by Kylie Brant
He caught her wandering hands and laced his fingers through hers. “Do you know you can get in serious trouble doing that?” he asked.
“Oh, do go on,” Michele answered interestedly. “What, pray tell, could happen to me?”
Connor pushed his hardness gently against her in answer. “You are in danger of becoming a victim of a sex-crazed maniac.”
Michele’s voice was demure, but the glance she gave him from beneath her lashes made his eyes widen in delight. “Thanks for the warning, Detective, but I think I’ll take my chances.”
“More than you know,” he muttered, thinking of the solitary foil-wrapped package he had taken from his pocket. He kept a firm grip on her hands. “Do you like pizza?” he asked.
Michele looked at him askance. “Pizza?” she repeated. He was thinking of food?
“Pizza,” Connor repeated firmly. “We could pick one up at a take-out place.”
Michele felt as if she had somehow missed a major thread of this conversation. “If you want pizza, we could just have it delivered here.”
Connor sighed mightily as he gazed down at the biggest temptation of his life. She had absolutely no idea how seductive she was and how close he was to abandoning his normal caution. “But if we go get the pizza,” he murmured in her ear, “I could make a stop at a drugstore.”
Michele gazed at him in mystification for several moments before realization came. “You only had one?” she blurted out without thinking. Heat immediately flooded her cheeks at her own naiveté.
Connor didn’t know which was more fascinating, her obvious mortification at her ingenuousness, or her perception of him. “How many do you think I should carry?” he asked in amused interest.
Her face was still scorched from embarrassment. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “I just thought a man like you would be prepared with three or four.”
“Three or four,” Connor repeated, striving for a straight face. He didn’t quite succeed, earning him an indignant glance from Michele. He knew better than to mention what an enchanting shade of crimson her cheeks had become. “Someday we’re going to have to discuss this fascinating image you seem to have of me. If truth be known,” he continued, lowering his head to nibble at her lips, now pursed in a mutinous pout, “you are the only lady of my acquaintance who could make carrying an entire box a necessary precaution.”
Michele couldn’t prevent a small smile at his compliment. She looked up into his light green eyes and felt a shiver race clear down to her toes at the desire she so easily read there. He was very blunt and very masculine and very, very sexy. He made her feel sexy, too, she suddenly realized, with his disregard of polite disclaimers, with his honesty. She felt more feminine around him than ever before in her life, and much more certain of her own womanly power.
But for now she knew he was right. She certainly was not in the habit of keeping contraceptives on hand, or of needing them. And the promise in his gaze made her wonder if he was reconsidering the need for caution.
“The pizza?” she reminded him breathlessly, as his lips began a slow descent.
Connor stifled a groan and laid his forehead against hers. “The pizza,” he agreed, mentally cursing.
* * *
“This is hedonistic,” Michele protested, giggling breathlessly as Connor held yet another slice of pizza to her lips. She bit down obediently and savored the hot tangy flavor. The pizza box lay on the bed between them, and they were leaning against the headboard, freely, wickedly nude. Michele had insisted on sliding beneath the sheet, but Connor was unabashedly stretched out on top of the covers.
“Not at all,” Connor countered smoothly, reaching over to pour more wine in her glass. Their goblets clinked a toast before he continued. “Now, if we were lying naked in bed, eating caviar and drinking imported champagne, that would be hedonistic. But pizza and wine? No way.”
Michele sipped from her glass consideringly. “Maybe you’re right.” They munched and sipped in silence for a while, before Connor reached down and swept the empty box out of the way. He took the half empty glass from Michele’s hand and sipped consideringly. “Oh, 2012. A good year,” he declared, and Michele laughed again. But her laughter caught in her throat as Connor pulled the sheet away. “But I’ll bet I know how it would taste even better,” he whispered before tipping the glass and allowing a trickle to run down between her breasts.
