
He's going to be the love of her life...if they survive the night.
Karmic Consultants, Book 5
With a single touch, Ronna Mitchell can catch stolen glimpses of the future and separate truth from lies. But life as a human polygraph machine can be lonely. Craving human contact, she moonlights as a palm reader whenever a carnival comes to town.
Officer Matt Holloway is intent on trailing a hit man when he ducks into a palm reader's booth to avoid being spotted by his quarry. The beguiling Jamaican fortune teller is definitely intriguing, but she'll have to wait. He's close on the assassin's tail.
When Ronna takes his hand, a startling vision of the future flashes in her mind's eye. Matt isn't a typical client, he's The One. Before she has the chance to introduce herself as the mother of his unborn children, he's gone, leaving her with a terrifying vision of her soul mate covered in blood. And dead certain she's the only one who can save her happily ever after.
Warning: This book contains carnies, cops, chases, chance encounters and love at first touch.
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
A Cop and a Feel
Copyright © 2011 by Vivi Andrews
ISBN: 978-1-60928-479-4
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Scott Carpenter
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: July 2011
A Cop and a Feel
For Kali, who was sitting beside me when I first started scribbling stories in a spiral notebook. Eighteen years later not much has changed except the upgrade to laptops and (hopefully) the quality of the words being scribbled. Thank you for enabling some of my best adventures.
Chapter One---Look into My Crystal Ball
When the tall, dark stranger burst into her booth, bells chimed dizzily in Ronna's ears.
Admittedly, chimes hung from the cloth that draped her doorway, so most of the bells she heard were of the physical variety, but a deeper awareness tolled a harmony in her soul. Bells galore. The tarot deck Ronna'd been fiddling with fell from her fingers as her heart jangled like a tambourine.
Hello, Tall, Dark and Mysterious. How's about you take me on a long journey?
Her mystery man wasn't dark in the expected sense---sandy brown hair didn't really call to mind Nubian princes---but a sense of black menace haloed him. He'd dressed casually, obviously an attempt to blend with the carnival crowd, but the tight black T-shirt, worn leather jacket and jeans couldn't conceal his true nature---or the holsters at his shoulder and ankle. This one was a predator, but she sensed it was honor that straightened his spine, an inborn heroism that kept his lethality in check.
Ronna's toes curled a little in her sequined strappy sandals as she imagined volunteering for prey duty, "I Need a Hero" playing as the soundtrack to her fantasy.
He didn't turn to face her, just stared through the gap in the curtain over her door, his attention fixed on something, or someone, outside her booth.
He wasn't here to see her, that much was obvious. She was just a convenient hiding place.
Ronna was used to being the spectator on everyone else's adventures. There was a natural voyeurism to her abilities that created a sense of distance between her and the people around her living their deliciously normal lives, even before they freaked out when they learned the truth about what she could do.
If life was a movie, she'd be the quirky best-friend character with a too-smart mouth, but something about Mr. Not-So-Dark/Dark and Mysterious skulking by her door made her want to be the plucky heroine rather than the comic-relief sidekick.
And a heroine didn't just sit back and let herself be ignored, no matter how sweet a view of James Bond's ass she might have.
"He'll be able to see your shadow against the curtain," Ronna commented, casually straightening her business cards and tip jar on the Middle-Eastern patterned silk that draped the small table.
Her stranger snapped around at the sound of her voice. "I was just..." His voice trailed off, eyes widening slightly.
Ronna pressed her lips together to keep from grinning at his reaction to her Madame Ramona getup. Giant gold hoop earrings, bright purple eye shadow, clattering bangle bracelets and a multicolored scarf tied loosely around the controlled chaos of her curls. She hadn't skimped on her fortune-teller costume.
"Spying on someone?" She tilted her head under his inspection, cranking up the charisma that put all her clients at ease---if her eyes were twinkling and she was working to con them, then they didn't worry that she really was psychic. It was amazing how many people would rather believe the ruse.
Tall, Blond and Sexy frowned, eyes narrowing suspiciously. "Waiting. For a friend."
"A friend." She couldn't help the grin that split her face. He wasn't even trying to lie convincingly.
His frown deepened as he scanned the colorful, fabric-draped interior of her booth and the small, hand-painted sign that offered Palm Readings: $5.
"You're a fortune teller." Scorn tightened his voice, a fist around his vocal cords.
"Palm reader, technically." Ronna extended her hand palm up across the table. "You want a look inside your future?" she asked, lacing the words with the hammy Jamaican accent she put on for her carnival act.
Her boss, Karma, founder and head honcho of Karmic Consultants, would be livid if she knew her best touch-reader dressed up like a gypsy and moonlighted for five bucks a pop, but Ronna loved the lively carnival atmosphere, the life and energy.
A foolproof human lie detector was valuable---as evidenced by the massive price tag Karma slapped on her services---but there were days when her day job felt soulless. No one ever asked the polygraph machine if she was happy. Touch the client's hand, truth, lies, thank you, next.
It was beyond boring. Palm reading, on the other hand, was never dull.
Ronna loved the contact with the masses, the laughing teenage girls who dragged their not-as-reluctant-as-they-wanted-to-seem teenage boyfriends to see the "psychic", the middle-aged women who needed an excuse for a change or a flash of hope in their lives, the parents pulled through her curtain by their eager children, indulgent of such youthful belief. Ronna loved them all.
Whenever a carnival sent ripples of excitement through the otherwise quiet town, Ronna put on her most theatrical silk scarves, dragged out a cheesy Jamaican accent and became Madame Ramona for a night, touching real people and giving them what they needed, sending them off happier and guiding them in the right direction for the sheer pleasure of using her gift on people who weren't even sure they believed and would certainly never be able to pay her exorbitant consultancy fee even if they did.
The man in her doorway glowered darkly at the trappings of her trade. Not a believer, this one. Luckily, that was her favorite kind. He was going to be fun.
"Come sit down," she urged, rising smoothly from her stool and gliding toward the doorway. "We'll leave the curtain open a bit and you'll be able to see him when he comes back this way. There is no exit at the end of this aisle. He'll have to loop back." The carnival was ingeniously designed to keep people in, much like Vegas casinos. Getting in was easy. Out took practice.
Her mystery man frowned at her with narrowed eyes---rather pretty green eyes, actually. Heavily shrouded in thick black lashes half of the female population would kill for. Those eyes were lovely, and suspicious as all hell.
"What makes you think my friend is a guy?"
Ronna smiled her I know all smile and gently took his arm, her fingers flexing appreciatively against his biceps through the jacket sleeve. She did love men with strong arms. "Come sit," she urged gently. "I'll give you a free reading, while you wait for your...friend."
He wasn't waiting for a friend. Everything about his demeanor spoke of a wolf on the prowl, a hunter sensing a threat---and she didn't think this man was threatened by women. He was stalking someone, and every instinct she had said it was a man.
He resisted her tugging, his attention still locked on the aisle outside her booth.
"You're being conspicuous standing here next to the curtain. He'll know you're waiting for him."
That got him moving.
Her mystery man allowed her to lead him the few feet to her table, but before she could take her usual spot, he slipped around the table to perch on her stool.
Ronna settled down opposite him, fluffing her skirts around her to conceal her discomfort over being the one with her back to the door. She'd never liked feeling like the world could sneak up on her without her knowledge, but something told her the menacing man across from her wouldn't allow anyone to take her by surprise. His eyes didn't rest on her, but constantly scanned the aisle behind her through the gap in the curtain.
Dealing with lies and liars on a daily basis, she wasn't the sort to trust easily---especially not without getting skin-to-skin confirmation of trustworthiness. But this guy... She didn't even know his name, but for some reason she trusted him to watch her back.
Ronna stretched out her hands palm up, waiting for him to supply one of his own. He didn't, not even glancing in her direction, eyes on the curtain. She cleared her throat to get his attention and tossed him a teasing smile and another twinkle. "Your hand? This goes faster if I don't have to wrestle you to the ground to get a look at your palm."
His eyes stayed locked on the curtain. Her attempt at humor didn't crack his stony concentration at all, but he thrust one hand at her, the action so quick his skin brushed against her fingers before she was braced for it.
This is not the hand he fires his gun with.
Whoa. Ronna flinched and pulled her hands away from the contact, startled by the clarity of the thought and the images that spilled into her brain with it.
She'd barely touched him for a second, but already visions swam in her mind. Flashes of the dark man in front of her at a firing range, both hands braced around the butt of a handgun, of him leaning against a wall next to a door, the nose of his gun pointed toward the ceiling as he waited, of him running down an alleyway, his hand pressed against the holster at his hip.
She cleared her throat and her thoughts, then reached again for his hand, braced for the impact of the touch this time.
Cop. Not yet a detective. Wants a promotion. To be an investigator on an elite task force. Get off the street. Ronna swallowed thickly against the push of information into her brain. It usually wasn't so sudden, so forceful. Her readings often felt like swimming through fog, but her impressions of this man slapped against the backs of her eyes in a battering rush.
She cradled his hand between her palms, trying to focus her eyes on the lines there---everyday people tended to be freaked out by the fact that she could learn so much from a touch. If she managed to glean it from a crease in their palm, then it was magical. If she just knew, it was terrifying.
"What's your name?" she asked, using her hypnotic Madame Ramona voice, adding her grandmother's Jamaican lilt by habit.
Her subject snorted, his hand jerking in hers. "Aren't you supposed to tell me, Miss Psychic?"
She looked up from his palm and shrugged, much more amused by his scorn than offended. "Sorry, I don't read minds. Just read palms."
Which wasn't technically true. She read truth---which, inside the human mind, tended to be emotional rather than logical. Feelings more than thoughts. Though if someone was thinking of something hard enough, it would come through. Memories sometimes floated to the surface, and once in a blue moon she'd get a flash of the future, but she wasn't a mind reader in the strictest sense of the word.
He grimaced in the face of her unflappable calm. "Holloway. Matt Holloway."
"Off---all right, Matt," she said, catching herself before she accidentally called him Officer Holloway. "Let's see what your future holds, shall we?"
He snorted again. "Do your worst, lady."
Ronna smiled mystically and decided to start simply. She'd save her worst for the encore. "You want a promotion."
He gave a rough bark of laughter, and Ronna shivered at the warm masculinity of the sound. "Doesn't everyone?" he scoffed.
"You're very good at your job," she told him. "Suited to it. Better than you would be if you got the promotion." The work would make him unhappy if he got the promotion. He was an active man. A doer. He would hate the unsolved cases. The fruitless investigations and the weight of bureaucracy. Where he was, he did good. His unique talents...
She traced a finger across a line that ran parallel to the fate line, connecting the head and heart lines. "You can tell things are going to happen before they do."
He laughed again. Dang, she loved that sound, even if it did carry the challenge of his skepticism inside it. "Do you get bigger tips if you tell people they're psychic?"
She ignored his derision. "Hunches. You have hunches. Small premonitions."
"Sure I do."
Ronna flicked a look away from his palm and up at his face. He still stared past her shoulder to the aisle beyond her booth, but she had part of his attention now. In spite of his skepticism, she had intrigued him. Officer Holloway was listening.
She felt a thrill at the small victory---for some unknown reason it was important to her to make a believer out of him.
"You put all of your energy into your work, leaving none for yourself."
He laughed again. She began to wonder if he laughed when he knew she was right. "You sound like my ex-wife."
She smiled secretively, knowing he wouldn't spare a glance from his surveillance to see it. "You've never been married."
His hand stiffened between hers, the fingers clenching. She held on, afraid for a moment that he was going to pull away and end the reading. She never forced her customers to listen longer than they wanted, but she wasn't ready for this man to walk out of her booth, and her life, just yet.
"You can tell that from my palm, can you?"
She cradled his hand, the left, and rubbed the skin at the base of his ring finger, unmarked by the long-term wear of a wedding band. "Madame Ramona can see all sorts of things," she replied in her most lilting, mystic tone.
He snorted, his fingers relaxing again, put at ease by her feigned charlatanism.
Ronna sifted through the images that pressed against the backs of her eyes. He was being used. Strung along and manipulated by the promised promotion. Someone had a dangerous agenda, and Matthew Holloway was caught up in it. "Dark forces circle around you."
