He glanced over at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Whenever I’m around you, my talents go crazy.”
“Are you saying it’s my fault that you’re psychic?”
“I told you that violence triggers my visions. Since I’ve met you, I’ve been able to see and hear things I’ve never had the skill to perceive before. It’s got to be you. You’re the prince of villainy, too.”
“Because I’m violent.” His emotions were flattening out. He was dropping into the cold, hard place his father had spent all those years pounding into him.
“Yes.”
“I won’t apologize for being who I am,” he stated icily.
“I’m not asking you to,” she snapped.
“It damned well sounds like you are.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth!” she exclaimed.
“I am who I am.” And he was feeling colder and harder by the second. “I never asked you to reach out to me for help or go to bed with me. You chose me of your own free will.”
“What was I thinking?” she replied sarcastically. “You’re the absolute last man I should be with. You bring out everything I despise in myself.”
The words cut through the layers of ice encasing him and eviscerated his heart like an arc welder, slicing it into neat little shreds of agony. Silent now, he guided the truck to the front of her shop.
She reached for the door handle, and he said emotionlessly, “I apologize for making you uncomfortable. I won’t bother you any further with my violent and unwelcome presence.”
A sound suspiciously like a sob escaped her as she slipped out of the truck and made her way to the front door of the shop. She fumbled at the latch and then disappeared into the dark. Into her magical, mystical world that had no place for him in it.
An urge to cry—or kill someone—swept over him. Cursing foully, he drove away into the night.
CHAPTER 12
Lissa didn’t know how long she cried. Long enough that the city went to sleep as much as it ever did around her and the night became deep and quiet outside. Her eyes burned and felt puffy, and she was wrung out emotionally. As if her own pain wasn’t enough to deal with, she’d been slammed by a massive wave of grief and rage from Max as he pulled away from the shop.
The fight had been building for a while. They were just too different. He pushed her triggers, and she pushed his. He unleashed in her too much power for her to control, and she saw too many of the secrets he was unwilling to share with anyone else.
Now that it had come out into the open, though, she had expected it to be easier to deal with. A clean break. But this was anything but clean. Her feelings for him were messy and persistent, not diminishing a bit in the face of her anger and frustration.
Truth be told, she wasn’t angry at him for asking her to find Callista’s body. She was angry that he’d denied the existence of her gift until it was convenient for him for it to exist.
She’d really thought he was different. That he could wrap his mind around her strange talent. She’d almost had herself convinced that maybe, just maybe, she deserved the same measure of happiness as anyone else.
But no. Life had reared up and smacked her in the face. Harder than ever. Her father was not only a violent criminal but apparently a spy to boot. She had tainted blood, and she would never outrun it.
She looked around her half-destroyed apartment. This was her life. A demolished mess. She could fight against it. She could put up drywall and paint it up all pretty, but it would still be a patch-up job.
Max had come along and made her kitchen perfect, and she’d been lulled into believing he could put her whole life back together. But it had been only a cruel joke, a glimpse of the life she could have had before it was yanked out of her grasp. That beautiful, gleaming kitchen was a taunt left behind to torture her.
She wasn’t tired, and she couldn’t stand looking at Max’s perfect kitchen anymore. She headed downstairs for a change of scenery.
Despair waited for her down here, too. This was all her life was destined to be. Knickknacks and baubles contained in a wrought iron guarded box. How had Callista put up with living here for all those years? Hadn’t she ever felt claustrophobic? Trapped?
Her aunt was having more adventures now that she was dead than she’d ever had while alive. Who would steal Callista’s body, anyway? And why? As she considered the questions, familiar pressure began to build in the back of her mind. A spirit wanted to speak with her.
She tried ignoring it. When that failed, she pushed back, refusing to listen to the whispers tickling her ears. She railed and raged against it, but still the pressure remained, a persistent discomfort in her skull.
Fine.
She’d lost the man of her dreams. Her secret was out. She’d completely blown her attempt to start a new life. If a dead person was so hot and bothered to talk to her, she’d let the blasted spirit talk.
Angrily, she walked around the store in search of a focus item for this particular spirit. She didn’t normally need a physical object to make contact, but she was too agitated to concentrate properly tonight.
Lissa stopped in front of the cash register. Frowned. Following the nudges of the spirit, she moved around behind the counter. Reached up...
Ahh. The glass case holding her aunt Callista’s most prized possession, an antique porcelain doll with real human hair and eyelashes. The doll was dressed beautifully in all the frills and ruffles of a pampered Victorian child. Lissa lifted her carefully out of the case, surprised at how large and heavy the doll turned out to be. She carried the doll to the middle of the store.
“Callista?” she asked aloud. For who else could the spirit be to have led her to this doll?
Power surged through her. She’d forgotten how gifted her aunt had been. Even in death, the woman’s spirit was formidable. Images flashed through Lissa’s head almost too quickly to process.
