Déjà Vu

by Lisa Childs

  She shook her head, but her lips curved into a weak smile of admission. Drained now by their passion, she rested her head against his chest. Her eyes, the lids so heavy, threatened to close. But she fought against sleep. She had so many things she wanted to ask him, so many things she needed to know about them now … and them back then.

  Had he remembered anything more?

  She’d expected to see again the images that had flickered behind her lids ever since their first meeting. But she had seen nothing. She’d been too busy feeling.

  Even now, as her eyes closed, she saw only the sweet black of oblivion. No images of her past life or death. Or of the man she had loved and betrayed. She forced her eyes open and stared up at his face.

  Stubble darkened the line of his strong jaw and clung to the hollows beneath his sculpted cheekbones. He was so handsome, so beautiful….

  “Why did you cover your face for the picture on your book jacket?” she wondered aloud. “Were you afraid that if they knew what you looked like, you would have hoards of adoring fans stalking you?”

  His mouth quirked into a self-deprecating grin. “Given what I write, the last thing I worried about was adoring fans. But I did worry about my privacy.”

  “Since you live in a fortress, I kind of figured out that you value your privacy,” she admitted, then pressed her fist to her mouth to stifle a yawn.

  “Go to sleep,” he told her, his hand stroking her back and shoulder. “Get some rest before I wake you up and make you scream again.”

  She shivered with anticipation and a resurgence of desire. “I—I need to get back to Detroit,” she said even though she didn’t want to leave his bed or his arms. “I shouldn’t have come up here, but I had to know …”

  “Who you were?”

  “About us,” she said. “I kept seeing us together, but it wasn’t us.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “The woman looked different but I knew it was you. If only I knew for sure who I was….”

  “You will,” she said, “when you finish your book. That’s another reason I should go. So you’re not distracted from writing.” But she yawned again, her sleepless night overwhelming her with bone-deep weariness.

  “You can’t make that long drive until you get some sleep,” he said. “These roads can be treacherous when you’re wide-awake and alert. You need to get some rest.”

  She wanted to, but those last doubts niggled at her. Dare she fall asleep in his arms, in his bed? Would she ever wake up again?

  Chapter 10

  He held her heart in his hands, blood oozing between his fingers. It was almost as if it beat yet, as if she lived. But she didn’t, not anymore. He had seen to that.

  Killing her had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. But there was no way he could have let her leave him again. No way. He loved her too much to ever let her go.

  And now she would forever be with him. He would forever hold her heart in his hands.

  His hands shaking, Trent slammed the laptop closed with such force the plastic cracked. He picked it up, tempted to hurl it out the window onto the trees and rocks below. But then he dropped it back onto his desk. It wouldn’t matter if he threw it out. The memories would keep coming.

  His memories. He had to have been the Thief of Hearts. Nothing else made any sense. How else could he have known exactly what the man had done and why?

  Because of her.

  He glanced toward the bookshelf that concealed the back stairwell. The urge to slide those shelves aside and climb the steps to her propelled him across the room. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t go up to where she slept in his bed.

  He couldn’t touch her again knowing that he had to have been the man who killed her. If they made love again, he might become as obsessed with her as he had been in their other life. Loving her might bring forth all his old tendencies.

  For murder.

  He closed his eyes, remembering the crime scene from two days ago. The blood spattered across the walls and the back cover of his book. The blood on his hand.

  Was it already too late?

  A scream burned the back of her throat, but Alaina couldn’t utter it. She couldn’t escape the nightmare.

  Finally she fought her way free of the hold of the dream and jerked awake, her hand pressed to the scar over her heart. The fear and horror clung to her. But were the emotions hers or his? Alone in the bed, she clutched the tangled sheets to her body and visually searched the room for him. Dawn’s light streaking through the blinds dispelled the shadows.

  Dawn?

  Images flashed through her mind, images of the past night instead of a past life. Trent making love to her. Again and again they had reached for each other, unable to get enough. And the sensations, the emotions, had been more intense each time they had made love.

  The emotions pummeling her now were different, frightening. So much guilt and regret.

  Despite what they’d done, she had no regrets. She’d wanted to know how it would feel to make love with him, if it would measure up to the passion in her flashes of memory. So the guilt and regret had to be all his.

  What had he done?

  She had to find him. Her hands shaking, she pulled on her clothes, then reached for her holster. In addition to the gun, it had a compartment for her phone and wallet. The phone beeped, probably from a low battery, but when she glanced at it, she noted the little envelope icon indicating a voice mail. She couldn’t deal with it now. She had to find Trent.

  Although she patted the walls of the inside of the walk-in closet, Alaina couldn’t find the switch for the secret panel that hid the back stairwell. So she used the door to the hall and found the grand staircase that opened onto the two-story foyer.

  Her footsteps echoed throughout the cavernous hall as she headed toward his den. But before she could reach for the doors, someone grabbed her arm.

  “Mr. Baines does not want to be disturbed,” Dietrich warned her.

  Heat burned her face, but despite her embarrassment over sleeping with someone she had once considered a murder suspect, she turned toward Trent’s assistant. “So he’s in there?”

