Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (48 page)

Startled, she looked up and found an enraged Gray Rouillard towering over her. Reuben must have called him, she thought absently. His black hair was loose, tangled around his shoulders. “Where the
hell,”
he barked, “have you been?”

“New Orleans,” she replied in a mild tone, though she was acutely aware of the breathless interest of everyone in the café.

“Would it be asking too much of you to let me know where you’re going to be?” he snapped.

“I went to Mr. Pleasant’s funeral,” she said.

He slid into the booth opposite her, some of the fury
fading from his face. Beneath the table, his long legs clasped hers, and he reached across to take both her hands in his. “I was scared sh—spitless,” he confessed, quickly adjusting his first word choice to something more socially acceptable. “You hadn’t checked out, but Reuben saw you put a suitcase in the car. I even had him open your room to see if any of your things were still there.”

“I wouldn’t have left town without telling you,” she said, secretly amused that he thought she might have left town at all.

“You’d better not,” he muttered. His hands tightened on hers. “Look,” he began, and stopped. “Ah, hell, I know this isn’t the best place to do it, but I’ve still got tons of paperwork to wade through and I don’t know how long it’ll be before I see daylight. Will you marry me?”

He had succeeded in surprising her. He had gone beyond surprising her. She sat back, stunned into speechlessness. Gray wanted to
marry
her? She hadn’t dared let herself even think of it. With their tangled pasts . . . the thorny situation with his mother and sister . . . well, it just hadn’t seemed to be an option.

Evidently he took her reaction as rejection, and his dark brows drew together. Being Gray, he immediately took ruthless measures to get what he wanted. “You have to marry me,” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the café could hear him. “That’s my baby girl you’re carrying. She’ll need a daddy, and you need a husband.”

Faith gasped, her eyes rounding with horror. “You
fiend,”
she shrieked, scrambling out of the booth. She wasn’t pregnant and she knew it, her period having arrived right on time, three days before. She had a confused, dizzying impression of a room full of avid faces, staring at her, and Gray wore a ruthlessly satisfied look on his face as he smiled at her, enjoying her sputtering, incoherent fury. Maybe he saw something in her eyes, a split second of warning, but it wasn’t enough. Her hand shot out for her glass of iced tea and she dashed it full in his face. “I am
not
pregnant!” she yelled.

Gray climbed out of the booth, wiping tea from his eyes
with Faith’s napkin. “Maybe not now, but if you want to be, we’d better get married.”

“Marry him,” Halley advised, leaning over the counter. She was grinning hugely. “And make his life hell. He deserves it, after this stunt.”

“Yeah,” he said positively. “I deserve it.”

Faith stared up at him. “But—what about your mother?” she asked helplessly.

He shrugged. “What about her?” Faith opened her mouth to yell at him again, and he grinned, holding up his hand. “I told her and Monica that I intended to marry you. Mother went into her acute disapproval syndrome, but Monica told her, literally, to put a sock in it. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Well, except for one.” His eyes glittered at her, outrageously reminding her of the courthouse. “Monica gives us her best wishes; she and Michael are getting married next week. She strongly suggested to Mother that she move to New Orleans, which she’s always liked better than Prescott, anyway. So, baby, I’m going to be rattling around in that big house all by myself, and I need my own personal redhead to keep me company.”

He meant it. Faith swallowed, once again unable to speak. Gray’s head tilted as he smiled down at her, dark eyes full of desire and tenderness. “There’s something else I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he murmured. “I love you, baby. I should have told you sooner, but things started happening.”

She thought of hitting him. She thought of snatching someone else’s tea to toss in his face. Instead she said, “Yes.” He held out his arms, and she walked into them, to the accompanying spatter of applause from the café patrons.

Marlie Keen was trying to lead a quiet, ordinary life. She thought the clairvoyance that allowed her to witness crimes as they happened had been destroyed in the nightmare of her past. Then one night it returned with a vengeance, and she desperately needed to find someone to make it stop.

Detective Dane Hollister of the Orlando police department had never met anyone like Marlie. He had doubts about her clairvoyance, but there was no doubt how much he desired her. Her soft, sweet scent set his blood afire, and he wanted to wrap her in his arms and chase the sadness from her eyes. To Marlie, Dane was all heat and hard muscle, and he made her body come alive as it never had before. But not even she could foresee where their passion would lead: a hungry quest for the elusive, dreamy ecstasies of love . . . and a dangerous journey into the twisted mind of a madman who would threaten their happiness and their lives. . . .

This is dedicated to Joyce, Liz, Marilyn, Beverly, Cheri, and Kathy, for their encouragement and participation. To Gary, for taking care of me all those long months when I could barely walk. To Robin, for the pep talks. To Claire, for her patience. To Iris and Catherine and Fayrene and Kay, for the support. Thanks, guys.

I
T WAS ELEVEN-THIRTY WHEN
M
ARLIE
K
EEN
left the Cinemaplex with the rest of the Friday night moviegoers. The movie had been a good one, a lighthearted romp that had made her laugh aloud several times and left her in a cheerful mood. As she walked briskly to her car, she thought she could tell which movie people had seen by how they were acting now. It wasn’t that difficult; the couples who were holding hands, or even exchanging kisses in the parking lot, had obviously seen the sexy romance. The aggressive bunch of teenage boys had seen the latest martial arts thriller. The well-dressed young professionals who were in earnest discussions had seen the latest
Thelma and Louise
imitation. Marlie was glad she had chosen the comedy.

It was as she was driving home on the brightly lit expressway that it hit her: She felt good. The best she had felt in years. Six years, to be precise.

