by Vivi Andrews
“No. Come on. I need to call this in.”
He hauled her forward another few feet, his hackles as high as a Rottweiler’s. Ronna looked back at the site of the shootout, hoping for some sign that she had changed the future and Matt was now safe. All she saw was a metallic gleam on the ground where the crazy carnie had stood, illuminated by a reflection off the giant Ferris wheel.
“Matt?”
“You can apologize later.”
She could apologize for saving his life?
It was tempting, but Ronna didn’t kick him. She should get a medal for not walloping him in the shins. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest, including the one he was still using to try to drag her toward the causeway.
“There’s something on the ground over there.”
Matt stopped dragging, his eyes flicking in the direction she pointed. “Dammit.” Scanning the rest of the area, he shoved her back against the enormous block that covered the Ferris wheel’s engine. “Stay here. Don’t touch anything.”
Somebody sure likes giving orders. Ronna watched, twirling her grandmother’s ring between her fingers, as Matt skulked over to the gleam on the ground. He hunkered down, pulling an old-fashioned handkerchief out of his back pocket to pick it up. Funny, she hadn’t pegged him as the handkerchief type.
“Is that his gun?”
“Stay where you are.” He didn’t look up, carefully wrapping the gun in the handkerchief and tucking it into his jacket pocket. Then he frowned. “Is that—?” He bent low, practically pressing his nose to the sticky gunk on the ground. While Ronna fantasized about a full-body disinfectant bath, Matt straightened, a viciously satisfied grin on his face. “Looks like I hit him after all.”
“You shot him?” Relief released every muscle she hadn’t realized she was clenching. That must have been the blood she saw on the Ferris wheel. Matt may never have been in any danger. But if that was the case, why had it been his face she had seen covered in blood?
“Probably just grazed him. There isn’t enough blood for a serious injury.”
“He ran away pretty fast. Maybe he just didn’t have enough time to bleed on the scene properly. He might be off somewhere bleeding to death as we speak,” she said cheerfully.
Matt gave his short, startled burst of laughter. “You’re pretty bloodthirsty for a palm reader.”
“He shot at you.” Of course she wanted him to bleed. No one got a free pass for shooting at the man she was going to marry.
He came to stand beside her again, still in super-cop, high-alert mode, but now he studied her face in the dim light, shaking his head at whatever he saw there. “Who are you?”
“I’m Ronna.”
Somehow she hit the brakes before she introduced herself as the mother of his unborn children.
“Well, Ronna, the next time you feel like running into the middle of a gunfight, refrain. Okay?” His tone was as dismissive as the indulgent little smile he gave her. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your booth so I can call this in. We’ll need your statement.”
Her statement.
He was thinking of her as a witness, a fortune teller who’d gotten in the way. How could he not see that she was the love of his life? That she was the girl who would literally throw herself in front of a bullet for him?
But of course he wouldn’t see.
Her entire life she’d been surrounded by people who didn’t see the things she did, but worse they didn’t see her. Why should he be any different?
She didn’t exactly go around telling everyone she met she was a human polygraph machine, so she couldn’t blame them when they treated her like a kooky fake psychic. And the few people she had told, the ones who actually believed her…it hadn’t been any better with them.
People liked their secrets. And they didn’t particularly like her once they discovered they couldn’t keep any from her.
People tended to react badly when their silent resentments weren’t so silent anymore. Ronna had learned to make herself an open book because she saw the uncomfortable friction between what people thought and what they showed to the world—but most people didn’t want that openness. Especially not if they couldn’t escape it.
Ronna couldn’t turn off her ability, so she couldn’t help but see the truth.
Most people, she’d learned, didn’t want that exposure of their darker selves, didn’t want to be forced to admit and embrace their less flattering attributes—the ones society had taught them to mask with fake smiles.
It was probably foolish optimism that Ronna still believed she would ever find someone to spend her life with who would want to share that openness with her. Someone who would want a life devoid of any attempts at subterfuge and deception.
It was definitely foolish optimism to believe that man was standing right in front of her.
But she did believe. Ronna couldn’t escape the hope that Matt’s hunches, his own specialness, would make him more open to hers.
She had to tell him the truth, the whole truth, about her.
He was already four steps ahead of her, moving toward the causeway crowds.
“Matt, wait.” Her sandals made a weird suctiony thwapping noise on the pavement as she ran to catch him. “I knew this wasn’t your ring.”
“What’s that?” he asked absently, not even turning to look at her, his eyes avidly scanning the crowd ahead.
“I knew you hadn’t left your ring. I followed you because I—” She swallowed nervously, her throat suddenly parched, but forced herself to go on. “I see things. In people.” God, that sounded idiotic. “Like visions. And sometimes I see the future—” Green-eyed babies. “And I saw that you were in danger so I followed you. And you were. And I saved your life because—” Oh, c’mon, Ronna, just effing say it already. “Because we’re meant to be together. Like together.”
His head turned slowly in her direction, his face expressionless and intent. Did he believe her? How could he not? He had to, didn’t he? It was his life she’d seen too. He had to be the one who would understand or she wouldn’t have seen that.
