(Rainshadow, #2) Deception Cove (9 page)

She caught her breath. “Oh.”

She did not dare to move for fear of shattering the crystalline moment.

“It would have been this kind of kiss,” Drake said.

He wrapped a hand around the back of her neck, drew her close, and covered her mouth with his own.

THE KISS WAS REAL, ALL RIGHT. SHE HAD BEEN OUT OF
practice for a year, but she had no problem recognizing the genuine article when it sent shock waves across all her senses.

Behind the shock waves of that first intimate connection came the slow burn of an exquisitely controlled but breathtakingly masculine passion.

Fire and ice splashed through her veins. The kiss was beyond real. At least it was beyond the reality of any kiss she had ever before experienced. It dazzled and astonished her. A strange confusion and a sparkling chaos made her head spin.
It was just a kiss,
she thought.
Just a kiss. Get a grip
.

But the energy of the embrace was having a bizarre effect on her. She was breathless, overwrought, and overwhelmed. It was too much. She had been walking an invisible tightrope for so long, lurching from crisis to crisis. She ricocheted between bursts of adrenaline and fury at her own inability to escape Ethel Whitcomb’s net. There had been too many nights when she had slammed her fist into her pillow, which were nights of bad dreams and cold sweats. Too many useless crying jags in the shower. Too many times when she had been forced to vanish at a moment’s notice. Too many times when she walked the floor until dawn with Houdini in her arms, searching for a way out.

Everything within her had been precariously balanced on high-alert status ever since she had run from the man who had tried to kill her. The edgy fire of Drake’s kiss sent her over the edge.

She clutched at his shoulders and threw herself into the embrace with ferocious abandon. She was frantic for release, any kind of release. She needed something, and in that moment she did not care if it came in the form of an act of violence or an act of passion. She just wanted to be free of her invisible prison, if only for a short time.

If Drake was startled or taken aback by her fierce response, he did not show it. There were a few seconds—the span of a couple of fast heartbeats—during which he seemed to be adjusting to the unexpected development in their short acquaintance. And then, like a driver who thought he was going to be getting behind the wheel of a compact car but discovers that he is piloting a turbo-rezzed sports car instead, he took back control of the kiss and floored the accelerator.

With a low, husky groan, he whipped her around and pushed her up against the nearest concrete pillar, caging her in. He deepened the kiss, giving her the kind of wild, over-the-top intensity that she wanted and needed. She fought him for the embrace with a passion that bordered on violence.

Until that moment she would not have believed that she was capable of such a response to a man. She could feel the hard shape of Drake’s heavy arousal and knew that she was not going into the wildfire alone.

Drake finally broke free of her mouth to kiss her throat. He flattened one hand against the pillar, leaning into her, and started to unfasten the front of her jacket. She found his belt buckle with her fingertips and fumbled with it until she got it undone.

The sound of an approaching car shattered the overcharged atmosphere.

Drake surfaced first. His fingers stilled on her jacket. He wrenched his mouth free and rested his damp forehead against hers.

“Damn,” he said. He was breathing hard. He used his hand on the pillar to push himself away from her. Quickly he refastened his belt. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Good grief,” Alice whispered.

She was stunned. Her legs were shaky. She was breathing too fast, and her senses were sparking and flashing, leaving her thoroughly disoriented.

A car turned the corner and entered the aisle in which the rental was parked, the driver cruising for a free space. Drake bundled Alice into the front seat, closed the door, and went quickly around to the driver’s side. He got behind the wheel.

Together they both sat silently, staring straight ahead through the windshield, as the innocent sedan moved slowly past the rear of the rental.

When the sedan disappeared around the corner, Drake made no move to start the car. Instead he continued to focus on the view of the shadowed garage. Alice did the same. Her brain seemed to have gone blank.

“Are we going to talk about this?” Drake asked evenly.

Alice took a deep breath. “Probably better if we don’t.”

“Maybe, but sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about it.”

“Stress,” she said. “It’s been a tough year.”

“That’s your excuse,” he said. “What’s mine? I was about to have sex with you in a parking garage.”

“I take it you don’t do that on a regular basis?”

“No,” he said. He gave that some thought. “Not that I’m against sex in a garage, or anywhere else, for that matter.”

The laughter welled up from out of nowhere. It swept through Alice in a cathartic kind of hysteria. She laughed until she cried. Houdini jumped down onto her lap and made soft little sounds. She clutched him close and sobbed into his fur.

Drake sat quietly until the tears stopped flowing. When it was over he handed her a tissue without saying a word.

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

She blotted up the last of the moisture from her eyes. An unfamiliar sensation came over her. It took her a moment to identify the feeling. She finally came up with the right words.

“This is going to sound weird,” she said, “but I feel much better now.”

“Good to know.” Drake started the car and reversed out of the parking space. “Speaking personally, I may never recover.”