“Connor.” Michele’s protest was lost as he followed the path the ruby liquid had taken, scooping at it with his tongue. Michele gasped as his hot fiery mouth made a sharp contrast to the cool wine on her suddenly fevered skin. And the meal was forgotten as they proved that it was a fine year indeed.
* * *
Connor lay awake long after Michele was wrapped in exhausted slumber. He couldn’t remember ever being so content just holding a woman. He had never been interested in much cuddling after lovemaking. Yet each time he found himself unwilling to release Michele. Cradling her as she slept seemed so right that he decided not to question it. He finally fell asleep himself, with his arms still around her.
It was several hours before the sounds of her terrified screams woke him.
Chapter 11
Connor came awake with a start. Michele was whimpering now, her head tossing back and forth on the pillow in mute denial of the nightmare that was rolling before her closed eyelids.
He froze for a moment, sick inside. He knew from the last experience what these episodes did to her. Sitting up, he reached over, settling Michele on his lap. Could it be harmful to wake her too abruptly from these damned dreams? he wondered frantically. All he knew was that seeing her in such obvious torment made his guts knot painfully. He began to rock her gently, his hard arms providing a gentle shelter for her trembling form.
“Shhh, shhh, baby, it’s all right. Wake up, Michele. You’re dreaming, honey. Wake up now.” His low voice crooned soothingly to her in a constant steady murmur.
But when, after long minutes, her eyelids finally fluttered open, Connor felt a finger of ice trace each of his vertebrae. Her eyes were opaque, flat, with a silvery sheen and the intensity in her voice, devoid of inflection, sent that chill skating through his body. “They took another one, Connor. And she’s so scared, so terrified.” Her voice broke then, and the trembling intensified, making words impossible.
He felt as though he had taken a blow to his midsection. If these episodes of hers were so chilling to witness secondhand, how much worse must they be for her? He gathered her more tightly in his arms and with one hand pulled the covers more closely over them. “It’s all right. It’s over now,” he whispered as he continued holding her, rocking her, keeping up a constant stream of reassurance. He didn’t even know what he said; his senses were geared only to the woman in his arms, to the gradual lessening of the severe shaking of her body.
The trembling of her limbs had not completely dissipated when she spoke again, her voice urgent. “Has there been another kidnapping that hasn’t been released to the media, Connor?”
He felt a fist clench in his midsection at the question he’d known was coming. Yet he couldn’t lie to her, even knowing how painful the truth was going to be. His gaze was steady as he met hers. “There haven’t been any more, Michele. We could never keep something like that from being made public.”
She stared at him, trying to make sense of the dream, the aftermath of which still shook her entire body, making speech difficult. “But how can that be?” She’d often cursed these dreams, wept over them, but she’d never doubted them. There had never been any reason to. Since she was a child they had been proven accurate time and again. What could possibly have thrown her so off-balance that she was now dreaming about things that had never happened?
It can’t be, she thought. This dream was the same as the rest, yet even more urgent, more vivid. She had felt as if she had been there, a helpless spectator to the girl’s terror.
Shaking her head, she looked at him earnestly. “It must be. It has to be,�
� she stressed, her voice quavering. “Connor, as much as I hate this . . . this curse I’m afflicted with, it’s never wrong. Maybe the girl’s parents don’t realize she’s missing. I don’t know. Maybe they think she’s with a friend, but she’s not, Connor. She’s not!” Her voice broke, and the trembling strengthened. His mouth flattened at her obvious distress and her body’s reaction to it.
He hated this, hated what it did to her, what it put her through. He pressed her head into the niche of his shoulder. He tried to keep his voice as gentle as possible; he didn’t want to add to her suffering. “Michele, you have to accept it. This time it just went haywire.”
Michele shook her head mutely against him. Didn’t he know how much she would give to be able to believe that? But she had lived with this all her life. She could still see the girl in her dream. Her frantic struggles and screams of terror still reverberated inside her head. “I wish I could believe that,” she whispered. She drew a breath, then released a long shuddering sigh. A thought suddenly occurred to her, and she looked up at him. “When did you last check in at the station?”
