Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1

by Maggie Shayne

  “She knows. She has to die.” It was a deeper voice, a meaner one, and I opened my eyelids the merest slit, trying to see who the speaker was, but he was turned away and I couldn’t.

  “I don’t want to,” said the almost familiar voice. It wasn’t clicking into place, because I’d expected it to be David’s. And it wasn’t.

  “I don’t give two shits what you want,” said the other voice, the completely different one. Except there was only one man and that voice was coming from the same set of lips.

  Whoever he was, he was batshit crazy.

  “Kill her now, before she wakes—unless you don’t have what it takes. In that case, just let me…for heaven’s sakes.” He laughed. It was low and dark, very brief. Clearly he found his rhyme scheme clever.

  Rhyming! Oh, God, it’s him. He’s here, somehow! “I don’t. I don’t have what it takes. Not a woman. Not her.”

  Wait, that voice…I almost had it now.

  “Fine. Stop fighting me, then, and let me do my job.”

  “This isn’t what I wanted. I’m leaving, I’m done.” He reached for the door, just as someone kicked it open.

  Mason!

  He sprang into the room, gun drawn, as the lunatic fell backward onto the floor, but the creep just rolled and scrambled over to me, looking right into my face in the split second before he pulled me in front of him and put a knife to my throat.

  Dr. Vosberg?

  Mason stood there, pointing his gun at the guy. It was hard to see him, silhouetted against the light spilling through the wide-open door behind him. Was I the only one to notice that the gun, like Mason himself, had water dripping from it? Would it even fire?

  “Dr. Vosberg?” he said. “What the hell?”

  “It’s not me! It’s not me! It’s the damn heart I got. It’s evil, it’s taking me over!”

  Mason’s eyes shifted to mine, and I shrugged.

  “You had a heart transplant?” Mason asked.

  “Was on the waiting list for a year.” His hand was shaking. “That’s when I did the research, wrote the book. But it was only two months ago, a little over, when I got the heart.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Mason was keeping his tone calm, soothing. “Just let her go and we’ll talk about it. This isn’t what you want to do.”

  I felt the doc stiffen behind me. And then the shaking stopped and his grip on me became brutal, the blade pressing close, maybe even cutting a little. His voice changed again, deeper, crueler, and he said, “Hello, little brother.”

  Mason blinked. Clearly the greeting shook him. “You’re not my brother,” he said.

  “Yes, I am. The only part of him that’s still alive, anyway. He called me the rat. But I’m no rat. I’m a man.”

  “You’re not a man. You’re a fucking sickness.” Mason advanced a single step.

  That resulted in the knife blade slicing into my skin. Maybe it was only a little, but it felt like a lot, and I whimpered from behind my tape as I felt warm blood trickling down my neck.

  “Okay, okay. Easy.” Mason held up his hands, one of them still holding the gun.

  “Drop it, or I’ll cut her jugular and you can watch her bleed out on the floor.”

  “Dr. Vosberg—Raymond, listen to me.”

  “The doctor is out right now. Would you like to make an appointment?” He laughed again, and the knife jiggled against my neck, cutting deeper every time. Then he stopped laughing and practically growled, “Mason better drop the gun, or brother’s knife will have some fun.” His tone was low and ice-cold.

  Mason dropped the gun.

  “Kick it this way.”

  He used one foot to push the gun carefully our way. I tugged at whatever bound my hands behind me, but it was useless. Shit.

  The Eric-possessed shrink reached out with his own foot to drag the gun closer, and then he let go of me with one hand so he could pick it up. The knife was still at my throat, but when he bent and twisted, it moved away a little.

  Enough.

  I jerked backward hard, bashing my head into his, then threw my entire weight sideways, away from the knife. I landed on top of the gun, and by the time I did, Mason was on the guy. They were a giant tangle, and then I heard a grunt as Mason staggered backward, one hand on his belly.

  Oh, God, blood was oozing from around it.

  I jumped to my feet and plowed into the doc headfirst, driving him backward until he bashed into the wall.

