by Rebecca York
What if she walked away from him? That thought made his chest feel hollow, but he told himself he knew where to find her.
When she finally said, “Okay,” he relaxed a little, yet his nerves were still humming as he turned in the direction of the restaurant.
They walked through the darkened streets, neither of them talking nor touching each other, yet each of them giving the other sideways glances as though that would lead to a sudden revelation.
The restaurant was crowded when they entered, but the maître d’ nodded at Jake as he headed straight toward the back, reassured by Rachel’s footsteps behind him.
They walked into the same office where he’d talked to the now-dead woman.
In addition to the desk and chair, the room contained a small, comfortable seating area with a modern leather sofa, antique tables and an Oriental rug that he’d gotten from an estate sale. To the right of the sofa were a bar and lawyer’s bookcases filled with old, leather-bound volumes that he’d bought when the aging resident of a Garden District Victorian had moved to a nursing home.
Rachel looked around with interest. “You’re doing well for yourself.”
He shrugged. “Moderately. Make yourself comfortable.”
She sat down gingerly on the edge of the sofa, looking as if she could spring up and bolt at any moment. He understood why. The atmosphere in the little room had turned supercharged, as though their very proximity was about to set off sparks.
“I think we could both use a drink,” he said.
“You have some wine?”
“Of course. What would you like?”
“Merlot.”
“You have good taste,” he said, thinking that sounded inane.
Turning, he opened the bar, got out a high-end bottle and removed the cork before pouring them each a glass. When he held one out to her, she said, “Put it on the table.”
“Why?”
“Because apparently we read each other’s minds when we’re touching.”
She’d said what they’d both been thinking.
He kept his gaze fixed on her as he sat down on the sofa, keeping several feet of space between them, even though he wanted to test the theory again.
“You’re sure of that?” he asked.
“Aren’t you?”
“I know what happened, but I’m having a little trouble believing it.”
“Me, too.”
He wanted to ask what she thought had happened, but he kept the question locked behind his lips. Instead, he studied her, trying not to be too obvious. She looked to be in her late twenties, with long dark hair pulled back into a French twist that was a bit undone so that a few wisps of hair hung down fetchingly. Her face was oval, her eyes large and blue. Her lips were very appealing. Too appealing.
He hadn’t brought her to this private room for seduction. Or had he unconsciously had that in the back of his mind? Not a good idea. If touching her hand opened his mind to her, what would kissing her do? What about more than kissing?
He ruthlessly cut off that line of speculation before he could act on the feelings coiling inside him.
Shifting in his seat, he said, “You read people’s minds all the time.”
“I read tarot cards.”
“And you pick up more than what’s in the cards.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged, then gave her the kind of analysis he might give a business associate.
“Well, you support yourself as a reader. So either you’re great at slinging bull…or you give people accurate information. I haven’t seen you putting ads in the Times-Picayune, yet your business is thriving.”
“I’m not into slinging bull.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“But I don’t have to live strictly on my income,” she added, apparently wanting to make full disclosure. “I inherited some money from my parents and my aunt.”
“They’re dead?”
“Yes,” she said without elaborating.
When she didn’t volunteer anything else, he leaned back and tried to relax, which wasn’t easy with whatever was humming between them. He wanted to reach for her. He wanted more than just his hand on her arm, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Not yet.
Of course, maybe she sensed it from the wary look she gave him as she took a sip of wine and set down her glass.
“I think we can assume that Evelyn Morgan wanted us to meet each other,” he said. “The question is why.”
She shrugged one shoulder.
“What if she came to New Orleans specifically to hook us up?” he asked.
“Why would she?”
“You have no idea?”
“No.”
“Even after doing a reading?”
“No.”
“And you never saw her before she walked into your shop?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s stop playing Twenty Questions. I think there’s a way to get some more information,” he said.
When he moved toward her, she tried to scoot back, but he was too quick.
He reached for her shoulder and pulled her into his arms, then brought his mouth down to hers for a kiss that he wanted to be gentle. But gentleness was impossible as he folded her close.
He had seduced many women. He was good at making love and all the preliminaries. The sweet words. The touches. The kisses.
This time, he thought the woman might pull away.
When she stayed where she was, he felt a surge of elation. This wasn’t simply seduction. It was a lot more important than a roll in the hay had ever been to him.
He liked sex as much as any man, but it had never held the kind of magic that people wrote songs about. It was physical sensation, nothing more.
He might have stopped to examine that idea, but he was too caught up in the pleasure of the moment as he increased the pressure, moving his mouth against hers with an urgency that shocked him.
He wanted her with a startling intensity, but a physical joining was only part of it. Sensuality leaped between them, carrying him deeper into unknown territory.
He had pulled thoughts from her mind. Maybe he’d been afraid it wouldn’t happen again. But it did. Only this time there was more depth and clarity.
