For Her Eyes Only

by Cait London

  She could be standing inches away from a man who wanted to kill her. If he succeeded, he’d weaken her family’s bonds and harm them. Leona took a deep breath and braced herself.

  She’d kill to protect her family. That harsh thought surprised her. Leona hadn’t realized how deeply and how far she would go to protect her sisters. She would do what she must. Trying to focus on her inner calm, she attempted to build those shields she’d used for a lifetime. Her voice seemed a little husky but definitely not panicked. “You’ve been busy. Did you know about my family before?”

  “I didn’t, before last night.” Owen studied her face. “Your eyes were dark green last night, with just touches of earth, and now they seem gold. You’re ready to fight, aren’t you? The lioness protecting her clan? Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you, but I need you. Janice picked up traces of you and your sisters on that bag. That’s why I need to talk with you. You just might be able to help my sister.”

  “Don’t count on it. And don’t believe everything you read.”

  “She’ll know if she meets you.”

  “What about you? What do you know, other than what you’ve read?” What did Owen sense now? Was he a psychic bloodhound, picking up traces of her psyche, and storing them away? Was he connected to the man who came into her shop in July?

  In their fiery storm of lovemaking, had she given Owen information that could harm her family?

  Owen’s expression remained impassive and grim. The morning shadows emphasized the hard planes of his face, those light, watchful, hunter’s eyes. “Janice is right sometimes, that’s all. Sometimes she’s not. She can be off just slightly, or completely wrong. I’ve learned to be prepared for anything. This time, if she’s right, then she’s picked through the people who have touched that bag and isolated your connection to your sisters. The designer of Claire’s Bags, and one other, and you. You spoke to Claire last night. I’m guessing that the third spirit woman is your sister, Tempest.”

  Owen’s determined expression chilled her. He was already too deep into the Aisling-Bartel lives and far too dangerous. Then, as if to drive home that point, Owen stated coolly, “Tempest Bartel-Storm…recently married to Marcus Greystone. I researched her name online, and she’s posted several notices to antiquities dealers and collectors. She’s been hunting a ninth-century artifact for about the past year and a half, a Viking brooch. Every one of the recent photos of your family shows you and your sisters and your mother wearing this same pin. Your mother is wearing matching jewelry in her television interviews. It’s in her PR photo in the back of her books. It means something to your family, doesn’t it?”

  He glanced meaningfully at Leona’s brooch. “Except for the wolf’s head, the design woven around it is Celtic. Since all of you have red hair and green eyes and that pale skin, I’d say you’re of that descent, and yet your home is stripped of anything that might resemble that link. In your sleep, you said, ‘I don’t want to be like you, and I’ll never forgive you.’ You’re holding a pretty deep grudge. Who would that be, Leona? Who won’t you forgive? Yourself? For what?”

  “Go to hell, Owen,” Leona managed coolly. But her emotions zigzagged from fear for her family, back to anger at Owen. Then at herself, for taking him to her body.

  “Been there. It’s not much fun.” He leaned close and nuzzled her cheek. “You smell good in the morning.” Then he smiled. “I’ll pick you up tonight. We’ll have that dinner and talk.”

  Leona eased away; her senses were already humming and wanting to take those hard lips, to feel the heavy beat of his heart beneath her hand. She gripped the tote’s handle to keep from touching him. Her blood simmered even now, when she both feared and hated him. “I’m busy tonight.”

  Owen leaned down to nibble on her ear. “Cancel.”

  She tried to ignore the shock waves ricocheting throughout her body; but desire curled into a hot, tight knot within, requiring another match with Owen. “I can’t. I’m helping a friend furnish his new house. We’re choosing the fabrics for his sofa. He’s borrowed the swatches for the night, so I can’t cancel. And I really don’t think I can help your sister.”

  “You’re afraid.” His challenge hung on the morning air between them.

  “No,” she lied. Of course she was afraid. Leona was afraid that whoever stalked her family would succeed in destroying them. She was afraid of Owen, of opening, of what ran deep inside her that she couldn’t turn off. She was afraid of going mad like her grandmother. “I just don’t want any more involvement with you.”