  His wide shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I don’t know. The doors are locked, and he won’t answer my knock. Or any of my calls.”

  “The doors are locked, so he has to be inside, then,” Alaina murmured, needing to convince herself that he was in his den and not out doing something he regretted.

  Like killing someone.

  Dietrich shrugged again. “I don’t know. This place has all these secret passageways. Sometimes I think that he has locked himself away to write, but then I’ll hear the helicopter take off.”

  “Did you hear it?” she asked, alarm shortening her breath. Had Trent left her alone?

  His assistant shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so …”

  “Do you know where he goes,” she asked, “when he just takes off?”

  “I know better than to ask Mr. Baines too many questions,” Dietrich told her.

  “Would he fire you if you did?”

  He shook his head again. “He just wouldn’t—doesn’t—answer me.”

  She’d experienced that frustration herself when she had talked to him the first time just a couple of days ago. What in the hell had she been thinking to make love with him? Maybe the guilt and regret was hers, after all.

  “He can be evasive,” she agreed.

  “Actually, I don’t think he knows the answers himself,” Dietrich admitted. “I think he gets so lost in his writing that it’s like he blacks out. He remembers nothing of what he’s done …”

  In this life.

  Was that because he remembered his other life too vividly? Had he been the killer then … and now?

  Her doubts struck him like a blow, and Trent winced. Finally he connected with her, feeling her emotions. And the first thing he experienced was her suspicion of him.

  He’d warned her; he should have been happy she had finally heeded that warning.
It was better that she didn’t trust him because he sure as hell didn’t trust himself.

  Yet he couldn’t stop himself from opening the doors to see her again. Not the doors to the hall. She was no longer there. Instead, he pushed apart the bookshelves and climbed the back stairs to the bedroom. He stepped out of the closet to find her down on her hands and knees on the floor, looking under the bed.

  He twirled her key chain around his finger. “Looking for these?”

  “You took my keys?” she asked with a little nervous catch of breath. “I thought they fell out of my pocket.”

  “No, I took them,” he admitted. He hadn’t wanted her to leave. Hell, it was too late. He was already obsessed with her, already so connected that he couldn’t let her go.

  “Why?” She reached beneath her coat, no doubt going for her gun.

  Instead of fear, pride and relief filled him. She was too smart to take chances, despite what they’d done the night before.

  He admitted, “I wanted to know when you left.”

  “You didn’t want to stop me from leaving?” she asked, her eyes narrowed as she studied his face.

  “No,” Trent lied, and she probably knew it. She probably felt it, like he had finally felt her emotions. “So are you leaving?”

  She nodded. “I have to get back to work.”

  “They don’t know where you are,” he guessed. Or the overprotective Agent Vonner would have already been pounding down his door.

  “I called in sick yesterday.” And with the color drained from her face, she looked sick. Sick with guilt over what they’d done. Her fingers trembling slightly, she took the keys from his hand.

  Her phone beeped, and she reached for it. “They keep calling.”

  “I’m surprised you got a signal at all up here,” he said. “It’s usually pretty hit-and-miss.”

  “It’s secluded up here,” she agreed with a shiver as she studied the ID screen of her phone.

  “Answer it,” he advised her.

  With a sigh, she lifted the cell to her ear and clicked a button. “Agent Paulsen.”

  Agent. At the moment, standing next to the tangled sheets of the bed where they had made love all night, she didn’t feel as though she deserved the title.

  “Alaina, where the hell have you been?”

  “Sick,” she lied to her partner.

  “Where have you been?” Vonner asked again. “I stopped by your place yesterday. A couple of times. Your car wasn’t in the lot.”

  So he’d found her address. He must have hacked into the personnel files. The first time she’d met the young agent she had picked up on his resourcefulness—and his ambition. “You must have missed my SUV,” she insisted.

  “That’s what I thought,” he admitted, “so I still went to your door.”

  “I wasn’t answering it.”

  “Or your phone,” he said. “The second time I didn’t knock. I just let myself in.”

  “You broke in?”

  “I wanted to figure out why the hell you’d gone off in the middle of a murder investigation and where you were—to make sure you were all right.” His voice rough with disapproval, he asked, “Are you with him?”

  “It’s not any of your business where I am or who I’m with,” she said.

  “It is if you’re working the case on your own,” Vonner said.

  She had no connection to Vonner, but she didn’t have to in order to hear his anger. “I’m not….” But she should have been. “You don’t need to worry about the case.”

  “I’m worried about you,” he admitted. “Even more so now. There’s been another murder here.”

  “When?”

  His sigh rattled the phone. “Rosenthal figures T.O.D. was sometime last night.”

  She glanced at the bed, remembering all those many, many times she and Trent had made love. She remembered lips brushing across lips, clinging, tongues tangling, skin sliding over skin as his body joined hers over and over again.

  Relief shuddered out of her; it couldn’t have been him. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She clicked off the cell and turned to Trent, who watched her, his gaze narrowed on her face.