  He dropped the knife but grabbed me by the throat a second later and started squeezing. That just about decided it. I couldn’t breathe at all, and he was squeezing still tighter. Black spots started blocking out my vision.

  Then I heard an explosion, and the hands around my neck eased. The eyes staring into mine widened, and Dr. Vosberg slowly sank to the floor.

  I turned to look behind me.

  Jeremy was standing in the middle of the room. The door was still open behind him, the gun still smoking in his hands.

  And Mason was still on the floor bleeding.

  I scraped my face against the wall, pushing the tape away from my mouth. Then I ran to Jeremy, turned my back to him. “Untie me.” When he didn’t move immediately I shouted, “Fucking untie me, Jeremy!”

  He did. Turned out my bonds were tape, not rope, and he picked up the killer’s knife and cut through them.

  I removed the tape and dropped to my knees beside Mason. “Jeremy, we need help. Is anyone else coming? Are you alone?” I pressed my hands to the wound in Mason’s belly, trying to slow the damned blood down. “Fuck, Mason, you’re bleeding like a stuck hog.”

  “Sorry, I’ll try to quit that.”

  I shot him a look. The first time I’d looked at his face since he’d busted in here. It was twisted up into a tight grimace. But his eyes stayed fixed on mine. The little wrinkles at the corners made my heart hurt.

  “Jeremy,” I said again, not looking away. “Come on. Your uncle’s bleeding out here. Snap out of it!”

  He finally moved. I heard him come closer, felt him set the gun down. “The police are coming. I didn’t want to wait. I brought the kayak.”

  “It’s a good thing you did,” I told him.

  “Check on Vosberg,” Mason said. “Make sure he’s dead.”

  I took Jeremy’s hands, pressed them to the wound. “Keep pressure on it.” Then I crawled over to the good doctor, who was only a few feet away. Still kneeling, I leaned over him. He’d fallen on his back, but he wasn’t dead. “Jeremy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You still got that gun?”

  “It’s right here.”

  “If this asshole tries anything, shoot him again.”

  Vosberg’s lips pulled into a smile, a sick one. His eyes opened, wider than I would have thought they were able to. “No need for that. I’m done.”

  Dr. V stared at me. Only it wasn’t Dr. V, I was sure of it. There was a stranger looking out at me through his eyes. He coughed. I angled my gaze to his chest, where bubbling red foam was spreading, then back to his face again. “I knew you were going to catch on,” he said. “It was only a matter of time. Framing you didn’t work, thanks to my little bro—”

  “Shut up!” I glanced behind me at Jeremy. He didn’t need to hear what the bastard was going to say.

  “You might think I’m dead and gone,” the monster speaking through Dr. Vosberg went on. “But part of me lives on and on.” His smile broadened. “Parts of me, that is.”

  The light went out then. I saw it. It just left. His eyes went from a living gaze to a pair of lifeless marbles. His jaw went slack. The bloody foam stopped bubbling. Just like that.

  The cops came busting in, and that was it.

  The nightmare was over. At least, I hoped it was.

  EPILOGUE

/>   My brother’s body was recovered, along with the other victims of the Wraith. The crimes were placed at the feet of Dr. Raymond Vosberg, a man whose wild ideas had been published, making it easy to believe he was completely insane. Terry Cobb, a patient of Vosberg’s, had been written off as a copycat, maybe even a protégé, who’d killed once and then realized he couldn’t live with being a murderer. David, it turned out, was just an overly possessive, jealous jerk, but otherwise harmless.

  We’d buried Tommy that afternoon in a beautiful spot overlooking the reservoir, and I liked to think he’d found some kind of peace. The funeral was over, and everyone had gone back to my place for comfort food. Everyone but me. I was still standing near the grave, with the shiny casket all flower-strewn on its stand above a thinly disguised hole in the ground. Myrtle was sleeping on my feet. She was wearing her pink plush jacket, and I was huddling into my long wool coat. The leaves were mostly gone, trees bare, and the breeze was brisk.