She laughed again, but this time the laughter sounded right, at least to her ears. Drake flashed her a quick, wicked grin and drove out of the garage onto the street.

Houdini hopped up onto the back of Alice’s seat and bounced up and down a little, unable to contain his excitement.

“You’re such a little speed junkie,” Alice said.

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THEY DROVE THROUGH THE
gates of a private airfield. A sleek, unmarked jet stood ready and waiting. Drake’s overnight bag and Alice’s two suitcases were removed from the trunk of the rental and stowed aboard.

“Are we going to fly all the way to Rainshadow?” Alice asked as they walked toward the plane.

“No,” Drake said. “There’s no landing strip on the island. No strip long enough for the jet on any of the neighboring islands, either. We’ll use the jet to get as far as Cadence and take a floatplane from there to Thursday Harbor. I’ve arranged to have a company boat waiting for us there.”

“Why not take the floatplane all the way to Rainshadow? I remember seeing floats landing in the bay.”

“The last I heard from my brother is that it’s not safe to fly anywhere near the island now,” Drake said. “The energy in the atmosphere is screwing up the instruments and creates mirages that are so bad a pilot can’t rely on visual cues.”

“Why isn’t any of this information about Rainshadow in the news?”

“Because the last thing we need are a lot of curiosity seekers trying to crash through the psi-fence into the Preserve. If that happens, we’ll end up wasting valuable time rescuing trespassers instead of locating the crystals.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” Alice said.

Drake escorted her up the steps into the cabin of the jet. He paused to speak briefly to the pilot and the copilot. Then he took the seat across from Alice. They fastened their seat belts.

Drake took the file he had confiscated from McCarson out of a briefcase and immediately became immersed in the contents.

Houdini tried to ride out the takeoff perched on the back of one of the seats so that he could see out the window. Alice grabbed him and held him in her lap until they were safely airborne. Then she released him. He bounded onto a seatback and gazed, enraptured, out the window.

“He likes to ride in anything that goes faster than he can,” Alice explained to Drake.

Drake did not look up from the file. “Who doesn’t?”

She smiled. There was something oddly endearing about Drake Sebastian when he was focused the way he was now. After a time he took out a pen, made a few notes, and closed the file.

“Find anything of interest?” she asked.

“Not much.” He handed her the folder. “But it’s your life. Maybe you’ll see something that looks wrong or weird.”

She opened the file and saw several photos of herself. A few had been shot while she was on stage. Those did not bother her. But most of the pictures had been taken when she was completely unaware of the camera. They sent cold chills down her spine. There were pictures of her coming and going from the various places she had lived in the past year as well as shots of her walking out of a grocery store, boarding a city bus, and sitting on a park bench, watching Houdini climb a tree.

“Geez,” she whispered, shaken. “I knew she was stalking me, but actually seeing the pictures her investigators snapped makes me feel sick to my stomach.”

“Don’t look at the photos,” Drake said quietly. “Read the file.”

She flipped through the handful of printouts with a wistful feeling. “Not much to my life, is there? No family. No permanent address after the orphanage. A bunch of different jobs. Several failed attempts at finding a husband through a professional matchmaking agency. One failed Marriage of Convenience. One MC husband dead under suspicious circumstances.” She looked up. “It’s kind of awful to see your whole life boiled down to a few pages like this.”

Drake watched her steadily through his glasses. “Did the matchmakers give you any reason for their failure to come up with a good match?”

“They were all very polite about it, but the reasons were obvious. Non-standard, high-rez talent combined with a lack of family background information was a nonstarter for most of the agencies. Boy, I sure wasted a lot of money on marriage brokers in the past few years. The few matches they did come up with didn’t work. I’ve had a lot of first dates that never got as far as a second date.”

“Count yourself lucky.”

She raised her brows. “Why is that?”

“I met someone about three years ago. We hit it off right from the start. Had a lot in common. She was also a light-talent. We registered with an agency. Lo and behold, we found out we were a near-perfect match.”

“What happened?”

“Her name was Zara Tucker, Dr. Zara Tucker. She was beautiful, brilliant, and charming, and she worked in one of the Sebastian, Inc. labs. She was the cause of the accident that made me day-blind.”

“How awful,” Alice whispered. “She must have been devastated by what happened. Is that why the two of you didn’t marry? She just couldn’t deal with the guilt of what she had done to you.”

A cold amusement edged Drake’s mouth. “Not exactly. More like she couldn’t deal with the fact that, in spite of what the matchmaking agency claimed, I decided that we were not a good match. She was furious. She grabbed an Alien artifact from the lab vault—a kind of psi-laser—and managed to fire a blast at my eyes.”

Alice caught her breath, horrified. “She was a psycho.”

“Oh, yeah. But to her credit, she hid it well.”

