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.
Because he was shocked that she hadn’t warned the woman? Or because the intimacy had triggered that Vulcan mind-meld thing, and he’d been as confounded by it as she?
She wanted to ask him. At the same time she heard an inner warning to stay as far away from him as she could.
And then there was the headache. Had the intimate contact been responsible for that, too? And made it hard to think clearly?
Trying to wrest her mind away from Jake, she crossed the room and turned on the television set. The hotel death had made the evening news.
But there wasn’t much more information than they’d picked up on the street. A woman had been found dead in her hotel room when the maid had come in to turn down the bed and put a piece of chocolate on the pillow.
Rachel fired up her laptop and got a web account of the incident. When she didn’t find anything new, she picked a deck of tarot cards from the shelf beside her easy chair. She had collected them over the years. There were modern interpretations. Fantasy versions. A Gothic deck with witches and vampires. But she usually ended up going back to the Rider-Waite deck because that was what she’d learned on, and she knew the cards so well.
She had never been good at doing readings for herself. Particularly anything formal. Instead of laying out one of the classic patterns, she shuffled the cards and cut, pulling out one at random.
The Lovers. Oh, great. Apparently she couldn’t get away from the heated scene between herself and Jake Harper.
Were they getting together again?
She shuffled a second time, and got the Magician. Did that mean she wanted to find a new direction in life? The card said that everything she needed was there—if she wasn’t afraid to reach for what she wanted. She had the tools and the power. Or did she?
IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, Mickey Delaney sat in front of the television set, waiting for Tanya to come home from one of her shopping trips. She liked to buy things. A lot of the time it was things she didn’t need, like clothing or jewelry, but he didn’t complain. What was the harm? If it made her happy, let her spend money. They could always get more.
“Yeah, money’s not a problem,” he said aloud just before an item on CNN caught his attention.
He’d turned it on because he liked to keep up with stuff. Now one of the talking heads was giving an account of a murder in New Orleans.
“The woman found dead in her New Orleans hotel room yesterday has been identified as …”
“Evelyn Morgan,” Mickey said.
The name had leaped into his head before the guy said it.
He didn’t know why, but he waited to see if the announcer said the same thing.
“Evelyn Morgan.”
“Okay!”
“She has no known relatives, and her reasons for being in the city have not been established, but it appears that robbery was the motive.”
Mickey was still focused on the way he’d picked up her name. It was like knowing the phone was going to ring and knowing who would be on the other end of the line, but this seemed more important than a phone call.
A little jolt of fear sizzled through him.
Was Evelyn Morgan going to mess up what he and Tanya had? Was that why he’d known her name?
Mickey shook his head. Sometimes when he woke up, he had to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe that his new life was real. As a kid he had to endure the constant fighting of his parents. He was using drugs by the time he was fourteen. When good old Mom and Dad had kicked him out, he’d hooked up with some of the dealers on the street in Baltimore.
Big business for the bosses. Small potatoes for the working stiffs.
He’d met Tanya Peterson at a Twelve-Step meeting after he’d gotten into some kind of do-good program run by a city charity.
They’d helped him clean up. Gotten him an apartment. But he’d known he was going to slip back into the bad life—until Tanya.
The first time they’d met, they’d clicked in a way he didn’t understand. It had been like a hit of some exotic drug, and he’d wanted more. Their thoughts had started running along the same lines—just like that.
They’d robbed a tourist down by the Inner Harbor, then gotten a hotel room where they could be alone.
They’d taken the money and headed for Chicago. Followed by Atlanta. New York. Cleveland.
Now they were back in Baltimore in a furnished Federal Hill town house they were subletting by the month because Tanya had gotten a yen for Maryland seafood.
She was going more on whims lately. Which was starting to worry him, and he hoped to hell that she wasn’t going to screw things up for the two of them.
When the door opened, he looked up. She had a couple of shopping bags with her, from Nordstrom and Macy’s and a couple of those high-priced women’s specialty shops.
She dropped the bags on the floor and crossed to him, just as the guy on TV started in about the murder again.
Tanya went very still. “I don’t like that at all.”
“It’s nothing to do with us,” he answered, hoping it was really true.
“I think you’re wrong. It’s got to do with us, and it could be … bad.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’re going to find out before everything changes.”
The warning sent a shiver over his skin. He loved things the way they were. No way did he vote for any changes. Well, if he could have anything he wanted, he’d like it if Tanya could just relax and take things the way they came. But he didn’t hold out much hope for that.
THE MURDER OF EVELYN MORGAN and the encounter with Jake Harper had put Rachel in a strange mood. Usually she looked to the future. Now, before she went down to open the shop, she started rummaging in the storage closet at the back of her apartment, where she kept some of the mementoes she’d brought from her parents’ house after Dad had died.
She took out an old photo album and thumbed through it, studying the pictures of herself and her parents when she’d been a baby. They looked so proud and happy to have her.
Seeing their faces gave her a little pang. Things hadn’t turned out the way they’d expected. She hadn’t exactly been the daughter they wanted. She’d never been warm and cuddly with them. She hadn’t made friends with kids in school, and when she’d gotten interested in tarot card reading, she’d seen their disapproval. At least they hadn’t forbidden her to work with the cards, but they’d insisted she graduate from college before she could become a full-time reader. Which was why she had a useless degree in history.
She turned more pages in the album, looking at pictures from the early life that she barely remembered. There was a picture of her at about age three with Mom outside a white building, with a plaque beside the door. She could see the word clinic, but she couldn’t read the name of the place because a tree branch partly hid it.
She clenched her fists in frustration. Intuition told her the name was important, but it looked as if whoever had taken the picture had deliberately made the sign unreadable. Could someone scan the photo and enlarge it?
Maybe, but she wasn’t going to take it to a photo shop or a computer store. That would be dangerous.
Dangerous?
She wasn’t