Matt laughed, and Ronna looked up at the sound, smiling in reaction. He flicked his gaze away from the doorway and met her eyes, his green ones sparkling between thick lashes. "Aren't you supposed to tell me I'm going to meet a beautiful stranger?"
You already have.
Ronna jerked, feeling like she'd been jolted with a cattle prod. Images tripped over one another, a dizzying kaleidoscope sequence inside her mind.
Those green eyes, twinkling into hers across a checkered plastic tablecloth at the best hole-in-the-wall pizza joint in town. Matt leaning across the same table to kiss her, his mouth warm and firm against her lips. "Mmm, you taste of tomato sauce." "I'm saucy." "You're my tomato." Matt pinning Ronna against the front door of her apartment, too desperate to make it back to the bedroom, her legs wrapped around his waist, their mouths welded together. Matt standing behind her in a furniture store, his hands linked over her stomach and chin propped on her shoulder as he grumbled halfheartedly over the price of a big four-poster bed. "You don't sleep on the frame. You sleep on the mattress." "Real men have real furniture, Matthew." The pair of them curled together in that big four-poster, lazing away a sunny Sunday beneath the sheets she'd bought to match his eyes, his mouth tracing her collarbone. Matt yanking at his collar, looking nervous and sick until he lifted his head and saw her coming down the aisle and the whole world fell away. "I now pronounce you..." Those green eyes, staring at the ultrasound monitor like he'd just been hit upside the head with a bag of bricks. "Jesus. Twins?" More green eyes, these surrounded by chubby caramel-skinned toddler faces and squeals of laughter. "Again, Daddy! Again!" Matt warm against her side as they sprawled together in that big four-poster, wallowing in a few more minutes of silence before the kids woke up. "Love you, Tomato."
Ronna saw a lifetime in that moment, spread out before her in a banquet of sex and laughter and love. It shocked the breath out of her. She wanted that life. It hadn't existed until a few seconds ago, but now she needed it.
She was the spectator, the lie detector. What man would want to build a life with a woman who could sense every tiny deception? She'd long since accepted there would be a hole in her life and resigned herself to keeping only the most casual of friendships---careful not to touch too much, not to see too much, afraid of accidentally sensing a lie she didn't want to know.
She'd learned to ignore the void. She was happy as a spectator, brushing against the vibrant lives of those who came into her booth each night of the carnival, filling the emptiness with little pieces, flickering emotions borrowed from each of them.
But now...
New emotion swelled inside her in a rush at the vision she'd just seen, the life she'd witnessed. This feeling wasn't love---not yet, though she felt the echoes of it so strongly in Matt's touch. No, it was hope. A hope she'd long since given up. That could be her future.
But the future was always conditional.
Those images were only a possibility. And they weren't all she'd seen.
Splashed in amongst the everyday utopia that could be their future were images bright with blood and thick with death. The red and black-hued scenes threatened their happily ever after.
Ronna tried to piece through the seemingly random flashes of blood and gore to find a pattern, a way of preventing that darker future, but through it all, the only commonality appeared to be Matt's green eyes, wide with shock and horror. Macabre carnival images haunted her. The Ferris wheel splattered with blood, people running screaming from a brightly colored booth like her own, blood soaking into ground coated with a sticky mass of popcorn and candy apples.
"Are you all right?"
Her face must have gone gray, which made sense since every drop of blood felt like it was rushing toward her pounding heart.
"I..."
He was in danger. Officer Matthew Holloway was going to get himself killed. Tonight.
Ronna had to save him, to protect him from himself, but her brain was overloaded, wild with a thousand images and words that couldn't fight their way through the clutter. Her mouth opened but her throat closed, emitting not a sound.
Matt's gaze shifted again to the curtain behind her and suddenly he yanked his hand out of hers, jumping to his feet. "Shit. There he is." He grabbed a five out of his pocket and shoved it into her tip jar, already loping toward the doorway. He paused, peering past the curtain, then disappeared through it without even a whisper from the bells before Ronna could do more than register the sudden loss of his presence, his touch.
She had never had such a strong reading before, nor ever been so strongly affected herself. She would occasionally get strong senses from people, but they were almost always memories that preoccupied or obsessed them. The future glimpses were without exception dim and foggy. Never before had she seen such a vivid Technicolor montage. But this time was different. This time it was her future too. Or it could have been. And those images struck her like tiny hammers pinging against her heart.
It took far too many long seconds before her brain reengaged and she leapt to her feet, stumbling in a frantic rush after him. The blood...
"Wait, Matt! You're in danger!"
Chapter Two---Save Ferris
Matt cut through the carnival crowds as quickly as he could without drawing unnecessary attention to himself. His target pushed through the mass of people ahead of him, not seeming to care who turned and glared as he shoved his way through.
Matt frowned. That was new.
Fifteen minutes ago, before Matt ducked into the cute palm reader's booth and his higher brain functions took a time-out, the target had been relaxed and subtle. Blending. Now he looked tense and hurried.
Shit. What had changed while he was out of Matt's sight? Had he already done the job? Was this his escape? How could Matt have been so stupid, sitting down with a goddamn palm reader when he was supposed to have eyes on the bastard at all times? A fuckup like that could cost lives. Could have already cost them.
Matt swore under his breath and increased his pace, forcing an apologetic smile on his face as he threaded through the crowd. He felt naked without a comm. in his ear, but the squad he was working with tonight were beyond paranoid about being overheard by their target. Those who spied on everyone seemed to be the most afraid of being spied on.
Which meant Matt was on his own tonight---but not unobserved.
It had been beyond stupid to stop in for a palm reading when lives could very well be at stake---no matter how hot the palm reader was. Damn, I didn't get her name.
Unforgivable. The slip with the job, not the fortune-teller's mystery name. No wonder he'd never been tapped for the organized-crime task force in the past. If all it took was a toffee-skinned Jamaican goddess with short wild reddish curls and a sexy, secretive smile to derail his pursuit of a suspected hit man, he didn't deserve the job.
Dammit. What had he been thinking? Or more to the point, what had he been thinking with? Because it sure as hell wasn't his brain.
She'd said he had hunches and she was right. He had ducked into her booth on a hunch, let her read him on a hunch---convinced he had time to kill by nothing more than an irrational feeling that his target was going the wrong direction, that he wouldn't find his victim at the end of the aisle and he'd have to loop back.
And now Cutter was hurrying as if he'd just committed a crime, drawing attention to himself as he fled...
He's a pro. He'd be calm after the job. Blending. He hasn't done the job yet.
Matt slowed his own headlong rush through the crowd, confidence returning suddenly. Cutter may be a thug, but he was also a long-time known associate with a reputation for merciless calm. He'd hardly panic after the job. His profile pegged him as more likely to be reckless because he was pissed off, and he'd be pissed off because he couldn't find his intended victim in the jumbled maze of the carnival.
The tip the task force had gotten was clear, Cutter had to bump off a "consultant" at the carnival.
A consultant. The bugs had picked up the word, and no one on the task force had been able to make sense of it. Who was the consultant?
The palm reader's face rose to the front of his mind, with the mischievous light in her warm brown eyes and her café-au-lait skin with the darker freckles across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose.
Something inside Matt stilled, but he continued trailing Cutter even as his awareness shifted to examine the baseless hunch.
It couldn't be her. It would be too much of a coincidence. Why would the mafia take out a hit on a palm reader? And why the urgency? How could she possibly be a threat?
It didn't make any sense. His subconscious must be trying to rationalize his preoccupation with her by making her a part of the job. There was no way the Morrissey crime family would be going after hocus-pocus mystics at a carnival. The Morrissey syndicate was under new management with Big Joe on trial for a list of crimes as long as his arm. The new boss, Vito Coretti, may be a relative unknown in the underworld, but a man didn't get into a position of such power by behaving irrationally. Taking out contracts on palm readers definitely fell into that category of behavior.
But why schedule the hit at a carnival? A public execution wouldn't be doing the family any favors, with their apparent new goal to stay under the radar and feign legitimacy as a corporation. Coretti had an appointment tomorrow to finalize a lucrative deal with a company he'd had to woo for months to convince he wasn't just another thug. The skittish CEO had finally agreed to the deal, so why would Coretti jeopardize it with a public execution only hours before the contracts were to be signed?
Cutter stopped suddenly, letting the crowd flow around him. Matt ducked around a balloon-animal vendor and tucked himself into the crowd around a face-painting booth in case his target looked behind him. But Cutter, so nicknamed due to his affection for switchblades, didn't glance back once. He was either cocky that he wasn't being followed, or already knew that he was. Matt was betting on the latter.
What was so special about this venue that the hit would have to be done here? Unless this was the only place they could get at the victim.
Dammit, who was the consultant? And what the hell were they doing here?
Matt hated not knowing. Especially because he couldn't shake the feeling that his superiors knew a helluva lot more than they were telling him.
He'd been recommended for the organized-crime task force which had fast track to detective written all over it, but no matter how many times he told himself this assignment had the potential to be a huge step forward in his career, it still felt off. Wrong.
All he had to do was tail Coretti's hit man, identify his intended target and prevent the hit. By the end of the night the consultant should be in protective custody and Cutter should be turning state's evidence against his boss.
Matt knew he wasn't the only one working the carnival, but the others would be watching him to see how he handled the situation as much as they would be watching the perp. One big practical exam. No pressure.
Hopefully they hadn't been watching closely enough to see the boner he had gotten when the Caribbean girl was stroking her fingers across his palm and purring at him about his future.
Matt shook his head to clear her from it as Cutter ducked around to the far side of the Ferris wheel and out of sight. He quickened his pace and slipped silently into the shadows behind the massive, grinding machinery block just in time to see the hit man yank out a cell phone and begin jabbing buttons on it with sharp, frustrated gestures. He definitely isn't calling to say the job is complete.
Cutter spoke too quietly for Matt to make out his words over the clanking of the Ferris wheel and the general din of the revelers beyond it. He couldn't move closer without exposing himself and giving up his position. Tucked away in the shadows, he was out of view with a clear line of sight. His target could walk right past him and unless he looked directly into the shadows around the engine that drove the Ferris wheel, he would never spot Matt lurking there. So Matt stayed put, trying to read Cutter's body language to glean some indication of what instructions he was being given now that his target had proved elusive.
Cutter nodded along with whatever was being told to him, apparently having missed that day in kindergarten when they explained that people speaking to you on phones can't see you nod. Whatever instructions he was being given, he was agreeable, though he didn't look any less tense. Matt had a hunch the hit was not being called off, and as the fortune teller had reminded him, his hunches were always right.
He hadn't missed his chance to nail Cutter.
The assassin flipped the phone shut, stowing it in his pocket, and Matt rose up on the balls of his feet, getting ready to move again.
Then chaos stepped in---bangle bracelets jangling.
Chapter Three---Palmistry to the Rescue!
Ronna's panic level reached a new high when Matt's sandy head disappeared around the back of the Ferris wheel. The image of the gears of the Ferris wheel splattered with blood replayed vividly in her mind's eye. The crowds swarmed around her, and her heart thudded loudly in her ears. He was going to be killed, and she couldn't get to him.
Why were there so many people at the damn carnival? And why were they all moving at an excruciating shuffle pace? Didn't they realize while they plodded along forming the impenetrable mass of a human herd, the man she was meant to spend the rest of her life with, who was going to give her adorable green-eyed babies and make her laugh until she was ninety-two and too senile to get his jokes anymore, was in peril at this very moment behind the Ferris wheel? So why they the hell weren't they moving faster?
Ronna pushed her way through the wall of bodies, too afraid of what might be happening to Matt to toss off apologies as people around her protested her shoving and stomping on feet.
She had to get to him.
Not that she'd be much help if she did. Touch-reading was hardly a super-power capable of stopping a speeding bullet, but she was sure she could save him if she was just there with him. He was the love of her life, or at least he would be, and she wasn't about to let some carnie thug off him behind the Ferris wheel.
A pocket opened up in the crowd between her and the Ferris wheel, and Ronna sprinted forward, running full tilt around the side of the ride and into the heavy shadows behind it, half expecting to stumble over Matt's lifeless form. In the moment it took for her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness after the spinning strobes of the carnival, she tried to remember how to breathe, gulping in oxygen. She squinted into the dark, one hand pressed over her drumming heart as a figure materialized out of the shadows in front of her.