  I felt him before I saw him. Mason. He walked up to stand beside me, his hands in his coat pockets.

  “I thought you’d left,” I said.

  “You thought wrong.” He slid an arm around my shoulders. Friendly, supportive. Also warm and strong. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, actually, I am. How about you?”

  “A little sore still.” He put a hand on his belly, where he’d been stabbed, as he said it. “But it’s healing fast.”

  “Good.” I drew a breath, sighed it out again. “You believe there’s an afterlife, Mason?”

  “Hard not to, after what we witnessed, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Yeah it is.” I blinked, and looked up at him. “I’d like to think Tommy’s found some peace.”

  “It feels peaceful here. Maybe that’s a sign that you’re right.”

  “I hope so.” I turned around, and he did, too, and we started walking slowly toward our cars, the only two left in the cemetery. “What did you decide to tell the family?” I asked. When I’d visited him in the hospital, he’d still been wrestling with that question.

  “Nothing. I decided to tell them nothing. Marie’s weeks away from giving birth. Jeremy and Josh are too young to handle it, and my mother would just refuse to accept it, anyway.”

  I nodded. “I think that’s the right call.”

  “I hope so. Jeremy, though… He’s still pretty haunted by what happened.”

  “Well, he killed a man. At sixteen. Is he seeing someone?”

  “Yeah. And he’s started reading your books, too.”

  I looked up fast. “No shit?”

  “He likes you, Rache.”

  “I like him, too.”

  There was a long, tense silence when we reached the cars. We stood there by his black behemoth and my bumblebee, parked side by side in the little lot. “So…” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Look why don’t we—”

  “I don’t think we have to—”

  We both spoke at once, then stopped and laughed awkwardly. He gestured at me, a ladies’ first sort of thing. So I had to go first.

  “I think if we were to start…seeing each other…it might go somewhere I’m not ready to be just yet,” I said.

  “I think I agree with you on that.”

  We were standing close, face-to-face, but I was looking down at my dog to avoid his eyes. “I just need a little time. To process everything that’s happened. To figure out who I am as a sighted adult without a serial killer in her head. At least, so far. You know?”

  “I hear you. I’ve got lot of people depending on me, now. The boys, especially. And shit of my own to work through, too.”

  No lie. His brother had been a serial killer, and he was carrying that heavy secret squarely on his shoulders. He would be lucky if he didn’t need to spend a few years in therapy himself.

  “So for now…friends?” I asked. When he didn’t answer, I lifted my head.

  “For now.” He held my eyes, and then he slid his arms around me and slowly pulled me to him, then lowered his head. I wound my arms around his neck, and we kissed. It was long, deep, luscious, and it made my heart hurt.

  When he lifted his mouth away from mine, he said, “Starting now.”

  “Starting in a minute.” I laid my head on his chest, and we just stood there, holding each other, while the wind blew over the naked trees and the tombstones, and over the two of us.

  * * * * *

  She didn’t want to need him.

  Murder brought self-help guru Rachel de Luca and Detective Mason Brown together. Their shared secrets drove them apart. But now they’re together again in this riveting novella that begins where New York Times bestselling author Maggie Shayne’s Sleep with the Lights On ended.

  She may have been blind for twenty years, but Rachel’s always had an uncanny gift for seeing through people—and she distrusts her assistant’s new boyfriend at first sight. Amy isn’t interested in Rachel’s misgivings, though. She’s too eager to celebrate Thanksgiving by introducing her family to the new man in her life.

  Then Amy doesn’t show up for the holiday….

  Desperate to find her missing friend, Rachel has no choice but to turn to Mason. Their investigation into Amy’s disappearance takes them ever deeper into danger—and reignites the attraction that they’ve both sworn to resist. Now it’s a race against time as these reluctant partners fight to stave off passion and save a life.

  Look for Wake to Darkness, the next installment in this suspenseful series, coming in December from Harlequin MIRA and Maggie Shayne.

