Read Dream Man Online

Authors: Linda Howard

Tags: #General, #Romance, #Fiction, #Fiction - Romance, #Non-Classifiable, #Romance: Modern, #Contemporary, #Romance - Contemporary, #Romance & Sagas, #Clairvoyance, #Orlando (Fla.)

Dream Man (9 page)

BOOK: Dream Man
8.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Then, six years ago, she had had to learn how to read people’s emotions the way everyone else did, by picking up subtle clues of body language and voice tone, by reading expressions. She had been like a baby learning how to talk, because she had never before had to rely on visual clues. For a while she hadn’t wanted to learn, all she had wanted was to be left alone in the blessed silence. But total isolation wasn’t human nature; even hermits usually took up with animals. Instinctively, once she had felt safe, she had begun to watch people and read them. It was difficult to read Detective Hollister, though. Her mouth quirked with wry humor. Maybe she had such a hard time reading him because she could barely stand to look at him. It wasn’t that he was repulsive, because for all his rough features, he wasn’t, but rather because he was so intense. He made her uncomfort-able, glaring at her the way he did, battering at her until he forced her to pull up memories she would rather forget.

She wasn’t afraid of him; no matter how much he might try, he couldn’t tie her to Nadine Vinick’s murder, because there was no tie. He couldn’t find evidence that didn’t exist. The uneasiness she felt—

Marlie froze, her eyes flying open and focusing on nothing as she mentally searched the feeling that had crept over her. It wasn’t a vision, or anything else that overwhelming. But she definitely sensed a vague, cold malevolence, a threat.

She got jerkily to her feet and began pacing as she tried to order her thoughts. What was happening?

Was the knowing truly returning, or was she experiencing a perfectly normal reaction to a lot of stress?

She had been thinking of Hollister, and all of a sudden she had felt uneasy and threatened. Easy enough to understand that, if Hollister was the source of the threat. Most people would think so, but Marlie analyzed the feeling again and couldn’t find any fear of Hollister in any way connected with his investigation.

The malevolence slapped at her, growing stronger. Marlie gagged on a sudden rise of nausea. Something was happen-ing. God, something was happening. What? Was it con-nected with Hollister? Was he in danger?

She lurched to a halt, her fists clenched. Maybe she should call him, see if he was all right. But what should she say? Nothing. She didn’t have to say anything. If he answered the phone, then he was obviously all right. She could just hang up-Childish trick. This unformed threat was sickening. She broke out in a sweat, torn with indecision, and all of a sudden the old instincts took over. Blindly she reached out with her mind, searching for Hollister, trying to pinpoint that nebulous cloud of evil. It was like groping in fog; she couldn’t focus on anything.

Groaning, she sank down on the couch again. What had she expected? She hadn’t been able to do that for six years, and even before, it hadn’t been easy. Just because she had had one freak vision, and felt this vague threat, she thought all of the old skills had come back? She hoped they never would, damn it!

But just now she needed them, needed something to calm this panic she felt. But if he was unconscious—she banished the word
dead
before it could form—then she wouldn’t be able to pick up his mental signals. Feeling even more frantic, she sum-moned up an image of his partner, Alex Trammell. She hadn’t paid much attention to him, but she was observant enough to be able to recall his face. She closed her eyes, concentrating, hearing her own harsh, fast breathing as she tried to find one particular person.
Think!
she fiercely commanded herself. Think of Trammell. It was no use. Nothing. Swearing under her breath, she grabbed the phone book and ran her finger down the
Hs
until she found the Hollisters. Why were there so damn many of them? Ah, there it was. Dane Hollister. She picked up the receiver and punched in the number before she could talk herself out of this. And suddenly she knew that he was all right.

It wasn’t like before. She hadn’t tuned in to his emotions; there was no mental barrage. She just knew. She had a mental picture of him sitting barefoot and bare-chested in front of the television, watching a baseball game and sipping on a beer. He muttered a curse as he reached for the telephone—

—“Yeah.”

Marlie jumped. The word had sounded in her ear just as she had pictured him in her mind, speaking.

“Ah… uh. Sorry,” she stammered, and dropped the receiver clattering into the cradle. She stared at the phone, so stunned she didn’t know what to do. She had heard the definite sounds of a baseball game in the background.

