Strangers in the Night

by Linda Howard

  Her hands were clasping his head, stroking, trying to soothe him. “Jackson? What’s wrong? What happened?”

  He couldn’t speak for a minute, still in shock from what he had said. The words had just boiled out, without thought. He hadn’t said those words to any woman since his high school days, when he fell in love on a regular basis.

  But they were true, he realized, and that shocked him almost as much as saying them. He loved her. He, Jackson Brody, was in love. It had happened too fast for him to come to terms with it, to think about it as they gradually became enmeshed in each other’s lives. Logic said he couldn’t possibly love her after so short a time; emotion said to hell with logic, he loved her.

  “Jackson?”

  He tried to pull away from that emotional brink, to function as a sheriff instead of a man. He had come here because a man had been murdered, and somewhere along the line he had forgotten that and focused, instead, on the woman at the center of the situation. But he was still inside her, still dazed from the force of his orgasm, and all he could do was sink more heavily against her, pressing her into the tree trunk. Birds sang around him, insects buzzed, the river murmured. Bright morning sunlight worked its way through the thick canopy of leaves, dappling their skin.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. “Did I hurt you?” He knew he had entered her far too roughly, and she hadn’t been aroused and ready.

  “Some.” She sounded remarkably peaceful. “At first. Then I enjoyed it.”

  He snorted. “You couldn’t have enjoyed it very much. I think I lasted about five seconds.” The sheriff still hadn’t made an appearance; the man held full sway.

  “I enjoyed your pleasure.” She kissed his neck. “It was actually rather … thrilling.”

  “I was scared to death,” he admitted baldly.

  “Scared? About what?”

  Finally, belatedly, the sheriff lifted his head. Jackson discovered he couldn’t question her, or even talk about Thaniel, while in his present position. Gently he withdrew from her and eased his weight back, holding her steady while her legs slipped from around his hips and she was once more standing on her own two feet.

  “We’d better hurry,” he said, picking up her clothes and handing them to her, then pulling up his own pants and getting everything tucked back in place. “The Rescue Squad could be here any minute.”

  “Rescue Squad?” she echoed, brows lifting in surprise.

  He waited until she was dressed. “I was afraid you’d been hurt.”

  “Why would I be hurt?” She still looked totally bewildered.

  As a man, he hated having to question her. As a sheriff, he knew he had to do it or resign today. “Thaniel Vargas’s body was found this morning.”

  A stillness came over her, and she looked at him but somehow she wasn’t seeing him, her gaze turned inward. “I knew he’d die,” she finally said.

  “He didn’t die,” Jackson corrected. “He was murdered. Shot in the face with a shotgun.”

  She came back from wherever she had gone, and her green eyes focused sharply on him. “You think I did it,” she said.

  9

  Iwas afraid he’d come back and y’all started shooting at each other again. I was afraid I’d find you dead, or dying.” His voice was remarkably calm, considering how shaken he felt.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t seen Thaniel since day before yesterday, but I don’t have any way to prove it.”

  “Lilah.” He gripped her shoulders, shaking her a little to get her attention. “You seem to think I’m going to take you in for murder. Baby, even if you did kill him, after what happened no D.A. would prosecute, at least not the DA. here. But I don’t think you could murder anyone, not even Thaniel, and he was one worthless jackass. If you say you didn’t kill him, then I believe you.” The man was speaking again. The sheriff struggled to regain his detachment, though he thought it was a losing cause. He would never be detached when it came to Lilah.

  She stared at him, a sense of wonderment coming to her eyes. In a flash of intuition he knew then she hadn’t believed him when he blurted out that he loved her. Why should she? Men said “I love you” all the time in the heat of passion. And they had known each other less than two days. He was acutely aware that she hadn’t said anything about love in return, but that would wait.

  “But one thing keeps eating at me. Day before yesterday, you looked at him and said, ‘You’re dead,’ and damn near scared him to death right then.” He didn’t ask anything, didn’t try to form her answer in any way. He wanted her response to come from her own thoughts.

  To his surprise, she went pale. She looked away, staring at the river. “I just—knew,” she finally said, her voice stifled.

  “Knew?”

  “Jackson, I—” She half-turned away from him, then turned back. She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “In English. That’s my only requirement.”

  “I just know things. I get flashes.”

  “Flashes?”

  Again the helpless gesture. “It isn’t a vision, not exactly. I don’t really see anything, I just know. Like intuition, only more.”

  “So you had one of these flashes about Thaniel?”

  She nodded. “I looked at him when I came out on the porch and all of a sudden I knew he was going to die. I didn’t know he was going to get killed. Just … that he wasn’t going to be here anymore.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. In the distance he could hear the droning of an outboard motor: the Rescue Squad was getting close.

  “I’ve never been wrong,” she said, almost apologetically.

  “No one else knows what you said.” His voice was as somber as he felt. “Just me.”

  She bent her head, and he saw her worrying her lower lip. She saw his dilemma. Then she raised her head and squared her shoulders. “You have to do your job. You can’t keep this to yourself, and be a good sheriff.”