In startled retrospect, she realized that she had been at peace for several months now, but she had been so caught up in the sedative routine of the life she had built here that she
hadn’t noticed. For a long time she had simply existed, going through the motions, but time had done its slow work and eventually she had healed, like an amputee recovering from the loss of a limb and learning to cope, then to enjoy life again. Her loss had been mental rather than physical, and unlike an amputee, she had prayed through dark, endless nights that she never recover that part of herself. At some point in the past six years, she had stopped living in dread that the knowing would return, and simply gotten on with her life.

She liked being normal. She liked being able to go to movies the way normal people did, liked being able to sit in a crowd; she hadn’t been able to do that before. Several years ago, when she had realized it was actually possible, she had turned into a movie junkie for a while, visually gorging on the films that she thought were safe. For a long time any degree of violence was unbearable, but for the past couple of years she had been able to watch the occasional thriller, though they weren’t her favorite type. To her surprise, she hadn’t yet been able to watch any sex scenes; she would have thought that violence would have been immeasurably more difficult for her to handle, maybe even impossible, but instead it was the portrayal of intimacy that gave her problems. Dr. Ewell had been fond of saying that no one should ever lay bets on the human psyche, and she was amused to find he was right. The violence in her life had been traumatic, devastating, while the sex had been merely unpleasant, but it was the “love” scenes that still had her squeezing her eyes shut until it was over.

She exited off the expressway onto a four-lane street, and of course was caught by the traffic light at the bottom of the exit ramp. The radio was tuned to an easy-listening station and she inhaled deeply, feeling the slow music and the lingering lightheartedness of the movie combine in a delicious, physical sense of contentment—

—the knife flashed down, gleaming dully. A sodden,
muffled THUNK! as it struck. The blade rose again, dripping red—

Marlie jerked back, an unconscious physical denial of the horribly real image that had just flashed in her mind. “No,” she moaned softly to herself. She could hear her own breathing, sharp and gasping.

“No,” she said again, though she already knew the protest was useless. Her hands were clenched on the steering wheel, white-knuckled, and even that wasn’t enough to stop the trembling that started at her feet and went all the way up. Dimly she watched her hands start shaking as the spasms intensified.

—Black, gloating pleasure. Triumph. Contempt—

It was happening again. Dear God,
it was coming back!
She had thought herself free, but she wasn’t. The knowing was coming closer, growing, looming, and she knew from experience that soon it would overwhelm her. Clumsily, her coordination already deteriorating, she steered the car to the right, so she wouldn’t block the exit ramp. A car horn blared as she wavered too close to the vehicle beside her, but the noise was distant, muted. Her vision was fading. Desperately she braked to a stop and shoved the gear lever into park, hoping that she had managed to get completely out of traffic, but then the nightmare image was back, hitting her full strength like a beacon that had brushed by her in search before homing in.

Her hands fell limply into her lap. She sat in the car staring straight ahead, her eyes unblinking, unseeing, everything focused inward.

Her breathing became harsher. Rough sounds began to form in her throat, but she didn’t hear them. Her right hand lifted slowly from her lap and formed itself into a fist, as if she were gripping something. The fist twitched violently, three times, in a rigidly restrained stabbing motion. Then she was quiet again, her face as still and blank as a statue’s, her gaze fixed and empty.

It was the sharp rapping on the window beside Marlie that brought her back. Confused and exhausted, for a terrifying moment she had no idea who she was, or where, or what was happening. An unearthly blue light was flashing in her eyes. She turned a dazed, uncomprehending look at the man who was bent over, peering into the window as he tapped on it with something shiny. She didn’t know him, didn’t know anything. He was a stranger, and he was trying to get into her car. Panic was sharp and acrid in her mouth.

Then identity, blessed identity, returned with a rush and brought reality with it. The shiny thing the man was using to rap against the glass transformed itself into a flashlight. A glint on his chest became recognizable as a badge, and he, frown and commanding voice and all, was a policeman. His patrol car, Mars lights flashing, was parked at an angle in front of hers.

The images of horror were still too close, too frighteningly real. She knew she had to block it out or she wouldn’t be able to function at all, and she needed to get control of herself. Some vague danger was threatening, some memory that danced close to the surface but wouldn’t quite crystalize. Desperately she pushed away the fog of confusion and fumbled to roll down the window, fighting for the strength to complete even that small act. The exhaustion was bone-deep, paralyzing, muscles turned to mush.

Warm, humid air poured through the open window. The officer flashed the light beam around the interior of her car. “What’s the problem here, ma’am?”

She felt cotton-brained, thought processes dulled, but even so she knew better than to blurt out the truth. That would immediately get her hauled in on suspicion of being under the influence of some kind of drug, probably a hallucinogen. Yes, that was it; that was the vague danger she had sensed. A night in jail, for a normal person, would be bad enough; for her, under these circumstances, it could be catastrophic.

She had no idea how much time had passed, but she knew that she must look pale and drained. “Ah . . . I’m sorry,” she said. Even her voice was shaky. Desperately she sought for a believable explanation. “I—I’m an epileptic. I began to feel dizzy and pulled over. I think I must have had a slight seizure.”

The flashlight beam sought her face, played across her features. “Please step out of the car, ma’am.”

The trembling was back; she didn’t know if her legs would hold her. But she got out, holding to the open door for support. The blue lights stabbed her eyes, and she turned her head away from the brightness as she stood there pinned in the glare, a human aspen, visibly quaking.

“May I see your driver’s license?”

Her limbs were leaden. It was an effort to retrieve her purse, and she dropped it immediately, the contents spilling half in the car, half on the ground. Innocuous contents, thank God; not even an aspirin bottle or pack of cigarettes. She was still afraid to take over-the-counter medications, even after six years, because the mental effects could be so unpredictable.