctor’s so-called assistance. Between the parade of psychiatrists who treated his father’s illness before the accident and the overpriced surgeons who sewed up his own eye after it, he’d seen enough doctors to last a lifetime, no matter how short.