Alice shuddered. “Well enough to pass the matchmaking agency’s test? That’s surprising and more than a little unnerving. I’ve heard those tests are extremely accurate.”

“Harry and I conducted an investigation later. We found out that she bribed the agency consultant to rig the results of the tests. Zara was obsessed with marrying me.”

“Sounds like your perfect match and my ex had a few things in common.”

Drake surprised her by going suddenly thoughtful, as if she had made a significant observation.

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” he said. “And three of the four of us are light-talents.” He paused. “I’m assuming Fulton Whitcomb was not a light?”

“No.” Alice frowned. “You think the fact that three of the four people we’re talking about are lights means something?”

“Probably not, but coincidences always interest me.”

“What happened to Dr. Tucker?”

“When she realized that we were never going to get married, she took her own life.”

“Suicide.” Alice closed her eyes briefly and then opened them to look at Drake. “Her death was supposed to be your punishment. She wanted you to feel guilty.”

“I believe that was part of it, yes. But who knows how a mentally ill person thinks?”

“How did she kill herself?”

“One day she simply went down into the catacombs without tuned amber and started walking.”

“They say that suicide-by-catacomb happens more often than most people realize. Did she leave a note?”

“Yes.”

“Blaming you?”

“Sure.”

“Did they ever find the body?” Alice asked.

“No. But they rarely do with catacomb suicides. Pretty sure that was deliberate, too. She wanted me to spend the rest of my life wondering if she was really dead.”

“Her final revenge.”

Drake’s smile could have been chipped out of glacial ice. “Yes.”

“Oh, man, you think she might still be alive, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Drake shoved his fingers through his hair. “That’s the hell of it. I just don’t know. In the course of our investigation, Harry and I pulled out all of the Sebastian, Inc. resources. Called in favors from the Federal Bureau of Psi Investigation and the local Guild boss. We found nothing that indicated that Zara Tucker might have faked her own death.”

“But nothing that proved she didn’t, either?”

“Right.”

“When did she disappear?”

“Nearly three years ago.”

“I dunno, Drake, that’s a long time for someone to stay lost while consumed with revenge. You’d think that if she was truly obsessed with you, she would have made some obvious move by now.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself.”

She watched him closely. “But in the meantime you haven’t registered with any more matchmaking agencies, have you? You’re afraid that if you do go into a Covenant Marriage and if Zara is still alive, she might reappear. You think she would be a threat to your wife.”

Drake gave her a long, considering look. “You’re right. That’s a very perceptive observation. The only other people who have figured that out are the members of my family.”

“Probably because they are the only other people who know the whole story.”

“Harry and the others in my family tell me I’m wrong to put my life on hold because of a threat that may or may not exist. They think that I’m the one who has become obsessed. They point out that if Zara is still alive somewhere, she’s probably in an institution by now. And if she did come out of the woodwork, my family has the resources to make her disappear again. For good this time.”

“But still you’re having a hard time moving on with that part of your life.”

Drake shifted in his seat, stretching out his legs. “Zara is my past. Let’s talk about yours.”

“What about it?”

He angled his head to indicate the folder on her lap. “Notice what is not in that file?”

She glanced down at the folder. “There’s not much here. What am I missing?”

“There is no information at all about Fulton Whitcomb beyond the fact that his body was found in his apartment. There’s no mention of your honeymoon from hell on Rainshadow.”

“Well, there’s no reason why Ethel would have gone into those details. She’s out to make my life miserable, not solve her son’s murder. As far as she’s concerned, I’m the killer. She wouldn’t waste time pointing an investigator in other directions.”

“True,” Drake said. “But everything in the case is linked to Rainshadow. You’d think that there would be something about that last trip in the file. If I were Ethel, I’d want to know exactly what happened on the island. And I’d also be asking questions about how Fulton was killed. Most of all, I’d want to know what was discovered that was worth murder.”

“You think like that because you are a logical, reasonable person. Trust me, Ethel is not logical or reasonable when it comes to her son’s death. Where are you going with this, Drake?”

“I’m not sure yet. But the focus on you makes me wonder if someone else is involved, someone who doesn’t want Ethel to look in another direction.”

A small shiver zapped through Alice. “The real killer?”

“It’s a possibility,” Drake said. “We need more information. And we’ll get it.”

“Okay,” Alice said. “Thanks.”

Drake studied her for a long moment.

“Do you know what I see when I look at that file?” he asked.

She smiled ruefully. “A misspent life? A person who can’t seem to focus on a career path? A woman who has been questioned in a possible homicide and declared unmatchable by a string of matchmaking agencies?”

“No,” he said. “I see a strong, intelligent woman who has managed to keep going in the face of some bad odds. I see a survivor.”

She thought about that. “Well, it’s not like a person has much choice.”

“There is always a choice,” Drake said. “And you keep making the choice to go forward. In my family we admire that kind of spirit.”