RAVEN'S HOLLOW

by Jenna Ryan

  “In that case, Lieutenant, shift your excellent butt to the passenger side, and let me in.”

  Not quite a storybook angel, but close enough. He grinned. “Helluva time to decide you want to do what we managed not to do in Boston.”

  With a glance into the hollow, she pushed on his shoulder. “If we do now what we didn’t do, this really thin rock ledge that your rear tires are barely sitting on is going to crumble apart and send us straight to hell. Or into Raven’s Bog. Jury’s still out on which name’s more appropriate.”

  Either place was jarring enough for him to snap his head around.

  “Bet that hurt—” she began, then gasped when he lifted her inside and deposited her on the passenger seat. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t move.” He reached for the ignition key.

  Swinging her legs around and down, she snagged his wrist. “The engine’s running, Eli. You just can’t hear it over the Tarzan roar of testosterone in your brain.”

  “Pretty sure I spun out trying to avoid a head-on with your vehicle, Sadie.”

  Keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, and using a spectacular bolt of lightning to aid his vision, Eli shoved the truck in gear. After several seconds of maneuvering, he crawled it away from the edge.

  Sadie let out a relieved breath. “I’d be impressed if I didn’t know for a fact that I could have done the same thing a full minute sooner.”

  “We’re not on a deadline, sweetheart.” He fingered a cut on his forehead, and wasn’t surprised when he spied a smear of blood. “Are you hurt, and did we hit?”

  “No, I’m not, and yes, we did. But not each other.” In the process of wringing out her long red-brown hair, she nodded at the windshield. “It’s difficult to see right now, but that big black thing in front of us is a pine tree. It started to fall, I hit the brakes. At the risk of fueling your already massive ego, you must have done one wicked spinout to avoid being flattened by something that could have pancaked an eighteen-wheeler.”

  “Speaking of.” Eli sized up the tilt of his truck’s back end. “Unless one of my tires is sitting in a hole, I’ve got a flat.”

  She waved a hand in front of his face. “Did I mention the tree was huge, with the potential to destroy both you and your vehicle?” A frustrated sound emerged. “Why are you even on this road, Eli? Why are you in Maine at all for that matter?”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t come for Rooney’s hundred and first?”

  “No, I figured you’d come, just not until the last minute.”

  “I’d be offended if I wasn’t sure about that flat and apparently in need of a lift.”

  She stabbed at the windshield, repeated very clearly, “Big tree, tremendous crushing power.”

  His lips curved. “Yeah, I get the luck part. What I haven’t got is a second spare.”

  He told her, in bullet points, about Rooney, the bicycle that was currently strapped to his roof rack and Joe’s bar.

  Laughing, she dropped her head back onto the seat. “If I said any of that surprised me, I’d be lying.” She slanted him a speculative look. “Still a little shocked to see you, though. On this road. At this time of night.”

  “Right back at you. And don’t tell me you didn’t know there was a storm rolling in.”

  “I knew,” she agreed, far too softly for his liking.

  He studied her profile in the next flash of lightning. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  With his brain back on track, he reached out and wrapped his fingers around her neck. “You were driving from the Hollow to the Cove, Sadie, in weather no sane person would take on without extremely strong incentive. As I recall, you’re stubborn, but relatively sane.”

  She started to speak, then broke off and grabbed his chin as lightning snaked through the clouds. “You’re bleeding!”

  “A little. It’s not...” He hissed when she poked at the gash. “Well, it was going numb.”

  “Sorry.” She lightened her touch and her tone. “Eli, you were barely conscious when I found you. You could have a concussion.”

  “I could also be halfway back to New York. Might have been except for a damn bulldog. Don’t ask. Just trust me when I tell you I’ve been hit on the head more times than I can count.”

  She formed her lips into a smile. “To which I’ll simply say, no comment—and you can let go of me now.”

  “I will, just as soon as you tell me why you were heading to the Cove in a storm that scared Rooney spitless for close to twenty minutes.”

  “I—seriously?”

  “Talk to me, Sadie.”

  She blew out a breath. “Fine, I got an email. It was—unusual. I don’t know how or why, but it also seemed familiar. Like a memory buried deep in my head. So deep I can’t visualize it.”

  “You got a familiar feeling from an email?”

  “Well, I say feeling. It was more like a punch of pure creepy. And a strong sense that the sender was watching me.”

  “Was he?”

  “I don’t see how. I was in my office at the Chronicle. The guy on the phone couldn’t have...” She halted there, bit her lip. “I, uh, didn’t mention him, did I?”

  “Not unless my brain’s shorting, and I doubt that.” Because his fingers were still curled around her neck, she couldn’t draw away. That she made no effort to do so told him a great deal—most of it not good. She was scared. “What did the guy on the phone want?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have been going to the Cove in a storm that scared your great-grandfather spitless.” Her eyes, as gray and stormy as the night, slid past him to the trails of mud that slithered down the driver’s window. “The ravens must be significant.”

  Eli’s grip tightened. “You wanna back that up for me?”

  “The card was animated. One of the ravens was inside a cage, the other was out. The outside one scratched the word MINE in blood with his talon. I freaked at first, but after a while I convinced myself it was no big deal.”