  If he hadn’t already known he loved her, that moment would have done it for him. And suddenly he knew something else. “Are these ‘flashes’ the reason Thaniel thought you’re a witch?”

  She gave him a rueful little smile. “I wasn’t very good at hiding things when I was young. I blabbed.”

  “Scared him, huh? And all these people who come to you for treatment—you just look at them and have flashes about what’s wrong with them?”

  “Of course not,” she said, startled. Then she blushed. “That’s something else.”

  The blush both intrigued and alarmed him. “What kind of something else?”

  “You’ll think I’m a freak,” she said in dismay.

  “But a sexy freak. Tell me.” A little bit of the sheriff was in his tone, a quiet authority.

  “I see auras. You know, the colors that everyone has around them. I know what the different colors mean, and if someone’s sick I can see where and know what to do, whether or not I can help them or they need to see a doctor.”

  Auras. Jackson wanted to sit down. He’d heard all that New Age mumbo-jumbo, but that’s just what it was, as far as he was concerned. He’d never seen a nimbus of color around anyone, never seen proof such a thing existed.

  “I haven’t told anyone about the auras,” she said, her voice shaking. “They just think I’m a … a medicine woman, like my mother. She saw them, too. I remember her telling me, when I was little, what the different colors meant. That’s how I learned my colors.” She gave a quick look at the river, where the boat had come into view. Tears welled in her eyes. “You have the most beautiful aura,” she whispered. “So clean and rich and healthy. I knew as soon as I saw you that—”

  She broke off, and he didn’t pursue it. The Rescue Squad boat had reached her dock, and the two men in it were getting out. One was Hal, who had come along himself to take charge if the Squad was needed, and the other was a tall, thin man Jackson recognized as a medic, though he didn’t know his name.

  Lilah did, thoug
h. She left Jackson’s side and walked out of the trees into the open, her hand lifted in a wave.

  Both men waved back. “Glad to see you’re okay,” Hal called as they started up the dock.

  “Just fine, thanks. Thaniel hadn’t been here, though.”

  “Yeah, we know.” Hal looked past Lilah to Jackson. “You left about a minute too soon, Sheriff. I still can’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?”

  “Jerry Watkins drove up just as you went out of sight. We were just getting the boat in the water. I tell you, Jerry looked like hell, like he’d been on a weeklong bender. He looked at the body bag in the meat wagon and just broke down, crying like a baby. He’s the one killed Thaniel, Sheriff. He jumped Thaniel about his boat, and you know how Thaniel was, too stupid to know when to back down. He told Jerry he sunk the son of a bitch. Beg pardon, Lilah. Jerry set a store by that boat. The way he tells it, he lost all control, grabbed the shotgun from his truck, and let Thaniel have it.”

  After years in law enforcement, little could surprise Jackson. He wasn’t surprised now, because dumber things had happened. And though the full moon was waning, weird things would continue to happen for another couple of days. He did feel as if he’d dropped the ball, however. He should have thought of Jerry. Everyone who knew Jerry knew how he loved that boat. Instead he’d been so focused on Lilah that he hadn’t been able to see anything else.

  “He sat down on the ground and put his hands on his head for your deputies to arrest him. Guess he saw that on television,” Hal finished.

  Well, that was that. Thaniel’s murder was solved before it had time to become a real mystery. But one little detail struck him as strange. Jackson looked at the medic. “If you knew Lilah was okay, that Thaniel hadn’t been killed in a fight here, why did you come along?”

  “He came to see me,” Lilah said. She shook her head. “I can’t help you, Cory. You’ve got gallstones. You’re going to have to see a doctor.”

  “Ah, hell, Lilah, I haven’t even told you my symptoms!”

  “You don’t have to tell me, I can see how you look. It hurts like blue blazes every time you eat, doesn’t it? Were you afraid you were having heart problems, maybe?”

  Cory made a face. “How’d you know?”

  “Just a hunch. Go see that doctor. There’s a good gastro specialist in Montgomery. I’ll give you his name.”

  “Okay,” he said glumly. “I was hoping it was an ulcer and you could give me something for it.”

  “Nope. Surgery.”

  “Damn.”

  “Well, that’s taken care of,” Hal said. “We’d better get back, we still got some more work to do in Pine Flats. Will you be along soon, Jackson?”

  “In a little while,” Jackson said. From the way Hal winked, he figured the older man had cottoned on to the fact that there was something between him and Lilah. Frankly, Jackson didn’t care if the whole county knew.

  He and Lilah watched the two men get back into the boat and head back downriver. Jackson squinted his eyes in the bright sun. “Auras, huh?” What the hell. If he believed she could have flashes of precognition, why not auras? If you loved someone, he thought, you accepted a lot of stuff that you never would have considered before. Privately, he’d check on Cory’s diagnosis from a doctor, just to make sure, but for some reason he figured Lilah had been right. Auras were as good a reason as anything.

  She reached for his hand. “I told you that you have a beautiful aura. I probably would have loved you just because of what I saw in it. But I had another flash when I saw you the first time.”

