Twisted by Love
Reincarnation Tales, Book 1
A sexy paranormal romance/mystery
Jasmine Haynes
Copyright 2012 Jasmine Haynes
Cover Design by Rae Monet Inc
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Summary
A love that spans lifetimes, an evil that has followed them through the ages...
Bern Daniels doesn’t believe in ghosts, UFOs, or reincarnation, but when he sees Livie Scott, it’s as if he’s known her forever. Now he can’t get her out of his mind. He wants her in his bed and in his life. For keeps. He’s even starting to believe they’ve lived past lives together.
Will jealousy out of the past come back to destroy their future?
Livie is unaccountably drawn to the tall, dark stranger. He literally sweeps her off her feet. And she’s oh so willing to let him. But her sister Toni is planted firmly in her path to happiness. Livie has been forced to choose between a man and Toni before; is she destined to play the same twisted game with her sister over and over?
Livie and Bern soon discover there are shadows lurking from their past, past lives that is, which threaten everything they believe in, everything they want. And even their lives.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my special network of friends who support me, brainstorm with me, and encourage me: Bella Andre, Shelley Bates, Jenny Andersen, Jackie Yau, Ellen Higuchi, Kathy Coatney, Pamela Fryer, Rosemary Gunn, and Laurel Jacobson. And a special thanks to Rae Monet for the fabulous cover!
Prologue
He saw her out of the corner of his eye as he crossed the lobby. She was just a flash in his periphery. His immediate thought was that he hadn’t believed he’d ever see her again, accompanied by emotions of loss, need, desire, and even anger. Quickly on the heels of that came the understanding that yes, of course, she was here in San Francisco, right where her sister said she’d be. Vast relief. Intense joy. Her name was on the tip of his tongue, yet the moment he turned, ready to call it out, the name vanished. It was like a dream you suddenly woke from, where one moment you were convinced it was real, and the next, the details were gone. He realized he didn’t know the woman at all.
Her mahogany hair, damp from the rain, swayed across her back as she walked at a fast clip, her tennis shoes incongruous with a tailored skirt that outlined her trim curves. Her blouse, also damp, clung to her enticingly. In profile, her eyelashes were long and lush, the color of her eyes darker than her hair. She didn’t smile, didn’t look at anyone, not even him though he’d stopped to watch her.
No, he didn’t know her, her fine-boned features unfamiliar, yet he still felt that original smack of recognition. It was something in the way she moved. But her name...her name was gone, not even a hint of its rhythm or the letter it began with.
She joined the throng in front of the elevators, shuffled forward as the middle car arrived, and filed inside amid the dense crowd. She turned to face front, meeting his eyes—though he could have imagined that.
He stood a moment longer, a rock in a stream of office workers. Perhaps she’d had surgery, changed her nose or altered her delicate jaw line. Something...he couldn’t put his finger on it, because really, she wasn’t familiar. At least not in looks.
Someone jostled his arm, he shook himself, then dashed to the elevator, making it on just before the doors closed. The car stopped and started at several floors, then she brushed past him to exit on the twelfth.
His skin heated with the brief contact, his heart raced. And he was struck anew with the sense that he’d known her. Intimately.
Chapter One
No one would ever call the man drop dead gorgeous, nor would his face grace the cover of Gentleman’s Quarterly. Yet the features reflected in the silver elevator door were arresting. Livie Scott’s three-inch heels put her at five feet seven, but standing behind her in the reflection, he was a head taller. A head taller than the rest of the elevator’s occupants, too.
He might not be GQ material, but Livie could pinpoint precisely what attracted her, why she’d noticed him in the first place a couple of weeks ago. Why she kept on noticing him. It was his eyes, a light green in marked contrast to his dark hair. The color of a pale jade gemstone, she could lose herself in those oddly familiar eyes. As if his gaze had at one time known every inch of her naked body. Yet she hadn’t met him before nor even seen him in her office building until that day two weeks ago.
She remembered the day clearly. Still breathless from her brisk lunchtime walk, Livie had crammed herself into the packed car. It had started raining during her outing, which was unusual for the middle of September, even in San Francisco. Her hair had been damp, her blouse clinging to her. In the blurry reflection, she hadn’t been able to tell if he returned her inspection, but the hairs at the back of her neck had prickled. Love at first sight was a myth—it took at least six months to discover a man’s idiosyncrasies and figure out if you could love him despite them—but lust at first sight, now that was a completely different issue. It had clearly been at work in the elevator that day.
It was still at work now.
Liberally applied cologne mingled with overdone perfume and the tang of sweaty bodies. Her nostrils twitched. The air in the badly ventilated elevator was suffocatingly warm. Livie tugged at her blouse, the collar suddenly constricting around her throat.
Which reminded her of last night’s dream. A nightmare really. Something tightening around her neck. Until she couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t scream. Something cold and rough and too thick to sink her nails into. Something with scales and the strength to squeeze her to death. What was it that killed its prey that way, a python? Lying awake in the dark, limbs trembling, an hour had passed before she could shake off the dream.
