BRIDAL JEOPARDY

by Rebecca York

  She shuddered. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Put it back.”

  She swallowed hard. “Why?”

  “So they’ll think you’re still here, even if you’re not.”

  “But...”

  He shook his head. “Let’s go back inside.”

  She stepped away, giving him room as he entered the courtyard again, then the house.

  Inside, they stood in the darkened room, a feeling of anticipation zinging between them.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Fine, he thought. If she wanted to postpone the touching part, he’d give her some space—for now. But he could feel the need building inside him and knew that he couldn’t let it go forever. He needed to find out if he’d had some kind of psychotic episode back in her shop.

  He canceled that thought. He wasn’t going to try to fool himself. He wasn’t leaving this house without touching her.

  But for the moment he lowered himself into the chair where he’d been sitting when she arrived.

  She took the sofa, her wary gaze on him.

  “Do you believe your father about the gambling?”

  “I think so.”

  “Which leaves us with the question, why do you think those men showed up at your shop?”

  “Do you think you can find out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks.” She dragged in a breath and let it out. “You think the man I’m going to marry is responsible for your brother’s death.”

  “You’re not going to marry him,” he answered, punching out the words.

  She reared back. “Why not?”

  “You know why not.”

  He’d issued a challenge. Before she could react, he was out of his chair and across the room. Pulling her to her feet, he wrapped his arms around her.

  The shock of the contact made them both gasp. It was like the first time, only more intense. He knew she’d been going to ask him for information about John Reynard. Now she didn’t have to ask. It was in his mind for the taking. His import-export business was a front for bringing illegal goods into the country. He had insinuated himself into New Orleans society to make his place in the city invulnerable. He had men murdered when he thought that was the best course of action.

  She moaned when she saw the pictures he’d seen of the man who had been buried in the swamp for twenty years.

  “Sorry,” he said when words were almost impossible.

  She’d told him she’d visited her father. He hadn’t known how the meeting had affected her. Now he felt her pain and her bewilderment at the way her parent had just treated her.

  Was it always like that? he asked.

  Not as bad when my mom was alive.

  I’d like to strangle him.

  He’s a sad old man.

  That’s charitable of you.

  The conversation cut off as physical sensations made it difficult to focus on anything besides the two of them, the feel of his body pressed to hers and hers to his. Because both sets of sensations played through each of them.

  She felt the insistence of his erection pressing against her middle, and at the same time he felt the way that part of him swelled with blood, making it difficult to form coherent thoughts.

  He reached between them, cupping her breast, stroking his thumb across the hardened tip. The feel of her made him ache more painfully, and at the same time he felt her reaction, the pleasure of his cupping and stroking her and the way the sensations shot downward through her body to her center.

  She gasped, rocking against him.

  That’s the way it is for a woman.

  Yes. And for a man.

  The overlay of sensations—feeling his own arousal and hers—made it almost impossible to stand as they swayed together, clinging to each other for support.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt a headache building, but he ignored it. The only thing he wanted to focus on was the woman in his arms.

  He wrapped her more tightly in his embrace, closing his eyes and absorbing every sensation that they shared. He breathed in her delicious feminine scent and knew she was tuning herself to him with all her senses. Each thing they shared was magnified by the intensity of the doubled experience.

  They were both breathing hard, and when she rocked her hips against his, he knew that they were heading for the bedroom. Or the sofa, because the bedroom was upstairs—too far away.

  He had never felt this open to another human being.

  That realization took him totally by surprise, shocking him to the marrow of his bones. All his life he had craved the closeness he had shared with his brother—searched for it—but what he felt now was more than he had experienced with Sam.

  The enormity of that recognition was like a blow to his solar plexus. He dropped his hands, staggering away from Stephanie.

  “Craig?”

  He couldn’t answer her. Not in words and not with his mind. His head was spinning as he backed up, bumping into the wall and pressing his shoulders against the vertical surface to keep his balance.

  She took a step toward him, but he managed to raise one hand to ward her away.

  “Don’t.” His voice was a harsh croak.

  Her face had turned pale. Another woman would have asked what had gone wrong. But she didn’t have to ask because she knew what had happened.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Not your fault.” He might have shaken his head, but the pain in his skull had flared to killer proportions.

  Killer?

  The thought had formed unbidden, but he knew it was close to the truth.

  “You should sit down,” she murmured.

  He staggered back to the chair and flopped into the seat, throwing his head back and closing his eyes. For long moments, he struggled for equilibrium.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that she was watching him.

  “You came here thinking you knew what to expect,” she whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “You were always looking for what you had with Sam.”

