Read Online Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3) by Roxanne St. Claire - Free Book Online

that’s what you mean. I don’t think old man Balzac is about to jump out of the dark hallway and scare us. But…” She took a slow breath. Talking to unbelievers was hard. She knew she sounded wack to them. But she wasn’t going to lie to this man and pretend she was as pragmatic as he was just to impress him. No way.
    “I believe there are spirits,” she finally said.
    “Spirits?” The word was laden with skepticism and amusement. “What’s the difference between that and a ghost?”
    “Ghosts have bad reputations. Spirits don’t bother people or show themselves. They live…on their own plane.” She closed her eyes, knowing she sounded like…the woo-woo girl.
    But he didn’t laugh or tease, not yet, anyway.
    “I believe in a lot of things that you can’t see,” she finally said after a beat of silence. “I don’t think that everything that exists is…tangible. Therefore, I put a lot of stock in my feelings, which can’t always be put into words, but they are very real.”
    “I believe in feelings,” he said, as if she’d accused him otherwise.
    “I don’t mean feelings like love and hate and anger. I mean intuition. Gut instinct. The perception that something is real even though it is not…possible.”
    “And that’s what you’re basing your request to me on?” he asked. “You want me to throw a huge monkey wrench into this project because of an intuition you have?”
    “And this necklace.” That was real, wasn’t it?
    She felt him inch back and resented the loss of his warmth. “Fine. Go have that checked out by an expert,” he said. “If they say it came from a thousand-year-old Indian jewelry maker, then we’ll talk.”
    “What if it’s too late?”
    He huffed again. “Get it done fast and I’ll do what I can to slow things down a day or two.”
    A day or two? “Building on native burial mounds is illegal in most states. Probably all.” She actually didn’t know that for a fact, but it was a safe bet. “So you could be saving your client a whole heap of fines and possible jail time.” Again, a guess she hoped sounded authoritative.
    “If he looks at it that way.”
    “What other way is there to look at it?” she demanded.
    He crossed his arms, leaning against the wall, the only sound throughout the tiny house the pounding rain and a howling wind through the glassless windows. “He fires me and finds himself another builder,” he murmured. “I mean, if you hadn’t found that necklace today, then we would have built and no one would have been the wiser.”
    “Depending on what you found when you backhoed.”
    “They don’t stop and inspect the ground covering, Arielle. They haul it to a dump.”
    “My point exactly. And I did find the necklace, and I found it for a reason.”
    She caught the whites of his eyes as he looked upward.
    “Don’t roll your eyes at me.”
    “You’re a cat who can see in the dark now?”
    She let out a sigh, and instantly, his hand found her shoulder with a touch that softened that comment. “Look, things don’t happen for a reason, Arielle. They just happen, and then you deal with them. At least, I do.”
    “Fine. This happened, so deal with it by doing the right thing.”
    He was stone silent, letting the pounding the house was taking by the storm answer for him. For a few slow heartbeats, they stood less than six inches apart, draped in darkness and the tension of his silence.
    “You do respect the dead, don’t you?” she asked.
    “I have a hell of a lot more respect for the living.”
    A gust of wind screamed through the living room window, along with another flash of lightning and a deafening crack of thunder. Instinctively, she grabbed hold of him. Strong, solid arms wrapped around her and pulled her close into a chest that felt even bigger than it looked.
    “It’s okay,” he whispered. “Don’t be scared.”
    She wasn’t scared, not of the storm. Grandma Good Bear had taught her to love storms. No, she was scared