Superstition

by Karen Robards

  21

  IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT by the time Joe got home. He was tired, but tired was a relative thing, made better because it had been a productive day. The surveillance tapes were of poor quality and grainy to begin with, and the system had not been designed to monitor people entering and leaving the library, but they had captured enough to pique Joe’s interest. He had sent them off to have certain frames enhanced, and had been promised the results by Monday. Then he would know whether or not they had anything. After that, he’d gotten back to the grunt work of good police investigations: reviewing files, verifying facts, cross-checking information. A few interesting things had popped up there, too. Then, driving home, he’d remembered that the day had even had a promising start: He’d woken up with Nicky entwined around him like spaghetti around a fork. She had been nearly naked and so silky soft and warm that he’d been aroused before he had even gotten his eyes open properly. The temptation to do something about it had been almost overwhelming, but he’d had an appointment at eight-fifteen and there simply hadn’t been time. Besides, having sex with her a second time was probably going to get the whole relationship discussion cranked up again, which was a point he probably wanted to keep at the forefront of his mind while she was staying with him.

  Women: Why did they always have to label everything?

  But whatever the state of their acquaintance, it felt surprisingly good to walk into his house and know that she was there. Cohen—a sad substitute—was on the couch, and Nicky wasn’t anywhere in sight, but the signs of her presence were unmistakable. Her shoes, sexy beaded sandals, were near the door, with one of them having fallen over on its side like she’d just kind of carelessly kicked them off. Her purse was on an end table. And there was an almost undetectable scent in the air—something flowery, some kind of soap, maybe, or shampoo—that had never been there before.

  A woman’s scent.

  Breathing it in, Joe realized for the first time just how much he’d missed having a woman in his life.

  He talked to Cohen briefly, and then the officer left. Joe went in search of Nicky.

  The kitchen was empty and the bathroom and spare-bedroom doors were open, so that left just one place she could be: his bedroom. Just the thought made him hot. The room was dark, so she was probably already asleep. He would strip down and slide under the covers next to her. . . .

  Tugging off his tie, he was already starting to unbutton his shirt as he opened the door. Walking into the room, careful not to make any more noise than he had to so as not to wake her, he unfastened his shoulder holster and took it off. There was just enough moonlight filtering in through the mini-blinds so that he could see the slender shape of her curled on her side beneath the covers. With one eye on the bed—he could hear the steady rhythm of her breathing and smell the soft floral scent he’d noticed earlier, both of which were playing hell with his pulse rate—he stripped down to his boxers and padded over to his side of the bed.

  Wait a minute: The whole damn thing was his bed. Since when did he have a side?

  Joe was pondering the ramifications of that as he climbed under the covers. His leg brushed hers—the smooth slide of her skin against his was enough to make his groin tighten—and then his arm brushed the silky thing she was wearing and he registered the soft curves beneath. He turned onto his back and stared up at the ceiling in an effort to combat the urge to wake her with a kiss and take it from there. But then the whole sweet-smelling warmth of her kind of crept over him like a fog and he could feel himself weakening, losing the power to resist. . . .

  Who was kidding whom here? There was no way in hell he was going to be able to sleep in this bed with her tonight and not rock both their worlds.

  He turned his head to look at her. To his surprise, he could see the gleam of her eyes looking back at him through the darkness. The smallest of smiles curved his mouth. So she had been awake after all.

  “Hey.” His voice was husky. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Joe,” she said, “who is Brian?”

  He suddenly went as immobile as if he’d been turned to stone. For a minute there, Nicky wasn’t even sure he was breathing. She had heard him come through the door, heard the rustle of clothing as he got undressed, watched the lean, muscular grace of him as he walked between the bed and the windows in his boxers, putting his gun and keys on the night table. Then he slid in next to her, stretching out on his back on the smooth, clean sheets, and she had felt his heat, felt the vibes he was giving off, and knew instantly what was on his mind: sex. She had a pretty nice buzz going on in that department herself, and at any other time, under these same conditions, she would already have been reaching for him.

  But she needed a few questions answered first. His reaction by itself told her a lot. No doubt about it, he definitely knew who she was talking about.

