by Julie Kenner
Dangerous… It could be true. She didn’t know John Stark nearly well enough to trust him. At this point, she was afraid to trust anyone! “Nothing,” she said as Tony backed away. “Nothing at all.”
IT DIDN’T MAKE SENSE, not yet, so John said good-night and went to bed without telling Miranda Garner what he had discovered tonight. Until he knew more, there wasn’t much to tell. Not much she’d care to hear, anyway.
Miranda was a skittish woman, easily startled and shy and standoffish. Her body language very clearly told him to keep his distance; no man would need to be psychic to decipher the crossed arms and clenched hands. Hard to believe that in her most recent past life she’d been the outrageous actress Vera Lavender.
Vera had been a passionate woman, and she’d loved to laugh. When she loved, she did so deeply. When she laughed, she didn’t hold anything back. She’d embraced life with her own sort of abandon, making her mark in her short lifetime. Vera had danced like an angel unfettered by the bounds of gravity, she’d sung with passion, and she’d died a horrible death, here in this house.
She was the dark-haired woman of his vision.
John unpacked, making use of the empty drawers in the antique dresser against the far wall. His bed was a tall four-poster, which was squeaky but surprisingly comfortable. Good thing, since he was likely to be here for a few days.
Somehow the present-day haunting was tied to Vera Lavender and the horrible way she’d died. But the situation was complicated, and some unexpected interference was getting in the way of his visions. He wasn’t seeing everything he should, and half of what he did see wasn’t making sense.
He closed his eyes, hoping for sleep to come easily. If he had no luck putting things together tomorrow, he’d call Lara Hilliard. Ghosts were Lara’s specialty, and she could talk to them in a way he could not. She and her team could come in here and make sense of what was going on in a matter of hours.
He should have thought of Lara earlier. That’s who Miranda Garner needed to hire. Not him. He couldn’t help her.
He had never been able to help her.
SUNLIGHT CAME THROUGHthe opened bedroom window at an angle that told him it was afternoon. A cool breeze wafted through the window. The sun would soon set, and it would be night again.
He was on his back in the four-poster bed where they made love on many an afternoon, and Vera sat beside him. Gentle hands caressed his bare chest, and her hair fell in a thick wave across her face. She was trying her best to look happy…but she wasn’t happy. She was never entirely happy.
She was a fabulous dancer, but in truth she could not act at all. At least, she couldn’t fool him with that false smile.
“Can I trust you, Johnny?” she asked softly.
“What do you mean? Of course you can trust me.”
“This thing with us has happened so fast. I haven’t known you very long at all. Why is it that I sometimes feel I can’t live without you?”
“Because you love me?” he asked, half-teasing.
“I can’t love you, you know that. But I do want you.”
Vera tried to hide her unhappiness as she always did, in passion, touching, kissing, in caressing and then undressing herself quickly when he reached for her. Sunlight on her bare body was fascinating. The swell of her breasts, the curve of her waist and her hip, the perfection of her face. He had never known a woman as beautiful as this one could exist, much less that such a creature could desire him.
“Come away with me,” he whispered as she pressed her bare body to his.
“And where will we go?”
“I don’t care.”
“How will we live?”
“We’ll find a way.” He didn’t care what kind of house they lived in. He didn’t care if their clothes were rags or the finest fashions, whether they had money or not.
But she did. He was good enough for Vera in bed, but not anywhere else.
He pushed her onto her back and spread her thighs with his knee. When he was inside her, she loved him, whether she would admit it or not. When the realities of life intruded, she was not so sure.
“Make love to me, Johnny,” she whispered. “Everything else can wait.”
He pushed inside her, and she wrapped her legs around his hips. Vera made love with abandon, the same way she danced and sang and laughed, and whether they were in his bed or down by the pond, he could almost forgive her for offering him her body but not her heart.
JOHN WOKE with a start. The room was dark and quiet, and there was no afternoon sun, no open window…no Vera.
He’d been so sound asleep, he couldn’t imagine why he’d awakened from the dream. It was just as well that he had. The dream had seemed too real, too tactile.
The house creaked, as the wind outside picked up. Perhaps a storm was coming in, and that’s what had disturbed his sleep. And then he heard the sound that had, no doubt, awakened him.
Miranda Garner was talking, her voice growing louder and more insistent and more afraid with each passing second. John leaped from the bed and reached for his jeans as he finally made out the words.
“Go away!”
And then she screamed.
IN THE SEMIDARKNESS of her room, Tony’s ghost took on an eerie glow. His face, in particular, shone malevolently as he descended upon her. He had appeared to her before, many times; he had shaken her bed and entered her dreams; he had wrapped his hands around her throat.
But he had never before looked so angry.
“Go away!” she said again, as she backed away from the bed.
“He’s going to kill you,” Tony said, “just like before.” A long knife appeared in his ghostly hand. “He stabbed you again and again, until the last of your breath left you and there was nothing left to kill, and still he thrust the knife into you.”
Tony tried to demonstrate, swinging the ghostly knife at her breasts. Miranda screamed as the image of the knife passed through her. She felt no stab, but there was a decided chill around her heart. Tony continued to advance on her, and she stepped back and away from him.