Connor caught her drift immediately and frowned impatiently. “Michele . . .” he started to protest.
“When, Connor?” she pressed.
“Not since yesterday,” he admitted. “But they have my cell number, plus I left your number at the desk. Someone would have called if there had been anything to report.”
The significance of his leaving her phone number occurred to Michele, but she didn’t address it. Urgently she pressed him, “Call now, Connor. Please. Please!” she stressed as she easily read his unwillingness.
Connor looked at her for a long moment before heaving a sigh. He reached for the cell phone he’d set on the bedside table, punched in the number of the station house and waited a few moments. “Yeah, Lieutenant McLain here. Let me talk to Michael Riley, will you?”
Michele waited with bated breath until Connor spoke again. “Yeah, Mike, how’s it going? Never mind why I’m not sleeping late. Listen, has anything new come up in the investigation?”
Michele felt her breath hiss out in frustration as he listened and then replied, “Nothing at all? There hasn’t been anything else reported, has there? Okay, call me if something comes up. Thanks. You too.” Disconnecting the call, he set it down again.
His gaze, when he looked back to her, was curiously gentle. He said nothing, but Michele thought she could read his thoughts in his eyes, and she couldn’t prevent the stab of betrayal she felt. He was, she reminded herself bleakly, an eminently practical man, concerned always with evidence and proof. Had she really even entertained the notion that he would believe her when none was available? She knew that didn’t negate his concern for her. But it would have been wonderful to be able to read trust as well as concern in his eyes.
Michele thrust the hopeless yearning away. Despite what he thought, despite what had or hadn’t been reported, she was wearily certain that another little girl was desperately in need of help. Now all she had to do was convince him of that fact.
“She’s only about nine or ten, Connor.” Her voice when she spoke was quiet but sure. He looked away at her words, but she continued, determined to be heard. “She’s wearing navy sweatpants, a white Penn State T-shirt and tennis shoes.”
“Michele, stop it.”
“She has straight light brown hair, blue eyes,” Michele continued, “and a slight build. She was on a playground, throwing rocks through a basketball hoop.”
Hard hands grasped her delicate shoulders, and he gave her a shake. “Don’t keep doing this to yourself.”
“She’d just finished delivering papers. The empty carrier bag is lying by the fence.”
For an instant, looking into those fathomless gray pools so close to his own, the scene she’d described flashed before Connor’s eyes. Just as Michele had drawn it in her verbal picture, Connor could see the deserted playground, empty now except for the canvas bag, lying in a crumpled heap by the chain-link fence.
He was stunned by the accompanying sweep of desolation at the flick of visual imagery. It was the closest he could ever come to understanding the unconscious torture she endured. He pulled her into his arms and held her tightly to him, as if by the sheer power of his presence he could banish all future demons from invading her unconscious.
“Let it go,” he ordered, pleaded with her. “Don’t let it torment you.”
Michele rested her head wearily against the muscled plane of his chest. “I don’t have a choice, Connor,” she murmured. “I never do.”
Despite his best attempts to calm her down, to distract her from her earlier nightmare, Michele remained jittery and on edge for the next few hours. And when his cell rang as they read the morning paper, she stared fixedly, unaware of the concerned glance Connor threw her way as he took the phone from his pocket to answer it.
He listened for a moment before biting out, “When? Do you have any. . .never mind, I’ll be right there.” His movements when he slipped the phone into his pocket were slow, labored, like those of an old man. And when he met her gaze, his eyes were bleak.
“Well, aren’t you even going to ask?” he demanded.
Michele said nothing as she stared steadily back at him. There was nothing to ask. She knew what the message was, even if she couldn’t tell the identity of the caller. She knew what had put that look in his eyes, the one she hadn’t seen since her childhood, the look of fascinated horror that people turned on her when she was proven correct.