She had told him her parents were dead. He saw her as a woman in her early twenties standing in a small crowd at a cemetery, watching a coffin being lowered into a grave, and knew that her mother had died of a longtime heart condition. And Rachel had felt guilty because maybe her mom shouldn’t have had children at all.
Her decision, he whispered into her mind
He saw her as a young girl, picking up a deck of tarot cards for the first time and feeling excitement surge inside her as she inspected the pictures and grasped the implications of the deck. This was what she was meant to do!
And at the same time, he heard her gasp and knew that she was pulling the same level of information from him. Things he had never told anybody. Things he had pushed down so deep that he’d thought they were buried for good.
He saw himself as a fifteen-year-old scrounging through Dumpsters at night for food, whacking at rats with a length of two-by-four.
Saw himself bedding down in an abandoned house, with the same two-by-four beside him as a defensive weapon.
Saw himself taking a discarded lamp to an antiques dealer and haggling over the price—getting less than it was worth but enough to keep him alive for a few more days.
“That’s so sad,” she whispered against his mouth.
“It’s not true now.”
“It made you tough and cautious. And determined to stay on top.”
He didn’t want to talk about his sordid past or her analysis of the man he’d grown into. He wanted to focus on what was happening now. In this room. With this woman who called out to him as no other human being ever had.
His head was pounding again, but he ignored the pain.
Wordlessly, he urged her to open for him. After a momen
t’s hesitation, she did, so that his tongue could slip into her mouth to play with the soft skin inside her lips and sweep along the serrated line of her teeth, tasting the wine she’d just sipped.
She made a small, needy sound of approval as he deepened the contact.
While he stroked one hand down her body, he slid his mouth to her cheek, then found the tender coil of her ear with his tongue.
When she snuggled closer, he wrapped his arms around her and leaned back on the sofa, changing their positions so that she was sprawled on top of him, loving the weight of her small body and the way she fit against him. He wrapped her closer, increasing the pressure of her breasts against his chest, then sliding his hand down her back to her bottom so that he could wedge the cleft at the juncture of her legs more tightly against his erection.
When he did, she moved her hips against him, and he couldn’t hold back a groan.
Her breath had turned ragged. So had his.
With any other woman, he would have been lost in the physical sensations.
Tonight the building sensuality couldn’t stop the other part of it—the shocking part where her mind and his opened to each other in a way that should be impossible.
When a startling piece of knowledge leaped toward him, he stiffened, then sat up so abruptly that she had to steady herself with a hand against the sofa cushion.
In the heat of the encounter, he had forgotten all about Evelyn Morgan. The reason Rachel had come to the Bourbon Street Arms. The reason she was here now.
They were supposed to be figuring stuff out, but it had gone far beyond that. Very quickly.
He heard the accusation in his voice when he said, “You knew she was going to die!”
ONLY A FEW BLOCKS AWAY Carter Frederick sat in the back booth of a bar. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, he fit in with the casually dressed evening crowd. The Jazz Authority wasn’t the most private spot in the world, but he needed a drink.
When the waitress brought him a double shot of bourbon, he chased it with a NOLA ale. He liked the local brew well enough.
He might have asked for more bourbon, but he wasn’t finished working for the night, and he had to keep a clear head. In his mind, he was planning what he was going to say to the Badger, spinning it the best he knew how.
Evelyn Morgan had been a tough old broad. She had narrowed her eyes and refused to tell him why she was in New Orleans. Then she’d come up with some surprising moves.
He’d thought he could handle any woman. Not this one. She’d attacked, and they’d fought. When he’d pushed her away, the back of her skull had come down hard against the edge of the radiator. Too hard. One look at the blood pooling around her head, and he’d known that she was done for, and that he had to get out of there before anyone figured out that he’d been in her room.
Even so, he’d taken precious minutes to go through her stuff and make it look like robbery was the motive. While he was ransacking her luggage, he’d found a daybook with the names of two locals. Rachel Gregory and Jake Harper.
At least he had that much. Not enough to satisfy the Badger, but he’d already put off his report as long as possible. Anticipating a nasty few minutes, he signaled for the waitress and paid for his drinks.
When he was outside on the street, he lit up a cigarette and took several deep drags before tossing it away. Finally knowing he couldn’t delay any longer, he pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed a number in Portland.
The Badger answered, and he started talking before Carter could get any of his carefully planned words out.
“Unfortunately for you, I’m listening to CNN. A woman visitor to New Orleans was killed this evening. I guess you made an effing mess of the assignment,” he said as soon as he heard Carter’s voice.
“Not my fault. Why didn’t you tell me she had martial arts training?”
“News to me.”
The man might or might not be lying. In Carter’s experience, the Badger said whatever was most effective at the time. And he might change his tune if another story was more convenient.
“Nobody can connect you with the incident?”