  “How long’s a while?”

  “Not sure, maybe fifteen minutes. Afterward, I decided to proofread a column I’d imported for the weekend edition about fanatics and the rising numbers of them who’ve begun to act on their so-called beliefs. And there I was, right back to freaked. Seeing as he knows everything raven-related, I figured the best thing to do would be talk to Rooney, who, in case you’re unaware, never answers his phone.”

  “I am aware of that, actually.” But Eli’s response was preoccupied as he searched his mind for—something. “A raven in a cage,” he repeated. “Why can I almost picture that?”

  “No idea, but please tell me there isn’t a legend in the Cove about this kind of thing.”

  “Not that I know of, and it’s the card part that’s ringing a really distant bell.”

  “That bell could be your head still ringing from the whack it took when you almost wound up in the bog.”

  “There is that,” he agreed.

  When thunder caused the ground to tremble, she stared straight into his eyes. “You know where we are, don’t you.”

  It wasn’t a question, Eli reflected. “Yeah, I know. This is where you and I met the night we discovered Laura’s body.”

  “Met, argued, walked and found.”

  “It’s been two decades, Sadie.”

  “I have a long, and vivid, memory.”

  “Ditto, but right now I have a more immediate problem.”

  The breath she released ended on a laugh. “You really don’t, you know. You’ve got a flat and no spare, which means your vehicle’s stranded. Mine, on the other hand, has all four tires intact. Seeing as it’s on the other side of the pine, the Hollow as a destination wins by default.” A light danced up into her eyes. “Looks like you get to
check out that bulldog after all, Lieutenant.”

  “Yeah, well.” He moved too quickly for her to react. One moment, his gaze was sliding across her mouth. The next, his own was covering it.

  The last thought Eli had before his brain shut down was that kissing Sadie Bellam would be either the best thing he’d ever do or the worst mistake he’d ever make.

  Chapter Five

  For a suspended moment, Sadie’s mind and senses blanked. Then everything inside began to sizzle and snap.

  She hadn’t kissed him in Boston. Oh, she’d wanted to, too many times to count, but whenever she’d thought about it, the ring on her finger had become a lead weight reminding her that she was engaged to another man.

  There was no ring on her finger now, Sadie’s overheated senses pointed out. But that still didn’t make kissing him a good idea.

  Unfortunately, the sound that emerged from her throat more closely resembled a purr than a protest. She also suspected the fingers she’d curled into his hair were holding his mouth on hers rather than trying to push him away.

  Fascination wove a greedy path through the sparks. Eli was seducing her with his lips and tongue, with his whole mouth, in fact. Although it was difficult to form a thought, Sadie wondered if she’d ever been kissed quite this thoroughly before. If she had—and she doubted it—the memory eluded her.

  A crackle of lightning preceded another ground-shaking peal of thunder. The storm sounds matched the heat currently shooting through her veins. With her fisted hands, she tugged him closer. She wanted to climb over the console and onto his lap, to let herself slide from fantasy into reality. She wanted to return the demands of his mouth, then simply sink in and not think at all.

  The fingers on her neck slid up into her damp hair, and his thumb grazed the side of her jaw. Her skin tingled everywhere, and her breathing—well, maybe she’d stopped breathing, because her head was alive with sensations she couldn’t hope to untangle.

  The next thunderbolt vibrated the body of Eli’s truck and shot straight up into her bones. Prying her mouth free, Sadie raised uncertain eyes. “Why do I feel like someone just reached down and gave us a really hard shake?”

  “I thought it was my brain trying to shake some time-and-place sense into us.”

  Or sense in general, Sadie reflected. A sigh escaped as she forced her spinning emotions to disengage.

  Did it surprise her that his kiss would be off the scale? Hardly. After one dance in Boston, she’d expected that scale to blow eventually.

  It was an effort to separate herself from him and keep her voice steady. “This shouldn’t have happened, Eli. We shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  Skimming his knuckles over her cheekbone, he held her gaze. “I won’t argue with you, but only because I know what I can and can’t give a woman. More than sex is more than I’ve got inside me right now.”

  She laughed out a breath. “When I unscramble that remark, I’ll probably agree. In the meantime...” She leaned forward just far enough to whisper a teasing “Your kisses rock, Lieutenant, with or without the drama of a full-blown storm beneath them.”

  Sadie knew he was considering tossing caution aside and diving in again, but he went with the wiser, if somewhat disappointing, alternative and reached behind them for his backpack. “It’s time we put some distance between us and these trees. Where’s your—” he raised a humorous brow “—car?”

  “Cars are neither bad words nor bad vehicles. I spent half my teenage life wanting to own a Maserati.”

  “You own a Maserati?”

  “No, I own a Land Rover, because I’m not in my teens, and I knew when I came back to the Hollow that the roads, in a pothole-to-pavement ratio, strongly favor the potholes. My mother had a man friend once who leased a Maserati, but I was thirteen when she left him, so I waved goodbye to that wish and switched to boys instead.”

  “I didn’t know your parents had broken up, Sadie. I’m sorry.”