  Again he answered in the affirmative.

  “You and Sam were young.” She paused, then went on, “And there was no sexual pull between you.”

  The statement hung in the air.

  “Is it the sexual pull that brought us together?” she asked.

  “It’s obviously part of it,” he answered, struggling to think clearly in the aftermath of the emotions that had churned through him.

  “What was different about you and Sam?”

  He fought to ground himself, to think about his relationship with his brother in a new way. It was a long time ago. Maybe he didn’t remember it exactly as it had been.

  Slowly, thinking as he spoke, he said, “We talked with thoughts, but there were other things we could do. Like if we worked together, we could move things with our minds.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He glanced around the room and settled on the shelves along the opposite wall. “If we wanted to, we could pull a book off a shelf and drop it onto the floor without touching it.”

  “You and I could try that,” she said, and he wondered if she was trying to get them on a different track.

  “We just met today.”

  “No—a couple of days ago at the reception,” she reminded him.

  He made a huffing sound. “Yeah. There’s that. But we just danced around each other there.”

  “Even so, we knew...something.”

  “True. But I don’t think we’re...bonded tightly enough to do any...tricks.”

  “I want to try,” she insisted, determination in her voice.

  He shrugged. “Okay, you focus on a book you want to pu
ll off the shelf, and I’ll try to help you.”

  He watched her turn toward the shelves and look at the titles. “There’s a paperback of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That would be appropriate.”

  “You liked it when you were a kid?” he asked.

  “Yes. Did you?”

  “I liked any books that took me away from the real world.”

  “Well, that’s something we have in common.”

  She walked to the shelves, found the book and pulled it a little way from the line of other books so they could both see it. Then she returned to her seat on the sofa and focused on the book. He could see the deep concentration on her face as she struggled to make something happen, and he tried to help her, giving her what he thought of as extra power. But there was no effect.

  He saw sweat break out on her forehead and knew she was working as hard as she could, even though she wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing. He kept up the effort to help her, but the effect was the same. Nothing.

  She dragged in several breaths and sharpened her features, looking defiantly at him before turning back to the bookshelf.

  Again he tried to help her, but it was clear she was only exhausting herself.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. “We might be able to do it if we were touching. That was the way Sam and I started out.”

  “If we touch, we won’t end up focused on books.”

  He sighed. “You’re probably right.”

  She took her lower lip between her teeth and then released it. “So why did we...open up to each other when we touched?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about you and Sam?”

  “We always had it—whatever it is.”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t have anyone.”

  He heard the pain in her voice and asked the question that had been in his mind since he’d first seen her at the reception. “Did you always feel alone—like other people could connect with each other, but you couldn’t?”

  Her face contorted. “Yes,” she whispered, and he knew it wasn’t something she was sharing easily.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You knew there was something better.”

  He nodded.

  “Did you have it with anyone besides Sam?”

  “No.”

  “Then the big question is—why us?”

  Chapter Seven

  Stephanie waited for Craig’s answer.

  “There must be something we have in common.” He shifted in his seat. “We might find out what it is if we touch each other again.”

  She stared at him, tempted by the suggestion, heat shooting through her as she remembered where they’d been a few minutes ago. He’d pulled away from her when he realized that what they were building between them was more intense than what he’d had with his brother. Now he was ready to try again, and she was the one who was feeling cautious.

  “I think it would be better to do it the old-fashioned way. I mean talking. You researched me. Did you find anything that was similar?”

  He shrugged. “Okay, if you want to play Twenty Questions. We’re about the same age. But what else do we have in common?”

  “Not our location. You grew up in the D.C. area, and I always lived down here.”

  He nodded. “What we’re looking for could be anything. From chemicals in the air to the treatments we got on our teeth, to the medicines we took, to the food we ate.”

  She made a low sound. “I suppose neither one of us was near a nuclear test site.”

  “I guess not. And it was early for oil spills to contaminate Gulf seafood.”

  “Nice of you to think of that, but that wouldn’t have applied to you, anyway. Anything strange about the food you ate? I mean, were your parents on any kind of health-food kick?”

  “Actually, they were on a low-carb kick for a long time.”

  “But you had gone out for Italian food and take-home pizza,” she said, then regretted the reference to his brother’s murder.

  His face clouded. “That was a special treat.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He lifted one shoulder. “It will keep coming up.”

  She focused on the original question. “Well, it’s definitely not from low carbs. I ate a pretty normal American diet—with Cajun touches because we lived down here. So that’s not it.”