  “What do you know about Brian?” There was no intonation in his voice at all.

  “I met him tonight in the kitchen.”

  “What?” Joe shot into a sitting position. The covers pooled around his waist. His chest and arms looked muscular and strong in the filtered moonlight as he turned around to stare down at her. “You met him . . .”

  His voice trailed off. He sounded like he’d simply run out of air.

  “I was getting the milk out of the refrigerator, and I turned around, and there was this blond guy standing at the end of the table, bending over your computer. I must have gasped or something—I know I nearly dropped the milk—because he looked up at me. I said, ‘Who are you?’ and he said, ‘I’m Brian,’ and I said, ‘What are you doing in here?’ and he said, ‘Ask Joe.’ Then he vanished. Poof! Just like that.”

  “Shit.” Joe flopped back down on his back beside her and ran his hands through his hair. “I thought I was the only one who could see him. I thought I was nuts.”

  “Joe, is Brian . . . dead?” Nicky asked in a careful tone. She was pretty sure of the answer, but she wanted to make absolutely certain.

  “Yeah.” His arms dropped, and his eyes cut her way. “By the way, what was Cohen doing during this little comedy?”

  “Watching TV. He never heard a thing. After I got over the shock of it, I was actually kind of glad the strange guy in the kitchen was dead instead of alive.”

  “Yeah.” Joe took a deep breath. “That was definitely a good thing.”

  Watching him, a thought struck her, and she stiffened. “Wait a minute. Let me get this straight: This whole time when you’ve been making fun of my mother because she can talk to the dead, when you acted like you thought I was imagining things when I saw Tara Mitchell in a window, you’ve been hanging out with a dead guy?”

  “We don’t hang out. He pops in whenever the hell he feels like it. And I thought he was a hallucination, maybe. Or that I had just frickin’ lost my mind. After your mother didn’t see him that night at the Old Taylor Place—”

  “He was there?” Nicky asked, aghast.

  “Big-time. Having a ball, too. Walking right beside her during most of the show. But she didn’t see him. So I thought, there’s one of two possibilities here: Either’s she’s a fake or I really am insane.”

  “She’s blocked. She can’t see dead people right now—at least, not in the way she usually does. I keep telling you that.”

  “Yeah.” It was clear from his tone that he still didn’t get it and wasn’t that interested. “So you saw him, too. That puts a whole different spin on things. How likely is it that we would both have the same hallucination?”

  “I definitely don’t think he’s a hallucination.”

  “No.” There was a wealth of what sounded like relief in the syllable. He blew out a sigh, stuffed a pillow beneath his head, hooked an arm around her, and pulled her close. “Christ, I’m not nuts. Do you have any idea how good that feels?”

  “Umm,” Nicky said. Just at that moment, the overwhelming rush of sensations that went along with having herself in her slinky nightie pulled tightly against his warm, muscula
r side left her too distracted for intelligent conversation. But as her mother had always told her, the James women bloom where they’re planted, and in that spirit, she settled in with her head on his shoulder and a hand resting on his chest and a thigh curving over his. Breathing in, she smelled the faint scent of cigarettes and man that equaled Joe to her, and felt her toes curl.

  “Hey.” He slanted a glance down at her. “Does this mean you take after your mother in more ways than just the red hair?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “The only dead people I ever saw are Tara Mitchell in that window, I think, and Brian—definitely—in the kitchen.”

  “Good.” He sounded relieved. His gaze switched to the ceiling. Staring up at it, he seemed deep in thought. Of their own volition, Nicky’s fingers made little twisty curls out of his chest hair. The hair was fine and crisp, the skin beneath smooth and hot. . . .

  “So, if we can both see him, that’s a pretty good indication that he’s really there. A ghost.” Joe’s voice was thoughtful. She glanced up from twisty-curl city to find that he was looking at her again. “Christ. I don’t believe it. What do you think he wants?”

  “Hard to say.” He really had great pecs, she thought, as her fingers, tiring of the twisty-curl thing, surreptitiously stroked the firm muscles beneath. “He must have some unfinished business with you. Did you ever ask him? Um, do you guys talk?”

