Forever...

by Jude Deveraux

  And Adam had brought her here. In his pursuit of knowledge about his own past, he had brought this young woman here and put her in mortal danger.

  So what did he do now? Adam was sure that as Darci had said, if they left now, they would be pursued. Already, someone had been sent to....To what? What had the gunman said? “They can have you.” Obviously, someone wanted her.

  Adam’s head came up and he looked at Darci walking ahead of him. If someone knew enough about her to know that she had a power that Adam thought even Darci didn’t know the extent of, then. . . . He drew in his breath. Then someone somewhere knew a great deal more than that about what Darci could do. They probably knew more than Darci did. And certainly much more than Adam did.

  He took another deep breath to calm himself. So, okay, maybe if he had more time, say, a year or so, he might be able to find out exactly what she could do and how her power could be used. But they didn’t have any time. It was close to the end of the year. It had been nearly a year since the last woman had “disappeared.” By the laws of statistics, that meant they had only a few weeks, eight at the most, to figure out what Darci could do and how to use it. And in the meantime, she had to be protected every second.

  And how could he, one man, do that? Truthfully, it was stupid of them to stay where they were right now. If he had any sense, he’d put Darci on the first plane and— What? Send her back to Putnam? As she’d said, how long would she last there? How long before she was found by whoever had sent that gunman this morning?

  In exasperation, Adam wiped his hands over his face. What did they want of her? How could he find out their intentions? How could he speed up this whole process? She could defeat them. He was sure of that. But how? What was her power? She couldn’t freeze the whole coven in place. Holding just two men for minutes this morning had drained her so much that it had taken hours for her to recover. And all it had taken was a sneeze to break her hold.

  But she did have the power to defeat them, or they wouldn’t be so afraid of her. But what was that power?! he asked himself again. It was his fault that she was here now and in mortal danger, so it was his responsibility to protect her. And the only way she would be protected was if her— and his—enemies were defeated.

  For a moment, Adam looked skyward and gave a little prayer asking for help, then he looked at Darci’s back. She had a stick and was trailing it through the fallen leaves. Surely, there was someone somewhere who knew what Darci could do, he thought. Maybe she had a grandmother who’d had this talent. Or a cousin. She seemed to have many relatives in that town of hers.

  In two long strides, he was walking beside her. “Are you the only one in your family, your extended family, that is— cousins, aunts, all of them—who has this power?”

  Darci seemed surprised at the question. “I don’t know. I know my mother’s side of the family hasn’t had a true thought in their lives, but I have no idea what my father’s family is like.”

  “I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to offend you,” Adam said slowly.

  “Go ahead. I have a thick skin,” she said, but, still, she lifted her shoulders as if he were about to strike her.

  “Is it possible that your mother had dealings with an . . . an underworld figure?”

  Darci relaxed, and a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Do you mean, is it possible that my mother went to bed with a warlock and conceived me?”

  “Sounds kind of dumb when you say it out loud,” he said. “But, yeah, I guess that’s what I did mean. More or less.”

  “It would have depended on what he looked like. My mother likes her men young and beautiful. So if he was, then she probably did.”

  Frowning, Adam refrained from commenting about Darci’s mother’s morals. “If you’ve been able to keep your abilities a secret, maybe your father did, too. Maybe someone else has powers like you do. But you don’t know who in Putnam that could be?”

  “She doesn’t confine herself to Putnam. Sometimes my mother travels all the way up to Louisville in search of a ‘party,’ as she calls it. My mother loves to party.”

  “Darci, what I’m thinking is that maybe you received this talent through your father’s family, so maybe there’s someone on that side of your family who knows something about what you can do. These people here are afraid of you. But why? What exactly can you do that can harm all of them? You can’t read minds. You can freeze people, but it exhausts you and you can’t hold it for very long. And we don’t have time to do what you did about Mr. Farnum so....”He shrugged in helplessness. “So I thought maybe a relative might know something. If it’s not your mother’s side, then maybe your father’s side would know something. But we need to know who your father is. Do you think you could persuade your mother to tell you?”