Would she?
“Let me see if I have this straight. You came after me to save my life because you see the future and I’m destined to be with you?”
“Pretty much.”
Now was probably not the time to mention the twins.
His expression changed minutely, a tightening around his lips, a slight narrowing of his eyes, and Ronna realized he wasn’t intent. He was angry.
No.
“Listen, lady. That’s real cute, and maybe, under other circumstances, I would be flattered, but I’m a police officer and you’re in the way of—I can’t tell you what you’re in the way of, but trust me when I say I am in no mood for this bullshit right now.”
“It isn’t bullshit—”
“You need to go back to your little tent thing—”
“Booth.”
“I don’t care what the hell you call it. Go there. Leave me alone so I can do my fucking job. Are we clear?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just plowed into the crowd.
Ronna gaped after him. No. How could she have been so wrong? He was supposed to be The One. He was The One. She was sure of it.
But he hadn’t figured out they were meant to be together yet. If he disappeared into the night, would he ever remember her? Would he realize his entire future happiness depended on her?
She had to show him.
Ronna elbowed her way into the crowd, shoving forward with single-minded focus that had people swearing in her wake.
“Matt!”
He half-turned to glower at her, and she threw caution to the wind and her arms around his neck.
She landed a kiss on his mouth that was as enthusiastic as it was inexperienced.
She hadn’t had much practice kissing. When you can pull people’s thoughts through a touch, mouth-to-mouth contact was a whole new kind of intimacy. She’d avoided it when possible and never once instigated it.
Until now.
The touch seared through her. His surprise blared into her mind, chased in quick succession by pleasure, suspicion, caution and need. Is she a decoy? Working with the perp? Then his doubts were flattened under a Mack truck of lust. He opened his mouth over hers almost without thinking. God, the taste of her. He liked when she stroked her tongue across his.
The sound of her hum of pleasure nearly drove him out of his senses.
Ronna had already lost hers completely.
The masses of carnival goers hurried around them, but nothing existed to her but Matt. The combined, amplified feelings, his and hers, swamped her in a dizzying rush. Why had she avoided this? It was heaven.
Heaven, right up until the moment he jerked away, setting her back from him so abruptly she swayed in reaction to the loss of his touch and the lingering weight of his want inside her mind.
“I can’t be distracted right now,” he said, wiping his arm across his mouth in a manner that she probably would have found much more insulting if her brain were actually functioning. “Go back to your booth,” he ordered. The crowd behind her surged and jostled her. She stumbled forward and Matt caught her, both hands bracing her upper arms, but he quickly set her away. “If you stop me again, I’ll…” He trailed off, shaking his head, but Ronna had seen enough of his mind to know what he was thinking.
He thought she’d tackled him to help his target get away, that she had kissed him to give her accomplice more time, but he couldn’t make himself believe it enough to arrest her for it. He told himself she was just a nuisance who didn’t know any better, which hurt almost as badly as his suspicions.
Ronna swallowed around a knot that had suddenly formed in her throat, feeling the hot press of tears behind her eyes.
It hadn’t occurred to her that he wouldn’t want her, that he wouldn’t know as soon as they kissed the way she had known as soon as they touched. They were meant to be together.
“I have to go.”
And he was walking away.
“Matt.” His name was a protest, barely audible under the suffocating weight of her disappointment and the noise of the crowd as it flowed around them.
“Go back to your booth, Ronna.”
Then he was gone.
Chapter Four—Men Are Pigs
Ronna didn’t cry on her way back to her booth. She was too stunned by his rejection to cry.
He was supposed to want her. That was the way fate was supposed to work. How could he not know that? What kind of an ignorant nonbeliever had fate stuck her with, anyway? Didn’t he realize they were destined to fall in love and make little green-eyed caramel-skinned babies? What was his problem?
Ronna wove her way through the crowd, moving slowly and going with the flow as much now as she had pushed and run before. There was no love of her life to save now. He didn’t want to be the love of her life anyway. The pig.
She just wanted to be alone, but instead she was shoved along on a tide of people, taking the long way back because she lacked the energy to fight for a direct path.
At least the aisle where she had her booth wasn’t as congested.
That part of the carnival cleared out considerably as the hour grew later. The traffic through her booth usually increased after sundown as people grew more enamored of the mystical in the moonlight, but as the night progressed the crowds filtered toward the main event pavilion on the opposite end of the field for the live concerts. By now the area around her booth was all but abandoned, and her neighbors were closing up for the night.
Ronna frowned as she approached her booth, realizing she hadn’t even thrown up her Be Back in a Moment sign before sprinting after Matt, the ungrateful pig. Her tip jar had probably been emptied by juvenile delinquents within five minutes of her departure, she thought cynically, drained of her habitual optimism.
She pushed back her curtain and stepped into the small booth that was her carnival home, surprised to find a customer seated on the stool with his back to the door, waiting for her. She wanted nothing more than to toss the customer out, close up for the night and wallow in her misery alone, but maybe a reading would perk her up. She refused to let Matt ruin her entire night.