  “‘Involvement?’ As in what happened last night?” Owen’s anger rose now, his face hard. A muscle moved in his jaw, and that pulse in his throat had become more prominent. “There’s no way to take that back, Leona.”

  “I don’t know what you’re angry about. You got what you wanted.”

  “So did you. I’m a little touchy about being used. Been there, done that,” Owen stated grimly.

  If Leona could take her psychic DNA, shove it in a box, and bury it, she would. And she’d toss in the heat and passion released last night with Owen.

  The only time Leona had opened herself to her powers was to help her sisters. Then she pushed back and closed the door on what she could be if she let her extrasensory inheritance develop. Helping Janice, who might have psychic ability, could be dangerous to her. To her entire family. If there was one thing Leona did not want to do with her life, it was to be entangled with Aisling’s seer gifts. They’d destroyed Leona’s grandmother and could destroy her.

  Owen had been studying her expression. His expression was harsh, his eyes gun-metal cold. “You’re uneasy with me. I understand that. Lovers look different in the harsh daylight, don’t they? Fine in the dark, but not by daylight?”

  Leona’s senses prickled warningly, and intuition took words to her lips. “You’ve been hurt, haven’t you? By a woman like me?”

  His eyes flashed at her, his lips hard. “Did I say that?”

  And then Leona knew what Owen had told no one. She’d snagged it from him, plucked it from the brooding darkness around him.

  If she could do that, they might have already developed a very deep, intangible connection of the senses. If so, she knew the exact moment it had happened: at their lovemaking’s peak, when they were both out there on that white-hot plane. Owen had taken something from her. But she’d taken as well. Lovemaking had been too perfect with him they’d been too well matched.

  The knowledge that Owen had loved a woman like her and he’d been badly hurt throbbed around her.

  “I’m so sorry, Owen,” she whispered.

  Nodding abruptly, he glanced around the back alley, as if removing himself from the tense emotional moment he didn’t want to revisit. “Janice thinks you can help. She’s desperate to meet you. She’s been through hell, Leona. You probably understand some of it from your own experiences. Think about it…. Some other time, then.”

  Just that look, that tilt of his head challenged her. Leona’s hand reached for his shirtfront, gripping it before she realized she’d moved. Tugging Owen’s face down to hers, she said “You have absolutely no ties on my life or who I see, and I don’t like being stalked.”

  “Someone was keeping very close tabs on you last night, Leona, and it wasn’t me.”

  Leona didn’t hide her fear for just that heartbeat, and Owen caught it. “Last night, on the phone with your sister you said, ‘he’s not getting me.’ What did you mean by that? Why are you afraid?”

  End the Aisling and Thorgood line. Get the brooch, get the power.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  This time, Owen wrapped his hand around her nape and drew her close, forehead to forehead. “Sure you do. You’re having nightmares. They’re bad enough to make you bring some ‘entertainment’ home. Me. A man you’d just met, so you could sleep without nightmares. Too bad. They came anyway. It’s been a long time since your husband died, right? Well, Leona, I’m not Joel Chablis or anything close.
Got it?”

  With that, Owen took her lips. His kiss was hard, demanding, and searing in its possession. Her instincts told her that he was branding her for his own. To her shock, Leona wrapped her arms around his shoulders and locked her body to his. Arching, she thrust her lower body hard against him, sex to sex.

  When Owen broke the kiss abruptly, then strode away, Leona trembled and wiped her hand across her burning lips. The primitive hunger between them shocked her; she’d reacted instantly, branding her mark on Owen’s lips and body just as he’d branded hers.

  She pitted herself against the sensual hunger raging deep within her. Too much was at risk, her family’s lives and her own. She couldn’t afford to be possessed, and Owen was already too close to completing that mission.

  He said he needed her to help his sister.

  But did he want more? Could Owen be the key to her family’s destruction?

  After work, Leona didn’t want to go home, to remember Owen in bed. Her appointment with Alex Cheslav offered a temporary buffer.