  Darci’s eyes shifted to the side. “It wouldn’t do any good to ask. She doesn’t remember her . . . parties. And I don’t think she’d like to remember that summer when I was conceived. She had her tubes tied after I was born because she said she didn’t want to make that mistake again.”

  Adam glanced down at her quickly, but he saw no sign of self-pity in Darci. “Can you call her?” he persisted.

  Darci punched her stick through a pile of dried leaves near a rock at the side of the path. “I don’t see any use in that. Besides, she’s rarely at home.”

  “She doesn’t have a cell phone?”

  “Yes, she does, but—” Breaking off, Darci looked up at him and saw he was staring at her intently. “Oh, no,” she said, backing away from him. “This job did not include calling my mother.”

  Shocked, Adam blinked at her. This young woman had the power to paralyze men, but she was afraid of calling her mother?!

  “The sooner you ask, the sooner we can find out.”

  Darci was still backing up. “My mother doesn’t like to be bothered. She doesn’t—” Halting, Darci took a deep breath, then put her hand to her ear as though she were holding a telephone. “What am I supposed to say to her? ‘Mom, I’ve just been told that I have some weird, strange power. Yeah, right, I can cast spells on people. Yeah, just like on Bewitched. Isn’t that a treat? Well, anyway, this guy here, my boss— Yeah, he’s beautiful, but he’s too old for you, Mom. So, anyway, my boss was wondering if maybe I inherited this ability from some relative of my father’s, so he was wondering if maybe you could remember who you were with that summer and who could have fathered me. Okay, Mom, it was just a thought. Mom, you don’t have to yell quite that loud and you don’t have to use those words. They’re not nice. No, Mom, I’m not back-talking you. No, Mom, I didn’t mean any disrespect. And, no, Mom, I won’t bother you again. Have a nice life.’”

  Darci put down her pretend telephone and looked up at Adam.

  It took Adam a few moments to recover from the vision she’d put into his head. “All right,” he said slowly, “if we can’t go through your mother, how do we find out who your father is? You told me that no one could keep secrets in Putnam, so who would know who your mother was with that summer?”

  “Her sister, Thelma,” Darci said immediately. “Aunt Thelma is quite jealous of my mother, and there’s always been tremendous rivalry between them. I think Aunt Thelma could probably remember every man my mother has, uh, dated.”

  “Shall we go call her?” Adam asked softly. “You won’t mind talking to your aunt, will you?”

  “Not at all. And if Uncle Vern isn’t at home to hear her, Aunt Thelma will enjoy ratting on my mother.”

  Try as he might, Adam couldn’t smile at this statement. After what he’d heard so far of the people in Putnam, he’d like to go into the town with a flamethrower. “All right,” he said, “Aunt Thelma it is. Shall we call from inside? We might need to take notes.” He knew was being overly gentle with her, and he expected her to snap at him that she didn’t want his pity. But he couldn’t get the images of Darci’s childhood from his head.

  As they were walking side by side, Darci tripped over a stone, and insti
nctively, he reached out to steady her. When he looked down at her, it occurred to him that never in his life had he seen anyone prettier than she was. She had on a big pink fuzzy sweater that exactly matched the color in her cheeks. He couldn’t stop himself from reaching up to touch her hair as it swept forward on her face.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” he said softly as he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s too much for you. And it’s too dangerous.” As he looked down at her, her lips were very appealing, and he couldn’t seem to stop himself as he bent forward to kiss her.

  As his face came within inches of hers, he really looked into her eyes. The irises were closed down so small that they were barely pinpricks. She was concentrating so hard that her eyes were closing off all light. And he damned well knew what she was concentrating on: him!

  “Why, you little brat,” he said under his breath, then he looked about for a way to break her concentration. If he was going to kiss her or anyone else, he was going to do it when he wanted and not when he was voodooed into it.

