Twisted By Love, Reincarnation Tales, Book 1 (3 page)

Even before he’d seen his mystery lady in the
lobby, he’d started making polite face-saving excuses to extricate
them both with dignity. Antonia hadn’t accepted those; she kept
calling, trying to pin him down. Then this afternoon she’d demanded
to see him. He’d laid it on the line, telling her they didn’t suit
each other. And she’d gone ballistic the way he’d known she
would.

Bern flopped down on his bed, waiting for his
phone to ring again. Her last voice mail—the sixth—had come in
about seven. It was only a matter of time before she called again.
Antonia did have a point, though, he was an asshole. He hadn’t
listened to his gut that first night, and he’d left himself get
involved, however slightly. And when he knew it was over, he hadn’t
told her plainly, unequivocally. Then again, no matter what he’d
said or how he’d done it, Antonia would have taken the discussion
badly.

Hell.

He thought of the beautiful woman who worked
in his building. He knew, with an unmistakable gut reaction, that
she was so much more to him than a mere sexual object. This was one
gut instinct he wouldn’t ignore.

His stomach muscles clenched suddenly. What
if she was in a serious relationship? Or engaged? Even married?
He’d checked her ring finger, but some career women didn’t wear the
usual accoutrements. No, not possible. The powers that be wouldn’t
be so cruel.

Tomorrow, he’d make his move. Maybe then he’d
figure out why she haunted him.

* * * * *

Livie buried her arms elbow deep in hot,
soapy water. She enjoyed doing the dishes by hand. The water warmed
her
down
to her toes. She loved a clean kitchen. She
loved order and neatness and everything in its proper place. She
loved an established routine and—

Something hit her on the cheek with a splat,
slid down her face, and landed with a plop in the water, sinking
before she actually saw what it was. She brushed her cheek with a
wet hand, soap suds settling close to her eye. She wiped them off
on against shoulder, then skimmed her hands through the water
searching for what had struck her.

Something slimy slithered across her fingers
and skittered away. She jerked, suds splashing over the edges of
the sink. In the kitchen doorway, her sister giggled, a girlish
giggle laced with malice. Another watery splat, this time on the
back of her head, and the thing, whatever it was, slid down her
neck into her blouse.

Just then, the one in the sink poked its
head above the water. A snake, a slimy, horrible, fat snake with
huge fangs that sank into the soft flesh between her thumb and
forefinger.

Livie started screaming when she felt the
snake down her blouse wriggle and slither all over her...

“Wake up, Livie.” Toni shook her.

Livie woke to find her nightgown was tangled
around her legs and the snakes were only in her nightmare.

“Je-sus. What’s wrong with you?” Toni
hunkered down on her pillow and stared. “I thought you were going
to start screaming out loud any moment, instead of just that awful
moaning. It gave me the creeps.”

Her throat dry and tight, Livie laid there a
moment, letting her breathing return to normal. She hated lizards,
frogs, slugs, but snakes were the worst. The worst of the worst was
not being able to get them off. This was the second night in a row
she’d had a similar nightmare.

She mumbled a quick
Sorry
, then
glanced at the clock. Two thirty. They had to be up in three hours.
“Go back to sleep.”

Toni gave her a sisterly jab. “You’re a
freak. Do you want to talk about the dream?”

“No.” She just wanted to go back to
sleep.

“You should see a doctor about that.”

“It was just a dream, Toni.”

It was a recurring nightmare she’d had as a
child, the frequency of them decreasing as she got older. She
distinctly remembered her mother picking imaginary snakes out of
her bed after one of her dreams. Mom’s repetition of the story
cemented it firmly in Livie’s memory. Though not exactly the same,
the dreams followed a common pattern, theme, and tone, starting out
pleasantly, a sense of warmth and well-being suffusing her. Then
Toni threw a snake or a lizard or something equally disgusting at
her.

She hadn’t dreamed like this in years. But
she’d had one the week before. And the week before that, too. Why
had they returned?