Dane shrugged with mild irritation and hung up the telephone. He had missed an out in the game, just in that short time when he’d taken his attention off the screen. He settled back down with a grunt, his bare feet propped on the coffee table and crossed at the ankle. This was the most comfortable he’d been in a while: no shirt, no shoes, the beer in his hand so cold that it made his mouth tingle to drink it. The caller had been a woman. He knew it instinctively, even though the voice had been low and unusually husky. A smoker’s voice.

He thought of Marlie Keen. Her voice had that little rasp; just hearing it gave him a hard-on every time. Reflexively he looked down at his lap. Bingo.

He reached for the phone.

“Did you just call?” he demanded tersely, after a quick call to local Information.

“I… yes. I’m sorry.”

“Any reason for it?”

He could hear her breathing over the line, the sounds fast and shallow. Something had upset her. “I was worried,” she finally admitted.

“Worried? About what?”

“I thought you might be in some sort of trouble. I was wrong. I’m sorry,” she said again.

“You were wrong,” he repeated, with exaggerated disbe-lief. “Imagine that.”

She slammed the receiver down in his ear. He winced, angrily started to punch the redial button, but hung up instead. Instead of being sarcastic, he should have tried to find out more about what had her so upset; maybe Nadine Vinick was weighing on her conscience. Maybe she’d been about to spill the beans; Officer Ewan had cleared her, though she didn’t know that yet, but he’d still bet money that she knew the perp’s identity. Now, because of his own big mouth, he had blown the chance to find out, because she sure as hell wasn’t going
to
talk to him now.

Then he realized that neither of them had identified themselves. She had known who he was, just as he had known who she was.

And she had been right about one thing, damn it. He
was
in trouble. He looked down at his lap again. Big trouble.

Temptation gnawed at him. He slammed the beer down onto the table so hard that foam sloshed out of the can. Then, cussing at his own stupidity, he picked up the receiver and hit the redial.

“What?” she snapped, answering before the first ring had even completed.

“What’s going on? Talk to me.”

“What would you like me to say?” she asked sweetly.

“How about the real reason why you called.”

“I
told
you. I thought something was wrong.”

“What gave you that idea?” Try as he might, he couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his tone. She took a deep, steadying breath. “Look. I had an uneasy feeling about you and I was worried. I was wrong.”

“What made you think it had anything to do with me?”

Dead silence. He waited, but she didn’t say anything. It was such a complete silence, without even the sound of her breathing, that alarm chilled his spine. “Are you all right?” he asked sharply. “Marlie?”

Silence. “Come on, babe, talk to me, or I’m on my way over there.”

“No!” Her voice sounded strangled. “No—don’t come over.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. I just… thought of something else.”

“Such as?”

“Maybe it wasn’t connected with you. Maybe it was someone else. I have to think about this. Good-bye.”

“Don’t hang up,” he warned. “Goddamn it, Marlie, don’t hang up—shit!” The dial tone buzzed in his ear. He slammed the phone down and surged to his feet. He’d go over there, check it out—

—And find what? He sincerely doubted she’d open the door to him. Nor did he have a reason, because Officer Ewan had cleared her. That had eaten at him all day; unless something else turned up, and things were looking damn hopeless in that respect, he had no reason to talk to her again. And solving Nadine Vinick’s murder seemed more and more unlikely. It pissed him royally that it looked as if the case would be a real mystery, a stranger-to-stranger killing, the kind that was almost never resolved. Mrs. Vinick deserved better than that.

And he didn’t want never to see Marlie Keen again. If she wasn’t involved in the case, and officially he had to accept that, then he’d have to arrange something else. He didn’t like what he was feeling, but it was too damn strong to ignore.

Marlie paced, alternately swearing and wiping away tears. Damn Hollister! He made her so angry, she could have cheerfully taken a swing at him, had he been there right then. But Hollister was the least of her problems. The knowing was definitely coming back, maybe a little altered from before. Maybe she wasn’t as empathic as she had been; maybe there was a bit more clairvoyance. How else could she have known that Hollister was watching a baseball game? How else could she have anticipated his answer right down to the second? That had never happened before.

