by Jean Barrett
Except she wasn’t alone, because without warning a figure appeared down at the end of the corridor that stretched away into the shadows, moving toward her. His long, pale robe identified him as one of the monks. Help at last!
“I can’t seem to find my way back to my room,” she called out to him. “Can you direct me, please?”
He must have heard her, but he didn’t answer her. Didn’t so much as pause as he continued to glide along the passage.
“Hello,” she called again.
Still no response. How could he not be conscious of her presence? And his gait…there was something not right about his gait. It was so slow and smooth, as if he weren’t walking but floating. Like a wraith.
Jennifer was no longer relieved by his arrival. In fact, she was far less than that when he turned and suddenly disappeared, as if he’d passed through a solid wall. Alone again, she shivered.
Not a ghost, she told herself firmly. There had to be an explanation, probably a cross passage down which he had vanished. But she was in no mood to investigate that likelihood. All she wanted was to get away from here and back to her room.
Swinging around with the intention of retracing her route, Jennifer slammed into a wall. It was a barrier composed not of stone or timber but of hard flesh.
Uttering a little cry of alarm, she threw up her hands in a gesture of self-defense. Her palms came into searing contact with a warm, naked chest. Although he had managed to sneak up behind her without a sound, there was no question of any apparition this time. He was very real.
Her gaze collided with his, and for a long moment she found herself trapped by a pair of whiskey-colored eyes that burned into hers with a disarming intensity. She wasn’t sure at what point she realized it wasn’t only his gaze that held her. A pair of strong hands grasped her by the elbows, locking her against him.
Her palms, still flat against that tantalizing chest, seemed to sizzle. She removed them with a breathless “Let me go.”
But he didn’t release her. He went on staring at her with a harsh expression in his eyes. Then, in a slow, gruff voice, he warned her, “It won’t do you any good to run. Wherever you go, I’ll find you.”
There was something about the way he said it, something in his entire manner that—
It struck her then. Leo McKenzie didn’t know what he was saying, probably didn’t know how he had managed to slip away from Brother Timothy and catch her here. He was disoriented. Was it the result of whatever kind of sedative the monk had given him, or—
Disassociated fugue.
A condition caused by a trauma, like a blow to the head. It could leave the victim confused, not responsible for his actions or his words, even rob him of any memory of his behavior afterwards. Leo McKenzie had suffered such a blow in the accident.
Was he dangerous like this? Maybe not, but the situation was far too intimate for comfort. She was suddenly conscious of things she hadn’t noticed before. Unsettling things, like the stubble on his jaw and the tattoo of a salamander that wrapped itself halfway around his right bicep. They made him look tough.
And, admit it, sexy.
Uh-uh, much as she longed for the answers, this was definitely not the time to ask him how and why he had pursued her to Yorkshire. Even if she wasn’t afraid of him, and that was not a certainty, he was in no state for any rational conversation.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she promised him as gently as possible, “so you don’t need to hang onto me any longer.”
Those hypnotic, whiskey-colored eyes continued to search her own eyes, narrowing now as if he were wondering whether he could trust her.
“Please,” she added softly.
For a moment she wondered whether he understood her plea. Then his hands on her elbows slowly relaxed. Taking a deep breath, Jennifer removed herself from his grip and put several safe feet between them.
He looked so suddenly bewildered that she felt sorry for him. Especially when, able to look down his full length now, she saw that he wore nothing but a pair of pajama bottoms that Brother Timothy must have dug out of his suitcase.
Jennifer was no expert on what the modern man wore to bed. From her limited experience, guys either slept in the raw or in T-shirts and boxer shorts. But Leo McKenzie’s hard body in those bottoms could have started a whole new craze for pajamas.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked him, noticing that his feet were bare against the stone-flagged floor.
He didn’t answer her.
“You must be cold. Come on,” she coaxed him, “let me take you back to your room.”
Would he go with her, or would he resist? He hesitated for a few seconds when she started to edge away along the passage, but then he willingly fell into step beside her. Good. Now she had only one other problem. Exactly where were their rooms?
She needn’t have worried. Dazed or not, his sense of direction was better than hers. She ended up following him, and by some instinct she didn’t understand, maybe the same one that had led him to her, he took them straight back to their rooms.
A worried Brother Timothy burst out of Leo’s room when they arrived. “Praise the saints, you found him!” he welcomed Jennifer. “I went and dozed off in that chair, I’m ashamed to say, and when I opened my eyes again he was gone.”
“I ran into him on my way back from a visit to the loo,” Jennifer said, using the British term for a bathroom for the sake of clarity. She didn’t feel the need to offer any further explanation about the whole episode. Brother Timothy looked worried enough.
“He’s all right then, is he?”
“I think so. Just…well, not with it yet.”
“That’d be the medicine.” He turned to his patient. “Come on, matey, you’ve been busy enough for one night. Let’s get you back to bed where you belong.”