  “Talk?” Joe grimaced. “Me? To a dead guy? No. Well, not much. I mean, there was only so crazy I was going to let myself be. But I did ask him why he was here once, and he said he was my guardian angel.” He drew in an audible breath and shook his head. “God, I’ve got to get used to this. Just talking about it makes me feel nuts.”

  Nicky ignored the side issue. It took lots of people a little time to accept that they’d seen a ghost. As a case in point, she’d been around ghosts her whole life, but seeing Tara Mitchell had still knocked her back a little.

  “So there you go, then. If he said he’s your guardian angel, then he probably is.”

  Joe laughed. It was a harsh sound, unamused. “If you knew this guy, you’d know how funny that is.”

  “So who is—was—he? A friend of yours?”

  “He’s the guy who shot me.”

  Nicky’s hand stilled. For a long moment, she simply lay there, looking up at him through the darkness. Then she moved, reaching up to press gentle fingers against the scars she knew were there but couldn’t see.

  “He gave you these?” she asked in a voice that was really more of a croak.

  “Yep.” He caught her hand, pressing his mouth to her palm. His lips were warm and firm, and she could feel the prickle of his stubbly chin against her skin. Ordinarily, the gesture would have made her blood heat, but she was so shocked by what she had just learned that getting turned on was beyond her for the moment.

  “Okay,” she said. “I think you better tell me the whole story.”

  “Mm.” He slanted a glance down at her. He kissed her palm again, letting his tongue touch it this time. It was warm and wet and . . . Wait. Stop. She wasn’t going there, not yet.

  She had a strong suspicion that he was trying to distract her.

  “And you might as well make it the truth.” She narrowed her eyes at him and pulled her hand away from his mouth. It ended up back on his chest, with his resting lightly on top of it. At the look in his eyes—a gleam of pure calculation came into them at her words—she sighed.

  “Maybe, just to save time and aggravation here, I should get you started. To begin with, the night you got shot, you were a vice cop who was also working undercover for the DEA, helping to set up a bust. The plan was to arrest the local drug kingpin and his gang as they accepted delivery of about five million dollars’ worth of cocaine, and at the same time bust the cops who were protecting them—you were pretending to be one of those cops—and the out-of-town guys bringing in the drugs. But somebody found out you were an undercover agent, and the whole thing went wrong.”

  His arm had hardened around her in incremental degrees as she spoke. By the time she finished, it was like an iron band. His hand pressed hers into his chest. He was motionless as a rock, staring down at her through narrowed eyes.

  “Where in hell did you come up with that?”

  “It’s the truth, and you know it.”

  He stared at her for a moment longer, still radiating tension. “Nobody knows that. Nobody’s supposed to know that. They’re still working leads from that bust.”

  With her head still pillowed on his shoulder, Nicky tilted her chin and gave him a saucy half smile. “Hey, like I keep telling you, I’m a reporter. A good one. Finding out secret stuff is what us good reporters do.”

  “Tell me you didn’t go poking around in that mess up in Jersey.”

  “I had some people check some things out, is all. Don’t worry, it was done very discreetly.”

  “You are a menace.” Despite her assurance, he sounded appalled. “Those are dangerous people. You don’t want to mess with them.”

  Since she didn’t feel like listening to him bitch at her about being careful for half an hour, it was her turn to distract him. She tweaked his chest hair, and he said “Ow!” and flattened his hand over hers again.

  “So now that we’ve got the whole dirty-cop fiction out of the way, you want to tell me about Brian? Who he was, and how he came to shoot you?”

  A beat passed in which he merely looked at her without saying anything. Nicky got the impression that something important hung in the balance: trust.

  “Strictly off the record,” she encouraged him. “No reporter, no cop. Just me and you.”

  “Exactly how much digging into my background did you do?”

  “What I told you, basically. Why?”

  “Because in order for you to understand who Brian is—was—I’d have to tell you the story of my life, which is something I don’t go into with people. Ever.”

