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By now she couldn’t stop the giggles. No one made her relax quite like Jax. “Nah, just climbing a ginormous beanstalk, having a peek around a kingdom in the clouds and hauling down untold riches. You?”
“Funny enough, I’m doing the same thing. We might as well go together.”
“Might as well.”
In the time a hummingbird would have taken to flap its wings, the moment went from light-hearted to heady. The heat appeared again in his brown eyes, so intense she wanted to fall in and never climb back out. More than a look, it had power and meaning. It was magic. She couldn’t look away–much to the joy of the armada of butterflies shooting off lust torpedoes in her belly.
Antoine let out a whoop of glee. “This bodes well, it does indeed. The beanstalk likes you two. I’ve heard about how it sometimes acts as an aphrodisiac. Good thing I got here in time or heavens knows what I would have seen when exiting my tent.”
Veronica jumped. She hadn’t just experienced a real connection with Jax. The effect was the same as grabbing a glass of tea and realizing only after having a mouthful that it was bourbon. Embarrassment at how she’d practically thrown herself at her ex-fiance burned down her gullet.
Once again she was alone in that dressing room, panicking as the walls closed in on her. “I can’t do this, Veronica. I’m sorry.” Then he’d hung up. She’d come completely undone, and had refused to leave the dressing room until the clerk tapped on the door for the fifth time. When she’d walked out of the dressing room, still swathed in lace and silk, she’d sworn she’d never get taken in again. Not by Jax. Not by her father. Not by anyone. Looked like she needed to add anything–plant, animal or mineral–to the list.
Desperate to escape, she kept her eyes averted. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“God, I hope it does.” Jax cupped her chin, tilted her head until her gaze met his. “We need to talk.”
She spun out of his grasp and put a yard of air between them, huffing huge gasps of breath. “Let’s keep it focused on the treasure. Professional.”
A crooked smile curled his full lips. “With us it always goes way beyond professional.”
Refusing to get pulled into that conversation, she squared her shoulders and turned to Antoine. “So are we ready to do this?”
The older man patted his knapsack straps and nodded. “By all means, please lead the way.”
Scaling the beanstalk took almost all her concentration, a little favor from God for which she was more than glad. Antoine took up what was left of her attention with his history lesson about the beanstalk. Still, every once in a while,
an updraft sent a puff of air scented with Jax’s cologne her way and her resolve to keep things professional wavered. Starting things fresh between them began to make more sense.
“So I should warn you that we may not be entirely alone once we arrive at the castle,” Antoine said.
“Don’t tell me you’re expecting giants.” Jax’s voice carried up from a few feet below. “They passed into extinction a hundred years ago.”
“Nasty thing, Sir Cravish’s supposed cure. They thought it was a chance to live a normal life, you know. Sir Cravish promised the giants they’d be transformed to a more manageable size, wouldn’t have to spend so much on food and could buy ready-built homes as opposed to dismantling mountain ranges for enough stone to build their huge castles.”
“What went wrong?” Veronica asked.
“No one is really sure. They shrank to only a foot or so taller than the average man. Then something went terribly wrong. It was a frightening time. More than ten thousand giants died in forty-eight hours. The rest vanished. One moment they were there in the hospital, the next–poof–they were all gone.”
Nothing disappeared. Not really. They had to be somewhere. Could they have gone back home? “Where do you think they went?”
“Heaven? Hell? Some place in between? Who knows?”
“What do you think is waiting up there?” Jax had voiced the concern growing in her mind.
“Probably nothing. But it’s always best to be prepared.”
“What’s your backup plan, to skedaddle down the beanstalk while we fight off hungry giants?” Veronica couldn’t help but laugh as she delivered the absurd line.
“You’d be surprised.” Antoine cackled like a dime-novel villain. “But enough about that. Let me tell you about the riches told to be in the castle. Gold coins, cups and treasures. A goose that lays golden eggs. A harp that plays the most beautiful melodies guaranteed to soothe away worries or cares.”
By now the clouds, already thick and puffy, had become impossibly dense. She pulled a retractable garden shovel with a seven-inch pointed tip out of her tool belt. It slid into the white mass like a hot knife into cold, hard ice cream, working like a dream but not without effort. Sweat had formed on her nape by the time she’d scooped out enough cloud to create a tunnel.
Upward she dug, until finally she poked through the top. Feeling a bit like a gopher on the golf course, she poked her head out only high enough to show her eyes. The view astounded her.
Bright sunlight glistened off the snow-white ground. Only a forest of clouds shaped like trees blocked them from their prize, a massive castle in the distance. No sound or movement pierced the stillness. The air smelled of cotton candy and salt-water taffy. Her lungs seemed a little tight because of the high altitude, but that she could live with in exchange for a thirty-three percent share in a golden goose. Since her father had disowned her and she’d started her company from scratch, she had a much better understanding of never wanting to eat cheap noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner ever again.
Planting her palms on the firm cloud ground, she hefted herself up and out of the tunnel. Her heartbeat raced as she stood guard, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Hell, who was she kidding? They’d just climbed a magic beanstalk and were walking on clouds. This whole event was out of the ordinary, even for her. And she’d once avoided cross-town traffic by taking a flying carpet.