She’d expected images of where her aunt’s body was or maybe even how Callista had died. But these images were of children playing together. One of the children in particular grew from a young girl into a beautiful young woman as Lissa looked on.
She knew that girl from somewhere...it was the red-haired girl from the night of Peter Menchekov’s party!
A new face exploded into Lissa’s mind with the force of a gunshot. A young man. Good-looking in a dark, dangerous way. Wavy chocolate-colored hair and eyes blacker than midnight. He was still lean with youth, but on his way to filling out into a big, powerful man. He wore a tuxedo with all the flair of James Bond.
He smiled at the red-haired girl and held out his arm to her, and the spirit inside Lissa’s head let out a scream so bloodcurdling and loud that Lissa dropped the doll.
She watched as the doll fell to the floor in slow motion, doing a half somersault to land on her heavy porcelain head. It shattered into hundreds of pieces that flew out in all directions as Lissa squawked in dismay. The doll’s dress flew up over her ruined head and her sawdust-filled body thumped to the floor.
Something black fell out of the doll’s petticoats. A glass lens stared up at Lissa like a monolithic eye, and she stared back at it, unable to comprehend what she was looking at. A tiny red light blinked steadily beside the lens.
And then it hit her all in a rush.
One of the surveillance cameras.
And it was recording, hence the blinking red light. It was looking right at her, and she was looking back at it.
Whoever was watching that feed knew that she knew she was being recorded.
Frantically, she stomped on the surveillance camera, smashing it beneath her foot. But she was too late. They knew. They’d be coming for her. She bolted for the front door and out into the night.
Her other vision still in place, she looked up and down the stree
t and reeled at the ghostly figures drifting up and down it. Dressed in the clothing of many time periods, they passed through one another obliviously. It was beyond creepy.
Since when did she see ghosts? Oh, she talked to them from time to time and got flashes of their memories, but this—this was new. She was losing her mind.
No time to figure it out. Bad guys were coming for her. She felt them jumping into a black SUV and careening toward her.
She dashed away from the store, dodging ghosts until she remembered they were ghosts and just blasted through them in her headlong flight for her life. Oh, God. Where to go? Where to hide?
* * *
Max considered opening a bottle of vodka and drinking until he passed out or found the bottom of the bottle, but he was too angry for that. He was angry at Lissa for the accusations she’d flung at him, and he was angry at himself for her accusations being true.
He stalked around his house, which normally soothed him, but tonight he saw her everywhere he looked. That bottle of vodka was starting to sound better.
His cell phone rang, and his heart leaped. Was it her? No such luck. “What do you want, Bastien?”
“This is an official call, Max. Where are you right now?”
He frowned. “I’m home. Why?”
“Where have you been for the past couple of hours?”
“I’d rather not say. What the hell’s going on?”
“The warehouse Julio G. and his crew are known to operate out of is on fire. Initial reports indicate that many of the guys in his gang were trapped inside and are thought to have perished.”
Max swore under his breath. So that had been the hellish glow on the horizon when they’d approached the city. “And you’re calling me in an official capacity to ask if I have an alibi.”
“That’s correct.”
“I do. I spent the evening with Lissa in a location that will have security film proof of our arrival and departure times. I would rather not say where that location is.”
“All right, man. Make sure those security tapes don’t get erased. You may need them later. Your name’s come up in more than one conversation around the police department tonight.”
“Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll make the call now.”
“One last thing,” Bastien added. “Any progress on finding Callista Clearmont’s body?”
He clenched his jaw, and he actually had to work at releasing it. “I’m working on it. You’ll be the first to know when I locate her remains.”
“Don’t mess with the body if you find it. Let a medical examiner secure her remains and create a clean chain of evidence, eh?”
Max muttered something affirmative and hung up the phone thoughtfully. Someone at the police department had launched an attack against him. Who and why?
The obvious answer was the Russian mob.
Were he and Lissa getting too close to something that someone didn’t want them to find?
The two of them must be on the right track regarding the identity of her father or the identity of the commander in chief of the Russian crime syndicate. He pulled the notebook paper out of his pocket and stared at the list of names he’d made earlier. If only he had Lissa’s abilities. Maybe he could look at this list and have one of the names glow or something.
What must it be like to have an ability like hers? It would be nice to get freebie hints at life. But he’d observed that she didn’t control when the hints came or didn’t come. That would be frustrating to him. He would hate having to wait around for lightning to strike, never knowing when or if it would.
Goodness knew he didn’t envy Lissa having to deal with people’s reactions to her gift. Hell, he loved the woman and he’d reacted terribly—
Whoa. Wait. What?
Well, that was a hell of an irony. It took getting dumped by the woman to realize he had feelings for her. Impotent fury at his father bubbled up in his gut. The man had made him so hard, so impervious to emotions and feelings that he’d fallen in love and not even known it.
No wonder Lissa had dumped him.
