She thanked him, too, for coming into her life—even if it had been in the middle of a diamond heist. That admission got a few chuckles from the gathered guests.
She went on that she was amazed that she could love so deeply and with such appreciation for the respect he gave her in return.
Ruff barked in the middle of her vows. Kieran laughed it off and went on, “And I just love you. I love your face in the morning, and at night, and the world is always good just because you’re beside me.”
Craig could hear Mary Kathleen quietly sobbing. She later claimed she always cried at a good wedding.
Then there were pictures, dozens of them, Kieran and Mary Kathleen and the bridesmaids. Craig and his cousins and the groomsmen.
Him and Kieran—and Ruff. So much smiling and celebrating.
Then, at last they headed for Finnegan’s.
Their wedding dinner would be the shepherd’s pie that was considered the best in the city.
And the cake. Craig would always have the memory of sharing the first delicious slice with Kieran in front of the crowd.
And toasts! Toasts and more toasts!
Because there were Kieran’s brothers who each had something to say. Her bosses, the Drs. Fuller and Miro. Richard Egan, Mike and Milo and so many other friends and coworkers. Regulars from Finnegan’s filled the space to standing room only.
The musical entertainment was arranged by Kevin—he’d managed to get a host of his Broadway performing friends to perform at the church, and for the reception—continued throughout.
Finally, it came time for the beautiful white limo—generously provided by the Drs. Fuller and Miro—to take Kieran and Craig to the airport.
Their destination was Central Florida.
It had been funny when it had first come up, but then the idea had taken hold—what better way to spend time away from lives that contained murder and mayhem and incredible tension than with nothing but fun and fantasy?
Then Richard Egan had done some research—or maybe had Marty do it for him—and discovered an amazing suite at one of the parks with a gorgeous whirlpool tub right in the bedroom, high up and with a view of spectacular fireworks each night.
So, the time to leave came. Mary Kathleen—and even Declan—had misty eyes. There were more toasts, and the party called out, “Slainte!”
“Slainte!”
They returned the toast together, laughing, and then Ruff barked, and even his bark sounded a bit like the word.
They were covered with rice as they climbed into the limo, and apologized to the driver, who laughed and informed them that he had a car vacuum.
Then they were at the airport, bags checked in, and almost to security.
Craig stopped. Kieran halted, questioning him with arched brows.
“Wow. Mrs. Frazier.”
“Ah, yes, you’re a married man, Special Agent.”
“Does it feel any different?”
She smiled. “I’ve known I’ve loved you for a very, very long time.”
He nodded. “But still... It’s amazing.”
She slung her arms around his neck, looking at him. “We’re about to start on an adventure.”
“You know, I never did get to meet Mickey Mouse when I was a kid.”
“You poor, deprived child! We’ll make it the first thing we do.”
He grinned, shaking his head. “First thing is trying out that whirlpool tub—and watching the fireworks.”
“I was rather thinking we’d create our own,” she said.
He smiled. “So was it all you dreamed of—today?”
“Honestly, the wedding was beautiful, but if I dreamed of anything, it was finding someone like you. Who understands that I have passions in life, who cares about my wacky family, who would...respect me and love me, the way that you do.”
“Wow!” Craig murmured, and he pulled her into his arms, kissing her deeply. Forgetting they were in one of the country’s busiest airports.
When he pulled back, people were staring.
And then they started clapping.
Craig looked around and realized that someone had stuck a big Just Married sign on his carry-on bag.
He could feel that he blushed. Yep, tough agent. That was him.
Kieran thought to call out, “Thank you!” Then she caught his hand, and drew them to the security line ahead.
Richard Egan had managed to get them lovely first-class tickets.
Once the plane was in the air, Craig turned to Kieran.
“Really, the adventure is just beginning. You were so...eloquent. And all I said was wow. Let me add to that. I am so grateful that you’re my wife. I am so grateful that I can wake up and see your face every morning, and when I’m down or frustrated, I can come to you, and that you will do the same with me, and that...”
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s not quite as eloquent.”
“What?” She was smiling.
He grinned and kissed her.
“And there’s a lot to be said for fireworks, too!”
* * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Seeing Darkness by Heather Graham.
Seeing Darkness
by Heather Graham
CHAPTER ONE
KYLIE CONNELLY COULD feel it.
First, the terror.
Then, the knife, slicing into her flesh, slamming into her bone. It was agony. As the blade rose and fell, again and again, she began to feel a strange numbness, the unbearable pain lessening, fading, the light before her eyes...
But her mind fought the vision. She couldn’t remember exactly where she was, what she was doing, how she was seeing this.
She had to see and feel something else: the past, the future, anything. This place, her friends, the laughter that had come before.
As if in a little bubble, she could see the immediate past: her friend, Corrine Rossello, third up with the hypnotist for their bizarre bachelorette party. Like a small screen before her eyes, she could again envision what she’d seen.
Corrine, happy as a lark. Under hypnosis and enjoying her beautiful vision.