Silent and docile now, Leo permitted the monk to take him inside the bedroom. Brother Timothy thanked Jennifer, wished her a good night, and closed the door behind them.
Jennifer entered her own bedroom, threw more peat on the smoking remains of the fire in the grate and crawled into bed. She, too, had had enough for one night.
Her brain refused to shut down, though. It was infuriatingly busy with the image of Leo McKenzie. That encounter with him in the passage had impacted her far more strongly than she cared to admit. Her hands still tingled from their contact with his chest.
Damn. This wasn’t good. Not good at all.
Chapter Three
No more midnight spooks, Jennifer thought with relief, opening her eyes to the first gray light of morning seeping into the room.
Or maybe she wasn’t relieved. A glance in the direction of the window showed her that the snow was still coming down. Just how bad was it?
Very bad, she decided when, leaving her bed with her robe clutched around her, she went to the glass and looked out. Or tried to look out. The snow was so thick that she could barely glimpse the savage, white landscape. Father Stephen hadn’t exaggerated when he’d told her the storm would leave them isolated, perhaps for several days.
Jennifer was tempted to climb back into bed and bury herself again under the warm blankets. Except…
Turning her head, she gazed at the closed door to the room that connected with hers. If this should turn out to be the opportunity she’d been hoping for, she couldn’t afford to waste it.
Crossing the room, she listened at the door. She could hear nothing but the eternal moan of the wind. The hour was very early. Chances were the occupants of that room were asleep. It was worth the risk. But this time she wouldn’t make the mistake of sneaking in there and getting caught by an alert Brother Timothy, who might not regard a second visit as innocent.
Jennifer’s rap on the door was soft enough not to rouse anyone but loud enough to be heard if one of them was awake. There was no response.
Turning the iron ring that served as a handle, she inched the door open and peered around its edge. Like her own, the room was murky with shadows. But the li
ght from the window, feeble though it was, revealed that Brother Timothy had departed. He must have determined that his patient no longer needed his presence.
Leo McKenzie was not restless this morning. His tall figure stretched out on the bed never stirred as Jennifer crept across the room. Reaching the chair at his bedside, she looked down at him, wanting to be sure he was as deeply, peacefully asleep as he appeared to be.
That was evident with a glance. There was no reason for her gaze to linger on his face, to be interested in those square-jawed, craggy features softened by a wide, sensual mouth. She hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a small, crescent-shaped, white scar high on his left cheek. A result of what? she wondered.
What was she doing? This man could be her enemy, probably was, and here she stood being susceptible again to his masculinity while wondering about a scar on his cheek. What difference did it make how he had come to have the scar?
Just get on with it.
Crouching down beside the chair, she considered the collection of his personal belongings spread out on the seat. A handful of coins, a comb, a belt, a set of keys, sunglasses tucked into a case, his passport and his wallet.
The wallet seemed the likeliest prospect. Jennifer started to reach for it, and then hesitated. She hated this. Hated the necessity of having to mine someone’s privacy, to dig out what ever secrets he might be concealing. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it? It was necessary.
Smothering her guilt, she snatched up the wallet and opened it. It was a bulky thing that carried his American driver’s license along with the usual credit cards. Folded among them were two kinds of currency, American bills mixed in with British pound notes of various denominations.
But what was this?
Tucked between the bills were several identical business cards, probably ignored by Brother Timothy who must have looked no further after satisfying himself with the information provided by the passport and the driver’s license. Jennifer removed one of the cards and read the bold print.
Leo McKenzie, Private Investigator.
Apprehensive now, her gaze flashed from the face of the card to the face of the man asleep on the bed beside her.
Leo McKenzie was a P.I.? But what was an American P.I. doing over here in England? More to the point, why should he be after her?
She supposed she could have waited until he was awake and then demanded an explanation from him. Assuming, that is, he would be in any state today to make sense. Or that he would be willing to tell her.
But she was in no mood to wait. She had waited long enough. She wanted answers now. Still hoping that the wallet could give them to her, she turned her attention back to its contents.
There was a series of plastic windows, the kind that displayed insurance cards and photographs. Jennifer rapidly flipped through them, passed the only photograph they contained and then, seized by something familiar, came immediately back to the solitary picture.
The once clear plastic was clouded from long use, blurring the photo. Removing it from the sleeve for a better look, she stared at it. It was a snapshot of two young men still in their teens, their arms draped over each other’s shoulders as they gazed into the lens of the camera.
The taller of the two wore a cocky grin. Jennifer judged that nearly two decades must have passed since he’d posed for that snapshot, but she was able to recognize him. It was Leo McKenzie. And the other one…
She sucked in her breath and then released it slowly.
Oh, yes, she was able to identify him, too. Guy Spalding, the man whose murder back in London she feared that sooner or later she could be charged with.
Leo and Guy. This was the connection. They’d known each other. But how could Leo McKenzie have—
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She’d been so intent on examining the snapshot that she’d forgotten to be cautious. Had failed to be aware that the man on the bed had awakened and discovered her investigating his wallet.