"Matt!"
Thank God. Ronna took two running steps forward.
The man in front of her turned toward her. Something was wrong. Ronna slammed on the brakes, her sandals skidding on the sticky asphalt. The form in front of her was too heavyset to be the tall, lean Officer Holloway.
"I-I'm sorry," she stammered. "I thought I saw someone come back here."
As soon as the words left her lips, Ronna could have kicked herself. He was probably a Ferris wheel operator. If he found Matt skulking back here, the future love of her life would get in trouble with the carnival operators. Which was better than his blood splashing all over the gears, but still...
"You know, I didn't see anyone," Ronna said quickly. A second figure shifted in the shadows to her left. She knew him as soon as he moved. Matt. He was okay. Hiding, which, yeah, was kinda weird, but totally okay. She'd been panicking over nothing. "Nobody here!" she sing-songed to the shadow man, bypassing subtle and going straight to obnoxiously Cinderella-cheerful. "Nobody at all."
She tossed the shadowy Ferris wheel operator a loopy smile. He didn't say much for a carnie. She still couldn't make him out, but he didn't seem familiar. She spent most of her time at the carnival in her booth, but she knew most of the regular operators at least on sight.
He reached toward her, waving something metallic, and Ronna's vision from Matt's touch replayed in her mind.
Oh crap, is that a gun?
"Get down!"
The shout came from her left. Matt surged into the open, a gun of his own braced between his hands. Ronna didn't think. And she didn't obey. In that split second in the shadow of the Ferris wheel with two armed-and-dangerous men, she couldn't see anything past the nightmare vision in her mind of Matt's gorgeous eyes, wide with horror and shock, in a face sprayed with blood. She dove toward him, slamming him to the ground in a tackle worthy of an NFL All Star. The spit of a silencer and the answering deafening report of an unsilenced gun split the shadows.
Matt grunted as he hit the ground and her weight hit him. Footsteps pounded the dirt nearby, and he rolled, pinning her protectively beneath his body as he twisted to scan the darkness around them, his gun trained on the spot where the gunman had stood.
The shadows were empty of crazy gun-wielding Ferris wheel operators now, but Matt's body didn't relax. He stayed tense above her.
Tense and whole. He's alive.
There wasn't any moisture where her front was pressed against his, no gushing fluids to indicate excessive bleeding from a mortal wound, but she ran her hands over his torso just to be safe, checking for bullet holes. When her hands hampered his range of movement with the gun he was still pointing into the darker shadows, he knocked them out of his way.
"Lie still," he snapped, clearly not appreciating her life-saving tackle or her continued concern for his well-being. He dug into his pocket, shifting his weight so he wasn't pressing her down into the filthy ground, but still shielding her as he lifted his cell phone, punched a number in with his thumb and pressed it to his ear, never taking his eyes off the shadows or lowering his gun.
She was close enough to hear the bleeping tone of a dropped call.
Matt swore and dialed again, snarling another obscenity when the call failed a second time. "Is it too much to ask for a fucking signal?"
Ronna couldn't make herself care about crappy cell providers. "You're alive."
"Of course I'm alive. You could have gotten yourself killed. What the hell were you thinking?"
"I saved your life," Ronna explained patiently. "I ruined his shot."
"You ruined my shot." Matt shoved his phone back into his pocket. "Not to mention my chances of getting a permanent spot on the task force. Damn it." He rose to a crouch, still alertly surveying the area.
Ronna sat up as well, taking stock of her now-filthy Madame Ramona getup. There was no fabric on earth capable of withstanding being ground into popcorn, cotton-candy residue and Ferris wheel grease and coming out unscathed. Her entire outfit would have to be burned when she got home to avoid contaminating the rest of her closet.
"What the hell do you think you're doing back here?" Matt straightened and helped her---none too gently---to her feet.
He would probably react badly if she told him she had envisioned his death and followed him out of her booth to protect him from a horrific Ferris wheel-related death. He didn't seem to be in a very receptive mood.
"You left your ring in my booth," she lied, hiding her hand in her skirts as she worked her grandmother's wide gold band off her thumb and rolled it into her palm. She held it out to him with her most dazzlingly innocent smile. "I thought you'd want it back."
He didn't spare the ring a glance. "It isn't mine. I don't wear jewelry."
"Were you following that guy?" she asked, as if she weren't perfectly aware that he had been stalking the maniacal gun-toting carnie.
Matt shot her a glare, grabbed her arm and began edging them both back toward the well-lit main causeway crowds, peering suspiciously into every shadow along the way. "It doesn't concern you."
Ronna dug in her heels. "Excuse me? I just saved your life. That man shot at us. I think that entitles me to a little explanation."
"You aren't entitled to shit. You should have stayed out of it."
"I'm in it now," Ronna protested. "Shouldn't I at least know what I'm in?"
"No. Come on. I need to call this in."
He hauled her forward another few feet, his hackles as high as a Rottweiler's. Ronna looked back at the site of the shootout, hoping for some sign that she had changed the future and Matt was now safe. All she saw was a metallic gleam on the ground where the crazy carnie had stood, illuminated by a reflection off the giant Ferris wheel.
"Matt?"
"You can apologize later."
She could apologize for saving his life?
It was tempting, but Ronna didn't kick him. She should get a medal for not walloping him in the shins. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest, including the one he was still using to try to drag her toward the causeway.
"There's something on the ground over there."
Matt stopped dragging, his eyes flicking in the direction she pointed. "Dammit." Scanning the rest of the area, he shoved her back against the enormous block that covered the Ferris wheel's engine. "Stay here. Don't touch anything."
Somebody sure likes giving orders. Ronna watched, twirling her grandmother's ring between her fingers, as Matt skulked over to the gleam on the ground. He hunkered down, pulling an old-fashioned handkerchief out of his back pocket to pick it up. Funny, she hadn't pegged him as the handkerchief type.
"Is that his gun?"
"Stay where you are." He didn't look up, carefully wrapping the gun in the handkerchief and tucking it into his jacket pocket. Then he frowned. "Is that---?" He bent low, practically pressing his nose to the sticky gunk on the ground. While Ronna fantasized about a full-body disinfectant bath, Matt straightened, a viciously satisfied grin on his face. "Looks like I hit him after all."
"You shot him?" Relief released every muscle she hadn't realized she was clenching. That must have been the blood she saw on the Ferris wheel. Matt may never have been in any danger. But if that was the case, why had it been his face she had seen covered in blood?
"Probably just grazed him. There isn't enough blood for a serious injury."
"He ran away pretty fast. Maybe he just didn't have enough time to bleed on the scene properly. He might be off somewhere bleeding to death as we speak," she said cheerfully.
Matt gave his short, startled burst of laughter. "You're pretty bloodthirsty for a palm reader."
"He shot at you." Of course she wanted him to bleed. No one got a free pass for shooting at the man she was going to marry.
He came to stand beside her again, still in super-cop, high-alert mode, but now he studied her face in the dim light, shaking his head at whatever he saw there. "Who are you?"
"I'm Ronna."
Somehow she hit the brakes before she introduced herself as the mother of his unborn children.
"Well, Ronna, the next time you feel like running into the middle of a gunfight, refrain. Okay?" His tone was as dismissive as the indulgent little smile he gave her. "Come on. Let's get you back to your booth so I can call this in. We'll need your statement."
Her statement.
He was thinking of her as a witness, a fortune teller who'd gotten in the way. How could he not see that she was the love of his life? That she was the girl who would literally throw herself in front of a bullet for him?
But of course he wouldn't see.
Her entire life she'd been surrounded by people who didn't see the things she did, but worse they didn't see her. Why should he be any different?
She didn't exactly go around telling everyone she met she was a human polygraph machine, so she couldn't blame them when they treated her like a kooky fake psychic. And the few people she had told, the ones who actually believed her...it hadn't been any better with them.
People liked their secrets. And they didn't particularly like her once they discovered they couldn't keep any from her.
People tended to react badly when their silent resentments weren't so silent anymore. Ronna had learned to make herself an open book because she saw the uncomfortable friction between what people thought and what they showed to the world---but most people didn't want that openness. Especially not if they couldn't escape it.
Ronna couldn't turn off her ability, so she couldn't help but see the truth.
Most people, she'd learned, didn't want that exposure of their darker selves, didn't want to be forced to admit and embrace their less flattering attributes---the ones society had taught them to mask with fake smiles.
It was probably foolish optimism that Ronna still believed she would ever find someone to spend her life with who would want to share that openness with her. Someone who would want a life devoid of any attempts at subterfuge and deception.
It was definitely foolish optimism to believe that man was standing right in front of her.
But she did believe. Ronna couldn't escape the hope that Matt's hunches, his own specialness, would make him more open to hers.
She had to tell him the truth, the whole truth, about her.
He was already four steps ahead of her, moving toward the causeway crowds.
"Matt, wait." Her sandals made a weird suctiony thwapping noise on the pavement as she ran to catch him. "I knew this wasn't your ring."
"What's that?" he asked absently, not even turning to look at her, his eyes avidly scanning the crowd ahead.
"I knew you hadn't left your ring. I followed you because I---" She swallowed nervously, her throat suddenly parched, but forced herself to go on. "I see things. In people." God, that sounded idiotic. "Like visions. And sometimes I see the future---" Green-eyed babies. "And I saw that you were in danger so I followed you. And you were. And I saved your life because---" Oh, c'mon, Ronna, just effing say it already. "Because we're meant to be together. Like together."
His head turned slowly in her direction, his face expressionless and intent. Did he believe her? How could he not? He had to, didn't he? It was his life she'd seen too. He had to be the one who would understand or she wouldn't have seen that.
Would she?
"Let me see if I have this straight. You came after me to save my life because you see the future and I'm destined to be with you?"
"Pretty much."
Now was probably not the time to mention the twins.
His expression changed minutely, a tightening around his lips, a slight narrowing of his eyes, and Ronna realized he wasn't intent. He was angry.
No.
"Listen, lady. That's real cute, and maybe, under other circumstances, I would be flattered, but I'm a police officer and you're in the way of---I can't tell you what you're in the way of, but trust me when I say I am in no mood for this bullshit right now."
"It isn't bullshit---"
"You need to go back to your little tent thing---"
"Booth."
"I don't care what the hell you call it. Go there. Leave me alone so I can do my fucking job. Are we clear?"
He didn't wait for an answer, just plowed into the crowd.
Ronna gaped after him. No. How could she have been so wrong? He was supposed to be The One. He was The One. She was sure of it.
But he hadn't figured out they were meant to be together yet. If he disappeared into the night, would he ever remember her? Would he realize his entire future happiness depended on her?
She had to show him.
Ronna elbowed her way into the crowd, shoving forward with single-minded focus that had people swearing in her wake.
"Matt!"
He half-turned to glower at her, and she threw caution to the wind and her arms around his neck.
She landed a kiss on his mouth that was as enthusiastic as it was inexperienced.
She hadn't had much practice kissing. When you can pull people's thoughts through a touch, mouth-to-mouth contact was a whole new kind of intimacy. She'd avoided it when possible and never once instigated it. Until now.
The touch seared through her. His surprise blared into her mind, chased in quick succession by pleasure, suspicion, caution and need. Is she a decoy? Working with the perp? Then his doubts were flattened under a Mack truck of lust. He opened his mouth over hers almost without thinking. God, the taste of her. He liked when she stroked her tongue across his.
The sound of her hum of pleasure nearly drove him out of his senses.
Ronna had already lost hers completely.
The masses of carnival goers hurried around them, but nothing existed to her but Matt. The combined, amplified feelings, his and hers, swamped her in a dizzying rush. Why had she avoided this? It was heaven.
Heaven, right up until the moment he jerked away, setting her back from him so abruptly she swayed in reaction to the loss of his touch and the lingering weight of his want inside her mind.
"I can't be distracted right now," he said, wiping his arm across his mouth in a manner that she probably would have found much more insulting if her brain were actually functioning. "Go back to your booth," he ordered. The crowd behind her surged and jostled her. She stumbled forward and Matt caught her, both hands bracing her upper arms, but he quickly set her away. "If you stop me again, I'll..." He trailed off, shaking his head, but Ronna had seen enough of his mind to know what he was thinking.