  She twitched away any residual sadness. “They were barely together when we lived in the Hollow. Molly says it’s the Bellam curse.”

  “What is?”

  “The inability of Nola Bellam’s female descendants—my mother in this case—to commit to people, places and/or things. An inability she believes is supplemented by the fact that those female descendants insist on passing the Bellam surname on to their own female children.”

  “Would this be your cousin Molly who only left Raven’s Hollow long enough to go to college?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Making her the notable exception commitment-wise.”

  “So it would seem.”

  With a smile grazing his lips, Eli indicated the outside storm. “You ready?”

  “Would saying no change the situation?”

  His smile deepened. “Between lightning bolts, then.”

  He would be gorgeous, Sadie thought with a sigh. A hot, gorgeous cop. A loner, with a reputation for getting the job done—however distasteful that job might be.

  As homicides went, Eli did it all. He’d go undercover for weeks, often months at a time, if going under meant bringing down a New York crime lord. During his tenure on the force, he’d worked countless night shifts while investigating gang-related murders. He’d hunted down serial killers, sunk his teeth into a dozen or more cold cases and, in at least one instance that she knew of, apprehended a man who made Hannibal Lecter appear well adjusted.

  Of course, it also didn’t hurt that he wore his dark hair long, always looked a little dangerous and somehow kept his truly superior six-foot-two-inch body totally cut.

  “There’s less than five seconds between thunderbolts,” he said now. “We’ll need to move fast and stay low.”

  “My way’s better.” Dragging her eyes from his profile, she regarded the storm-tossed trees. “Don’t count, don’t think, just do.”

  “Which is why, as a kid, you stepped in groundhog holes and sprained your ankles on a monthly basis.”

  “Two groundhog holes, two twisted ankles.” And one dead hand, she recalled with a chill that she couldn’t quite battle back. “On three?”

  “Your count.”

  They exited the truck simultaneously. With her skirt tied into a thigh-baring knot, Sadie led the way to the narrowest part of the fallen tree’s trunk. Before she could boost herself up and over, Eli scooped her off the ground.

  “Wait, don’t! Are you...” He deposited her without ceremony in a puddle on the far side. “...crazy?” she finished through her teeth.

  Joining her, he shouldered his pack and grabbed her hand. “Come on.”

  Because arguing was pointless, Sadie ran with him to her Land Rover. They fell inside on the heels of a triple fork of lightning that illuminated the woodland hollow as far as she could see.

  “Road’s a single lane here.” Raindrops flew from the ends of Eli’s hair as he looked in several directions at once. “You’re the DD, sweetheart. How are you at maneuvering in reverse?”

  She summoned a tight smile. “Guess we’ll find out.”

  Fortunately, she knew the twists and dips well enough to feel her way back through them. Eli’s flashlight helped. So did the sky-wide slashes of lightning. Still, her nerves didn’t stop jumping until they reached a point where the vehicle could be safely turned around.

  “I’d say that was worthy of a Maserati should the opportunity for you to own one ever arise.”

  “Highly unlikely in this lifetime. And please don’t say I could’ve had a fleet of them if I’d gone to New York, because everyone except my uncle—who looks on the Chronicle as a father might a beloved only child—has already pointed that out.”

  She felt more than saw his stare. “I get family loyalty, Sadie. You love your uncle, so you wanted to keep his dream alive. What I don’t get is wh
y he asked you to do it rather than someone who already lived in the Hollow.”

  “Back to Molly again, huh?”

  “Rooney says she’s smart, and given her history, I don’t see her leaving town any time soon.”

  “She’s an introvert, Eli.”

  “She worked at the Chronicle part-time through high school.”

  “As a proofreader. Look, I’m sure my uncle talked to her before approaching me. If Molly had wanted to run the newspaper, she’d be doing it.” But she angled him an impressed look. “You’ve kept up, haven’t you?”

  “It’s a hard loop to escape. There are six Blumes within a six-block radius of my apartment. One of them lives across the street from me and drops by twice a week to make sure there’s food in my fridge.”

  Sadie regarded the scattering of blackened houses as they approached Raven’s Hollow. “Power’s out. All I see are glimmers of light in a few... Stop it, Eli.”

  He hid most of a grin. “Stop what?”

  “You’re giving me a Molly smile. Those flickers are candles, not the spirits of Bellams past.”

  Now he chuckled. “I don’t know, Sadie. Word has it Raven’s Hollow was recently named one of three most haunted towns in New England.”

  “It was not.” But she lowered suspicious lashes. “Who told you that?”

  “Rooney.”

  “Well, in that case, consider the source. The man’s propagating a myth to encourage tourism in the area.”

  “Always possible. One of my more ambitious cousins lived with him for a few years. He might have planted the thought. Does it bother you?”

  Her lips curved into a deceptively sweet smile. “Do witches ride broomsticks?”

  “I’ll take the Fifth at this point. Something tells me you’re only marginally tolerant when it comes to people who believe in the local lore.”

  “That’s because I’m part of the local lore. Unfortunately.”

  She eased the Land Rover along a narrow, densely wooded road that wound up and up to a rocky promontory. The jagged point of land speared into a small bay where the waves, even on a calm day, broke white against the base of the cliff.