Mountain Man's Crystal Touch

Crystal healer Loralee sets up at the Cady Springs autumn festival with crystals, hand-poured candles, flower essences, and healing oils, offering only a handful of intuitive readings because other people's energy always takes something from her.

The last person she expects is Rocco, a brooding security specialist who trusts training, evidence, and dangers he can see, and has no patience for mystical warnings.

Still, he keeps finding reasons to linger at her booth, unsettled by a woman who seems to know more about him than she should, until an old injury flares and she coaxes him onto her massage table for one crystal-balancing session.

He means only to prove her methods are nonsense, but her hands and a single piercing observation leave him more unguarded than any physical threat ever has.

When a troubling reading leaves Loralee shaken and drained, Rocco cannot walk away, and as the autumn nights turn colder he even starts carrying the rose quartz he once dismissed.

He has always protected people from harm he can see; keeping the healer who has already reached the parts of him he locked away will require surrendering the control that has kept him safe.