Swearing, he headed for that bottle of vodka, but he was interrupted again by a ringing phone. He put down the unopened bottle of vodka and fished out his phone. Bastien. Again. “What do you want?” he snapped.
“We’ve got a problem.” Bastien was breathing hard as if he was running. “The panic button at your girlfriend’s shop was just hit.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“I had the police dispatchers put a note on her phone number to contact me if there was a report from her shop.” An engine revved in the background of Bastien’s voice.
Max’s first impulse was to sprint for Lola, too. But then he remembered she’d dumped him and likely wouldn’t appreciate his help. Instead he said grimly, “Let me know that she’s okay, will you?”
“You’re not going over there?” Bastien blurted.
“She told me to kiss off earlier tonight.”
“And you give a crap about that if she’s in danger?”
Aw, hell. Bastien was right. “Quit being my damned conscience for me. I’m on my way,” he bit out. He’d have gone anyway. Bastien just forced him to admit it faster. He made a mental note to thank the bastard when this was all over and Lissa was safe.
* * *
Lissa crouched in an alley, shivering, her other vision clearer and realer than eyesight, as the power rolled over her. Too much. She couldn’t contain it anymore. It felt as if every bit of the power she’d held back for all these months had come rushing in all at once. Her senses, her mind, were overwhelmed. She couldn’t take it all in.
They were almost there. The men in the black vehicle with death on their minds and in their hands. She felt oiled steel in her palms. Heavy. Cold. Solid. Locked and loaded. They knew she’d found the camera. Orders had come down. Eliminate her and her visions.
Too much knowledge. Too much power.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples, pressing back against the threatening explosion of her brain from her skull. She was losing her mind. Must run. Must hide. And yet her limbs refused to move. Refused all commands. She huddled deeper in the shadow of a stack of metal trash cans as it began to rain.
* * *
Max leaped out of Lola in an alley around the corner from the shop, barely registering the spitting rain. He lifted the hatch and yanked out a bullet-resistant vest. He slammed it on, and the extra ammo clips in the pockets banged reassuringly into his ribs. He jammed a pistol into the sewn-in holster at the back of his waistband and another into the ankle holster he quickly strapped to his leg.
He picked up a light assault weapon and slung its carry strap over his shoulder, swinging the rifle up into firing position. He advanced around the corner toward the shop.
“You moving?” a voice murmured quietly in his ear. He and Bastien had wired up and set up a discreet radio frequency for themselves while they’d been driving over there like bats out of hell.
“Affirmative. One black SUV in front of the shop,” Max said into his throat mike. He studied the vehicle through the thermal imaging feature of his nightscope and added, “Nobody inside the vehicle.”
“Back door is standing open,” Bastien reported in turn. “No movement out here in the alley.”
Max aimed his high-tech scope at the wall of Lissa’s shop. “I’m not painting any heat signatures on the ground floor.” He moved across the street from the shop so he could point his sight up at the second floor over the shop. “No heat sigs upstairs.”
“Ground floor clear,” Bastien reported.
Max slowly and quietly opened the SUV’s passenger door. He reached across the interior and grabbed a handful of wires from under the steering wheel column. He gave a good yank. “Vehicle is disabled,” he breathed into his
throat mike.
“Upstairs clear,” Bastien reported.
“There’s a basement. Single room, straight entry, no obstructions. Large crates around the walls that a man could hide behind,” Max replied.
“I’m on it.”
It was good working with a former SEAL.
“Basement’s clear. I’m heading back up to the ground floor.” A pause. “There’s something in here you should see.”
Max used his key to let himself into the shop. Apparently, the bad guys had entered and exited through the back door tonight. Bastien was crouching in the middle of the shop, looking at something on the floor. Max spotted broken pieces of what looked like a dinner plate all around his friend. And then he spied what held Bastien’s interest. Something black and electronic looking.
“Any idea what it is?” Bastien asked.
“Surveillance camera,” he bit out.
“It’s been smashed.”
Max’s mind leaped into overdrive. Lissa had found one of the cameras. It had fallen—he looked at the flattened bit of electronics—no. Lissa had stomped on it. She would know that men would come in response to her finding and destroying it. She ran the last time they had come. She would run again.
Given that the SUV was still out front, the men who’d come hadn’t found her yet. Which meant she was all alone, no doubt scared out of her mind, while armed hostiles hunted her.
“She ran, Bass. She’s out there while a truckload of men hunt her down.” He swore luridly.
“Focus, Max. Where would she go?”
“She would just run to begin with.”
“Okay. That places her a couple of blocks away from here before she slows to get her bearings. Where would she go from there? Where would she feel safe?”
His surveillance blind. Would she go back there?
“I have an idea.”
They left the shop, some fifty feet apart but moving in tandem. They crossed the street and headed down the alley, covering each other’s movements. While Bastien guarded the alley, Max climbed the stairs quickly and let himself into the blind.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2016 Box Set Page 62