He thought she'd tackled him to help his target get away, that she had kissed him to give her accomplice more time, but he couldn't make himself believe it enough to arrest her for it. He told himself she was just a nuisance who didn't know any better, which hurt almost as badly as his suspicions.
Ronna swallowed around a knot that had suddenly formed in her throat, feeling the hot press of tears behind her eyes.
It hadn't occurred to her that he wouldn't want her, that he wouldn't know as soon as they kissed the way she had known as soon as they touched. They were meant to be together.
"I have to go."
And he was walking away.
"Matt." His name was a protest, barely audible under the suffocating weight of her disappointment and the noise of the crowd as it flowed around them.
"Go back to your booth, Ronna."
Then he was gone.
Chapter Four---Men Are Pigs
Ronna didn't cry on her way back to her booth. She was too stunned by his rejection to cry.
He was supposed to want her. That was the way fate was supposed to work. How could he not know that? What kind of an ignorant nonbeliever had fate stuck her with, anyway? Didn't he realize they were destined to fall in love and make little green-eyed caramel-skinned babies? What was his problem?
Ronna wove her way through the crowd, moving slowly and going with the flow as much now as she had pushed and run before. There was no love of her life to save now. He didn't want to be the love of her life anyway. The pig.
She just wanted to be alone, but instead she was shoved along on a tide of people, taking the long way back because she lacked the energy to fight for a direct path.
At least the aisle where she had her booth wasn't as congested.
That part of the carnival cleared out considerably as the hour grew later. The traffic through her booth usually increased after sundown as people grew more enamored of the mystical in the moonlight, but as the night progressed the crowds filtered toward the main event pavilion on the opposite end of the field for the live concerts. By now the area around her booth was all but abandoned, and her neighbors were closing up for the night.
Ronna frowned as she approached her booth, realizing she hadn't even thrown up her Be Back in a Moment sign before sprinting after Matt, the ungrateful pig. Her tip jar had probably been emptied by juvenile delinquents within five minutes of her departure, she thought cynically, drained of her habitual optimism.
She pushed back her curtain and stepped into the small booth that was her carnival home, surprised to find a customer seated on the stool with his back to the door, waiting for her. She wanted nothing more than to toss the customer out, close up for the night and wallow in her misery alone, but maybe a reading would perk her up. She refused to let Matt ruin her entire night.
Plastering on her brightest, fakest smile, she came around the edge of the table to her stool. "Good evening. I'm so sorry to keep you waiting," she said smoothly, using the Madame Ramona accent. She fluffed her filthy skirts around her as she settled herself. "I hope you haven't been here long."
Her eyes flicked automatically to the tip jar. Amazingly, it was still full. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad night after all.
"Not long."
Ronna looked up at the gravelly voice, taking her first good look at her customer. He was a large man, swarthy, with the sort of broad features that always made her think of typecasting for hired muscle in action movies, but Ronna had touched too many hands and found teddy bears beneath scary shells to trust in appearances.
She placed her hands on the table palm up, smiling invitingly and waiting for him to offer his for a reading.
He extended his left hand, just as Matt had. Most people instinctively gave her their dominant hand, but perhaps he was a leftie. Automatically her eyes flicked to his right hand, but he had hidden it beneath the table. As soon as her fingers brushed the skin of his left hand, she knew why.
He kills with his right hand.
Ronna jerked her hands back at the jolt that traveled from his hands to hers, a lightning bolt of static electricity accompanied by gruesome images. Slashed faces, gashes on wrists and throats, thin liquid streams of blood pulsing, squirting. He loves his work.
Ronna threw herself backwards, shoving away from the table and knocking over her stool. The killer---Cutter, his name is Cutter---lunged across the table. His fist closed over her wrist, and he yanked her forward until her hips bumped the precarious table that was all that separated them, rocking it toward him. Her tip jar crashed onto the floor, the coins splattering haphazardly.
He didn't seem to notice or care that he was literally upsetting her orderly little world. "I've been looking for you, girl."
Through his iron hold on her wrist, carnage flashed across her mind's eye in a nauseating rush. She'd never before touched a killer. His every sin was crowding for space in her mind, murder, torture, a smorgasbord of pain and violence.
Ronna couldn't breathe past the piano someone had dropped on her chest. She couldn't think through the ugly fog.
Get away. Run. Matt. Find Matt.
She gasped, twisting wildly in his grip. Cutter's hand was wet and hers slipped loose. She jerked back quickly and tripped over the fallen stool, landing in a tangle of filthy fabric and limbs on the floor.
She crab-walked backward, knocking the stool out of the way with her arm, and looked around frantically, searching for some escape even though she knew very well the murderer stood between her and the only door.
He must have known it as well. He made no move to come after her. Instead, he loomed on the other side of the table, wearing a malicious smile rich with his satisfaction at her terror. In his left hand, a pearl-handled switchblade flicked open, closed, open, closed. A hypnotic flashing dance of pearl and steel.
"Why?" It was the only word chasing itself around the confusion of her mind. Crouched defensively on the floor, Ronna rubbed her wrist where he'd bruised her, her fingers coming away bloody.
Was she bleeding? Had he cut her?
No. He was bleeding.
Realization hit her hard, crashing into her until she felt stupid for not seeing instantly.
Matt had shot him. This was the man who had been waiting with the gun behind the Ferris wheel. But he hadn't been waiting for Matt.
Matt's life hadn't been in danger for a moment. It wasn't his blood that was splattered all over his face, all over the gears of the Ferris wheel. It wasn't his own death that had brought such shocked horror to his green eyes.
All along, it had been her.
The obstacle to their perfect life together had never been Matt.
The switchblade flashed open and shut. I'm going to die.
Chapter Five---Second Thoughts & Psychopaths
In defiance of his better judgment, Matt found himself back in front of Ronna's booth. He'd left the task-force crime-scene team behind the Ferris wheel, separated from the other task-force members circling the main event pavilion searching for signs of Cutter, and beelined back to Ronna.
It was just because he needed her statement.
It had nothing to do with the mind-numbing kiss. The kiss that shouldn't have happened and shouldn't have affected him at all. He sure as hell shouldn't still be able to taste her, the lingering tease of her vaguely raspberry flavor haunting him.
Matt shook the thought of her out of his head. Cutter. He was here for Cutter. But the assassin had left no blood trail. No trace. And as much as Matt tried to focus on his duty and track his wounded target, he couldn't seem to escape the feeling that he had missed something crucial.
His mind kept circling back to the moment when Ronna rushed around the side of the Ferris wheel into Cutter's sights.
Matt was certain Cutter hadn't been able to see him waiting there in the shadows, but still he had drawn his gun. He'd pulled his weapon when the only person he could see was Ronna.
Cutter was a pro. Calm and collected---and not yet in prison for life. A man didn't attain those credentials by firing at unarmed, innocent women.
If Ronna had been a bystander, Cutter would have no reason to threaten her. She hadn't caught him doing anything incriminating. If she was his accomplice, then why fire at her? Unless the goal had been to let her save Matt---which was a lot of effort and risk just to earn his gratitude.
The only other option, the one that haunted him, was the disturbing possibility that somehow Ronna, a carnival palm reader, was the consultant Cutter had come for. Which meant she was in danger.
Matt's conscience wouldn't let him ignore the possibility, however far-fetched, that an organized crime family had taken out a hit on one helpless, harmless palm reader.
And he needed her statement anyway---though technically he should let an officer who wasn't also the only other witness collect it.
The gauzy curtain was mostly drawn on Madame Ramona's Palm Readings. Through it Matt could see the outline of a figure inside the booth. A figure far too large to be Ronna.
His hand went instinctively to his sidearm before doubt flashed across his mind, reminding him that the thug and the palm reader might be in this together. He hesitated, inching closer and straining to hear what was being said inside the small booth. Cutter's voice was low, and Matt could only hear one word in ten.
"Mr. Coretti appreciates your cooperation...important agreement...hate to disappoint Mr. Coretti...alert the police..."
She's working with him. What other explanation was there for Coretti to be appreciating her cooperation?
Matt's disappointment stabbed him in the stomach.
There was no reason he should care so much about a girl he'd just met. She'd probably been working with Coretti for months, planning the entire ruse, but Matt still felt a piercing sense of betrayal.
He hadn't wanted her to be on the shady side of the law. Sure, it was naïve, but he'd wanted that kiss to be real. To mean something.
Matt slid his weapon from his holster, running through possible strategies now that he had two targets rather than just one. He hadn't heard Ronna's voice yet, but she had to be in there, hidden by the hit man's bulk.
If he was even a hit man.
What if the entire hit had been a ruse designed to draw out the task force?
Had his bosses known this wasn't a straightforward assignment? Was that why the usual guys were out of sight and they were using him instead? New blood on the front lines so he would be the one to take the fall? So they wouldn't burn any of their usual personnel by having them IDed by Cutter?
The entire operation seemed much more ominous than a simple test.
Matt's jaw locked as betrayal battered him from all sides. Even his own people were probably using and manipulating him. The feeling made his stomach roil. And this was what he had to look forward to if he got the job. A lifetime of this bilious twisting in his gut. Paranoia. Second-guessing. Deception.
A nightmare.
Matt flexed his hands around the grip of his gun.
He'd done the job. He'd made a damn target of himself like they wanted. Now he'd see it through. He would arrest Cutter and his little accomplice just as soon as he was sure she was the consultant the hit man had been sent to make contact with.
Matt leaned against the side of her booth, concealed from the hit man's view, and waited for his moment.
"I don't understand," Ronna protested, though she understood perfectly. She needed to buy some time for the cavalry she prayed was on its way. Please, Matt, get here soon. "What does Mr. Coretti have to do with the carnival?"
Beneath the concealing volume of her layered skirts, Ronna drew her legs up, readying to spring toward safety the moment the opportunity presented itself. Provided she'd be able to spring. She was shaking like shutters in a hurricane from the force of the adrenaline surging through her veins, and she wasn't entirely sure her body would obey her mind when fight came to flight.
"Nothing to do with the carnival," Cutter growled, weaving the blade back and forth to catch the low light from the lamp in hypnotic flashes. "All you need to remember is that Mr. Coretti is a fine, upstanding businessman. That's what you're going to say tomorrow when that fuck-wit Brenden Henderson asks you to read him, isn't it? A fine, upstanding citizen. Get it? No matter what you feel or see or whatever the fuck happens when you do your hocus-pocus bullshit, you say 'Vito Coretti is a fine, upstanding businessman.'"
Ronna could spot a nonbeliever a mile off. "You don't believe I can really read him. Why does it matter what I say?"
"Because Henderson believes in your bullshit and Henderson needs to believe in Mr. Coretti. Get it? So you're going to cooperate and be a good girl and no one is going to get hurt. Isn't that right, missy?"
"I don't want anyone to get hurt."
Especially not her. Or Matt. Cutter getting hurt would be okay.
"Neither do I," Cutter purred, though his smile made the words a lie, sending icy chills down her spine. "And I'd sure hate to have to pay you another visit if I heard you'd shot off your mouth about our little agreement."
"Yeah, I'd hate that too."
"You sure would." His slow, toothy smile added an edge to the threat. The man made alligators look cuddly.
"So we have an agreement. You go on like nothing has happened---no alerting the police, missy---and tell the world how honorable Mr. Coretti is, and I won't have to slice open that pretty little face of yours."
It wasn't a question, but Ronna nodded readily. Anything to get him to leave. He must have sensed her insincerity, because he came around the fabric-draped table. Ronna shrank back. Where was a trap door when you needed one? He loomed above her, so close he was stepping on the edge of her skirt.
He wouldn't hurt her tonight---if she was beat up it would look bad at the reading, wouldn't it? But even knowing she was as safe as a person could be while sitting in a room with Cutter, she couldn't stop remembering the sickening kaleidoscope of his thoughts.
He bent toward her, extending the blade like another man might offer his hand to a timid dog to sniff. Ronna cringed, folding herself away from him as far as possible, but he kept coming until the blade slipped under her chin, tipping it up with gentle taps like a lover raising her face for a kiss. She held perfectly still, the blade cold against the soft skin on the underside of her chin, too frightened to tremble.
