Rebecca York - Sudden Insight

Mickey shook his head. Sometimes when he woke up, he had to pinch himself because he couldn’t believe that his new life was real. As a kid he had to endure the constant fighting of his parents. He was using drugs by the time he was fourteen. When good old Mom and Dad had kicked him out, he’d hooked up with some of the dealers on the street in Baltimore.

Big business for the bosses. Small potatoes for the working stiffs.

He’d met Tanya Peterson at a Twelve-Step meeting after he’d gotten into some kind of do-good program run by a city charity.

They’d helped him clean up. Gotten him an apartment. But he’d known he was going to slip back into the bad life—until Tanya.

The first time they’d met, they’d clicked in a way he didn’t understand. It had been like a hit of some exotic drug, and he’d wanted more. Their thoughts had started running along the same lines—just like that.

They’d robbed a tourist down by the Inner Harbor, then gotten a hotel room where they could be alone.

They’d taken the money and headed for Chicago. Followed by Atlanta. New York. Cleveland.

Now they were back in Baltimore in a furnished Federal Hill town house they were subletting by the month because Tanya had gotten a yen for Maryland seafood.

She was going more on whims lately. Which was starting to worry him, and he hoped to hell that she wasn’t going to screw things up for the two of them.

When the door opened, he looked up. She had a couple of shopping bags with her, from Nordstrom and Macy’s and a couple of those high-priced women’s specialty shops.

She dropped the bags on the floor and crossed to him, just as the guy on TV started in about the murder again.

Tanya went very still. “I don’t like that at all.”

“It’s nothing to do with us,” he answered, hoping it was really true.

“I think you’re wrong. It’s got to do with us, and it could be … bad.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet. But we’re going to find out before everything changes.”

The warning sent a shiver over his skin. He loved things the way they were. No way did he vote for any changes. Well, if he could have anything he wanted, he’d like it if Tanya could just relax and take things the way they came. But he didn’t hold out much hope for that.

THE MURDER OF EVELYN MORGAN and the encounter with Jake Harper had put Rachel in a strange mood. Usually she looked to the future. Now, before she went down to open the shop, she started rummaging in the storage closet at the back of her apartment, where she kept some of the mementoes she’d brought from her parents’ house after Dad had died.

She took out an old photo album and thumbed through it, studying the pictures of herself and her parents when she’d been a baby. They looked so proud and happy to have her.

Seeing their faces gave her a little pang. Things hadn’t turned out the way they’d expected. She hadn’t exactly been the daughter they wanted. She’d never been warm and cuddly with them. She hadn’t made friends with kids in school, and when she’d gotten interested in tarot card reading, she’d seen their disapproval. At least they hadn’t forbidden her to work with the cards, but they’d insisted she graduate from college before she could become a full-time reader. Which was why she had a useless degree in history.

She turned more pages in the album, looking at pictures from the early life that she barely remembered. There was a picture of her at about age three with Mom outside a white building, with a plaque beside the door. She could see the word clinic , but she couldn’t read the name of the place because a tree branch partly hid it.

She clenched her fists in frustration. Intuition told her the name was important, but it looked as if whoever had taken the picture had deliberately made the sign unreadable. Could someone scan the photo and enlarge it?

Maybe, but she wasn’t going to take it to a photo shop or a computer store. That would be dangerous.

Dangerous?

She wasn’t sure where that conviction came from, but in this case, she trusted her instincts and went back to the albums, looking for a picture taken at the same place. When she couldn’t find any, she gave up.

Finally, she snapped the book closed and sat with it on the table in front of her, staring into space, thinking about Jake Harper—the subject she’d been trying to avoid since last night.

JAKE HAD PLENTY TO DO TO keep himself busy over the next twenty-four hours. Like several businesses to run. With the restaurant, his assistant, Patrick, who’d been trained in one of the country’s top cooking schools, did the major work like ordering supplies and overseeing the kitchen.

But Jake was the one who knew antiques, and he did have to inspect an out-of-town shipment that a dealer had given him first dibs on.

He was usually good at bargaining. This time, though, he couldn’t focus on Victorian desks and Queen Anne dining room sets because his thoughts kept zinging back to Rachel Gregory.

Finally he made an offer on the furniture, just to satisfy the dealer. When the guy’s eyes widened, he knew he’d paid too much, but he wasn’t going to go back on the deal.

He left as quickly as he could, hardly aware of his surroundings as he started thinking about the woman from last night again. They’d been heading for lovemaking before she’d left. And it was his own damn fault that she’d fled. Maybe if he hadn’t been so harsh, if he’d just kept his damn mouth shut, they would have ended up finishing what he’d started.

Or would they?

He’d wanted her—more powerfully than he’d ever wanted any other woman. Yet at the same time, as the heat had built between them, he’d felt the edge of danger. If he made love with her, it was either going to be the best thing that had ever happened to him … or the worst.

And when he’d read the information about the dead woman in Rachel’s mind, he’d used the excuse to pull away.

Unfortunately that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about Rachel, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

Telling himself he wasn’t obsessed, he searched her on Google and found out that she’d been reading tarot cards in the city for about fifteen years. She’d started as a teenager on summer school breaks and quickly developed a reputation that brought customers coming back and recommending her to their friends, just as he’d surmised.

She’d stayed through the aftermath of Katrina, and she’d been able to pick up property in the French Quarter at a reduced price—leaving her in a very good financial position. She made money from her readings and also from the tourist items she sold in her shop. And she also had her inheritance.

In addition, she’d made good investments.

Because her profession gave her advance market information?

Maybe.

He laughed. He could use someone like that on his staff, giving him hot tips. But he doubted she’d want to work for him.

He tried to get her out of his mind, but finally he gave up. They’d left a lot of stuff unanswered when she’d fled his office.

What if he went over to her place and asked her some questions? He laughed, then sobered. If he asked for a reading, was she going to make the price so high that he’d turn around and leave? Or was she going to tell him he was marked for death?

He tried to shove those thoughts out of his mind, but he couldn’t do it.

Finally, just before five, he told Patrick he would be out for a while and walked into the street. It was almost dark, and he didn’t need a pack of tarot cards to feel a sudden sense of dread.

He looked around, expecting some kind of trouble on the block, but saw nothing.

He’d planned to stroll to Rachel’s, but a leisurely walk was suddenly out of the question. He had to get there fast. He had a choice of cars and trucks, but since he didn’t need them in the French Quarter, they were all in garages several blocks away. By the time he got a vehicle and drove to her shop, it would be too late.