Alarmed, her gaze shifted from the young face in the photograph to its mature, coldly angry counterpart.
“If you’re through snooping,” he said, his voice early-morning husky, “then I’d like to have those back.”
His hand shot out, plucking the wallet and the snapshot from her fingers. With both of them back in his possession, he shoved himself up against the headboard, those mesmerizing, whiskey-colored eyes wearing a challenge as they glowered at her.
“Satisfied yourself, have you?”
“I haven’t even begun to be satisfied.” Jennifer herself was angry now as she got to her feet. “I saw one of your business cards in that wallet, and unless you’re licensed to operate here in the U.K., and I very much doubt that you are, then you have no right to investigate me, much less the authority to follow me to Yorkshire.”
“You think that’s what I’ve been doing and that it entitles you to answers?”
“You bet I do. And you can start with the snapshot. You obviously knew Guy, but I can’t believe you were friends, long-time or otherwise.”
“Why not?”
“Because, frankly, I don’t see how you could have had anything in common with him.”
“Meaning that he had cultivated tastes and I’m some kind of a lout who wouldn’t know Chinese Chippendale from Chinese checkers? Maybe you’re right. But we had something in common all right. Our mother.”
Jennifer stared at him in disbelief. “Are you saying you were brothers? But how is that possible when—”
“He was a Spalding, and I’m a McKenzie? Half brothers, Jenny.”
No one called her Jenny, but she didn’t bother to correct him. “I didn’t know,” she said.
Not that Guy would have had any particular reason to mention it to her. Their relationship hadn’t reached the stage of intimate confidences, whatever his efforts in that direction. But she was still very surprised.
“Didn’t you?” he said.
She didn’t like the way he looked at her, as if she weren’t to be trusted about anything she said.
“So, okay,” he relented, “I guess it’s understandable he didn’t tell you about me. Why should he when Guy and I didn’t see a whole lot of each other after our mother died. We were separated when her first husband, who was English, took him back to London, and my own father kept me in the States. But there was always a bond between us, maybe because we were the only family each other had after our fathers were gone.”
All of which meant he must be determined to bring his brother’s murderer to justice, and if he was somehow convinced that she—
But she didn’t know that was his reason for following her. Not for sure. She wasn’t even certain that he had recovered his memory of yesterday’s events, though he seemed entirely lucid this morning.
“Do you know where you’re at, or how you got here?”
“Testing me?” His slow smile wore something of the cocky grin in that photo. “I’ve a pretty good idea, yeah.”
Brother Timothy must have explained it to him at some point. But whether he had any recollection of his encounter with her out in the passage last night was another matter. Maybe not. Maybe it had just been some P.I.’s instinct kicking in so that, dazed though he’d been, he’d left the room to search for her. Whatever the explanation, she had no intention of reminding him of that uncomfortable episode.
“What are you wondering now, Jenny? Whether I’m going to be okay, or whether I’m a candidate for the nearest hospital?”
He was observant all right. He had caught her eyeing the injury on his forehead, where the swelling was considerably diminished, and the tape wrapped around the lower half of that sinewy bare chest.
“I hate to disappoint you, but it’s like this….”
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he sat up on its edge. There was something provocative about the way he leaned toward her so earnestly, his dark hair tousled, his unshaven face flushed, as though he’d spent a long night doing
more than just sleeping.
Damning her treacherous imagination, she backed several inches away from him. There was no question of it. Leo McKenzie was a threat to her on more than one level.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he finished informing her emphatically. “Nothing that a monk’s medicine and a night in bed haven’t already fixed. So, while I’m grateful for both your rescue and your concern, if you think I might be too helpless to keep you from running again—”
“Why?” she demanded. “Why are you after me?”
“My brother was murdered. I’d kind of like to see that his killer pays for that.”
“And you think that I’m the one who murdered him?”
“It occurred to me that you might know something about it anyway, especially after what Barbara had to tell me.”
“Barbara?”
“Yeah, Barbara, his wife. Or do you want to pretend that you didn’t know Guy was married?”
“I didn’t, not until the day before his death.”
“Funny, because Barbara seemed to think you knew all about her. She was in a bad state when she called me at home and begged me to fly over to try to talk some sense into Guy.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Enough to worry me. I got the full details on the way into London when Barbara picked me up at Heathrow the night before last. How Guy had told her he was crazy about you and that he wanted a divorce. How you were already so wildly possessive of him that you’d do anything to have him, including breaking up his marriage.”
Jennifer was dumbfounded. She knew that Guy had been in love with her, or foolishly claimed to be, but to tell his wife such outrageous lies…
“And you believed what she told you?”
“I believed she believed it. As for me, I wanted to talk to Guy before I got real serious about it. Only I never got the chance. The police were there to meet us with the bad news when Barbara and I got to his shop.”
Guy’s esteemed antique business on Great Brompton Road where he had been murdered. The scene haunted Jennifer.