"I think I need you to promise you aren't going to double-cross my good friend Mr. Coretti," he whispered. "I think I need you to swear on the neck of that pretty-boy cop boyfriend of yours who's been following me around all night."
Boyfriend. Had he seen their kiss? The thought was a violation in itself.
Please, Matt, get here soon. "I promise," she mumbled, moving her jaw as little as possible to avoid cutting herself on the knife that held her face up to him. "I swear it."
"Good girl."
He held her there, suspended on the edge of his knife, drinking in her fear for several long, excruciating seconds. Then, with a reluctant sigh as if he were being denied a treat, he deftly flipped the switchblade closed and tucked it out of sight.
Ronna wasn't fool enough to let herself breathe easy. He'd put it away in a heartbeat. He could have it out again just as quickly.
Cutter smiled his cold alligator smile and straightened, lumbering back a few steps until he leaned against the tiny table.
Leave, leave, please God, just leave. She tried to will him gone. He had what he had come for. She had agreed. But still he didn't move, lapping up her fear.
"You're a pretty little thing, aren't you?"
Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. Ronna's mind blanked except for the jabbering of her fear. The last thing she needed was this monster thinking she was a shiny new toy.
Matt, where are you?
She could scream. The booths weren't anything near soundproofed. The vendors nearby would hear her even if the customers had cleared out.
If there was anyone in the booths around her. She'd completely lost her ability to gauge time. How long had he been in here with her? It felt like hours even though she knew it couldn't be.
No. If she screamed, help would come.
But it would be too late. He was close and strong and armed. She'd be bleeding to death, her throat split open, her assailant running out into the night.
She couldn't call for help. She couldn't get away. She couldn't do anything.
And Cutter knew it. He wallowed in it.
"What did you see when you read me, pretty girl? Did you like touching me?"
He liked to hurt. He liked the control of inflicting pain and fear, but he was frightened too. Frightened of Vito Coretti, of being replaced by a younger, crazier model, of falling out of favor, losing the trust of suspicious men and having his own work done to him one night. His mind was a zoo of insecurities, but when he was the cutter, he was in control.
She couldn't tell him she had hated touching him. That it had made her feel sick. He would only make her do it again. She couldn't tell him that she hadn't. She wasn't that good a liar. So she said nothing. And he smiled. The teeth were straight, the lips full, the curve pleasant, but to Ronna it was a nightmare vision. Freddy Krueger, eat your heart out.
Leave, she urged silently. Leave me alone.
Still he stood there. Still he smiled.
Chapter Six---Carnie Deathmatch
It had gone quiet inside the booth.
Cutter moved out of Matt's line of sight, crouching down in front of the table. Matt couldn't see him without standing directly in front of the opening in the curtain and being seen himself. Ronna had to be on the floor in front of Cutter, which didn't make sense if they were in collusion together, but he couldn't escape the evidence in the words. Agreement. Cooperation.
Still, his instincts pushed back against the words, the secretive sweetness of her smile casting his assumptions in shades of doubt. What if she was in trouble?
He should wait. He knew he should wait. If Ronna wasn't the consultant, Cutter would come out of Ronna's booth and lead him to the real target. If he stormed inside, all hope of identifying the mysterious consultant would be gone and with it any chance of securing a permanent position with a team he was no longer sure he trusted.
Matt waited for some sign, some indication that he was doing the right thing, but as the seconds ticked past, the feeling that Ronna was in danger, that he needed to get inside that booth and save her, rose in him.
Shit. His white-knight act was rusty as all hell.
The bells on the curtain jangled madly, announcing his presence with a tinkling riot. "Police! Hands in the air!"
Cutter wasn't into following directions. He whirled, throwing the table at Matt. The pedestal caught him across the legs and he went down, buried under the wood and a mountain of fabric.
Matt kept his grip on the gun but couldn't risk a shot in such close quarters with Ronna possibly in the line of fire. He kicked the table off his legs and rolled to reacquire his target, still tangled in the swath of colorful fabric that had draped it. Cutter was on him before he could raise the gun, an open blade flashing in his hand. The knife slashed down toward his throat.
Matt twisted and raised his arms in instinctive defense, the blade slicing into the flesh of his forearm. The wound surprised him more than it hurt, but he had no time to register the shock. Cutter's blade was swinging toward him again, a swift, deadly arc.
"Matt! No!"
A compact figure covered in more fabric than sense slammed into the pair of them.
The force of Ronna's intervention knocked both the knife and the gun loose, and they skittered across the dirty floor to the far edges of the booth. Cutter swung to grab her, but she wriggled out of his grasp, a frenzy of motion, twisting, kicking, biting, hitting and scratching every inch of him she could reach. Matt's arms were pinned by the struggling pair. Her knee drove into his ribs, but most of her haphazard blows landed on Cutter.
Still, her frantic flailing wasn't having the desired effect. The hit man wasn't even fazed.
Then her nails raked down Cutter's cheek and he snarled. He dove at the rainbow-hued nuisance, his fist swinging toward the delicate bones of her face. Matt, his arms freed by the sudden movement, lurched up and caught Cutter's arm in a hammerlock before his fist could land.
Ronna rolled away, scrambling out of reach. She froze in a crouch at the door, wide-eyed and breathing fast.
"Run, dammit!" Matt shouted, just as Cutter's elbow rammed back toward his face.
The bells at her doorway chimed as Cutter and Matt slammed to the ground again.
Ronna had taken a dozen running steps away from the booth before she realized she'd left Matt alone with a professional killer.
"Help!" She spun on her heel and stumbled back toward the booth where the man of her dreams---or at least her visions---was fighting for his life. Ronna sucked in the deepest breath her panic would allow and let loose her best horror-starlet scream.
The sound was sucked up into the night. Her only reply was the distant thrum of the bass vibrating through the air from the concert pavilion. No curious heads popped out of booths. No passersby ran to her aid. She couldn't even call nine-one-one because her cell phone was still in her bag underneath her table---or wherever it had been thrown in the struggle.
She could go for help, but Matt. He didn't have time to wait for reinforcements.
"Help!" she screamed until her throat was raw. Wasn't there security around here?
The booths around her were dark and locked up for the night. Dammit, when had it gotten so late? The carnival was a graveyard.
No. Not a graveyard. No one is going to die. Matt isn't going to die.
Ronna fisted her hands in her hair, willing her brain to stop spinning and work. What should she do? Matt had said to run. She had run. She could run for help, but it would take so long for that help to come and Matt needed help now. She couldn't just leave him there. She had to go back. Even if he was angry with her for returning. He could be as angry as he wanted as long as he was alive.
A weapon. She needed a weapon.
Ronna spun in a circle, scanning the area around her, the tightly locked booths, the bare packed-dirt aisle. "A knife, a gun, a club, something," she muttered aloud as she searched, each passing second sending stabs of desperation into her lungs, filling each new breath with sharp little needles.
A gunshot exploded inside Ronna's booth. An involuntary scream flew out of her mouth as she fell back two steps. The blood. Not Matt, it can't be Matt, please not Matt...
No longer caring that she didn't have a weapon, Ronna ran toward the sound of the shot. "Please." The word ripped raw from her throat, a stranger's plea. "Be okay, be okay, please, Matt, please."
The bells attached to her curtains jangled, the noise harsh against her ringing ears. A hand pushed aside the fabric barrier. A large, blunt hand. Ronna saw that hand and knew, but her mind fought the knowledge even as anguish slammed into her stomach like a mace.
Cutter stepped out of the booth.
"No."
She was made of denial. Only that word, no, was real.
Ronna staggered backwards but couldn't run. The threat of the large bloody man in front of her couldn't touch her through the suffocating weight of her grief. The sickly sweet carnival smell pressed cloyingly against her. The harsh fluorescent lights that shone down on the darkened carnival burned her eyes. The distant sounds of the late-night rides, the late-night revelers, were hollow echoes, fading into the distance, swallowed by the dull ringing in her ears. She felt everything and nothing, paralyzed and as if each molecule of her body were screaming for motion. Or just screaming. A silent, cellular hysteria.
Cutter reached for her. It didn't even occur to Ronna to run until his hand closed on her arm. He yanked her back toward the booth, and through her numbness, Ronna realized he was taking her there to kill her in private. The same way he'd killed Matt.
She had seen lives pass before her eyes for years. A casual touch, a brush of skin, a handshake. A thousand little lives, but she had never seen her own life flickering behind her eyes until Matt. It was as though she hadn't truly existed until that moment.
Now, only an hour later, she saw her life again in the touch of another, but this time the rough hand on the bare skin of her arm conjured images dark and bloody. Her death, passing before her eyes, filtered through the thoughts of her killer as he dragged her toward the booth.
His thoughts were poetic in their simplicity. No one had seen Cutter enter the booth. No one would see him haul Ronna back inside. No one would see him leave. By the time the police arrived on the scene, he would be long gone and the evidence would all point to a neat and tragic scenario. Murder-suicide. A domestic disturbance. So common, so tragic. No need to investigate further. Even if the murderer was once a cop. Such a stressful profession. Living so close to the edge, under such pressure. It was so easy to snap.
Ronna jerked back, digging in her heels. He was going to blame Matt for her death. The man who should have been the love of her life, whose loss dug into her soul and gouged out a piece, was going to become just another sad statistic, a cop gone bad, a jealous lover. She couldn't allow that.
"Help! Murderer!" Ronna began to fight, a last protest against futility, shouting and twisting in Cutter's iron grip.
He swung her around by his hold on her arm, whipping her in a tight little circle, her own momentum driving her jaw into the fist he held out. The blow stopped her cries abruptly, and she sagged in his hold as the world fogged and spun.
"It didn't have to be like this," he growled. "Everybody has to be a fucking hero."
"Obviously not a problem you're afflicted with," Ronna dragged herself through the fog to mumble.
The bastard laughed. "Yeah, guess not. Lucky me."
He was laughing. He had just killed the love of her life and he was laughing. Rage coalesced in her heart, sending pulses of vicious anger into her veins with every heartbeat.
Ronna dropped all of her weight on him. She wasn't heavy enough to take him down, but the sudden move startled him enough to loosen his grip on her. She drove her heel into his instep, and he released his hold on her completely.
She ran, screaming like a banshee, but only made it half a dozen steps before a hand closed in her hair, jerking her off her feet. She clutched his wrist with both hands, trying to take some of her weight off her scalp. His other arm wrapped around her throat, and Ronna forgot about the pain in her head as she fought for breath.
"You had to go and make me angry, didn't you? Shame on you, little girl."
Ronna dug her nails into the arm at her throat and kicked back, but he had braced his legs wide and her feet just swung wildly in the air.
Pressure built in her chest. Her vision began to go black, but the images pouring into her from Cutter stayed as vivid and bright as ever. She was going to die with the thoughts of a murderer clouding her brain, corrupting her soul. In the darkness of her helplessness, one thought swam through the nightmare.
Matt. She clung to the memory of those dark-lashed green eyes as the rest of the world collapsed around her. Matt, help me.
Chapter Seven---Showdown at the O.K. Carnival
Matt came to with the metallic tang of blood in his mouth and a wet trickle rolling down his throat. He choked and rolled to his side, coughing and spitting out a stream of blood. His nose felt like it had swollen to five times its normal size. His own blood drained down the back of his throat and poured across his face. He didn't try to touch the source of the pain. He didn't need to in order to know his nose was crushed, broken in at least two places.
He blearily remembered getting a shot off but knew it had gone wide. Then the butt of his own gun had rammed into his face, and the world had snapped to black. Why had Cutter just left him here? Why not finish him off? It wouldn't have taken more than a second to pull the gun from his limp grasp and fire a few shots into his head. Knives were Cutter's weapon of choice, but that was just sloppy. Careless. Had he been in that much of a hurry, that reckless in his need to pursue Ronna?
Ronna.
Matt shoved to his feet, stumbling like a drunk but chased by a horrifying urgency. How long had he been out? The weight of his gun reminded him that he still held it. Ignoring knuckles that were already beginning to swell and the stiffness in his fingers, he raised the gun to the ready as he shoved through the jangling curtains.
