Such a sap. Such a fool.
She’s jumped at the offer when he’d suggested the champagne to seal their deal, but she hadn’t gotten as drunk as he had thought she was. She wanted to live. He had her bound and gagged, but she was still struggling, and…
Those eyes!
He thought he might see her awful, bulging eyes forever.
And then, at last, they closed.
She stopped struggling, and the rest was easy. Distasteful, but easy. He hadn’t done so well the last time, hadn’t been able to carry out his literary parallel to the full extent he would have liked to. In this day and age, walling up old Thorne wouldn’t have been easy.
He couldn’t really use Poe as his road map. Not without chancing being caught.
So he would just do his best to follow the master’s model.
In this case, Genevieve O’Brien would have made a much more appropriate victim. She was far lovelier than the original cigar girl, Mary Rogers, not to mention Lori Star. But Lori had been too nosy, and though he didn’t believe in psychics, someone else might, so she had had to become his Marie Roget.
Finally he was done, and he sent to her body to a watery grave. Of course, she would be discovered. It was, in fact, absolutely necessary that she be found.
As he headed back to the hustle and flow of life in New York, he contemplated the fact that he hadn’t done a bad job. In fact, he was feeling quite satisfied with his efforts, even gleeful.
This was going to be fun.
Then he paused, arrested by a flash in his mind’s eye. Those bulging eyes.
But for a minute, they hadn’t belonged to the whore, the would-be psychic, Lori Star. They had been her eyes. The eyes of the beauty he had originally intended to take the victim’s part in his reenactment of Poe’s brilliant original. They had been the eyes of Genevieve O’Brien. Beautiful and blue.
Watching him.
Seeing him.
Knowing him for who—and what—he was.
Genevieve!
She was at his side, Joe told himself. There in her bed.
Sleeping.
He, too, had been asleep. No, it hadn’t been a dream, it had been a nightmare, a look into the hellish pit of his imagination.
He had seen her face, and she’d been looking at him with those brilliantly blue eyes of hers.
Looking at him…in accusation.
And then those perfectly blue eyes had begun to bulge, her face growing red as it was suffused with blood, her throat darkening with the deep black and blue of bruises.
She was choking. Being choked. By the hands he could see around her throat. Powerful hands, squeezing, tightening, stealing her breath…stealing her life.
It had only been a dream, he told himself again. They were still in her bed, and she was next to him.
But she wasn’t sleeping. She sat up suddenly, staring ahead blankly into the shadows of the room.
“Gen?” He was bathed in sweat, but already the Technicolor horror of the dream was fading.
She didn’t hear him at first.
“Gen?” he said again.
She blinked, then shuddered and turned to him. Tousled hair framed the delicate features of her face, and she smiled. “Hey,” she said softly.
“Hey,” he said back.
She lay down beside him again, as if nothing were wrong in the world.
Was anything wrong?
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said, but she sounded hesitant as she added, “How about you?” He realized instantly that she was referring to what had transpired between them, that her question had nothing to do with what had been his nightmare. After all, people didn’t share their dreams, their nightmares, not even if they had been intimate.
He shook off the dream. It was just a result of stress, he told himself. Just like thinking he’d heard the dead speak. No matter how embarrassing it was, he was going to have to go see a shrink. How many cases had he worked on in his life? How many corpses had he seen? So why now?
Yeah, a shrink was definitely in order.
He reached out, slipping his arms around her. “I’m fine. I haven’t been so fine in a very long time,” he said.
Her smiled deepened. “Can you stay…through the night?” she whispered.
“Just try to get rid of me,” he told her.
Her eyes, so deep, so blue, so trusting, were on him.
He held her closer, and for a moment there was nothing between them but warmth. Contentment. Closeness. There was something so good about just being together, touching.
Later in the night, they made love again. And when they slept again at last, it was as if they were meant to fit together. The only thing that marred the feeling for him was…
Fear.
Dear God, he thought, please, don’t let me lose her, too. We’ve come through so much. She’s survived so much. Please…
CHAPTER 9