Excerpt of Heart Secret

This excerpt is NOT from the beginning of the book. If you want the first scene and chapter 1, go here: http://speculativesalon.blogspot.com/

Set up: Garrett Primross (hero/private eye) and Artemisia Mugwort (heroine/Healer), are in the Turquoise House (TQ), an intelligent house. It needs it's core database (housestones) rearranged so they are in the most secret chamber.

Wonderful smells and sounds wafted from the HouseHeart, teasing Garrett—cocoa, vanilla, cinnamon, burning wood.

“I have flatsweets on the table by the fire,” TQ said.

Garrett couldn’t move. The woman was too close, the dim chamber beyond stirred a great yearning inside him, as if he knew once he set foot in it, the true essence of home would seep into his bones and he’d never get it out of them and forever miss it.

Ignore that.

Artemisia entered first. Keeping his steps light—he’d wanted to leave something of himself here in TQ’s HouseHeart, not have something imprinted upon himself forever—Garrett walked into the room.

It had brackets near the top of the walls with spell-lights that looked like flames. The door slid shut. On this side it appeared a seamless wall covered with pale yellow paper with red and blue flourishes. Artemisia stooped. “What a lovely cat!”

“I made her and am making her and she is becoming. She can move her tail, look!”

The painting of the gray and black tabby cat—who also had red and blue flowers tinted on her—moved. The round tip of her gray and black tail extruded from the wall, flicked, then disappeared again.

Meewww. Tiny, as if it took great effort.

“How do we feed her?” Artemisia asked.

“I can draw the Flair and energy you naturally emit throughout the day, like body heat, to her,” TQ said.

“Hmm.” The woman sat with crossed legs, stroked the cat’s painted forehead, then left her hand there. Closing her eyes, she stilled. Garrett sensed her gathering Flair.

Her full breasts rose as she took a deep breath, the cloth of her tunic shaping over them. As she exhaled, golden motes of Flair-magic spun around her.

“What’s she doing?” Garrett asked.

“She’s sending love to my cat!” whispered TQ.

Garrett wasn’t sure how that worked.

“You know Fam animals,” TQ said.

Garrett did. They were drawn to him, maybe because he could speak to them all, and sometimes they had plenty to say.

“Think how you feel about them,” Artemisia said. “How you care, and send that feeling to them. When you do that, you send love. As I do to this cat who belongs to TQ and herself.”

Garrett watched Artemisia breathe deeply a few more times. He should have been examining the first HouseHeart he’d ever been in but couldn’t take his gaze off the woman.

MEEWWW. The sound was stronger and followed by a short and rumbling purr.
Artemisia smiled at the cat. A damned painted, mostly inanimate and unalive cat, and Garrett’s heart wanted that smile for himself.

****

Enjoy!
Robin