When Livie settled back into her pillow
without another word, Toni huffed and rolled over. Livie’s
condominium was a two-bedroom. She couldn’t afford to waste the
space, and she used the second bedroom as a home office. So when
Toni stayed over, they had to share her bed. At least it was a
queen with enough room for the two of them. Moments later, her
sister’s breathing slowed, but Livie didn’t fall asleep so easily.
She couldn’t say how long she lay awake, but when the alarm went
off in the morning, she pounded the snooze button and cracked one
eye open to view the clock.

Damn. She’d slept through the first two
alarms. She was going to be late. Again.

Chapter Three

His lady had broken her routine. Bern hadn’t
seen her enter the building, though he’d been near the elevators at
her customary arrival time. He’d heard on the radio there’d been a
snarl-up near the airport. If she came from the Peninsula, she’d
have been stalled for hours.

Missing her whacked out his day. He
envisioned her in a crushed, mangled car, the jaws of life brought
in to extricate her. Consequently, he hadn’t accomplished a thing
all morning, hadn’t even prepared for his lunch meeting with
Gillespie and Sons. Bern had made his name in the architectural
field by specializing in manufacturing facility design. The company
planned to install a new production roll coater in their Red Cliff
plant. The small Northern California town was relatively close to
his hometown of Freedom. There were innumerable considerations,
from city ordinances on chemical use to the best layout for the
proposed tandem coating process to smooth production flow from
coating machine to clean room. All of this was made more difficult
by installing everything in an existing building. Since they were
still at the investigatory stage, he could wing it with the pages
of notes and questions he’d drawn up right after scheduling the
meeting, but he’d have to be a hell of a lot more organized when he
went up to Red Cliff the week after next to tour the facility and
start mapping the layout. His brother Wade, who was a structural
engineer, would be joining him.

Due to the Gillespie lunch, Bern had been
unable to shadow the lobby for a lunchtime sighting of the woman.
On the drive back from the meeting, it occurred to him that he’d
moved beyond strong attraction into absurd obsession when he
considered following her home tonight to find out where she lived.
Yeah. What he’d already done bordered on stalking. Following her
home was beyond the pale.

Cool your jets, bud.

The warning didn’t stop him from haunting the
elevators.

Damn. What was there about her that caused a
rational man to start acting irrationally? Honest to God, he didn’t
know. At seven, he stepped into the empty elevator for the fourth
time and put his finger on the button for the twelfth floor. Her
floor. Casual observation had shown that she worked in the suite of
offices directly across from the bank of elevators.

What the hell was his excuse for knocking on
the suite door?

I was worried about you.

She’d asked why, since she didn’t even know
him. Or she’d freak and call security.

He’d lost his mind. Pushing the garage level
button, he went straight down without stopping at the twelfth
floor. Because he
wasn’t
a crazed, obsessive stalker.

The doors parted, and there ahead of him,
just having exited one of the other elevators, his beautiful yet
mysterious obsession sashayed down the parking aisle as if his very
imaginings had conjured her. Relief rushed to his head, leaving him
semi-dazed and dizzy.

He drank in the sight. Her earrings flirted
with the collar of her jacket, and her hair swished across her back
as she walked. She’d traded out the usual dark suit for a
black-and-pink blazer—hot pink and extremely sexy—paired with a
polka-dot dress, a chic but very short dress that caressed her
mouth-watering thighs. The hemline was barely longer than the
jacket and displayed firm, muscled legs developed during her daily
walk.

She glanced back once, almost furtively, then
hurried on.

Speak, man, or she’ll be gone before you
open your mouth.

* * * * *

The clack of Livie’s heels bounced off the
walls of the dimly-lit garage yet didn’t mask the footsteps behind
her. At seven o’clock, few cars were left after the workday
exodus.

God. A tingle zipped up and down her arms,
half wanting to run, half needing to turn and look straight into
his amazing jade-green eyes. She hadn’t had time for her walk at
lunch, but she’d thought about him. She’d done a
lot
of
thinking about him. If Toni hadn’t been there last night, if she
hadn’t had a nightmare, Livie was sure she’d have been dreaming
about
him
. Sexual dreams. She’d even dressed this morning
with him in mind. It wasn’t like her. It was madness. But there it
was. Her heart beat rapidly, matching the tap of her heels.