  When his words didn’t break her concentration, or take away his urge to kiss her, to sweep her into his arms and give her the best kiss you’ve ever given anyone in your whole, entire life, ever!—which were the words that were flooding loud and clear into his mind—he grabbed her and tossed her over his shoulder. The second her feet left the ground and her concentration was broken, the overwhelming, undeniable “need” to kiss her left him.

  “Listen to me, you brat,” he said as he began to twirl her about. “Don’t you ever, ever again use that . . . that whatever it is that you have, against me! Do you hear me? Do I make myself clear?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Darci said as Adam spun her about.

  He turned around faster. “I want your promise.”

  “I’m going to throw up,” she said. “And it’s going to go all down your back!”

  “Then you’ll give me your promise after you empty your stomach,” he said, not giving in. “I mean it, Darci T. Monroe. I want your most sacred, solemn vow that you will never again use that power of yours against me.” He stopped twirling. “Do I have that promise?”

  He heard the sound of retching, but when he looked over his shoulder, nothing had come up.

  Setting her down on the ground, he put his hands on her shoulders, and looked at her. “Do I get your promise?”

  Darci bent over, putting her hands on her knees. “I hate going round and round,” she said as she took deep breaths.”I was the only kid in Putnam who hated those rides at the local fair.” Still bending, she tilted her head to look up at him.

  But Adam’s face showed that he had no sympathy for her. His eyes were ablaze with anger. “I want your promise. You do not use your power against me. Ever.”

  “But you need sleep,” Darci said, her head still down.

  “What?”

  “Sleep. You don’t sleep much, so I concentrate and help you relax.”

  Adam didn’t know why such an answer made him furious, but it did. He could forgive her for making him want to kiss her; after all, that was flattering, wasn’t it? And, also, maybe he had wanted to kiss her. But when he thought of her using her . . . her abilities to make him sleep. . . . The idea made him furious!

  Darci didn’t need clairvoyant power to see that she’d said the wrong thing. Instantly, she stood up. “Okay, I promise,” she said quickly. “I swear it. My sacred word of honor. Okay?”

  Adam was afraid of what he’d say if he opened his mouth. Instead, he jammed his hands into his pockets and went back toward the guest house with such long strides that Darci had to run to catch him.

  “You’re just angry because you don’t want to admit that you want to kiss me. With all your heart and soul you want to kiss me. You want to take me in your arms and say, ‘Darci, my darling, I’ve never met anyone like you, and I know that I never will. I’ve never talked to a woman as much as I have to you. I’ve never revealed as much of myself to a woman as I have to you. And I’ve—’”

  But Adam didn’t smile at her words. Instead, he paused at the door and looked down at her. “If this is going to work between us, I have to know that you aren’t going to be working against me. I have to be able to trust you. I need your promise. No jokes. Your promise.”

  “Not even—” she began, but his look cut her off. “All right,” she said at last. “You can wander around all night long and I won’t help you. Now are you happy?”

  “More than I was,” he said, then opened the door for her to go in ahead of him.

  “But you did want to kiss me, didn’t you?” she said over her shoulder. “I didn’t have to put much energy into making you want to kiss me.”

  Smiling in spite of himself, Adam followed her inside. “All right, you win. I’ve been dying to kiss you since I first saw you. Now call your aunt.”

  Darci leaned over the telephone on the side table and began to punch buttons. “I’m giving you my promise, but I want you to know that this is difficult for me. I’m in the habit of—”

  “I’m not part of your ‘habit,’” Adam said as he walked across the room to stand near her.

  “Of course you aren’t,” Darci said, then looked down at the telephone. “Busy,” she said, then hung up the receiver. Too bad she wouldn’t be allowed to put things into his mind, she thought, because right now she’d like to tell him, Darci is such a wonderful person that I want to buy her a steak dinner and three dozen yellow roses.

  “I don’t know about ‘wonderful,’” Adam said, “but steak I can handle. But after the little trick you just tried to pull, you don’t deserve a clump of turnips, much less yellow....” He trailed off when he saw Darci’s face.