Half expecting to see Ronna's body mangled on the ground, he staggered to a stop at the sight that crossed his blurry vision. She dangled from the arm barred across her throat, motionless save for the fingers clawing at the arm that held her.
An icy calm flowed through Matt. He raised his gun even though the target areas on Cutter were blocked by Ronna's body. "She dies, you die," he vowed flatly.
Ronna's eyes flew open at the sound of his voice, locking on him with something that might have been relief. Don't get ahead of yourself, honey. We aren't out of the woods yet.
Cutter lowered her to the ground, easing his arm away from her throat enough to allow her to cough and draw in a jagged breath. He didn't release her though. Instead, he huddled his large body behind her small frame and pulled a switchblade from his pocket, flipping it open and raising it to rest against Ronna's cheek.
"Looks like we have ourselves a Mexican standoff," Cutter said in a disturbingly cheerful tone.
Matt didn't have a clear target, but he wasn't about to let Cutter walk away with Ronna, and if he touched a hair on her head, he was going down in a hail of bullets.
If the task force hadn't completely abandoned him, now would be a hell of a time for reinforcements to arrive, but no agents poured out of nearby booths to come to his aid. For all the crowds just an hour earlier, this part of the carnival was deserted now, an eerily festive ghost town.
"What do you want, Cutter?" Matt called, easing subtly to the side to try to get a better angle.
"What do I want?" Cutter barked with a laugh. "I want you to mind your own fucking business."
Ronna stared straight into Matt's eyes, her own wide and oddly blank as she maintained a white-knuckled grip on the arm that held her. "He didn't come to kill me," she explained, her voice hoarse and strangely flat. "He was supposed to scare me into cooperating. He's not allowed to kill me. It would look too suspicious. But he doesn't see another option. You ruined everything. He's scared."
"Shut up!" Cutter shouted, shaking her roughly, but Ronna's eerie monotone continued.
"He's failing them. It isn't the first time. He's failed them before. With Singer and Martelli."
The hand holding the knife to Ronna's face shook. "You can't know that. No one knows that."
"Things have been bad since Big Joe left. Coretti does things differently. Doesn't trust anyone. Doesn't trust Cutter. He's on the outside now. Any day they could decide he's expendable. Too dangerous, too volatile. He knows too much."
"Shut up, you crazy bitch!" Cutter screamed, nicking Ronna's cheek ever so slightly with the blade so that a drop of blood formed like a tear on her face. Matt considered adding his urging to Cutter's that she shut up. Whatever the hell Ronna was doing, it wasn't helping the situation, but she didn't look like she would hear him. Her face was blank, like she was lost in a trance. She hadn't even reacted to the knife slicing into her cheek.
Matt remembered with a jolt what she'd told him earlier. Sensing things from people. Truth. Futures. It was real. She's for real.
"He wants to kill you," she continued doggedly. "Maybe if he kills you, I'll do what they want me to. I'll tell Henderson that Coretti is a saint. Cutter will be rewarded. He'll get the respect he deserves." Ronna blinked rapidly, like someone waking from a dream and her eyes focused on Matt's again. "Give him what he deserves."
Matt sighted down the barrel of his gun, ready for any shot that presented itself, but Cutter wasn't giving him a target. In spite of his reaction to Ronna's rant, he hadn't poked his head out from behind her once. They were exactly where they had been. At an impasse.
Every hostage scene from every movie Ronna had ever seen battled for dominance with Cutter's frantic memories in her mind. The "shoot the hostage" moment from Speed stuck out in Technicolor detail, but as much as she trusted Matt, she wasn't about to suggest that particular brand of insanity. She could have a dozen bullet holes through her and Cutter would still hold her up like a human shield. No, there had to be some other way.
Cutter was panicking. His body was calm, but his mind was chaos. Through his touch, she felt him scrambling for a solution, a way out. Matt's eyes were sharp and clear with resolve, his stance firm and unyielding, even though his nose was a swollen purple mess and blood drenched his face and the arm where Cutter had sliced him.
God, Matt looked awful, but Ronna had never seen a more gorgeous sight than when she opened her eyes to see him standing there, battered, bloodied, determined and alive. The light in her world had suddenly switched back on.
She'd merged her mind with Cutter's, searching for some clue, some hint as to how to outsmart him, but there was no plan to reveal. He was panicked, reacting, his thoughts a careless jumble, moments of decision mixed with flares of fear and frustration.
Fuck it. Just kill the bitch.
Ronna knew a fraction of a second before the knife descended that he was going to lay her throat open. Fear flared her eyes wide. "Matt."
He didn't have a shot. She was going to die. He was going to watch her die, those gorgeous green eyes filled with shock and horror at his helplessness. The look she'd seen in her vision...
No.
Ronna squeezed Cutter's arm, hanging on tight. She took every image that had poured into her from his brain, every violent horrific death, and saturated it with her own terror, throwing the nightmare back into his mind. She reversed the flow for the first time, forcing him to see, to feel, to be every victim he had ever tortured, trapping him in a hell truly of his own device, laying his mind open with the fear he loved.
Cutter jerked, a strangled gargling noise issuing from his throat as his body stiffened and arced, his mind bare and defenseless against the assault, his own assault. Ronna flung every horror into him, pushing them through the touch. His long, unbroken scream blended with hers, high and wild, until they were both cut off by the explosive crack of a gunshot.
His body jerked again under the force of the bullet, the knife in his hand jumping close to her skin before tumbling from his lax grip. He collapsed, Ronna falling with him in the prison of his arms.
Before she could twist and struggle away, Matt was there. He lifted her off Cutter and set her behind him, training his gun on the killer again. But Cutter wasn't moving. The hole Matt had placed between his eyes made sure of that.
Ronna's hands shook. They didn't feel like hers, but as if someone had taken away her hands and put heavy, swollen weights on the end of her arms where they should have been. She had killed him. Matt may have fired the bullet, but it was Ronna's touch that had done it. The shot had just put him out of his misery. She had thrown insanity into him, and even if she had only done it to save herself, even if he deserved it in ways she could never even begin to imagine, the horror of having done it made strangers of her hands.
Matt crouched and picked something up, turning to her with a grim look in his eyes. "Are you all right?"
It was a lock of her hair, she realized, watching him rub it between her fingers. Neatly sheared. Cutter had cut her after all. The thought didn't make what she had done better or worse. It simply was.
Dazed, Ronna shook her head. She was not all right.
Matt stepped toward her, concern etched in his face. "Where are you hurt?" he asked urgently.
"Don't touch me!" Ronna stumbled back away from him. What if she couldn't turn it off? What if, after having launched that nightmare, she would hurt everyone she touched?
Matt froze, his expression suddenly wary. Closed. "Ronna," he began, then seemed to think better of it. He took a step back and holstered his gun, hiding it beneath his jacket as if the sight of it offended her. How little he understood. The problem wasn't the gun. The problem was her hands.
He slid a cell phone out of his pocket. "I need to call this in. Can I call anyone for you?" he asked, cautiously keeping his distance. Ronna didn't blame him. She didn't trust herself to touch anyone.
"Karma," she heard her voice say in some faraway place. "Call Karma."
Chapter Eight---You Can't Always Get What You Want
"A palm reader. Of all the crazy bullshit." Lieutenant Grey, the bastard in charge of the entire op, shook his head ruefully. "How did you know, Holloway?"
Matt gritted his teeth as an EMT laid surgical tape across the bridge of his newly set nose to help keep it in place. "Call it a hunch."
The EMT stepped back. "That arm needs stitches."
"Later," Matt said curtly, shoving his bandaged arm back into the bloody sleeve of his jacket. He'd just as soon have gone without the bloodstained coat, but he didn't want Ronna being reminded of what had happened by the gun underneath it, and he needed to see her.
She sat in another ambulance, being treated for shock and reacting hysterically whenever anyone tried to touch her. Matt knew the shock was almost entirely his fault, but he couldn't just leave her. Even if all she saw when she looked at him was a killer. The man who had shot someone she'd been touching at the time.
He'd never had to fire his weapon in the line of duty. He'd sure as hell never killed anyone before, but he couldn't make himself regret it for a second. He would pull that trigger again in a heartbeat. Cutter had given him the shot, just for a split second, and he hadn't hesitated. Matt had needed to protect Ronna with a ferocity he couldn't even begin to explain. The only shot had been a headshot, but even if he could have gone for a wounding instead of the kill, he wasn't sure he would have.
Cutter had threatened Ronna, terrorized her. If ever a man had needed killing...
If only he could make Ronna understand that. Matt couldn't blame her for being frightened of him now, even though the sight of that wide-eyed panic in her dark brown eyes made him sick.
He knew he should just leave her be. Let the EMTs take care of her until her boss Karma arrived, but he needed to verify with his own eyes that she was still whole. Hysterical, but safe.
At Matt's side, the lieutenant rocked back on his heels, an annoyingly smug expression on his heavily lined face. "Impressive hunch, Holloway. There's a spot for you on the task force if you want it."
Five hours ago, those words would have been a triumph. Now... "Where the hell were you?"
The lieutenant blinked. "What was that, officer?" he asked icily.
"Where the fuck were you guys? I could have been killed. Ronna was nearly strangled and stabbed and you were where? Listening to some tunes over in the main pavilion?"
"We had no reason to suspect Cutter wasn't in the main pavilion area---"
"Did you string me out as your front man in case he IDed me? In case it was a setup?"
The lieutenant was silent for a long, telling moment. "Strategically---"
"I don't need to hear more. My answer is no. Thanks, but I'll stay where I am."
The lieutenant's face was tight with irritation, but he said coldly, "You're not thinking. It's been a helluva night." He pulled out his card. "Take some time. Sleep on it. Let me know what you decide in a week or two."
Matt took the card, but he knew he wouldn't change his mind. This one night had been all the action and deception he needed to know he didn't belong there, on a career fast-tracking task force with people he would never trust.
"Where is she?" a strong, throaty female voice demanded. "Where's Ronna?"
The tall, slim woman in a business suit cut a swath through the crime scene, determination in high heels.
Matt placed himself in her path. "Karma?"
"Officer Holloway." She spoke his name flatly, as if she was already certain who he was. "Take me to her."
Matt led the way to where Ronna was perched in the open back of an ambulance shivering under a scratchy wool blanket and cowering away from all attempts to touch her skin. Karma planted herself directly in front of her shell-shocked employee.
"You see?" she said with icy precision. "This is what happens when you moonlight."
Ronna trembled beneath the blanket, her eyes locked on Karma like she was the Holy Grail of sanity. "It's just palm reading," she protested, her voice hoarse and raw.
"Just palm reading, she says." Karma made a show of rolling her eyes. "Did it ever occur to you, my dear, that I might have a very good reason for keeping you under wraps? I.e. so things like this can never happen to you?"
"No one knows me as Madame Ramona."
Karma's exotically slanted eyes narrowed. "Yes. And Jake is looking into how they could have found out, but in the meantime, do you think you could put your palm-reading career on hold and focus on your real job?"
Matt's hackles were rising higher with every word out of the condescending Karma's mouth. Ronna had been through hell tonight. The last thing she needed was a lecture on how disappointing her behavior was. Matt's urge to snarl at Karma increased exponentially when Ronna gave a teary sniffle.
"I'm not sure I can do it anymore," she said wetly.
Karma waved away the complaint with a flip of her long, scarlet-tipped fingers. "Of course the reading tomorrow for Coretti has been cancelled. Tonight's events have certainly confirmed his character to our client's satisfaction. You can take a day, two if you insist, and then get back to work."
"No, Karma," Ronna protested, a little more strongly, though just as tearfully. "I don't think I can do it again ever."
"Don't be ridiculous," Karma said, so sharp and unsympathetic Matt wanted to punch her, and he was not in the habit of punching females.
"I can't, Karma," Ronna sobbed. "I broke that man. I pushed into his mind every horrible thing he had ever done. I drove him so mad death was a relief."
Karma tipped her head to the side speculatively. "So you've learned to project, have you? I hardly see that it is a problem. Seems an excellent defense mechanism to me. Provided you have someone on hand to shoot the lunatics after you've sent them round the bend." Her gaze flicked to Matt. "Handy bit of teamwork."