They were alone. Yet Livie wasn’t afraid. The
man exuded an air of protectiveness. He actually made her feel
calm, when he wasn’t making her feel warm all over. That was the
most ridiculous thing. She should have been afraid. Any normal
woman would be. He’d followed her yesterday. True, he’d saved her
from that homeless man, but she couldn’t get away from the feeling
that he’d been watching her. But then she’d been watching him,
too.

Her best friend Julia had passed on a
bestselling self-defense book for women written by some well known
security expert. His most salient point had been that evil came
from seemingly benign sources: a man offering unsolicited help, a
harmless man asking for help. Ted Bundy had sometimes used a fake
arm cast.

A voice whispered inside:
Be afraid.
It was stupid not to be, yet she actually had to coax herself into
being wary.

“You dropped this.”

The unexpectedness of his voice startled her,
especially in the midst of her ruminations about Ted Bundy. She
actually let out a cry, stumbled, then caught herself on the trunk
lid of a car. Her vehicle was still five spaces away. The man
didn’t seem like a rapist, though she didn’t know any to compare
with. Hadn’t she used the word
dangerous
to describe him?
Instead of turning to him, she quickened her pace. Better safe than
sorry, as the security expert advised.

When she’d donned her sexy outfit, she hadn’t
planned to be alone with him. She’d counted on a crush at five
o’clock, and even at six, there would have been a fair amount of
human traffic. She hadn’t foreseen her boss, Mr. Donaldson, calling
her into his office for an update on the R&A reserve she would
be presenting at tomorrow’s audit committee meeting. When she
finally left at seven, she hadn’t anticipated seeing the elevator
man at all.

Wearing a provocatively short dress was
something Toni might have done, but Livie was the level-headed one.
He probably thought she’d worn it for him. And he’d be correct.

“I believe you’re going to want this.”

Her purse strap slipped off her arm, and her
bag slapped against her briefcase. She almost dropped both.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

She believed him. But only because she wanted
to? Really, she didn’t know anything about him. She wanted to turn
around and blurt out the question uppermost in her mind:
Were
you following me yesterday?

“I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just going
to my car. It’s right over there.”

Livie glanced over her shoulder to find him
pointing to a black luxury model four parking spots from her
car.

He made everything sound so aboveboard. And
he’d helped her get away from that street person yesterday. He
couldn’t be all bad. But he was close. Livie reexamined her
instincts and found them lacking, at least in an empty garage where
no one would hear her scream.

It was best just to slip into her car and
lock the door. An empty garage was not the best place to make a
first introduction. She’d talk to him tomorrow, when they weren’t
alone. It was safer that way.

She wanted to appear calm and sure of
herself, but she dropped her purse and her briefcase, fumbled with
the damn key fob, and couldn’t find the button to unlock the car.
She felt like an idiot. She turned to face him.

He stood by her rear bumper, both hands up in
surrender, a piece of paper between the thumb and forefinger of his
right hand.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. We
were heading the same way.” His words and tone were soothing, but
it was his eyes that captured her. The dim overhead lighting turned
them mystical, mesmerizing, dark pupils surrounded by glowing
jade.

“I didn’t drop anything,” she said. It would
be silly to let her guard down. Julia would read her the riot act
for not screaming her lungs out the minute he’d followed her into
the garage.
Followed
. Had he really
followed
her?

He glanced at the paper in his hand. “It’s
some sort of flyer. I’ll just put it here on your trunk, and you
can pick it up when I’m gone.”

His deep voice held the hint of a rasp, like
a hinge that with one drop of oil would work perfectly. It was that
very defect that made her feel as well as hear him, reaching inside
her body, like a chord that played on her nerve endings until they
vibrated. Just as in the elevator the day before, her heart raced
and her nipples beaded. She simply stared, caught in his compelling
gaze. Why did this man have such a powerful effect on her? She
couldn’t think of a thing to say.