First he’d been surprised by his instant animosity to her. He couldn’t figure it out. He’d never had anything against Kendall, and she had read tarot cards for a living. But Rowenna…Well, for some reason she was different. Then there had been that immediate inner warning, telling him that he needed to keep his distance from her, because of his fascination with her. And now…
Now, more than anything, he was surprised by the mere fact that he was here with her. Because now, everything had changed. Last night, when he had left his hotel and walked right to her door, he had known. Known that if he followed the path that was beckoning him, everything in his world was going to change. He would be on a course straight toward emotional danger, with no way back.
It hadn’t mattered. He’d had to go to her, even knowing she might slam the door in his face.
But she hadn’t.
He watched her. She was blessed with porcelain skin and perfect features, highlighted by those glimmering golden eyes, and her long, slim body teased him even from under the billowing cloak. There was just no figuring attraction. She drove him crazy, but he cared about her. Cared for her. Maybe it had just been man’s natural instinct for survival and self-preservation that had made him so wary of her, knowing that what he felt for her could destroy him if he gave it free rein. She was so good at an argument—yet he had found himself seeking her out to argue, because she was a challenge, and because she was so fully herself. She didn’t possess an ounce of pretension, and her laughter was as charming as her pigheadedness.
Her forthrightness was his undoing. Last night, when she had opened the door, let him in, then dropped that silky nothing she’d been wearing and risen up on her toes to kiss his lips…In the darkness of the elegant old bedroom, the drapes whispering in the breeze behind her, every vestige of intelligence and thought had slipped from his mind.
And later, when they had slept, and she had started to toss and turn, crying out in the midst of her dream…
He knew that feeling. Being so deep in a dream, desperate to awaken, afraid that he wouldn’t, that the dream would play out over and over again for eternity, an endless loop of hell.
The department had made him see a shrink, but in the end he had left the force, determined to beat the nightmares on his own by doing something to combat the problem that had caused them in the first place.
It had been almost two years since the accident that had killed the children, and the dream still came to him now and then. And he always remembered it when he awoke.
He had the feeling that Rowenna had remembered her dream, too.
So much for her being entirely forthright with him, he thought.
Time would tell.
Time…Dusk turned to darkness. An uniformed watchman was asking everyone to vacate the cemetery.
He would come back in daylight, he decided. He would walk every inch of the ground, check every gravestone, and he would find out if Mary had been taken away through some secret exit, like the one in the family plot back at the Flynn plantation, or if she had somehow been dragged away through the Halloween crowd. It would have been easy enough. A gag shoved in her mouth, a hooded costume thrown over her, hiding her face, and then she could have been carried off between two coconspirators, as if they were a trio, the two sober members supporting the third, who imbibed a few too many spirits throughout the day.
“Rowenna?”
He didn’t see her at first, and panic flared through him. “Rowenna!”
“I’m over here.” She stepped out from behind a tree that had hidden her from view. “I was trying to read this tombstone. It has my initials on it,” she told him.
He was shaking when he reached her. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he demanded sharply.
She turned to him, startled. “What are you talking about?”
“You disappeared.”
“I was standing right here.”
“You didn’t answer when I called,” he said, still angry. He knew he was overreacting, but…
A woman had disappeared—and her phone and purse had been found by a tombstone that bore her initials.
“I answered you. You just didn’t hear me.”
She turned and started for the exit. He followed her. He could see by the set of her shoulders that she was angry.
So was he. For God’s sake, after what had happened, she should be thinking about what she was doing. “I was worried,” he said curtly.
“Well, this is my home turf. You don’t need to be worried.” She stopped so short that he almost plowed into her back.
“What?”
“There’s Joe,” she said.
“Your friend, the detective Joe?”
She nodded. The white-haired man in a plain leather jacket was strolling along the street as if he hadn’t a care in the world. But he had seen Rowenna, and a smile lit his lips—until he saw Jeremy standing behind her. The smile remained, but it had tightened, as if he was trying not to let it turn into a scowl.
“Joe!” Rowenna called, hurrying out the gate.