  As though in a trance, she looked up at him.

  At first Adam didn’t understand her shocked expression, but then the reason dawned on him. “You didn’t say that out loud, did you?”

  She could only shake her head no.

  “Say something else to me. Silently.”

  I wish you’d take me in your arms and—

  “Not that,” he said impatiently. “Something for me to hear and—” His eyes widened. “But I just did hear you, didn’t I?” he said softly. “I heard what you said. Say something else. No, wait a minute. Let’s go to the diner and get some food and bring it back here. We’ll call your aunt again, then we’ll get on the Internet and see what we can find out about any names your aunt gives us. If she has names for us, that is. There has to be someone out there who knows something about what you can do.”

  Can’t do much with you, Darci thought with a grimace, then was annoyed to hear Adam laugh. Was he going to be able to read her mind? Hear her every thought? Was she never again going to be able to have a private thought? When she looked at Adam, she could see by his self-satisfied little smile that he was thinking this very thing.

  Smiling at him, she tried to shut her mind to him, then thought, Your hair is on fire. When Adam didn’t move but just kept smiling, she relaxed. No, he could hear her thoughts only when she wanted him to—or when she was too relaxed to keep her guard up.

  As they left the guest house, Darci breathed a sigh of relief.

  11

  “SO WHAT WAS THAT?” Adam asked in disgust. “Number twelve? Or was it number two hundred and six?”

  Darci looked at the list of names that her Aunt Thelma had given her and counted. “Fourteen.”

  “I still can’t believe that your aunt remembered all these names.”

  “She keeps diaries,” Darci said, looking at the screen of Adam’s laptop computer, which was on her legs. He’d spent about fifteen minutes showing her how to use the Internet, and she’d taken over from there. Adam typed with two fingers and a thumb, but Darci’s small fingers flew across the keyboard.

  “I thought you had no skills,” he said when he saw her type. “And that you didn’t know anything about computers.”

  She knew he was still annoyed because she’d figured out how to
block him from reading her thoughts. She had an idea that he’d wanted to hear her thoughts so he’d know what she was up to every second of the day. “This Internet thing isn’t exactly rocket science, is it?” she said. “It’s like a big mailbox. You type in the address and voilà, up it comes.”

  “You’re not dumb, are you?”

  “Did you think I was?” she shot back at him.

  Adam thought it was better that he didn’t answer that question.

  As soon as they’d returned to the guest house loaded with food, Darci had called her aunt Thelma and told her what she wanted. “I don’t know if Jerlene would want me to tell you that,” Thelma said, but even Adam, who didn’t know the woman and was listening in on the extension, could hear the insincerity in her voice. Thelma was dying to tell all about her sister’s liaisons.

  When Darci didn’t bother answering the rhetorical remark, Thelma said, “But then a girl should know who her parents are, shouldn’t she? That’s what I told Jerlene back then and that’s what I’m sayin’ to you now. I said that a girl should know who her parents are. And you know what your mother said when I told her that?”

  “No, but I can guess,” Darci said tiredly, obviously having heard the arguments between the two sisters for many years.

  Thelma ignored her niece’s tone of voice. “Jerlene said, ‘Then you figure out which one her father is and you tell her.’ Never let it be said that I would do anything without my sister’s permission. So I kept all the names of the boys that I had written down that summer. They were all hangin’ around your mother, and I had a premonition that something was gonna happen, and when it did, I had those names. Not that I’ve ever shown them to anyone, mind you, but I knew that someday you might ask. The truth is, Darci, honey, I tried my best to get your mother to say which one was your father, and I was gonna try to get him to pay for your support. You know what your mother’s like, so you’ll believe me when I tell you that some of those young men were drivin’ Cadillacs. But you know how Jerlene is, she just laughed at me and said something quite nasty about what I could do with my list. So, now, Darci, it’s up to you to figure out which one of them is your daddy. You got some paper and a pen with lots of ink in it?”