She glanced behind her when a chill touched her back. The window had been closed when she’d gone to bed, she was sure of it. But it was open now, to allow a cool autumn wind to rush into her room. With every step she took, she was closer to that opening.
The doorknob jiggled loudly. Tony turned and looked toward the locked door, and he smiled. “You were smart to lock him out. You can’t trust him, Miranda. I love you. No one will ever love you the way I do. Don’t let him come between us.”
John Stark called her name frantically, and a moment later the door buckled and creaked as he threw his weight against it. “Miranda?” he yelled again. “Unlock the door!”
Tony stood between her and the door, menacing and misty and glowing. When she tried to inch around him, he moved with her, always between her and escape. The door creaked again. It was solid oak, and would not be easy to break down, but John was trying to do just that.
“Don’t let him in,” Tony commanded. “He’ll kill you if you give him the chance.”
“Miranda!” John shouted again. “Open the door.”
Who could she trust? The ghost who had been haunting her for a year, who had stalked her before his death, who had all but robbed her of her sanity? Or the flesh-and-blood man she barely knew who had come here to help her?
Miranda closed her eyes and rushed through and past Tony. The space he occupied was cold, so cold it touched her very bones, but she pushed through it. She ran to the door on bare feet, and her fingers fumbled with the lock before she managed to work it. When the door was unlocked, she threw it open and flung her arms around John Stark’s neck.
She didn’t know why she felt such a strong need to hold this man she barely knew, but once she had her arms around him she didn’t let go. She held onto John Stark, and after a moment he wrapped one strong arm around her.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re all right, Miranda.”
Reli
ef rushed through her, warm and tangible. Holding on to John, hearing him whisper those reassuring words…she liked it. His arms around her not only made her feel stronger, saner and less alone, they also warmed her to the pit of her soul.
Tony was gone, at least for now. He always preferred to torment her when she was alone.
She did not know John Stark as well as she should, but at the moment he was all she had. He was the only person, the only thing standing between her and Tony.
A psychic, a stranger, a man. Her last chance.
“Can I trust you, Johnny?” she whispered. “Can I trust you?”
CHAPTER FOUR
MIRANDA GARNER’S father had worked out of this study when he’d been living. It was an impressive office, in an Old South kind of way. The desk was massive and fashioned of gleaming dark wood that had been well-loved over the years. The chairs were made of burgundy leather, slightly worn but not shabby. Bookshelves crammed with books—old and new—climbed to the ceiling.
John knew without being told that Miranda did not spend much time in this room. It had been her father’s domain and still was…and always would be.
On the desk sat a photo of a gap-toothed little girl with blond pigtails and green eyes. It was hard to believe that the little Miranda in the photo and the frightened woman seated beside him were one and the same.
Someone had actually written a book about Vera Lavender—her life and her murder. The book had been self-published and bound cheaply, but the story was there in its entirety. What was known of the story, at least.
A subdued Miranda sat beside him; each of them had claimed one of the red leather chairs. He was pretty subdued himself; he hadn’t actually looked her squarely in the eye since she’d thrown her arms around him and repeated that question from his dream.
Can I trust you, Johnny?
No one had called him Johnny since the age of twelve.
“That’s him.” Miranda reached past him to place a fingertip on a grainy black-and-white photo of the man who’d murdered her great-aunt. BJ Oliver. Nowhere did it say that the J in BJ stood for John, but he knew that to be true. Why else would the Vera in his dreams have called him Johnny?
BJ Oliver was an ordinary-looking fellow, brown-haired and square-jawed, not pretty but certainly not ugly, either. There was a sadness about him, even in this photo that had been taken long before his entanglement with Vera Lavender.
John touched his own finger to the photo, and Miranda jerked her hand away, as if it would be unwise for their hands to come too close. He delved deep into his mind to try to learn for himself if this man truly had murdered his lover and then killed himself…but got no answers to his questions. He was psychic, not omniscient. There would always be questions to which he had no answers. Why did he so desperately want BJ Oliver to be innocent of the crime of murder?
He nodded and flipped through the pages. Another man’s photo caught his attention. The smile that had been flashed for the photographer was wide and bright and false. Thick blond hair was perfectly styled, to suit the era in which the man had been a minor and short-lived star.
“Phillip Lavender,” Miranda said. “He was much better looking than that BJ Oliver fellow,” she mused. “I don’t know why Vera would turn her back on a man like this one for a…a poor artist who couldn’t hold a candle to her husband in any way that I can see. Phillip adored his wife and was extremely distraught after her murder.”
John felt a moment of indignation for the poor artist as he touched one finger to the photo. “You don’t know how Vera’s husband treated her when no one was watching.” He knew, though. He knew too well. “Phillip saw his wife as a possession, not a partner. A thing he owned, no different than a car or a suit. He said he loved her, and he did in his own way. Phillip loved Vera the same way he loved his gold watch and his favorite tie. As long as she did as she was told and brought him pleasure, he loved her. When she didn’t…when she didn’t please him, he no longer loved her.”