  “Maybe you could make me an exception.” Acting on instinct, she turned her head and pressed her lips against his warm, bare shoulder in a soft, sweet, coaxing kiss. “I mean, I know you were an undercover DEA agent, and I know you have a ghost paying you drop-in visits. What’s the story of your life after that?”

  “Good point.” The slightest glimmer of a smile touched his lips as his eyes met hers. It was a sign of trust being extended, and she tucked the knowledge away somewhere close to her heart. He blew out a sigh. “Okay, here goes. Bare bones.” His tone was brisk, unemotional. “My dad left the family when I was three. My mother took off when I was six. We—my little sister, Gina, and I—were put into a foster home. Not long afterwards, they split us up. I found out later that my sister had been adopted. I wasn’t. I guess I was too old, too bad—I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t the best-behaved kid in the world—something. Anyway, I stayed in the foster system, bounced around from home to home—some good, some not so good. By the time I was fourteen, I was considered kind of incorrigible, and I wound up in a group home for teenage boys nobody had the time or patience to deal with. Brian was living there, too. We shared a cottage—one of ten in the complex—with four other bad-news kids and a pair of foster parents who didn’t have the slightest idea how to deal with us. We got in trouble—of course we got in trouble, trouble was what we lived for—and Brian and I finally got arrested for bashing in car windows with a baseball bat and stealing whatever happened to be in the cars. We were in jail for a week before somebody came to get us out, and it scared me straight. I never in my life wanted to go back to jail. It had a different effect on Brian.”

  Nicky had been listening in silence, her heart aching for the lonely, scared little boy and just as lonely, just as scared, but determinedly macho teenager he must have been. Now, as he paused, she snuggled closer, stroking his chest with her fingertips, brushing a kiss against the side of his neck, encouraging him to go on with body language rather than words. Words, she feared, might remind him that he was giving her a glimpse into what she had already divin
ed was a very private, very guarded heart.

  He must have gotten the message, because after a moment, he continued. His arm stayed securely around her, but he was looking up at the ceiling now as he spoke.

  “They kick you out of the system when you’re eighteen. Brian is—was—about a year older than I am, so he left first. His birthday came and boom, he was gone. When it was my turn to leave, I floundered for a few months, then got my act more or less together, worked, and borrowed my way through college, became a cop. I was working vice in Trenton when I ran across Brian again. He knew I was a cop, of course. Since he was involved in just about every illegal thing you can think of, running scams right and left, you can understand why we didn’t exactly renew our childhood friendship. But we kept in touch, kind of indirectly. Then I got approached by some DEA guys I knew. They wanted me to help them take down some cops who were getting paid big bucks to look the other way while this major drug ring set up operations in our area, and I agreed. Not long after that, Brian got busted for felony drug possession. Since he was looking at some major time, he sent for me, thought maybe he could trade on our old friendship and get me to help him out with that. Bingo. I had my way in. I made a deal with Brian. He would bring me into his circle, introduce me around as a cop who wanted to make some money on the side, and if things went right when it was all over, I would see to it that the charges against him were dropped. Then, while all this was going on, Gina—remember my little sister?—found me through some damned Internet group that helps kids who’ve been adopted locate their birth families. I couldn’t believe it. All those years without a word, and with the worst timing in the world, there she was, divorced with a kid of her own, just barely making it as a waitress up in Newark.”

  “Were you glad to see her?” Nicky prompted when he hesitated just long enough to make her wonder if he intended to stop right there.

  “Yeah.” His voice was soft. “Hell, yeah. My sister, you know? When you don’t have any, family means a lot. Anyway, she was having a hard time of it financially, so I helped her out a little, went by and played with the kid. A boy, Jeff. Ten years old. Then I started thinking that maybe it wasn’t too safe for them to have me hanging around, what with everything that was going down with the drug ring, so I kind of backed off, figuring I’d pretty much stay away until it was all over. But by then, from stopping by my place, she’d already met Brian. Brian, being Brian, immediately started playing the angles. He thought he could use her to his advantage in his dealings with me. He started calling her up, taking her out. By the time I’d found out what was going on, the damage had been done. Brian, the damned fool, had been showing her off to his scumbag associates, telling them she was my sister.”