Her silence goaded Connor, the sheer helplessness of the situation washing over him. “That was Riley. There are some parents at his desk, demanding that we do something. Seems they think their little girl is the latest victim of the kidnapper. Seems she never came home from delivering her papers this morning.”
Michele closed her eyes then, forcing away the memories of the early-morning nightmare that threatened to come flooding back, seeping into every facet of her consciousness, enveloping her once again in the icy terror.
Two hard hands grasped her shoulders, and Michele’s eyes flew wide as Connor shook her, hard. “Say something, damn you!” he bit out. “Tell me again where we’ll find her empty canvas bag, what she was wearing.”
Michele tiredly moved herself out of his grasp. “You already know,” she told him quietly. “You don’t realize how much I would like to be wrong.”
He surveyed her for a moment longer, his frustration fading away as he became aware of how tautly she was holding herself, as if she had become suddenly brittle. He became belatedly aware of the way he was lashing out at her and how she was likely to read his reaction as something else. “Michele,” he started, reaching for her again.
But she moved out of his range. “You’d better go,” she reminded him distantly. “I’m sure you’ll want to talk to the parents.”
Connor stood there for a moment longer, feeling like a bastard. He had reacted out of the sheer frustration he’d felt, both with the situation and with his inability to understand her uncanny knowledge. “This could be a false alarm, you know. She may have wandered off. She could be with a friend . . .” His voice trailed away as they both remembered her words earlier as she’d striven to convince him.
Michele didn’t respond to his attempt to reassure her. “You’d better go,” she repeated quietly.
After a tense moment Connor cursed and strode over to get his jacket. Shrugging into it impatiently, he turned back to her and gathered her close, despite her stiffness. His lips touched her hair as he murmured, ‘Stay here, will you? I’ll check in when I can. We need to talk.”
Michele nodded mutely but didn’t respond. She watched his departing figure numbly. After all, what was there to talk about? They seemed to have come full circle. And she was more than certain of what he would have to say to her when he returned.
* * *
Connor watched the girl’s parents depart and felt tired. Down to the bone, soul-deep weariness. Their panic, their desperate need for
reassurance, had drained him of every bit of emotion he had. He dropped down in his desk chair and wiped both hands over his face.
“So, Houdini,” drawled a voice from the door. “Mind telling me how you knew about this?”
Connor looked up to see Cruz standing in the doorway, holding up a plastic evidence bag. Even from a distance Connor knew there would be a canvas newspaper bag inside.
Cruz closed the door to the office and sauntered into the room.
“That should have been sent to the lab,” Connor remarked tensely, ignoring the question.
“On my way, on my way,” Cruz retorted mildly as he dropped into a chair opposite Connor’s desk, the bag still clutched in his hand. “But not until you answer my question. How the hell did you know to tell us to check the playgrounds in the vicinity of her route home?”
Connor feigned a bored tone. “That’s pretty standard. You know that, Cruz. She could have been there, may still be for all we know.”
“Tell me another one,” scoffed his partner, before turning deadly serious. “You forget, I know you, amigo. Quite well. You knew we’d find something, and I think you even knew what it would be. Now give. You know something more than you’re telling.”
Connor surveyed his best friend silently, mentally debating. He knew he could trust Cruz. Hell, he’d trusted him with his life on occasions too numerous to mention. And God knew he needed someone to run this by, and who better than Cruz?
He regarded his friend soberly for long moments while weighing his answer. When he spoke, his voice was devoid of inflection. “You’re right. I knew where to look, and I knew what we’d find there. I already knew what Susie Kimberly looked like, what she was wearing and what she was doing when she disappeared. And, yeah, despite procedures and checking out her absence, I’m already sure that she’s the latest victim of the kidnapper.”
Cruz rubbed his chin reflectively as he watched his friend. “Well, old buddy, I knew you were on to something. What I still don’t understand is how you knew all that. You must be becoming psych—Michele!” he said with certainty and leaned forward eagerly. “That’s how you knew, isn’t it? Michele dreamed it, or whatever, and told you. When? How long have you known this?”