  “What about mental illness in your family?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “This has something to do with our brains. Maybe you can only do it if you’re schizophrenic,” he muttered.

  “You really think that?”

  “No. But something else, maybe.”

  “If you dig around enough, you find out that everyone has a relative that was ‘off.’ You have an uncle Charlie who was committed?” she asked.

  “When he came back from Vietnam and was never quite right again. What about you?”

  “I guess my mother’s sister suffered from depression. They didn’t talk about it much.”

  “Okay, what about physical illnesses? Anything unusual?”

  “No, what about you?” she asked.

  “I had all the vaccinations.”

  “I did, too. But people have suspected vaccinations of causing various problems—like autism.”

  “I suppose,” he allowed. “I wonder what our moms ate when they were pregnant with us.”

  The question made her mind zing back to something she remembered, and she cleared her throat. “There is something else. I once heard my parents talking about how hard it was for my mom to get pregnant.”

  He went very still. “And she had some kind of treatment?”

  “I think she went to a fertility clinic.”

  “That’s interesting. Mine did, too,” he said slowly. “A friend of hers who lived in New Orleans told her about a doctor who was supposed to be very good, and she traveled to Louisiana to see him.”

  They stared at each other. “To New Orleans?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think that could be it?”

  “It’s something unusual,” he conceded.

  “What clinic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would your father know the name of the place?”

  * * *

  A MAN NAMED Harold Goddard could have given them the answer—if he’d been so inclined.

  But he wasn’t the kind of man who did things simply because they were in the best interests of others. His moves were always careful and calculated. He was cautious when it came to his own welfare, yet the quest for knowledge was a powerful motivator. Not just knowledge for its own sake. He wanted information he could use to his advantage.

  This afternoon he was waiting for a report from New Orleans regarding a scenario that he’d set in motion a couple of months ago.

  He turned from the window and walked to his desk, where he scrolled through the messages in his email. Unfortunately, there was nothing he hadn’t known a few hours ago.

  With a sigh, he got up and left the office, heading for his home gym, which was equipped with a treadmill, a recumbent bike and a universal weight machine. This afternoon he stepped onto the treadmill and slowly raised the speed to three miles per hour.

  He was in his sixties, and he hated to exercise, but he knew that it was supposed to keep his body fit and his mind sharp, so he made himself do it.

  He was retired now, but he kept up his interest in the projects that he’d handled for the Howell Institute, working under the direction of a man named Bill Wellington, who’d operated with funds hidden in a variety of budget entries. Wellington had been interested in advancing America through the application of science. Everything from new ways to fertilize crops to schemes for improving the human
race.

  Some of the experiments were well thought out, others bordered on lunatic fringe. And all of them had been shut down years ago. Or at least Goddard had thought so—until a few months ago when the news from Houma, Louisiana, had been filled with reports of an explosion in a private research laboratory. The local fire marshal had ruled that the explosion was due to a gas leak, but Goddard had sent his own team down to investigate, and he suspected there might be another explanation—because the clinic had been owned by a Dr. Douglas Solomon. He’d been one of Wellington’s fair-haired boys, until his experiments had failed to pan out.

  Solomon had operated a fertility clinic in Houma, Louisiana, where he’d been highly successful in using in vitro fertilization techniques. It was what he’d tried with the embryos that had not been a roaring success. Solomon’s experiments had been designed to produce children with superintelligence, but when his testing of the subjects had not shown they had higher IQs than would be expected in a normal bell curve, the Howell Institute had terminated the funding.

  But now the children had reached adulthood, and there might be something important the doctor and Wellington had both missed—as demonstrated by the mysterious explosion in Houma.

  Goddard had partial records from the Solomon Clinic, and he’d followed up on some of the children. A number of them had disappeared. Others had died under mysterious circumstances—often in bed together—around the country.

  But had Solomon unwittingly created men and women with something special that had previously been latent—until they made contact with each other?

  Because he wanted to know the answer to that question, he’d decided to try an experiment. After scrolling through the list of names, he’d found two that looked as if they were perfect for his purposes. Stephanie Swift and Craig Branson.

  He’d set in motion a scenario that had propelled them together. Now he was waiting to find out the effects. But he couldn’t afford to leave them on the loose for long. And what he did when he captured them was still up for consideration. He’d like to know what they could do together, but it might also be important to examine their brain tissues.

  * * *

  STEPHANIE LOOKED DOWN at her hands. “I don’t know if my dad remembers the name of the clinic, and I don’t know if he’d tell me if he did. He wasn’t too friendly when I went over there this afternoon.”