"What if I can't control it? What if I can never use my gift again without pushing that awful hurt into the people I touch?"
"Ronna. Get a hold of yourself." Karma stepped forward, reached under the blanket and grabbed Ronna's bare hands, trapping them between her own and hanging on tight when Ronna cried out and tried to pull away.
Matt stepped forward, ready to defend Ronna if necessary, but the next sound out of her mouth was a jagged sigh of utter relief.
"Oh, thank God," she moaned, tears streaming smooth and clear down her face. "I thought I'd never be able to... I was so scared I'd lost it..." She gazed into Karma's face, a kind of wonder passing over her own. "You've never let me read you before," she whispered. "You're so proud of me. Wow, you were so worried. You worry about all of us. All the time. We..."
Karma cleared her throat, visibly unnerved by Ronna's unwavering eyes. "Yes, well. You see? Nothing to worry about. You aren't projecting a bit." Her eyes flicked to the side, landing hard on Matt. "I should have a word with the investigators. Here." Karma grabbed Matt and shoved his hands where hers had been around Ronna's so quickly he didn't have time to react. Then she was walking away, her stride long and confident.
Matt hesitated, knowing he should pull away, but Ronna threaded her fingers through his, hanging on tight.
"I'm sorry," he began, knowing he had a laundry list to apologize for, but Ronna didn't seem to hear him.
"I was so scared," she confessed in a low, raw voice, her eyes locked on their joined hands. "I didn't trust myself not to hurt you." She lifted her gaze and it connected with his, clinging as strongly as her fingers were. "I didn't want to think about the possibility of hurting you." Her hands tightened fractionally around his as she grew absorbed with something only she could see. "It was never you I was afraid of, Matt," she said softly. "How could I be? You saved me. Just like I knew you would. Even when I thought he had killed you, I knew you would come for me." Matt couldn't speak, humbled by the unswerving faith in her eyes. "I love you, Matthew Holloway."
The words should have been ridiculous. She was emotional, in shock. They'd only met a few hours ago.
But in that time they had saved one another so many times he had lost count. The way she felt, the way they both felt, couldn't possibly be real, but he couldn't make himself deny her words. Instead, he leaned forward over their joined hands, holding her gaze until the last minute when her lashes swept down and his lips brushed over hers.
For a moment it was soft and gentle. Then the world fell away and he couldn't tell where he ended and she began.
In that perfect blend, the future laid out in front of him like a feast of possibilities.
She sat across from him in a cheesy pizza joint he knew, looking so damn adorable with a dab of tomato sauce on the corner of her mouth that he had to kiss it away. "...my Tomato." Pressing her against the door to an apartment---hers, he knew in some impossible recess of his mind---wanting her so badly he would go mad if he couldn't get inside her this instant. Standing close behind her in a furniture store so he could breathe in the tangy citrus scent of her soap, teasing her about the expense of furniture they both knew he wanted as much as she did, just to feel her go all mock prickly in his arms. "Real men have real furniture, Matthew." Nibbling that spot beneath her clavicle that belonged to him and him alone as they lay soft and warm together in the lazy afternoon sunlight that splashed across their big new bed. The damn rented tuxedo choking him, then lifting his gaze and seeing his reason for living walking toward him, looking soft and hopeful and so happy she was glowing from the inside out. "I now pronounce you..." Her small hand, held so tight in his, feeling so fragile and yet so perfect as they looked together at the future on that screen. So proud and excited and so damn scared he was practically shaking with it. "Jesus. Twins?" A pair of freckled, toffee faces topped by untamable red curls, just like their mother's. Laughing and demanding and making him feel like a king. "Now me, Daddy! Fly me!" His beautiful Ronna, tucked so perfectly into the circle of his arms, trying to steal a few more minutes of her perfection before the rest of the world crawled into bed with them. "I love you, Matthew Holloway."
Matt pulled back, the vision in his head falling away as soon as her lips fell away from his. He blinked at her, startled and bemused, and Ronna, his beautiful Ronna, smiled.
What the hell just happened?
Her smile grew wider, knowing and open. He could trust this. He could trust her. Always.
"Don't worry, Matt. There are great things ahead for us. We're going to live happily ever after."
He felt a matching smile tugging at his own mouth. "You know, I have a hunch you might be right."
He kissed her again, letting the heaven of the pull and slide of her mouth erase all of his doubts. When he lifted his head, he tucked her under his arm, knowing even before he did that she would fit perfectly there.
"Come on. Let's go get cleaned up. I know this great pizza place you've gotta try."
About the Author
Vivi Andrews lives in Alaska when she isn't indulging her travel addiction. She's currently hard at work on her next paranormal romance. For more about her books or the exploits of a nomadic author, please visit her website at www.viviandrews.com or stop by her blog at viviandrews.blogspot.com. Vivi also loves to hear from readers and invites you to email her at vivi@viviandrews.com.
Look for these titles by Vivi Andrews
Now Available:
Karmic Consultants
The Ghost Shrink, the Accidental Gigolo & the Poltergeist Accountant
The Ghost Exterminator: A Love Story
The Sexorcist
The Naked Detective
A Cop and a Feel
Serengeti Shifters
Serengeti Heat
Serengeti Storm
Serengeti Lightning
Serengeti Sunrise
Coming Soon:
Ghosts of Boyfriends Past
No strings? Try hopelessly tangled.
Serengeti Sunrise
© 2011 Vivi Andrews
Serengeti Shifters, Book 4
Zoe King is itching to get out of Three Rocks. Sure, the pride is more progressive with her brother in charge. She's just got a bad case of wanderlust...and an even worse case of the hots for Tyler Minor.
The pride's mechanic sets her senses on fire one second, then shuts down and walks away the next. Before she hits the road for good, this lioness decides it's time to bring their cat-and-mouse game to a satisfying end.
Twenty years ago, Tyler's father walked out and left him with a mountain of responsibility. Now that his younger siblings are settled, the last thing he wants or needs is another obligation. Which is exactly what he'll get if he screws around with the Alpha's sister.
When Zoe offers---more like demands---a no-strings affair, temptation wins and he finds his hands in places they shouldn't be, and his thoughts straying to words like his. But Zoe's got her own ideas about possessive, chest-banging males. And they don't include white picket fences...or letting Tyler keep her out of the danger zone when an outside threat to the pride's secrecy becomes all too real.
Warning: This story contains sexual relations, manipulations, ultimatums and two strong-willed shifters determined to be on top.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Serengeti Sunrise:
Zoe launched herself out of the truck. "Tyler!" His only response was the clang of the heavy metal door to the garage slamming behind him after he ducked inside. "Dammit." She stalked after him. Cutting through the garage was the fastest way to the main part of the compound, but they weren't finished here yet and she was going to make sure he knew it.
She ran to the door, jerked it open and surged through, carried on a tide of indignant frustration.
"Tyler!" Her shout echoed in the garage bay along with the ringing clang of the heavy door banging shut behind her. "Stop running and face me, you coward!"
Two yards from the front exit, Tyler's feet took root on the concrete floor. She could hear a growl rumbling in his chest. His lion must not have liked being called a coward. Well, hers didn't much like him running away from her.
Her lioness was ready for this fight, had been itching for it for months.
He turned to face her, his eyes narrowed and hands loose around his hips like a gunslinger. As they faced one another across the length of the garage, she felt that high-noon feeling herself. Tension snapped in the air, the unavoidable sense that something was coming. Something that had been bearing down on them for a while now.
Love or war. Whichever it was, there wasn't any middle ground. They'd burned it all away with the friction of the last year.
"Coward?" he asked, his voice a soft, dark rumble.
"You have another word you'd prefer?" She strolled across the concrete floor, adding an extra sway to her hips as she came to stand directly in front of him. "Chicken? Pussy, perhaps?"
"Don't push me, Zoe." He rumbled the warning.
"Or what? You gonna show me who's boss? Or are you just gonna run away like you always do? Like a coward."
His lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl and he loomed over her. She could practically feel his lion pushing against his skin, burning with the need to prove to her, once and for all, which one of them would end up on top if it ever came down to a battle for dominance. He might play at being civilized, but Tyler wanted to make her submit. She could see it in the luminous feline gold of his eyes.
"Are you going to kiss me or throttle me?" Zoe tipped her chin back, meeting his eyes with a blatant challenge. "Whichever you're going to do, do it now. Because I'm sick of waiting for you to make up your mind."
"What makes you think I didn't make up my mind months ago and you just can't take a hint?"
"What hint was that? The way you stare at me when you think I'm not looking? How you take the longest possible path between your bungalow and the garage each evening just so you can go past my house? Or maybe the fact that you can't tell when I'm in heat because you always want me?"
He turned away, striding toward the door. "That's quite a healthy ego you have there."
"It's all in my head, is that it?" He put his hand on the door and Zoe felt her composure fracture. "Dammit, Tyler! What the fuck is your deal?" He didn't turn back to her, but he didn't open the door either. She shouted at his back. "You want me. I've made it embarrassingly obvious I want you too. So what is the big problem?"
"Your brother..."
"I'm twenty-seven years old. I don't have to ask his permission to fuck whoever the hell I want."
He turned, leaning his shoulders against the door, one hand still resting on the knob. "He's the Alpha---"
"So what? This has nothing to do with him. He doesn't even have to know."
"He'll know."
"Who the fuck cares? Because I'm the Alpha's sister, I'm not allowed to get any?"
"I don't want any more commitments in my life. I'm sick of being responsible for everyone."
"Who's talking about a commitment? I'm talking about sex. Fucking. Screwing. Banging our brains out. No strings attached. I never asked you for a fucking commitment, dumbass."
"It's never going to be no strings. Not with the Alpha's sister."
"God, I am so sick of being the Alpha's sister. I'm Zoe. Can we just have one conversation that doesn't include Landon?"
Tyler thunked his head back against the door. "Look, Zoe, if I wanted to stay here at the pride for the rest of my life and mate with a little lioness who'd give me lots of fat babies, you'd be the first person I'd---"
She cut him off with a solid punch to his shoulder that made him wince. "You asshole. Would you listen to me for five seconds? I don't want to marry you. I'm not Mara the fucking baby-making machine. If you tried to give me a picket fence, I would rip up the posts and shove them up your ass. So stop trying to put me in that box." She slapped her palms flat on his chest, baring her teeth up at him. "I want sex. And I want it from you. So do you want me or not? Because I'm done waiting. We're deciding this, once and for all. Are you a man or what? Because for someone with the teeth of an alpha lion, you're awfully fucking scared of me."
He grabbed her so fast her back was slamming against the door before she even realized his hands were on her waist. Her hat went flying, landing somewhere on the dirty floor. "Scared, am I?" He gripped her jaw and forced her face up to his. "Does this look like fear to you?"
His expression was harsh and unforgiving, the animal running close to the surface. There was nothing contained or distant about the heat in his eyes. Who is this man and what has he done with Tyler Minor? Zoe's breathing quickened.
His claws flexed against her side. Zoe wet her lips. She'd goaded him to this.
A little flicker of misgiving flared in her chest.
"Hasn't anyone told you not to bait lions?" he growled, palming her nape.
Zoe's heart stopped then restarted and accelerated. The nervous sensation got lost in a flood of heat as he took command. Finally. This was it. After a year of foreplay, it was finally happening. Quick, rough, one and done. At last, she'd get over this stupid obsession.
Tyler Minor had her pinned between hard and harder, leaving no doubt in her mind exactly how much he wanted her. Then he leaned in and sealed his mouth over hers, and Zoe forgot everything but the taste of him. This wasn't just a quickie to get him out of her system. This was everything.
Some secrets are dangerous. This Secret is deadly.
Something Secret This Way Comes
© 2011 Sierra Dean
Secret McQueen, Book 1
For Secret McQueen, her life feels like the punch line for a terrible joke. Abandoned at birth by her werewolf mother, hired as a teen by the vampire council of New York City to kill rogues, Secret is a part of both worlds, but belongs to neither. At twenty-two, she has carved out as close to a normal life as a bounty hunter can.
When an enemy from her past returns with her death on his mind, she is forced to call on every ounce of her mixed heritage to save herself---and everyone else in the city she calls home. As if the fate of the world wasn't enough to deal with, there's Lucas Rain, King of the East Coast werewolves, who seems to believe he and Secret are fated to be together. Too bad Secret also feels a connection with Desmond, Lucas's second-in-command...