  When she pulled into his driveway, just off a busy tree-lined street, she saw that Alex stood on the shadowy porch of his elegant two-story house. Obviously in deep thought, he studied a row of giant potted hanging ferns sitting on the porch. As always when it came to renovating his plantation-style home, Alex looked adrift. His hand ran through his shoulder-length gray hair.

  According to what he’d told Leona, he was a widower, retired and, having recently moved to Lexington, eager to renovate and furnish the house. He and his wife had long planned the move, but now he was alone. Leona had first met him when he’d come into her shop, two months ago. He was looking at things that reminded him of his beloved wife. After a second visit and more conversation about his wife and the move they’d planned together, Leona and Alex had shared a dinner and become friends. She soon learned that bright sunlight affected his poor eyesight and Alex preferred to move in the shadows, his home dimly lit. Almost forty years older than Leona, Alex sometimes acted as if she were his daughter though he had no children of his own.

  Leona parked her car in the driveway, behind his fuel-economy one. She collected the take-out dinner sack and exited the car, enjoying the cool damp evening air as she walked to the front porch. The stained glass window on the front door had been her selection, the lily-of-the-valley pattern a favorite of his deceased wife.

  Tall, stooped, and carrying a little too much weight around his middle, Alex had the well-worn comfortable look of a retired businessman. Behind his tinted and thick eyeglasses, Alex’s brown eyes seemed to light at the sight of Leona. “Ferns. Have to have ’em, all these old houses do. ‘Curb appeal,’ you know. How do you hang the things, and how do you water them?”

  After a hard day, filled with reminders of the danger Owen represented as well as aches from the passion they’d shared, Leona was set to unwind. She’d have a nice glass of wine with Alex and deal with nothing more than the great fern-dilemma and the upholstery swatches. Over dinner, she’d gently tell him the ferns he’d chosen would have to go back, replaced by ones that could withstand the outdoor temperatures. In the meantime Leona held up a sack. “I brought dinner from that home-cooking place you like. There’s a salad and plenty of the entree you can have as leftovers for your lunch tomorrow.”

  He took the sack, peered down inside to the meatloaf dinner, and smiled almost boyishly. “Cynthia always used to make the best meat loaf. The restaurant comes the closest to her recipe. Thank you, Leona. I forgot to eat lunch. I was watching my retirement investments online, and see now that this place is going to cost a fortune to renovate. Cynthia would have had a hissy fit at the cost. The handyman you recommended is great though, quite reasonable. I like Vernon.”

  “Good. Just don’t take him away from me before he’s done with my closet. He just started it yesterday,” Leona said with a smile. “I was lucky to get him. He’s just started house-sitting for Billy Balleau, the country music star. Billy’s on tour now, and Vernon is doing some minor renovation and repair while he’s gone.”

  Alex released one of his gentle, friendly teases. “Oh, Vernon made it clear right away that you were his priority and that he had other work. It seems Vernon likes you, taking special care to see that you’re pleased with his work. He’s very proud of working for you. He says you have class, Leona.”

  “He’s right. I do,” she returned with the ease of their friendship. Leona surveyed the large shade trees surrounding Alex’s home, the row of elegant homes and gardens lining the street. They seemed like peaceful, beautiful reminders of a slower time. “I would have loved to have a home like this, but I don’t have the time to give it the attention it needs. I barely have time to manage my own. I’m trying to make a brick patio.”

  The task of fitting the bricks together reminded her of her plan to fit her life together. Joel and she had planned to buy one of these lovely old homes. The ache of missing Joel and their plans swept gently through her. Leona frowned. She couldn’t even remember his face, yet Owen’s image had come easily to her mind.

  A powerful psychic could imprint images into the minds of others—and the images of their lovemaking had returned too many times today. Her body still bore his touch, no matter how she’d tried to forget. She may have made love with the man who could be dangerous to her family!

  “I know you don’t have time to spare, but I really appreciate your dropping by tonight, Leona.” Alex’s tinted glasses glinted in the shadows as he frowned. “Is something bothering you? You seem—I don’t know—very tired? And here you are, coming to help me after a full workday.”

