Rebecca York - Sudden Insight

“Oh, yeah?”

“You think I’m lying?”

“No.”

They had been so close a moment ago. Too close, and they must have been thinking the same thing. It was time to put up some barriers.

She moved away from him and automatically felt to see if her hair was messed up. Some had come loose, and she worked stray strands back into place.

Her head was throbbing, making it hard to think.

“Coming here was a mistake,” she said as she stood up and smoothed out her dress.

He kept his gaze on her. “Something happened between us. Don’t you want to find out what it was?”

“Lust.”

“You know damn well it was more than that.”

Maybe she did, but she wasn’t going to admit it to him. Not now. Not when she was still shaking inside from the intensity of what she’d felt—on so many levels.

Turning on her heel, she left the office and walked through the restaurant, feeling the eyes of the maître d’ and some of the diners on her.

She kept walking, out onto the street, then headed back toward her building. The shop door was on Toulouse Street. The entrance to her apartment was in a little courtyard with an iron gate. She unlocked it, glad when the light came on as she stepped into familiar surroundings.

She’d fixed up the area with potted plants and patio furniture. Sometimes she sat down here; sometimes up on the upper patio outside her living room. Tonight she just wanted to get inside her apartment and lock the door.

When she was finally feeling safe, she sat down at the table by the window and stared out into the darkened street, trying to figure out what had really happened tonight.

A woman had been murdered. A woman she’d done a reading for a little over a day earlier.

Was Jake Harper’s harsh judgment right? Should she have warned Evelyn Morgan about what she’d seen? Had she played a role in her death by keeping silent? Maybe Evelyn would have left New Orleans. Maybe that wouldn’t have done any good, like in that book Appointment in Samarra , where the guy is heading for death no matter what he does.

She squeezed her hands into fists, grappling with the what-ifs.

She came back to the woman herself. There had been a strong streak of determination in Evelyn Morgan. She wouldn’t have run. She would have stayed around to accomplish her mission—whatever it was—but maybe she would have moved up her timetable. What if the meeting had been last night and Evelyn had left town before her murderer arrived?

Rachel had never felt so conflicted about a reading. True, she’d seen death in the cards before. But not murder.

Well, she hadn’t known it was murder. The cards hadn’t been that specific. And as she’d told Jake, there was always the chance she’d gotten it wrong.

She squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to banish the woman’s image from her mind. As she tried to focus on something else, her thoughts jumped back to Jake Harper. Another upsetting subject. For too many reasons.

All her life she’d felt a little apart from other people. No, to be brutally honest, she’d felt a lot apart. People made connections that she simply couldn’t manage herself.

Over the years she’d had lovers. The physical part had been all right, but she’d longed to find a soul mate—someone who would understand her and be there for her no matter what happened.

It had never come to pass. Somehow, she always put emotional distance between herself and other people because it felt as though something was missing in the relationship. Did she create that? Or was she missing some cues about human relations that came easily to everyone else?

When she and Jake Harper had met on the street, when they’d touched, she’d felt a zing of awareness that was totally alien to her.

She’d wanted to burrow into his arms. At the same time, she’d wanted to run from him. But she’d gone back to his restaurant, and when he’d started stroking her and kissing her, everything from the encounter on the street had only become more vivid.

She’d felt a need for him that burned in her brain and in her blood. Even though it had frightened her, she’d clung to him.

The need had been the same with him. She knew it from the way he’d kissed her with an urgency that took her breath away. And from what she’d read in his mind. He was a man, and lust should have been enough to keep him focused on what they were doing.

Instead, when he’d stumbled on the information that Rachel had anticipated Evelyn’s death, he’d pulled away.

Because he was shocked that she hadn’t warned the woman? Or because the intimacy had triggered that Vulcan mind-meld thing, and he’d been as confounded by it as she?

She wanted to ask him. At the same time she heard an inner warning to stay as far away from him as she could.

And then there was the headache. Had the intimate contact been responsible for that, too? And made it hard to think clearly?

Trying to wrest her mind away from Jake, she crossed the room and turned on the television set. The hotel death had made the evening news.

But there wasn’t much more information than they’d picked up on the street. A woman had been found dead in her hotel room when the maid had come in to turn down the bed and put a piece of chocolate on the pillow.

Rachel fired up her laptop and got a web account of the incident. When she didn’t find anything new, she picked a deck of tarot cards from the shelf beside her easy chair. She had collected them over the years. There were modern interpretations. Fantasy versions. A Gothic deck with witches and vampires. But she usually ended up going back to the Rider-Waite deck because that was what she’d learned on, and she knew the cards so well.

She had never been good at doing readings for herself. Particularly anything formal. Instead of laying out one of the classic patterns, she shuffled the cards and cut, pulling out one at random.

The Lovers. Oh, great. Apparently she couldn’t get away from the heated scene between herself and Jake Harper.

Were they getting together again?

She shuffled a second time, and got the Magician. Did that mean she wanted to find a new direction in life? The card said that everything she needed was there—if she wasn’t afraid to reach for what she wanted. She had the tools and the power. Or did she?

IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, Mickey Delaney sat in front of the television set, waiting for Tanya to come home from one of her shopping trips. She liked to buy things. A lot of the time it was things she didn’t need, like clothing or jewelry, but he didn’t complain. What was the harm? If it made her happy, let her spend money. They could always get more.

“Yeah, money’s not a problem,” he said aloud just before an item on CNN caught his attention.

He’d turned it on because he liked to keep up with stuff. Now one of the talking heads was giving an account of a murder in New Orleans.

“The woman found dead in her New Orleans hotel room yesterday has been identified as …”

“Evelyn Morgan,” Mickey said.

The name had leaped into his head before the guy said it.

He didn’t know why, but he waited to see if the announcer said the same thing.

“Evelyn Morgan.”

“Okay!”

“She has no known relatives, and her reasons for being in the city have not been established, but it appears that robbery was the motive.”

Mickey was still focused on the way he’d picked up her name. It was like knowing the phone was going to ring and knowing who would be on the other end of the line, but this seemed more important than a phone call.

A little jolt of fear sizzled through him.

Was Evelyn Morgan going to mess up what he and Tanya had? Was that why he’d known her name?