Now You See Her Linda Howard(40)

She snorted. "Yeah, the same people who buy a VanDern and think they've bought anything a monkey couldn't reproduce."

The disdain in her voice made him laugh. Now he felt able to touch her again, so he lifted another curl and watched it wrap around his finger. He examined the curl, rubbed his thumb over it to separate the silky strands, and carefully considered his next question. Maybe it shouldn't be a question at all. "Now tell me why you were convinced that if you had painted me, I would be dead."

He glanced at her in time to see the panic in her eyes. "You'll think I'm crazy," she said.

"Try me. I'm not leaving you alone until I know what's going on."

She wiggled again, frowning impatiently at the blanket. "Let me out of this thing. I feel as if I'm in a straitjacket, and considering what I just said, it's making me very uncomfortable."

Smiling, he tugged hard on the blanket, loosening it. She started to push it aside, then remembered she was almost naked and settled for tucking it under her arms. She sighed. "About a year ago, weird things began happening."

"Weird, how?"

She waved her hand. "Oh, traffic lights turning green whenever I approached, parking spaces at the front of the row emptying just as I got there, that sort of thing."

His eyebrows lifted. "Convenient." He remembered how fast the trip from the gallery to here had been.

It had been almost miraculous, the way traffic had cleared out of their way. It had irritated the hell out of him, because he had been looking forward to spending more time with her.

"Yeah, I kind of like that part. And I like the way the plants look. Before, they tended to die on me, but now, no matter what I do, they just keep growing and blooming." She pointed at a plant with delicate pink blossoms. "That's a Christmas cactus. This is the sixth time already it has bloomed this year."

He rubbed his jaw. "I assume it isn't supposed to do that."

"Well, it never has before."

"What else?" There had to be something else. Traffic signals and parking spaces wouldn't make her this uneasy

She shivered suddenly, alarming him. But her skin remained smooth, and he realized it was her thoughts that had made her shiver. She stared at him, blue eyes stark and haunted. "I began seeing ghosts," she whispered.




Chapter 10


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Sweeney couldn't tell if he believed her or not, and for a moment it didn't matter. The relief at having told someone else was enormous, and until now she hadn't realized how much strain she had been under, facing this alone. His dark gaze never wavered from her face, and his hand remained gentle in her hair.

Then she realized that it did matter what he thought. It mattered very much. Three days before she wouldn't have believed she could respond to any man the way she did to him. She was uncertain how he had become so important to her so fast, but she couldn't argue with the truth. And it was because he was important to her that she cared about his opinion. What if he thought she was a crackpot and decided she was more trouble than she was worth?

Suddenly she couldn't look at him, and she felt her face heating again. Oh, God, where had her sense of caution gone? How had she let a threat to take her to the doctor, of all things, convince her to spill her guts like that? She had even been thinking of going to a doctor herself, just to see if her constant chill was in any way caused by a physical ailment. As threats went, that one was a real wimp.

"I don't know why I told you all that," she mumbled.

He merely looked at her and continued to play with her hair. "Yes, you do," he finally said in a mild tone. "How do you know they're ghosts?"

"Because they're dead," she said irritably, and scowled at him. "When you go to someone's funeral and then see him in the supermarket parking lot a month later, you pretty well know something strange is going on." She didn't know what to make of that cryptic "Yes, you do," so she ignored it.

"Yeah, I'd say that's a given." His mouth quirked as if he was struggling to hide a grin, and she wondered just what it was about her that he thought was so funny. He frequently looked as if he was trying not to laugh.

"What's so funny?"

"You are. You're so busy trying to rebuild your fences to keep me out you haven't realized I'm already in the pasture with you."

"We agreed not to get involved—"

"That's not exactly how I recall it," he drawled. "We're already 'involved'. We agreed not to have sex.

We haven't, though I have to tell you, sweetie, it was mighty tempting."

He was doing something funny to her name, she thought, fluttering the n or something like that. Maybe it was caused by that remnant of a Virginia drawl that she had never before noticed, though she didn't know how she could have missed it. And he really should put on his shirt, instead of leaning over her halfnaked like that. The guy in the Diet Coke commercial didn't have anything on Richard in the chest department. His chest was broad, and muscled, and wonderfully hairy, and she wanted to lay her hands on his pecs, feel his heart beating against her palm, somehow bank his heat against the cold hours when he wasn't there.

"Tell me more about the ghosts," he coaxed.