Plastering on her brightest, fakest smile, she came around the edge of the table to her stool. “Good evening. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” she said smoothly, using the Madame Ramona accent. She fluffed her filthy skirts around her as she settled herself. “I hope you haven’t been here long.”
Her eyes flicked automatically to the tip jar. Amazingly, it was still full. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad night after all.
“Not long.”
Ronna looked up at the gravelly voice, taking her first good look at her customer. He was a large man, swarthy, with the sort of broad features that always made her think of typecasting for hired muscle in action movies, but Ronna had touched too many hands and found teddy bears beneath scary shells to trust in appearances.
She placed her hands on the table palm up, smiling invitingly and waiting for him to offer his for a reading.
He extended his left hand, just as Matt had. Most people instinctively gave her their dominant hand, but perhaps he was a leftie. Automatically her eyes flicked to his right hand, but he had hidden it beneath the table. As soon as her fingers brushed the skin of his left hand, she knew why.
He kills with his right hand.
Ronna jerked her hands back at the jolt that traveled from his hands to hers, a lightning bolt of static electricity accompanied by gruesome images. Slashed faces, gashes on wrists and throats, thin liquid streams of blood pulsing, squirting. He loves his work.
Ronna threw herself backwards, shoving away from the table and knocking over her stool. The killer—Cutter, his name is Cutter—lunged across the table. His fist closed over her wrist, and he yanked her forward until her hips bumped the precarious table that was all that separated them, rocking it toward him. Her tip jar crashed onto the floor, the coins splattering haphazardly.
He didn’t seem to notice or care that he was literally upsetting her orderly little world. “I’ve been looking for you, girl.”
Through his iron hold on her wrist, carnage flashed across her mind’s eye in a nauseating rush. She’d never before touched a killer. His every sin was crowding for space in her mind, murder, torture, a smorgasbord of pain and violence.
Ronna couldn’t breathe past the piano someone had dropped on her chest. She couldn’t think through the ugly fog.
Get away. Run. Matt. Find Matt.
She gasped, twisting wildly in his grip. Cutter’s hand was wet and hers slipped loose. She jerked back quickly and tripped over the fallen stool, landing in a tangle of filthy fabric and limbs on the floor.
She crab-walked backward, knocking the stool out of the way with her arm, and looked around frantically, searching for some escape even though she knew very well the murderer stood between her and the only door.
He must have known it as well. He made no move to come after her. Instead, he loomed on the other side of the table, wearing a malicious smile rich with his satisfaction at her terror. In his left hand, a pearl-handled switchblade flicked open, closed, open, closed. A hypnotic flashing dance of pearl and steel.
“Why?” It was the only word chasing itself around the confusion of her mind. Crouched defensively on the floor, Ronna rubbed her wrist where he’d bruised her, her fingers coming away bloody.
Was she bleeding? Had he cut her?
No. He was bleeding.
Realization hit her hard, crashing into her until she felt stupid for not seeing instantly.
Matt had shot him. This was the man who had been waiting with the gun behind the Ferris wheel. But he hadn’t been waiting for Matt.
Matt’s life hadn’t been in danger for a moment. It wasn’t his blood that was splattered all over his face, all over the gears of the Ferris wheel. It wasn’t his own death that had brought such shocked horror to his green eyes.
All along, it had been her
.
The obstacle to their perfect life together had never been Matt.
The switchblade flashed open and shut. I’m going to die.
Chapter Five—Second Thoughts & Psychopaths
In defiance of his better judgment, Matt found himself back in front of Ronna’s booth. He’d left the task-force crime-scene team behind the Ferris wheel, separated from the other task-force members circling the main event pavilion searching for signs of Cutter, and beelined back to Ronna.
It was just because he needed her statement.
It had nothing to do with the mind-numbing kiss. The kiss that shouldn’t have happened and shouldn’t have affected him at all. He sure as hell shouldn’t still be able to taste her, the lingering tease of her vaguely raspberry flavor haunting him.
Matt shook the thought of her out of his head. Cutter. He was here for Cutter. But the assassin had left no blood trail. No trace. And as much as Matt tried to focus on his duty and track his wounded target, he couldn’t seem to escape the feeling that he had missed something crucial.
His mind kept circling back to the moment when Ronna rushed around the side of the Ferris wheel into Cutter’s sights.
Matt was certain Cutter hadn’t been able to see him waiting there in the shadows, but still he had drawn his gun. He’d pulled his weapon when the only person he could see was Ronna.
Cutter was a pro. Calm and collected—and not yet in prison for life. A man didn’t attain those credentials by firing at unarmed, innocent women.
If Ronna had been a bystander, Cutter would have no reason to threaten her. She hadn’t caught him doing anything incriminating. If she was his accomplice, then why fire at her? Unless the goal had been to let her save Matt—which was a lot of effort and risk just to earn his gratitude.
The only other option, the one that haunted him, was the disturbing possibility that somehow Ronna, a carnival palm reader, was the consultant Cutter had come for. Which meant she was in danger.
Matt’s conscience wouldn’t let him ignore the possibility, however far-fetched, that an organized crime family had taken out a hit on one helpless, harmless palm reader.