“I’m walking... I’m walking along, and the day is bright. I’m in a park... I can feel my dress, I believe it’s satin, and it makes a delicate little swishing sound when I move. And there, before me... I see a carriage,” Corrine said in the bubble. “It’s a beautiful carriage, and there’s a man who steps from it, but not before he’s assisted by a footman in a truly regal costume. And then... he has his hand stretched out to me. The man who stepped from the carriage, he’s so good-looking, gorgeous actually, and he’s waiting for me. I start to hurry... a maid is following me, she’s my maid, but we’re very good friends, and she’s happy!”
Corrine was a beautiful young woman with raven-dark hair, broad cheeks and deep brown eyes.
She looked like she was in rapture.
She was lying down on the hypnotist’s couch, her head and shoulders inclined upon a bed of pillows...
No. Kylie knew that she was now the one lying on the hypnotist’s couch.
Corrine’s eyes were closed; she had consumed her tea—something that helped with regression, or so the hypnotist had told them—and she was smiling as she recalled her former life.
“Yes. You’re making us see you,” the hypnotist, Dr. Sayers, declared. “You—as you were. I believe it’s Hyde Park. And you are going to the man you love. Your husband, I believe, and he’s... he’s a duke!”
Kylie was somehow seeing that oh-so-recent past, Corrine’s turn on the couch, the hypnotist... She had to keep seeing it. It was something she could cling to as she fought against...
The knife.
No! Something inside her screamed, fought the new images that were not the past, but now.
Fight it, fight it, fight it!
Kylie saw the little bubble-movie of the recent past again.
Sighs and murmurs of amazement and pleasure went around the little group who had come to Doctor Sayers, a psychologist/hypnotist who specialized in past-life regression.
Her friends were enchanted.
But Kylie couldn’t help but think, What a pile of...
Yet, she had agreed to come. Her friends were dear to her—and Corrine was the almost-bride, and this—regression to past lives—was what she had wanted to do that day.
Kylie had smiled the whole way. They were in Salem, Massachusetts, a “haunt” they had all visited multiple times in the past, for parties, for history, the Essex Museum, fun ghost tours, even shopping.
They’d met at college. They were all from Massachusetts and made it into Harvard. None of them had come from money; they had worked hard for their scholarships and had kept jobs to pay their way through their school years, as well. That had made their little jaunts extra special.
They had come here, close to all their homes, so many times. They all loved the city. Every time they took a ghost tour—but not the obvious tourist traps. They didn’t usually come for tea-leaf or palm or tarot card readings. The town, with its incredibly sad past, was naturally a backdrop for every manner of wiccan, new-ager, or occultist. They had fun with it. And Salem was, of course, at a certain time of the year, Halloween heaven.
When they’d started out that morning—she and Corrine Rossello, Nancy Ryman, and Jenny Auger—she had agreed that she would come along. She had assured them that she didn’t believe in past-life regression, but Corrine had already made the appointments, and this little weekend together was Corrine’s concept of a bridal shower; she had no interest in a wild weekend with dance clubs and strippers. She just wanted their group together to do something special, and this was her version.
The knife.
He’d caught hold of her and spun her around. Despite her hatred for him, she wanted to live. She begged, she pleaded, she cried. She’d have done anything, said anything, to stop him. And yet she knew, even as he held her there, that there was no chance, that the knife would fall, that she would look into the hatred in his dark eyes as he brought that blade down, ripping into her flesh again and again, she knew that he would want her to suffer even past death...
Back to the bubble; the immediate past.
Kylie fought to remember. Her mind was in this strange place, switching between screens, the memory of herself and her friends in the hypnotist’s office, and that of the knife in the alley...
She struggled so hard to stop it, not to see the image of the knife, the pain and the numbness, the look in the eyes of her murderer.
“It will be new for us! I hear it’s fun, and you’re going to love it!” Corrine had assured her from the beginning, when she had first suggested it on the drive up.
Kylie had kept smiling. She hadn’t loved it, but she did love her friend, and this was what Corrine wanted. She had been last to go under with the hypnotist; Jenny discovered she had been a Norse princess, and Nancy had ruled a pirate ship until she’d married a legitimate sea captain and lived happily on a Caribbean island.
Apparently, none of the three had been poor, nor maids or servants of any kind—or lived lives of any hardship or remarkable trauma.
Or died beneath the fury of a razor-honed blade, cutting flesh and blood and bone.
“Oh, my God!” Corrine had said, her eyes closed as she almost sat up, in love with the vision before her eyes—or in her mind. “It’s Derrick—it’s my Derrick! He was a duke in his previous life, and now I’m running to him, and he sweeps me up and...”
Corrine’s voice faded. She lay back, exhausted—and smiling.
Of course, she was smiling; she was about to marry to a man named Derrick.
A great guy, solid, but rather staid. He was working for an attorney as he made his way through law school, and was the kind of guy to give Corrine the life she wanted with a picket fence, two-point-five children, and a cat and dog in the yard. They would settle in a suburb outside either New York City or Boston. Kylie knew that because they had all told one another their dreams often enough.