Warning: This book contains a sarcastic, kick-ass bounty hunter; a metaphysical love triangle with two sexy werewolves; a demanding vampire council; and a spicy seasoning of sex and violence.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Something Secret This Way Comes:
I recapped the events of the evening as best I could over the limitations of voicemail. "Hey, Holden, it's Secret. I killed an unsanctioned rogue in the park tonight. He had it coming. Send the Tribunal my love."
I was in an all-night café near Keaty's, waiting for my nonfat no-foam latte while I left the message. The barista behind the counter, who appeared to be about fourteen, gave me a concerned look.
I flashed him my well-practiced innocent smile and said, "My dungeon master." A spark of revelation lit upon his zitty face. "I just needed him to know the outcome of a campaign he missed." I winked and took my drink out of his hand while he muttered something about rolling twenties.
It was late spring, and there was still a chill in the air, but the café had seen fit to set up its sidewalk patio a week or so after the snow melted. I pulled my jacket around me, though the cold didn't really bother me, and sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs. My cell phone was securely in my pocket in case Holden called, but I expected I wouldn't hear from him right away. I was also in no hurry to go back to the office and talk to Keaty about the state of affairs I now found myself in. I'd told him I was getting a coffee and then calling it a night.
Dawn was only an hour or two away, and there was nothing I could do to change what I'd done tonight. I would have to face the consequences when they came.
I tried to enjoy the hot, bitter sweetness of the latte, in sharp contrast to the coolness of the night, but my mind was reeling from what had happened. It took a lot to scare me, mostly because almost anything that went bump in the night I had killed at some point, but my encounter with Henry Davies had really shaken me.
The unshakeable, calm and centered Secret McQueen had been knocked on her proverbial ass by the impression of a bite mark. Maybe I had been mistaken. There was a chance part of the bite had healed faster or maybe I had been anticipating it so much I had imagined the missing tooth mark.
I prayed that I was wrong. In the six years I had been doing this, the closest anyone had ever come to truly killing me was Alexandre Peyton, and he had promised me that next time we met he wouldn't fail. If I was right about it being his mark, I was going to need to be on my guard more than usual until things either came to a head or blew over.
As I sipped my coffee I was overcome by an unexpected warmth which had nothing to do with the drink. It was like a humid summer breeze was blowing down 81st Street, only it crawled over my body and into my pores. My mouth felt thick with musky, dense flavor. The sensation was invasive and overwhelming, and what scared me the most was how comfortable I felt with it. I licked my lips and tasted cinnamon.
My latte was vanilla.
It was then, with a ripple of electric pinpricks up my spine, I felt a man pass. He approached from behind me and seemed to be wholly unaware of my presence until he turned towards the café door. He paused before entering, his close-cropped ash-colored hair tousled by the cool night air, and fixed his radiant azure eyes on me. There were two men with him, one on either side---a brunet who was the same height, just over six feet, and another who was my height and blond. The one who was watching me looked as puzzled as I felt, but he snapped out of it after a brief period of stunned silence and took a step in my direction.
"Hello?" he said, the way people do when they believe they already know you and simply cannot place the who and how.
If I'd been on my game, I'd have a snappy shoot-down or roll my eyes and tell him to get lost. I might have ignored him under any normal circumstances, because as a general rule I try to avoid men who might try to flirt with me. I did not date, although I had tried once or twice in the past. I had no time or patience for it, not to mention there were certain aspects of my life I could never explain to a human boyfriend.
But I could not look away, and nothing about this felt normal.
Not only could I not tear my eyes from him, something inside me pulled closer, dragging me nearer like a leash being tugged. There was a piece of me that wanted nothing more than to go to him. He was beautiful, I couldn't deny that, but he was a stranger, and this reaction was strange to say the least. This was more than magnetism; it was practically a law of attraction. The pull knotted inside me, fluttering in my stomach with the feeling of a thousand desperate moths crowding together to seek the light of a single bare bulb. My body demanded I go to him, and I realized I was now standing. My chair was several inches behind me, and I held my drink in trembling hands. When had I stood?
His friends were watching me too, like they knew what was happening between us. They were both interested and unconcerned by my reaction. I bet none of them had to make much of an effort to attract the ladies, considering all three were picture-perfect male specimens. The man in the middle smiled, a flash of white canines, and it dawned on me what I was smelling below the cinnamon and electricity. It stopped me dead in my tracks.
"Wolf," I said. It was almost a hiss, the sound an animal makes when threatened.
My stupid werewolf half was being lured by him, and I wasn't about to have any part of it. I had no intention of letting some animal dupe me with werewolf lust. I'd heard about this, weres using their powers to overwhelm newer or lesser wolves. I'd been dealing with my lycanthrope half since birth, which was a lot longer than most adults with the affliction. Just because I'd never shifted as an adult didn't mean some twenty-something who'd probably been turned last week was going to get the best of me.
I tended to shut out my werewolf half far more than my vampire half. Vampires, for all their flaws, were still primarily human in their behavior. I could accept that and relate to it. Their society had laws, structure and regulation. They were very political in their hierarchical organization.
Werewolves left me feeling more unsettled. They were animals. Primal beings. They were willing to abandon the human aspects of themselves to embrace something wild and reckless. I'd never tried to learn about their world because I didn't want to be a part of something that catered to such careless freedom. I did not have the luxury to let myself lose control in that way. If I did, I risked releasing much more than my inner wolf.
I turned away from him, and his face fogged with confusion again. I was not going to play his games. Heading towards the back entrance of the patio, I made a break for it. I was almost at the corner of the block before I hazarded a glance back. They were gone.
I stopped walking, still clutching my latte. Maybe he'd been willing to let it go when he saw I clearly wasn't interested. I breathed a sigh of relief. One less thing to worry about for the night. My plate was already overburdened as it was. The last thing I needed was to fend off some pushy frat boy's puppy love.
Turning back to the corner, I walked smack into the tall brunet who had been with the man. A small sound of surprise escaped my lips.
"What the---?"
"I'd like you to come with me, miss."
"Like hell." I dropped my drink and was reaching for the gun at the small of my back, but he grabbed my arm first.
"That won't be necessary. We only want to have a quick word with you about what just happened at the café."
Before I could find the proper string of profanities to explain I had no intention of going anywhere with him, he was dragging me none too gently towards a waiting car. He pushed me into the backseat as the door opened, pulling the gun from the back of my belt as he did.
And I thought my night couldn't get any worse.
The first bullet is always free. After that, you gotta pay.
The Zero Dog War
© 2011 Keith Melton
Zero Dog Missions, Book 1
After accidentally blowing up both a client facility and a cushy city contract in the same day, pyromancer and mercenary captain Andrea Walker is scrambling to save her Zero Dogs. A team including (but not limited to) a sexually repressed succubus, a werewolf with a thing for health food, a sarcastic tank driver/aspiring romance novelist, a three-hundred-pound calico cat, and a massive demon who really loves to blow stuff up.
With the bankruptcy vultures circling, Homeland Security throws her a high-paying, short-term contract even the Zero Dogs can't screw up: destroy a capitalist necromancer bent on dominating the gelatin industry with an all-zombie workforce. The catch? She has to take on Special Forces Captain Jake Sanders, a man who threatens both the existence of the team and Andrea's deliberate avoidance of romantic entanglements.
As Andrea strains to hold her dysfunctional team together long enough to derail the corporate zombie apocalypse, the prospect of getting her heart run over by a tank tread is the least of her worries. The government never does anything without an ulterior motive. Jake could be the key to success...or just another bad day at the office for the Zeroes.
Warning: Contains explicit language, intense action and violence, rampaging zombie hordes, a heroine with an attitude and flamethrower, Special Forces commandos, ninjas, apocalyptic necromancer capitalist machinations, absurd parody and mayhem, self-deluded humor, irreverence, geek humor, mutant cats, low-brow comedy, and banana-kiwi-flavored gelatin.
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Zero Dog War:
I double-timed it up the stairs off the foyer, thumping my way toward Gavin's rooms. I wanted nothing more than to get this over with ASAP, and I'd just raced up to the second-floor landing when I rounded the banister and crashed right into Captain Sanders. For one moment all I could think about was muscles and the smell of gun oil...until I realized he held me steady, his large hands on my upper arms. I shoved back from him, and he let me go. I could feel my skin grow blazing hot.
"Excuse me." I stepped farther away. He'd come early. I hadn't expected him until tonight. Something else to deal with, and my list already floweth over.
He smiled, but he had a way of looking at me that made me feel as if I were the focal point of the universe, as if he waited for every word I might chose to speak. I didn't like it. The word disconcerting sprang to mind.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I should've been more careful. I was looking for you."
"I'll let you know when I find me."
He cocked an eyebrow, but his smile didn't falter. I took a deep breath and willed my heart to airbrake back to a normal speed. A muscle in my cheek might've twitched with my effort to suppress my stupid schoolgirl-crush reactions. I clamped down even tighter. I had a job to do and a team to run. I sure as hell wouldn't allow this distraction to endanger either.
"I wondered if we could sit down together and go over a few tactical scenarios before the briefing," he said. "Make sure we're on the same page."
"I'm still tracking down my people." I glanced at my watch. "And I'm scheduled out until about...eight twenty-five. And hey, that's when your briefing starts. How unfortunate."
His smile slipped a notch. "Maybe afterwards---"
"Look, Captain Sanders---"
"Call me Jake. Save syllables."
"Fine. Jake. I'm busy running a team, Jake. Not a lot of time to attend your little tête-à-tête." Hail, and all witness Captain Andrea Walker behaving like an ass---yet, I couldn't stop now. Inertia was a horrible thing.
He didn't seem daunted as the wattage on his smile dialed back up to blazing. "May I call you Andrea? In private, of course."
God. Damn. It. Men, you let them pick up the ball and they ran off the field with it, yelling how they'd won. "I'm more comfortable with Captain Walker, Jake, thank you."
"All right, Captain Walker."
We stood so close, with no one else around. My skin felt afire, flushed, and sweat dampened my armpits. The urge to drop my gaze from his eyes pulled at me like an iron chain, but I refused to look away. Dominance games? I could play them all week, and he'd soon find out if he didn't stand down. I stepped back from him again, putting even more distance between us. Any farther and I'd fall down the stairs---but I still didn't blink, so point to me.
He didn't pursue. "I'm confident we can map out some strategies to maximize our team assets."
"Our team assets? Look, Jake, those are my people. Mine. I'm responsible for them, for keeping them safe and getting them back here every night after we go out and bust our asses, blowing shit up. I call the shots. I'm the only Captain Ahab around here. You can dispense advice when I damn well decide I need the input of a magical Green Beret."
Something flared in his eyes---either anger or respect---before the professional detachment slammed back down. Anger I could understand, but respect would only vex me more. I didn't need his damn respect.
"I didn't mean to violate protocols," he said in a smooth, calm voice. "I just want to make certain we mesh together well. That our leadership styles are fully integrated to avoid any splintering of command."
Mesh together well. That conjured up some distracting images. Oh, he did vex me something awful, the bastard. "We can fully integrate if you listen to my orders. When we're hot, I'm calling the shots."
"Understood. I'm here to support and advise. My only goal is to achieve our mission objectives."
"Then I suggest you stay out of my way. I'm driving this truck." I walked around him, careful not to touch him again, and continued up the next set of stairs, willing my fists to remain unclenched and my jaw muscles to cease and desist from grinding my teeth to powder.
He called after me. "One last thing, Captain Walker."
I glanced down. He had his game face on---a hard-as-steel, raptor-eyed, chew-dynamite-and-spit-out-nitroglycerin look which appeared pretty damn impressive. "What?"
"I meant what I said about achieving mission objectives. I'll do whatever I have to. There are lives to save."
I swallowed my cheeky comment and gave him the benefit of a nod, despite my smoldering irritation. As if I didn't know there were civvy lives at stake. Who'd he think he was dealing with? Backwater hicks?
I spun on my heel and took the stairs two at a time, eager to be away from him. God help me, this might just be the hardest damn job I'd ever done.