  He closed his hand warmly around hers. “What did that one tell you?”

  She gave him a somber look. “That you were going to be the love of my life.”

  He felt a little light-headed. Maybe it was just the culmination of a very stressful morning, but he remembered that feeling of dizziness the first time he’d seen her. “Didn’t you say those flashes had never been wrong?”

  “That’s right.” She rose on tiptoe and kissed him. “They’re one-hundred-percent accurate.”

  He needed to get back to work He needed to do a lot of things. But he didn’t need to do them as much as he needed to hold her, so he wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, breathing in the essence of the love of his life, so happy he thought he might burst.

  “We’re going to do this up right,” he said aloud. “The whole enchilada. Marriage. Kids.”

  “The whole enchilada,” she agreed, and hand in hand they walked into the house.

  WHITE OUT

  1

  It was going to snow. The sky was low and flat, an ominous purplish gray that blended into and obscured the mountaintops, so that it was difficult to tell where the earth stopped and the sky began. The air had a sharp, ammonia smell to it, and the icy edge of the wind cut through Hope Bradshaw’s jeans as if they were made of gauze instead of thick denim. The trees moaned under the lash of the wind, branches rustling and whipping, the low, mournful sound settling in her bones.

  She was too busy to stand around staring at the clouds, but she was nevertheless always aware of them hovering, pressing closer. A sense of urgency kept her moving, checking the generator and making sure she had plenty of fuel handy for it, carrying extra wood into her cabin and stacking even more on the broad, covered porch behind the kitchen. Maybe her instincts were wrong and the snow wouldn’t amount to any more than the four to six inches the weather forecasters were predicting.

  She trusted her instincts, though. This was her seventh winter in Idaho, and every time there had been a big snow, she had gotten this same crawly feeling just before it. The atmosphere was charged with energy, Mother Nature gathering herself for a real blast. Whether caused by static electricity or plain old foreboding, her spine was tingling from an uneasiness that wouldn’t let her rest.

  She wasn’t worried about surviving: she had food, water, shelter. This was, however, the first time Hope had gone through a big snow alone. Dylan had been here the first two years; after he died, her dad had moved to Idaho to help her take care of the resort. But her uncle Pete had suffered a heart attack three days ago, and her dad had flown to Indianapolis to be with his oldest brother. Uncle Pete’s prognosis was good: the heart attack was relatively mild, and he had gotten to the hospital soon enough to minimize the damage. Her dad planned to stay another week, since he hadn’t seen any of his brothers or sisters in over a year.

  She didn’t mind being alone, but securing the cabins was a lot of work for one person. There were eight of them, single-storied, some with one bedroom and some with two, sheltered by towering trees. There were four on one side of her own, much larger A-frame cabin, and four on the other side, the nine buildings curving around the bank of a picturesque lake that was teeming with fish. She had to make certain the doors and windows were securely fastened against what could be a violent wind, and water valves had to be turned off and pipes drained so they wouldn’t freeze and burst when the power went off, which she had absolute faith would happen. Losing power wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

  Actually, the weather had been mild this year; though it was December, there had been only one snow, a measly few inches, the remnants of which still lingered in the shaded areas and crunched under her boots. The ski resorts were hurting; their owners would welcome even a blizzard, if it left behind a good, thick base.

  Even the infamously optimistic slobber-hound, a golden retriever otherwise known as Tinkerbell even though he was neither female nor a fairy, seemed to be worrying about the weather. He stayed right behind her as she trudged from cabin to cabin, sitting on the porch while she worked inside, his tail thumping on the planks in relieved greeting when she reappeared. “Go chase a rabbit or something,” she told him after she almost stumbled over him as she left the next to last cabin, but though his brown eyes lit with enthusiasm at the idea, he declined the invitation.

  Those brown eyes were irresistible, staring up at her with love and boundless t
rust. Hope squatted down and rubbed behind his ears, sending him into twisting, whining ecstasy as he all but collapsed under the pleasure. “You big mutt,” she said lovingly, and he responded to the tone with a swipe of his tongue on her hand.

  Tink was five; she had gotten him the month after Dylan died, before her dad had come to live with her. The clumsy, adorable, loving ball of fuzz seemed to sense her sadness and had devoted himself to making her laugh with his antics. He smothered her with affection, licking whatever part of her was within reach, crying at night until she surrendered and lifted the puppy onto the bed with her, where he happily settled down against her, and the warmth of the little body in the night somehow made the loneliness more bearable.

  Gradually the pain became less acute, her father arrived, and she was less lonely, and as he grew, Tink gradually distanced himself, moving from her bed to the rug beside it, then to the doorway, and finally down to the living room, as if he were weaning her from his presence. His accustomed sleeping spot now was on the rug in front of the fireplace, though he made periodic tours of the house during the night to make certain everything in his doggy world was okay.

  Hope looked at Tink, and her lungs suddenly constricted, compressing as an enormous sense of panic seized her. He was five. Dylan had been dead five years! The impossibility of it stunned her, rocked her back. Hope stared, unseeing, at the dog, her eyes wide and fixed, her hand still on his head.