She could see that bubble of what had been—just moments before again.
Dr. Sayers smiling and saying, “Corrine, I’m bringing you back now. I will count slowly to ten, snap by fingers... and you will wake up.”
Dr. Sayers was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five, Kylie thought. Neatly dressed in a blue, pin-striped suit, with sleek sandy hair combed back and a surprisingly normal and...mundane look about him. The lights in his office were kept low, but he’d had no problem with all of them sitting in for each other’s “regressions.”
The tea, Kylie thought. He had something in the tea. But that couldn’t be legal, could it?
And once again, as the hypnotist counted, Kylie couldn’t help but think, are they all really falling for this? Seriously?
Her friends were all professional women. They had met as freshman at Harvard, for God’s sake! Corrine was now the manager of a chain of incredibly popular themed restaurants. Nancy was working on Wall Street, and Jenny was head of accounting for a small chain of boutique hotels. Kylie had just been hired away from the Met to manage all aspects of the newly opened Trelawny House, a museum that featured New York’s Colonial period through the present—including a tavern that featured all things historic.
“Ten!” Dr. Sayers said, and snapped his fingers.
Corrine’s eyes flew open and she stared around at the others. “That was amazing! I was there—that was me! Oh, I did live before, and Derrick and I... we were in love over, and over again. It’s so wonderfully right!” She jumped up and caught Kylie’s hand.
“Your turn, Kylie!”
And then Kylie was on the couch, and Dr. Sayers was talking to her, telling her that she would never do anything that she wouldn’t do naturally, that she would search back into the hidden recesses of her mind and memory.
As she slipped under, she thought, I didn’t even drink the tea.
But then she was somewhere else.
She was someone else.
The bubble was gone; she’d lost the fight to escape whatever was happening to her. To the her she had become.
“I’m by the graveyard... It’s dark...and he has me...”
Kylie couldn’t believe the words were coming out of her mouth, but she could see herself moving down the dirt road by the old forgotten graveyard and cemetery just outside the city. She shouldn’t have come this way—the road was isolated.
A cat screeched.
She knew she had made a mistake, the worst mistake of her life, the mistake that would bring about her death.
Because someone was coming after her.
And she knew it was him.
When she turned and saw him, she screamed, but no one heard...
He dragged her into the burial ground surrounding the small church. She saw the old gravestones around them as he jerked her along by her hair.
For a moment, one of those little bubbles of reality broke through.
Where the hell am I? Kylie wondered.
But she knew where she was, not in the center of Salem, not where the tourists came.
The knife! Oh, God, ripping through her flesh, making that terrible noise...
They’d warned her he would kill her.
And he was doing it.
She could feel the numbness setting in, a terrible cold, an agonizing sense of loss...
“Ten! Wake up. Wake up, Kylie!”
Her eyes flew open. They were all there—Corrine, Jenny, Nancy, and Dr. Sayers. They were staring at her with concern.
“Oh, Kylie, you scared us—you were screaming and screaming, as if being skinned alive!” Corrine said, her eyes wide, her face contorted with concern.
“I don’t think she met a prince or a duke or anything,” Jenny muttered, hazel eyes narrowed. Tall and slim, Jenny had long sandy hair. She also had a very dry sense of humor, and often used sarcasm as her method of defense.
She also appeared deeply concerned, despite her dry words.
“Miss Connelly, are you all right?” Dr. Sayers asked nervously.
Of course, he was nervous. People came to him to find out they had been princesses or some kind of royalty or—at the least—had been very influential in some imaginary past life.
They didn’t come to feel knives thrusting into their bodies.
Kylie made an effort to smile. She didn’t know what the hell had happened, but she was trying to surreptitiously touch her body, to make sure she wasn’t bleeding. It had all been too real; the feel of the knife. The terror—the sheer horror—of knowing she was dying, being brutally murdered.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, desperately laughing to shake the feeling that had come over her. “Sir, you’re very good,” she told Dr. Sayers, trying to ease his fear—after all, he had made the bride-to-be very happy. “It’s just like I was there,” she said.
“And?” Corrine asked nervously.
When Kylie hesitated, Nancy, the petite redhead, spoke up, “You were screaming, crying for help... begging.”
“Well, sadly, I guess my last life wasn’t so good!” Kylie said lightly. “I apparently had something going with a gorgeous monster of a man—and he killed me.”
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry!” Corrine said with distress. “This was all my fault.”
“No one’s fault—a truly unique experience!” Kylie said quickly. This was supposed to be a wonderful weekend. Corrine wanted to go to Salem and do some of the things they had done so many times when they had escaped the stress of final exams when they had been students. That included staying at their favorite old inn and strolling through the funky shops—many of them witchcraft themed, some owned by true-believers and some owned by smart capitalists. And that night, drinks and dinner at their favorite witch-themed restaurant on Essex Street, the Cauldron.
The Final Deception Page 28