Finally managing to sleep again, she’d woken to the sun already rising in the sky versus her usual oh-dark-thirty wake-up, which was why she’d had to run to catch the elevator. In the morning rush, it took forever for the lifts to make it all the way to the top floor then back down to the garage, and she could ill afford the extra ten minutes. For the Wednesday morning budget review, she needed to update her backlog numbers with the month’s activity at the company’s three San Francisco area manufacturing facilities. Being the only female director added a lot of performance pressure, especially as she planned to be the first female vice president on the executive team within the next couple of years.
The doors whooshed open, disgorged a couple of passengers, partially relieving the crush, then slid shut again. With fewer heads in the way, she could see the man more clearly in the silvered reflection. Arresting wasn’t the right word to describe him. Or how he made her feel. He was somehow primitive. Powerful. Dangerous. An intoxicating mixture all wrapped up in suit and tie.
She couldn’t determine his age any better than she’d been able to on the other occasions she’d noticed him in the building over the past few days. Late thirties, early forties maybe, yet his hair was still a thick, dark brown. His brow ridge was complemented by harsh cheekbones. His sensual lips, just short of being girlishly plump, were tempting. She undid the top button of her blouse. For fresh air. Or something. His eyes seemed t
o track the movement. Or was that just her overactive imagination? Maybe she wanted him to notice.
She could feel herself breathe now, a little faster than before. A pulse throbbed at her throat. Her nipples tightened, and warmth swept down between her legs.
The doors opened again. A businessman jostled her to the side as he exited. When the doors closed, the man’s face was now obscured by the join.
A soft excuse me fluttered in the air behind her, then the scent of some musky aftershave tantalized her nose. No, not aftershave. Something distinctly male-generated. Jungle rain and animal heat. His minty toothpaste breath ruffled her hair. She had the urge to lean back, but remained rigidly still.
The grinding elevator gears threw her slightly off balance, her suit jacket brushing the hard male chest behind her. A hand at her waist steadied her. And stayed there. His touch heated her through. She wanted more. She wanted to turn, touch him, explore him. See him. And she wanted his hands all over her, everywhere. She was dizzy with desire.
In front of her, the doors parted to reveal the gray utilitarian carpet of her floor. For a frozen moment, she failed to move, the warmth of his hand almost mesmerizing.
He pushed her gently.
Gathering her wits about her, Livie marched directly across the hall and threw open the suite’s lobby door more forcefully than necessary. It was only when safely in her office that she thought to wonder how the man had known this was her floor. The answer was obvious, of course, he’d seen her enough times in the elevator.
Yet her body was suffused with heat, and Livie knew it was so much more.
* * * * *
Bern Daniels wasn’t particularly fond of small, cramped spaces, but he wouldn’t allow a mere sensitivity to get the better of him. He’d never given in to it. This lunchtime was no exception as he took the crowded elevator to the lobby level. He pondered his mystery woman. The aroma of her garden-scented shampoo was lighter now, just a memory from this morning’s elevator ride. He’d breathed her in as if she were a life-saving potion. Her navy skirt, while circumspect, had hugged her shapely rear. He’d braced her at the waist, but now he wished he’d cupped the tempting outline. He wanted a touch, a taste, a stroke of her heat.
He closed his eyes. She did things to him he couldn’t explain. Her scent saturated him. She filled a space deep inside that he hadn’t even known was empty until the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
He’d watched her for two weeks, since that day he’d first seen her in the lobby. He’d moved into his new office space in the San Francisco high-rise only a couple of weeks before that, at the beginning of September, but from the moment he saw her, her face had haunted him. He knew every feature. Her eyes were a deep earthy brown that matched one shade of her hair, which was an array of dark reds, russets, and deep golds. He knew her office was on the twelfth floor, that she usually worked an eleven-hour day, arriving at seven and leaving at six. Except on Wednesdays when, for some reason, she arrived late and left early. Most days, she exited the building at noon and returned forty-five minutes later. She wore high-heeled pumps in the morning and the evening, but donned white tennis shoes for her lunch-hour jaunt in the fall sunshine. He could set his watch by her regular habits.
He knew small, meaningless details about her. They whet his appetite for more. The need to know was an ache in his gut. He hadn’t mentioned her to his brother, Jake. He knew exactly what Jake would say: You knew her in a previous life. If Jake wasn’t his brother, Bern would have called him crazy long ago. Yet for the first time, in the face of his extreme reaction to a woman he didn’t know, Bern wondered if it was possible.
No, that was crazy.
She intrigued him beyond measure. What did she think about on her walks? What lay beneath the smartly tailored suits she wore? That first day he’d glimpsed a taste of lace when her blouse had been damp with raindrops. Knowing nothing more about her than her work routines, her shampoo preferences, and her penchant for dark-colored suits gave her a captivating air of mystery, but he hungered to know more, to learn everything.