  “Someone else died?” he asked, a muscle ticking beneath the dark gold stubble on his jaw.

  She nodded. “So it couldn’t have been you. You were here with me.”

  “I could have left last night,” he pointed out, “after you fell asleep.”

  Why was he so determined for her to think the worst of him? Because he thought the worst of himself.

  “No, you couldn’t have,” she argued. “We didn’t sleep much last night.”

  His breath escaped in a ragged sigh, then he acknowledged, “No, we didn’t.”

  She glanced again to the bed, remembering everything they’d done to each other. Every kiss, every caress …

  Pushing the new images from her mind, she stammered, “I—I have to leave.”

  “I’m going, too,” he said.

  “No, you can’t,” she said, horrified at the thought of him at another crime scene, showing up with her, in front of Vonner’s disapproving face.

  “The director says I can,” he reminded her. “He’s given me clearance.”

  “Why? And don’t tell me it’s just because Graves is a fan.” Something else she doubted. “What do you have on him?”

  “Seriously, nothing,” he claimed. “He must think, because of the books, that I can help. That I can see something you might miss.”

  “I won’t miss anything,” she assured him, “once I get there.”

  “I’m going, too,” he said again. “I’ll either beat you there or you can ride with me.”

  Within minutes, they were on their way, the helicopter lifting off from the pad on the roof of Trent’s fortress. Alaina’s heart pounded hard with nerves as she watched the ground below, the treetops and the castle, getting smaller and smaller.

  “Relax,” he urged her, speaking directly in her ear through the headphones she wore, “and enjoy the ride.”

  She wouldn’t relax until they found the killer. But she could take in the scenery. Like him at the controls, so arrogant in his confidence. Dark glasses concealed those compelling eyes. Sexy stubble darkened his strong jaw, and his hair appeared lighter in the sun shining through the mostly glass body of the copter. It looked as though he had run his fingers through it instead of a comb.

  She wanted to run her fingers through the soft strands, like she had last night when she’d held his mouth to hers. She could taste him yet on her lips, her tongue….

  She pulled her gaze away, refusing to be drawn to him again. Yet. Instead, she studied the landscape below them and glimpsed the hip roof of another building on the hillside. “Who lives there?”

  “Just rats, probably,” Trent answered, following the direction of her pointing finger to the rooftop. “That’s an old barn on my property.”

  “All of this is yours?” He turned to her, his gaze possessive. “Yes, it’s all mine.”

  And Alaina was afraid that he was right. She was all his….

  Chapter 11

  The walls were thin—too thin—and tumultuous emotions flooded the crime scene. Trent’s head pounded as he tried to process everything he was feeling. But there was fear. So much fear.

  He closed his eyes, shutting out the broken furniture and blood-spattered walls, but he couldn’t shut out those emotions that pummeled him. He gasped, fighting for breath. “She fought …”

  “But he overpowered her,” Alaina said, her voice cracking with emotion.

  Hers were the only ones Trent couldn’t feel right now. But he opened his eyes and studied her face. The color had drained from her skin as she studied the crime scene. There was so much blood….

  “He’s such a sick bastard,” Trent said, choking for breath, like his latest victim had choked for breath. The son of a bitch hadn’t strangled her to death, though. Like last time, he had waited for her to regain consciousness before he’d plunged the
knife into her chest, into her heart.

  Trent reeled from the agony and doubled over, clutching his hand to his chest.

  “Are you all right?” Alaina asked, her voice soft with concern. Her fingers brushed gently over his arm, but even her touch couldn’t distract him from the horror that gripped him.

  A stronger feeling, darker and more violent, pushed out the pain and fear. For the first time Trent experienced the killer’s emotions—his rage and hatred. And his frustration and resentment. Even though he’d killed, this murder hadn’t satisfied him. This woman wasn’t the one he had wanted to kill, the one he planned to kill.

  Once again Alaina was that woman, the object of a killer’s sick obsession.

  She was going to be next….

  “You’re in danger,” he warned her as the rage and hatred overwhelmed him.

  “The killer’s long gone,” she assured him, her fingers tightening on his arm.

  But the madman’s feelings weren’t gone. Trent couldn’t shake them off. Nor could he shake off the feelings of the other residents of the apartment complex. Their fear over the murder in their midst. And their guilt. Had there been witnesses? People who’d heard her screams, her fight, but had not come to her aid?

  Before they could deal with the guilt that would haunt them, Trent had to deal with it.

  All of it. The leftover emotions from the victim, the killer and the reluctant witnesses.

  It was too much. He couldn’t shut them out, so he shut down, letting the blackness of his soul overtake his mind, as well.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Alaina asked the doctor, her heart beating fast and hard as she recalled Trent dropping to the floor and falling across the blood-soaked carpet where the victim’s body must have lain before the coroner had taken her to the morgue in the basement of the federal building.

  The doctor nodded, and Alaina’s breath shuddered out with relief. She’d been so worried.

  She had barely felt Trent’s breath as she’d leaned over him, checking for his pulse. It had been so thready and weak, as if this life had been about to slip away from him, too.