She had been thinking about him, unwillingly, but he had definitely been on her mind when the uneasiness, the sense of danger, had swept over her. She had automatically thought it had something to do with him, but it hadn’t; he had just been so strongly in her mind that she hadn’t realized the two weren’t connected. That meant she had two problems; no, three. One: Her extra sensorial skills were coming back, in fits and starts. She didn’t want them to, but they were, and she’d have to deal with it. She pushed that acknowledgment away, because though this problem would have the biggest effect on her life, the others were more immediate.

Two: Detective Hollister was going to be a big complica-tion. He already was. He made her angrier than anyone else she’d ever met, and he did it without even trying. He was a big Neanderthal, sarcastic and skeptical, and she could feel his own anger blazing at her. He was so intense that she almost yielded to the impulse to hide her face every time she saw him. He burned with the sort of fierce masculinity that made women turn and go all google-eyed when they watched him. Marlie knew she didn’t have much experience with men, but that didn’t mean she was stupid, either. Her reactions to him were too intense, out of all proportion. The last thing she needed right now was a sexual attraction to handle, especially when nothing could come of it. Groaning, she realized that Hollister felt the same reluctant attraction. He had called her “babe.” Probably the only thing that had held him back was his suspicion of her, and that couldn’t last in the absence of evidence. Men like him didn’t hesitate when they wanted a woman; once he admitted that she had nothing to do with Nadine Vinick’s murder, she would have to fend him off. Which brought her to problem number three, the one so distressing that she had put off thinking about it: The evil she had felt, which had made her so uneasy, had the same… texture, or personality, as the force she had felt the night Nadine Vinick had been murdered. It was the same man. He was still out there, and his evil was focusing on someone else. It was unformed as yet; she had caught only an echo of it. But he was going to act again, and she was the only hope the police had, and his intended victim had, to stop him in time.

She had nothing to go on. No face, no name. Eventually, though, she would be able to focus on him, stay with him, and he would make some mistake that would tell her his identity. She would have to work with the police, and that meant working with Hollister. She had no doubt it would be an uncomfortable, difficult situation, but she had no choice. She was caught up in this and had no way of getting out.

Chapter 7

Marlie had just finished dressing the next morning when the heavy knock at the front door made her jump, then frown with both annoyance and alarm. She had no doubt who was pounding on her door at seven-twenty in the morning, and it didn’t take any special skills to figure it out. The best way to deal with him, though, was to not let him know that she reacted to him in any way. He would see her anger as a weakness, and heaven help her if he should get even a hint of the unwilling attraction she felt. He was too aggressive to let either circumstance pass by. She wasn’t about to invite him in. She had to get to work, and she had no intention of letting him make her late. She got her purse and had her keys in hand as she marched to the front door. When she opened it, he was standing almost in her face, leaning with one muscular arm braced against the frame and the other one raised to pound on her door again. The closeness of his body made her catch her breath, a reaction she hid by stepping out and turning to close the door behind her. Unfortunately, he didn’t move back, and she fetched up solidly against him, all heat and hard muscle. She was practically in his arms; all he had to do was close them around her, and she would be caught.

Grimly she concentrated on locking the door, trying to ignore the situation. The brief look she had had at his face told her that he was ill tempered this morning, but now she sensed an alarming male edginess beneath the temper. He was as fractious as a stallion scenting a mare in season. The mental image was unfortunate, and so apt that her heart began beating wildly. With her back turned to him as she wrestled with the stubborn lock, she was suddenly acutely aware of the press of his body against her buttocks. An unmistakable ridge had formed, thick and hard, blatant in intent. The lock finally clicked into place. She stood motionless, frozen with indecision. If she moved, she would be rubbing against him; if she didn’t move, he might take it as an invitation. She closed her eyes against the insidious tempta-tion to simply turn and face him, giving him silent permis-sion by giving him access. Only the certainty that it wouldn’t work, that she would freeze under the onslaught of a six-year-old horror, kept her from giving in. She couldn’t go through that again. She forced her voice to work. “What do you want, Detective?” Then she could have bit her tongue. Bad choice of words, under the circumstances. With his erection insis-tently nudging her, what he wanted was obvious.

BOOK: Dream Man
8.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The King of Plagues by Jonathan Maberry
Walleye Junction by Karin Salvalaggio
Dear Drama by Braya Spice
Faith In Love by Liann Snow
The Giant Smugglers by Matt Solomon
Jagged Edge by Mercy Cortez
The Unreasoning Mask by Philip Jose Farmer
Raising Hell by Julie Kenner