“I’m clean. I didn’t talk to anyone at the desk. I paid a delivery boy to ask for her room.”
“Okay.”
“Afterward, I went down the back stairs.”
“So you got away, but we’re at a dead end.”
“Not exactly. I got the names of two contacts that she visited in the city.”
They talked for a few more minutes with the Badger pressing him for results and Carter wishing he’d never accepted the freaking assignment.
Not that he had a choice. Once you got on the Badger’s Christmas-card list, you stayed on it.
After hanging up, he clamped his fingers around the phone as he automatically studied the evening crowd to make sure nobody was listening in.
Then he started planning his next moves.
Chapter Three
Rachel dragged in a breath and let it out. “I saw something in the cards.”
“Her death?” he clarified.
“I thought so. But it’s never hard and fast. There are always alternate interpretations of anything I see.”
He swore under his breath. “You were thinking, ‘You’re going to die.’”
“But I couldn’t say it. Not like that.”
“Did you warn her?”
“No.”
His voice turned sharp. “Why not?”
Rachel couldn’t help being defensive. “Would you tell anyone something that devastating? I could have been wrong. I never tell people anything so…upsetting. I let her know she was in for a rough patch. At the end of the session, she asked me to meet her at her hotel room tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You think I’m lying?”
“No.”
They had been so close a moment ago. Too close, and they must have been thinking the same thing. It was time to put up some barriers.
She moved away from him and automatically felt to see if her hair was messed up. Some had come loose, and she worked stray strands back into place.
Her head was throbbing, making it hard to think.
“Coming here was a mistake,” she said as she stood up and smoothed out her dress.
He kept his gaze on her. “Something happened between us. Don’t you want to find out what it was?”
“Lust.”
“You know damn well it was more than that.”
Maybe she did, but she wasn’t going to admit it to him. Not now. Not when she was still shaking inside from the intensity of what she’d felt—on so many levels.
Turning on her heel, she left the office and walked through the restaurant, feeling the eyes of the maître d’ and some of the diners on her.
She kept walking, out onto the street, then headed back toward her building. The shop door was on Toulouse Street. The entrance to her apartment was in a little courtyard with an iron gate. She unlocked it, glad when the light came on as she stepped into familiar surroundings.
She’d fixed up the area with potted plants and patio furniture. Sometimes she sat down here; sometimes up on the upper patio outside her living room. Tonight she just wanted to get inside her apartment and lock the door.
When she was finally feeling safe, she sat down at the table by the window and stared out into the darkened street, trying to figure out what had really happened tonight.
A woman had been murdered. A woman she’d done a reading for a little over a day earlier.
Was Jake Harper’s harsh judgment right? Should she have warned Evelyn Morgan about what she’d seen? Had she played a role in her death by keeping silent? Maybe Evelyn would have left New Orleans. Maybe that wouldn’t have done any good, like in that book Appointment in Samarra, where the guy is heading for death no matter what he does.
She squeezed her hands into fists, grappling with the what-ifs.
She came back to the woman herself. The
re had been a strong streak of determination in Evelyn Morgan. She wouldn’t have run. She would have stayed around to accomplish her mission—whatever it was—but maybe she would have moved up her timetable. What if the meeting had been last night and Evelyn had left town before her murderer arrived?
Rachel had never felt so conflicted about a reading. True, she’d seen death in the cards before. But not murder.
Well, she hadn’t known it was murder. The cards hadn’t been that specific. And as she’d told Jake, there was always the chance she’d gotten it wrong.
She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to banish the woman’s image from her mind. As she tried to focus on something else, her thoughts jumped back to Jake Harper. Another upsetting subject. For too many reasons.
All her life she’d felt a little apart from other people. No, to be brutally honest, she’d felt a lot apart. People made connections that she simply couldn’t manage herself.
Over the years she’d had lovers. The physical part had been all right, but she’d longed to find a soul mate—someone who would understand her and be there for her no matter what happened.
It had never come to pass. Somehow, she always put emotional distance between herself and other people because it felt as though something was missing in the relationship. Did she create that? Or was she missing some cues about human relations that came easily to everyone else?
When she and Jake Harper had met on the street, when they’d touched, she’d felt a zing of awareness that was totally alien to her.
She’d wanted to burrow into his arms. At the same time, she’d wanted to run from him. But she’d gone back to his restaurant, and when he’d started stroking her and kissing her, everything from the encounter on the street had only become more vivid.
She’d felt a need for him that burned in her brain and in her blood. Even though it had frightened her, she’d clung to him.
The need had been the same with him. She knew it from the way he’d kissed her with an urgency that took her breath away. And from what she’d read in his mind. He was a man, and lust should have been enough to keep him focused on what they were doing.
Instead, when he’d stumbled on the information that Rachel had anticipated Evelyn’s death, he’d pulled away.