“This is fascinating,” Miranda said dryly, “but what does it have to do with Tony?”
“I’m not sure,” he muttered.
“I don’t care about something that happened almost sixty years ago. I want my ghost gone—nothing else matters.” She squirmed. “It’s becoming apparent that you’re not going to be able to help me,” Miranda said primly. “It was a mistake for me to call you, and it was certainly a mistake for you to come here so impulsively. I’ll write you a check for the services you’ve rendered thus far, and you can leave this afternoon.”
“No,” John said halfheartedly as he leafed through the book.
“I hired you. I can fire you,” Miranda snapped.
“I’ll leave after you’ve retained the services of someone else,” he said. “I won’t leave you alone in this house.”
“I’ve done fine alone for the past year.”
John lifted his head and looked Miranda in the eye. She was pretty, and she was stronger than she gave herself credit for. But she was not fine. “I don’t want to scare you, but…”
“But what?” she prompted when he faltered. “Go ahead. Scare me.”
“Tony wants you dead,” he said as gently as possible.
MIRANDA MADE A FRESH PITCHER of iced tea while John made some calls from the parlor phone. She tried not to allow her hands to shake, while she went about the simple chore, but the shaking started and would not stop. More than her hands shook—she shivered to her bones.
She wasn’t at all surprised to hear that Tony wanted her dead. He was always whispering in her ear about the two of them being together forever. Forever mine, he’d said as he lay dying, in a rasping voice that still reminded her of some macabre Valentine’s Day greeting even though at the time she’d had no idea what his words had meant.
Miranda did her best to ignore the soft voice that whispered to her now. At least she didn’t see Tony this afternoon. Instead there was just a whisper, and a breeze that might or might not be the touch of his hand, a chill against her ear that was nothing more than his ghostly breath.
“I’m not the one who wants to hurt you,” her ghost whispered. “It’s Johnny. Don’t trust him…don’t let him touch you…I’m the one you can trust. The only one. Don’t you remember? You gave me your heart…”
“I did not,” she muttered as she mindlessly stirred the tea. “I never gave you my heart.”
“Think back, love. Remember. You’re mine, now and forever. You swore it to be true and I won’t let you go now.”
What could she have said to Tony to make him think she was literally offering him her heart. They had never even come close to a romantic relationship of that type. Miranda swore to herself that if she got out of this alive and ghostless, she would never so much as look at another man. It would be best that way, since she obviously had the worst of luck where the opposite sex was concerned. How could she have been so wrong about Tony? For a while she’d been so certain he was a nice, normal, gentle man. It hadn’t taken long for her to discover the truth about him.
He had been obsessive and cruel, in life and in death.
“Bad news,” John said as he walked into the room.
Startled by the sound of his voice, Miranda twitched and sent the spoon with which she’d been stirring the tea spinning to the floor. She twirled around to see John standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb as if he didn’t have a care in the world. How was it that the appearance of a flesh-and-blood man made her jump more than the whisper of a ghost?
“What?” she snapped. Just what she needed, more bad news.
“Lara is on a job, and she won’t be able to get away for a week. Possibly two. She’s involved in some sort of research project and can’t leave. Think you can stand me for that long?” A hint of teasing crept into his voice.
Miranda turned back to her tea that did not need any further stirring. Since the spoon she’d been using was on the floor, she grabbed another one from the drawer and began to stir anyway. John
said Tony wanted to kill her. Tony said the same thing about John. Like it or not, she knew Tony a lot better than John Stark, and while he had scared her witless and she wanted him gone…he had not physically harmed her.
“I appreciate your offer to stay, but it’s not necessary,” she said calmly. “You obviously can’t help me with my problem, so you might as well go home. I don’t mind staying here alone for a few more days.” So why did her heart lurch at the very idea?
“I’m not going anywhere until Lara and her team arrive,” John insisted. “I suppose you could kick me out of the house, but I’d just camp in the front yard anyway.”
She felt John coming up behind her, the same way she always felt Tony. This sensation was different, though. It was warm and reassuring. Comforting and calming. If he whispered in her ear she wouldn’t feel a chill. Instead she’d feel the warmth of his breath, the heat of his lips…
“I need to be here, and I knew that without doubt the moment I touched the message with your name written on it. Should I have called and made arrangements? Of course. But I didn’t call because I knew that it would be dangerous for you to be forewarned.” John’s voice was deep and warm and real. “I know now that Tony would’ve been a more serious threat if he’d known I was coming. For some reason he didn’t want us to meet. I believe he would have tried to find a way to kill you before I arrived, if he could’ve managed it. He isn’t that strong yet, but he grows stronger every day. Every day, Miranda. You know that as well as I do.”
Tony was growing stronger, and at least John didn’t think she was crazy because she saw a ghost. She couldn’t forget that John had saved her last night, that he had not only frightened Tony away…he’d made her feel safe for the first time in a year.
“All right,” she said. “You can stay until your friend arrives. Who knows? Maybe you’ll discover something new before she gets here.”
John laid a hand on her shoulder, and even though she’d known he was close she jumped when he touched her. Yes, he was warm, and like the voice—the touch was real.