Paula Graves - Forbidden Temptation

But the sad fact was, for all her expertise in bringing couples together, her own experiences with romance were limited. She’d been waiting for the true-love veils to tell her when she’d met the man who would own her heart.

What came easily to other women was a puzzle to her.

“Rosie, do you have feelings for him?” Iris asked.

“I can’t see the true-love veils anymore,” Rose blurted.

Iris’s dark eyes narrowed. “Not what I asked.”

“How can I know any man is my one true love?”

Iris’s lips tightened into a thin line. “What makes you think you ever could?”

Rose glared at her sister. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Iris held her gaze, her expression serious. “Dillon and Carrie Granville were true loves. Soul mates. And he ended up killing her and himself because she was going to leave him.”

Rose bit her lip. “I must have made a mistake-”

“What if you didn’t?” Iris asked. “What if you saw exactly what you always see? What if they were soul mates? True loves? What if all that was true, but they still weren’t supposed to be together because Dillon wasn’t stable enough to handle it?”

Rose shook her head. “That’s not how it works.”

Iris laughed, though there was little humor in the sound. “We don’t know how our gifts work. Lily doesn’t really know how her visions work. I don’t know why I feel other people’s pain when I touch them, and why sometimes it’s stronger than other times. And maybe all you ever knew about true-love veils was that they were signposts, pointing to people with the capacity for a forever kind of love. A signpost, not a guarantee.”

Rose shook her head again, her sister’s words clanging like chaos in her head. That’s not the way things were. It couldn’t be. From childhood, she’d known with utter certainty that the true-love veils were signs that two people were destined for lifetime happiness with each other. And she’d never been wrong, not in all the years she’d been seeing them.

Not until Carrie and Dillon Granville.

“I kept you from doing something stupid with Paul Abernathy,” she reminded Iris. “I saw the true-love veil of Ann Curtis on his face, and I saved you a heart-ache. And I was right about Lily and McBride, too-”

“There’s a difference between probabilities and certainties,” Iris said. “The true-love veils told you about probabilities-these two people have what it takes to be happy together if they play their cards right. But it can’t promise a good outcome. That’s up to the people involved, isn’t it?”

Rose pressed her face in her hands. “Then, what was the point of even having that gift, if it was only a maybe?”

Iris touched Rose’s cheek. “I guess, that’s what you have to find out now that it’s gone.”

Rose stood, pulled her keys from her pocket and let them in the back door. She led her sister into the living room, crossing to the mirror above the fireplace mantel. She gazed at her haunted reflection and asked the question she dreaded most. “Why do you think I’m seeing death veils now?”

Iris crossed to stand just behind her. Their eyes met in the mirror. “Maybe you’re meant to stop the murders.”

Rose closed her eyes. “How?”

“I wish I could tell you.” Iris put her hands on Rose’s shoulders, the touch electric. Tension flowed out of Rose’s arms, pouring through the connection between them. Rose opened her eyes and saw the hollows that seemed to form, like dreadful magic, under her sister’s dark eyes.

Rose pulled away from Iris’s touch, turning to face her. “You can’t heal this. You’ll hurt yourself trying.”

“I wish I could take it all away from you.”

Rose caught Iris’s hand in hers, enfolding it between her palms. “Just being here helped. I didn’t know just how much I needed to tell you about this.”

Iris’s smile was pained. “A lot’s changed with you. I wish I’d known before now. I wish you’d told Lily or me something so we could have helped you out.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You want me to tell Lily so she’ll know what’s going on?”

Rose shook her head. “I’ll tell her. I’m a big girl.”

Iris tugged Rose’s hair. “I brought a bag, just in case. I can stay here tonight. We could do each other’s hair and watch cheesy movies.” Her eyes took on a teasing glint. “That is, unless you’ve got a date with the wonderboy profiler.”

Relief bubbled up in Rose’s throat; her self-imposed estrangement from her sisters had hurt more than she realized. Why had she thought keeping secrets from them would make her life easier? “No date,” she assured her sister. “But I have a whole tin of chocolate.”

Iris laughed. “I’ll go get my bag!”

“HOW MANY of the death veils have you seen?” Iris asked Rose over breakfast Thursday morning.

Rose washed down her bite of bagel with milk. “Twelve.”

Iris cocked her head. “Exactly twelve?”

Rose put down the rest of her bagel, her appetite gone. “It’s not something I could forget.”

Iris reached across the table and squeezed Rose’s hand. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t a topic you want to talk about, especially over breakfast, but-”

“But I’ve been running away from it long enough,” Rose finished for her. “I know. You’re right.”

“Do you remember who those twelve were, how they died-”

“Only eleven are dead, but I can even tell you the dates they died.” Those faces, those names were etched in Rose’s memory.

“Melissa’s the twelfth?”

Rose nodded, the memory of Melissa Bannerman’s death veil making her stomach roll.

“Okay. So tell me who the others were.” Iris crossed to the refrigerator and removed a magnetized notepad with attached pen that hung on the door. She sat across from Rose. “I know about Dillon. Who’s next?”

Pushing aside her revulsion, Rose answered, “Jenny Maitland. She died in a car accident on New Year’s Eve. Drunk driver hit her. I saw her earlier in the day, at the grocery store. I tried to tell her to be careful, but she looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Nothing new for us Browning girls, right?” Iris smiled, but her eyes were full of empathy as she jotted down a few notes on the notepad. “Who else?”

As Rose named the others, a pattern began to appear. “All foul play of some sort,” Iris pointed out.

She was right. Of the twelve death veils Rose had seen over the past ten months, none of the eleven had died of natural causes or simple accidents.

“Violent deaths that might’ve been prevented.” Iris pushed the notepad toward Rose. “Maybe that’s why you’re seeing them.”

“To stop their deaths?” Rose grimaced. “Then, I’m failing miserably.”

“Nobody ever said having a special gift would be easy-” A soft trilling sound interrupted Iris. She crossed to the counter where she’d left her purse and answered her cell phone. “Oh, hi, Shelley. What’s up?”

Shelley Daniels was a college student who helped Iris at the plant nursery Iris owned. Probably some business question. Rose turned her attention to the list of names.

Eleven people dead. Melissa in grave danger. And apparently Rose was seeing death veils because there was a chance to prevent the deaths.

But how was she supposed to do that?

“And you can’t get it going at all?”

Rose looked up at the sound of concern in her sister’s voice. Iris’s mouth tightened. “No, I know it’s a hunk of junk, but it’s all I can afford at the moment. I can be there in an hour. I can usually get it running again.”

The generator, Rose guessed. Her sister had been fighting with that piece of machinery for four years, ever since she’d started growing tropicals at her nursery.