With her, the possibility of soul mates didn’t seem like a myth. Yet why he should think that was beyond his comprehension. He’d never even spoken to her. It was crazy. But the fact remained that he lusted in equal parts for her mind, her body, and her heart, and in all his forty-three years, he’d never felt this way about any woman.
As he joined the exodus from the elevator, he realized he couldn’t have timed his departure from his office more perfectly. Wearing her walking shoes, she was halfway across the lobby, heading for the outside.
He was a normal man, and he shouldn’t do it. It was compulsive. He could be called a stalker. Jesus, he was a stalker. Except that he didn’t mean her any harm. He almost laughed aloud at that. How many other deluded stalker types had told themselves the same thing?
Bern knew it was wrong. He followed her out the door anyway.
* * * * *
The sky was a bright, cloudless blue above the high-rises. On a day like this, Livie could ignore exhaust fumes, honking, and hoards of office workers out for lunch. She scented fall in the air, the temperature cooler after a long, hot summer, and she walked a route that allowed her to stay in the sun rather than moving into the shadow of the skyscrapers.
As she waited for a stoplight, Livie lifted her face to the sun. A breeze blew her hair across her face, and she tugged the strands away before they caught in her lipstick. The red light changed and after crossing the street, she checked her image in a shop window.
With a shock, she saw him in the reflection, the man from her building. The elevator man. He stood across the street, facing her direction. Something skittered across her skin, and it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Was he following her?
She turned quickly, but he was already moving again. He wore sunglasses just as she did, so really, he could have been looking at anything. Another man, dressed in executive garb like it was a uniform, stopped to shake his hand. They were acquaintances, and behind them yawned the open doors of a high-priced restaurant. Of course he hadn’t followed her. He’d been on his way to a lunch engagement. She was ridiculous.
Yet she felt the oddest sense of loss. As if she wouldn’t mind at all that her mystery man had been watching her. There was something about him that gave her crazy thoughts.
It was time to start back. Rather than retrace her steps, she turned down an adjacent street that wasn’t as crowded. Ahead, a homeless man was spreading his blanket on the sidewalk beneath the ragged awning of a vacant shop. A small dog milled about his feet.
As Livie reached him, he held his arm out, blocking her way. “You got a buck to feed my dog, lady?”
“I’m sorry, no.” Livie didn’t carry her purse during her walk.
“A pretty lady like you? Nice threads like that?” He flicked her jacket collar, and Livie jumped back.
Most of the street people she came across asked then went about their business if you refused. Or gave a polite thank-you if you handed them a few coins. This man was something else entirely. A strange glow lit his eyes as he looked at her. As if he could see into her.
“I know your kind,” he whispered, his breath rancid. His face was clean, but his clothes reeked. “You think we’re lazy, we’re drunks, or we’re crazies. You think it’s our own fault.” He stabbed a finger at her, barely missing her cheek. “But you’ll get yours in the end. She’ll get you. She always does.”
“What are you talking about?” He didn’t make sense.
“You know,” he snarled at her. “She’ll punish you for what you’ve done. And she always wins.”
She should have walked away. But his gaze was hypnotic, holding her as if he’d put his hands on her.
“Bitch,” he muttered, flecks of spittle on his lips. “She’ll be the death of you. She always is and always will be.”
She stared, couldn’t tear herself away.
“Hey.” A sharp voice broke the spell. “This is what you want.” It
was him again, her elevator man. He hadn’t gone into the restaurant after all. Waving a twenty dollar bill at the homeless man, he glanced at her, his lips forming the single word Go.
The last thing Livie saw was the flash of a bony white hand as the homeless man snatched the bill and stuffed it into the voluminous pocket of his camouflage jacket.
Perhaps she should have stayed, yet something about the encounter had completely unnerved her. She didn’t look back. Crossing the street a block down, she stood a moment against the wall of a bank building, letting the sun warm her.
Why did he hate her, a man who didn’t even know her? He must have been crazy. It occurred to her that she ought to be afraid. But of whom? The homeless man? Or the man who’d rescued her?
* * * * *
Vindication. She’d needed him. The guy on the street had a maniacal glint in his eye; the incident could have escalated. Bern had saved her. Then he’d followed her back to their building, made sure she got safely inside. He thought about catching up, getting into the elevator with her, talking to her.
His rationalization didn’t cut it; he was still sounding like a stalker. It was the word follow. It bothered him. He needed to get a grip.
He needed to introduce himself, like any normal man would.
Chapter Two
Toni was an hour late. Livie and her sister had a standing dinner date every Wednesday at Chez Bouchard’s in Palo Alto, part of Toni’s we-are-family-and-must-not-grow-apart motto. It was a leftover sentiment from family therapy days, before Dad died and Mom had retired south to Palm Springs. Their mother didn’t fly anymore and claimed the drive was too long, so she’d left Toni in Livie’s capable hands. Two years older, Livie had always been her sister’s keeper. Even as she sometimes resented it, she knew she always would be.
Twisted By Love, Reincarnation Tales, Book 1 Page 1