  “I took a break. Sue Ann came in to help for a couple hours at noon. Between fall orders coming in and unpacking new inventory, it got a little hectic. I went to a nice quiet library for a little while to get away from it all.”

  “You could have come here. It’s closer than your home, isn’t it?”

  “I needed to catch up on some designer magazines.” Leona had really spent her break researching Owen Shaw, lately of Montana. He’d said that he and his sister were born there. Leona’s research quickly turned up a newspaper obituary noting the accidental vehicular death of his parents. Janice and Owen were the only surviving family. He’d been Janice’s guardian for years…. Another article listed Owen as a promising new partner in an investment firm. And that was it; Leona had learned nothing new. Except now she knew more—that Janice was an extrasensory, and that could mean that Owen was also.

  If he was, Owen could just be the psychic vampire tracking her family. He was already questioning the significance of her brooch. Psychics could observe and pair physical objects with their own extrasensory ability in order to learn everything about someone. They could use a viewer’s emotions to create a mask over their real identity.

  The curse on the brooch ran through Leona’s mind: End the ancient seer Aisling’s line…. Get the brooch, get the power….

  Five

  “ONCE I DESTROY LEONA, I’LL HAVE THAT BROOCH. THEN I’LL have everything,” Rolf Erling promised his undisguised reflection in his rearview mirror.

  In the rear of the SUV, the handyman’s tools rattled slightly as Rolf drove over the street’s speed bump. He slowed immediately, careful to push his temper down. Rage had always been a problem since childhood. He couldn’t afford to lose control now that he had the last Aisling-Bartel triplet in his grasp.

  Leona would be the true test of his power; he would kill or break her, weakening the connections to the others and their combined psychic strength.

  Rolf briefly closed his eyes and saw Greer Aisling, the woman who had publicly defeated and shamed him. When he finally came for Greer—and the brooch—she would have no defenses. How he would savor that moment….

  Alex Cheslav, a widower, still in love with his deceased wife, had been the perfect bait for a widow like Leona. The older man touched Leona’s vulnerable, aching side, reminding her of her own husband and creating an emotional tie.

  From w
hat Rolf had observed, Leona wasn’t practicing, wasn’t developing her gifts. Only a fool would turn away from the power she could possess. She’d easily taken the bait—the assumed identity of Alex Cheslav. Add the fact that Alex lived in the kind of gorgeous home she’d always wanted with gardens she loved and a greenhouse in the back and her connection to the lonely man was all that much stronger. Rolf’s “prey” was just within his grasp.

  Softened by their friendship, Leona would also be open to other things—such as the fear Rolf loved to feed upon and that made him stronger.

  As Rolf drove the powerful SUV through the softly falling rain toward Leona’s home, he continued to fight his anger. He’d have to be very careful around Leona Aisling-Bartel-Chablis. He’d sensed she was potentially stronger than her sisters. Glancing at the rearview mirror, he admired his image—tall, sleek, powerful—and very, very smart. The tinted contacts changed his eye color, but he much preferred his own eyes, so black that pupil and iris were one.

  Since early childhood, he’d been tutored by his father. Rolf had learned that his eyes and mind and skill could take control of the vulnerable ones, to make them do things they shouldn’t, like puppets. He chuckled at that, thinking of his childhood, of the tricks he’d played while developing his extrasensory gift.

  He could hide who he was now, become anyone with the help of easy identity theft. He’d learned to mask himself from other psychics—even Greer Aisling, that red-haired witch. How he hated her, and he would have her crawl before he was done, have her begging on her knees, whining, trying to protect her daughters…. Didn’t she know that he’d already killed her beloved husband?

  Rolf chuckled, remembering how as an eight-year-old boy, he’d captured Daniel Bartel’s attention. The meeting had been arranged by Rolf’s father, who had also helped him arrange Bartel’s death. Rolf had simply imprinted the image of himself chasing his ball across the highway in front of Bartel’s car. Of course, Daniel Bartel, husband of Greer and father of the triplets, had swerved, crashed his car, and died.