  Dream of Danger

  Maggie Shayne

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Who the hell is that?” I asked, indicating the car at the end of the drive.

  It wasn’t my usual front-door greeting, but it wasn’t a usual morning. Myrtle had an appointment at the vet, I had to get my daily ten pages written and my faithful companion and right-hand goth-chick assistant, Amy Montrose, was late.

  Late. Despite the black clothes and, occasionally, lipstick and nail polish, Amy was never late.

  And she’d been dropped off by a Jag-driving douche bag outside the gate, despite that it was wide open and he could’ve easily driven her right to the front door.

  “It’s Mel.”

  Mel was currently trying to execute a three-point turn in my narrow dirt road without getting his tires dirty. I pushed past Amy, Myrtle, my bulldog, sticking close to my side, and walked down the driveway in my fluffy slippers, yoga pants and tank top—aka my work clothes—waving my arms to get his attention and yelling, in case that might help. “Yo! Mel!”

  He glanced my way, then did a double take and got the look on his face that a kid gets when caught with his hand in the cookie jar: guilty, but unapologetic. He put his window down about the time I got within talking distance, and I reminded myself it was 9:30 a.m. on the day before Thanksgiving, in Whitney Point, New York. In other words, freakin’ freezing outside. But I was close enough to get a read on the guy. I could tell a lot about a person just by standing close enough to talk to them. Sort of feel them. Being blind for twenty years of your life gives your other senses a boost, maybe even opens up one or two that sighted people don’t have. I’d only had my vision back for a few months now. Since August. And so far my superkeen perceptions hadn’t seemed to fade.

  “Hello,” Mel said from inside his toasty-warm car. “You must be Rachel.”

  Ms. De Luca to you, buttface. “And you must be incredibly shy, Mel. ’Cause clearly yo
u’d have driven Amy up the driveway to the door otherwise, especially on such a chilly morning.”

  He looked at me, the length of driveway between his car and the front door, and then me again. “Not shy, just running late.”

  “You can turn around a lot easier if you pull in,” I said, then added under my breath, “should’ve thought of that to begin with.”

  By then Amy had joined me and leaned close to whisper loudly in my ear. “Rachel, don’t be a bitch and scare him off. Jeez, he’s already nervous as hell about meeting my folks tomorrow.”

  I gaped at her, taking my attention off Mel. Didn’t matter, I’d managed to get a read on him. The guy was hiding something. And he was kind of a jerk. “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her diamond nose stud winked in the sun. “I invited him to Erie for T-day with the fam.” She smiled. “He said yes.”

  He’d already closed his window, backed into my driveway, and was about to pull out again. “He’s going home to meet your parents and I haven’t even got his last name yet?” I waved at Mel again. “Hey, wait up!”

  “Rachel!”

  He waved back and drove away with a pleasant smile. My antennae were quivering. There was something majorly off about that guy.

  But it was thirty-five degrees and way too breezy to stay out here arguing. Myrtle had already peed and was leaning on my calf for warmth, and Mel and his silver Jaguar were vanishing in a cloud of dust on my isolated road. I heaved an impatient sigh and turned back toward my front door. Amy followed behind me, her arms full of mail from the post-office box, because it was Wednesday, and Wednesdays were answer-the-fan-mail days.

  Except I had the vet. And the pages. I waited for her to trundle in, then closed the door while she dumped the truckload of mail on the coffee table.

  “So tell me about this Mel,” I said as I heeled off my boots.

  “What do you want to know?” She talked while she walked, straight through my giant living room, formerly off-white, currently a deep brick-red hue with gold petroglyphs stenciled all around the walls way up high. I liked color. The kitchen, also formerly off-white, was freshly yellow, with big fat sunflowers in every possible location. We’d done it last week, and I was planning to tackle the currently beige dining room next. I was thinking gold. Or maybe orange. How I’d lived in a colorless home for so long was beyond me. You’d think I’d have sensed the boredom, even blind.