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“Mr. Parker! Mike, what—what are you doing?”
“It’s not what I’m doing, doll. It’s what you’re doing. Leaving.”
He started hustling her toward the door, but Sara dug in her heels. “What’s the matter? Have I said something wrong?”
Mike rolled his eyes. “No, nothing much. You just waltzed in here and asked me to go to work for some woman who kicked the bucket over a quarter of a century ago.”
“Oh, so that’s it.” Sara managed to wriggle free of his grasp. She angled a challenging glance up at him. “You don’t believe in ghosts?”
“No, I sure as hell don’t.”
“But you just said a moment ago that anything’s possible.”
“I meant anything normal, not things that go bump in the night. I don’t believe in anything that I can’t see, hear, smell or feel.”
“Then that means that you don’t believe in intuition. Or faith. Or even love.” She exuded a soft sigh. “That’s very sad.”
“Yeah, tragic.” She was the one ready for a straitjacket and yet she had the nerve to stand there looking as though she felt sorry for him.
Stepping around her, he swung open the door. “Sorry I can’t be of service, but I’m sure you and Miss Patrick will manage just swell without me. Maybe you can locate the guy in your crystal ball.”
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Sara said reproachfully. “If I had that much psychic power, I wouldn’t need you to help Mamie.”
“If she’s a ghost, why doesn’t Miss Mamie just fly off and find the kid herself?”
“She’s restricted to the old Pine Top Inn, the last place she lived before she died. Manifestations usually cannot go wherever they want to.”
“Ghosts have rules?”
“Everyone has rules, Mr. Parker.”
“And one of mine happens to be I don’t take on any client where I have to hold a seance to present my bill. So if you don’t mind—” Mike indicated the door with a sweeping gesture, but Sara ignored him, fishing inside her purse instead.
“If you’re worried about being paid, you needn’t be,” she said. “I can write you a check right now.”
Mike pressed one hand to his brow. This woman just wasn’t getting the message. As she started to drag out her checkbook, he covered her hand to stop her.
“Look, honey, save your dough. I have a feeling you’re going to need it. Good psychiatric care is expensive these days.”
She flinched as though he’d struck her “I was hoping that you would be much more open-minded, Mr. Parker.”
“Whatever gave you an idea like that?”
“It was your picture in the paper. Your face...it seemed so wise and accepting. And kind.”
“That was my dazed look. A flashbulb had just gone off in my eyes.”
“But I was so certain you were the one to help,” Sara murmured almost to herself. “I could sense it, and when I trust my instincts, I’m almost never wrong.”
Pressing her lips in a stubborn line, she gazed up at Mike again. “Would you mind letting me feel your aura?”
“Feel my what?” Mike’s pulses rioted with the possibilities. But it was only his hand she reached for. She turned it palm upward.
He tugged free of her grasp, but she begged, “Please. Just let me run this one little test. Then I promise I’ll go away and leave you alone.”
Mike opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again as she looked up at him, pleading. Why was he always such a sucker for big blue eyes?
Grimacing, he held out his hand. “This test isn’t going to involve voodoo pins or anything like that?”
“Of course not.” She cupped his hand in her own smaller fragile one. “Now close your eyes.”
“What for?” he asked suspiciously.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Trust me.”
It had been a damned long time since Mike had trusted anyone, but he gave a long-suffering sigh and shut his eyes. She ran her fingertips lightly across his open palm.
“Just relax, Mr. Parker.”
Mike sucked in his breath. That wasn’t what was going to happen if she kept stroking him in that slow, sensual fashion. When her soft fingers danced across his wrist, his pulse gave an erratic leap. He was starting to really enjoy this when, to his disappointment, she stopped.
“Now I’m going to close my eyes and lower my hand toward yours. If we do this right, as I get closer, you should feel a surge of power between us.”
“This is stupid,” Mike grumbled. He wished she’d go back to the caressing part again. He felt like a total idiot standing here with his hand held out like a bellboy hoping for a tip.
“Please, Mr. Parker. Concentrate and keep your eyes closed.”
Mike tried to, but he’d always had the same problem not peeking whenever he played hide-and-seek as a kid. He cracked one eye open and realized that whatever else Sara might be, she wasn’t a con artist. She really believed in all this mumbo jumbo.
Her smooth brow was furrowed in earnest concentration. Her purse balanced in her left hand, her right one hovered barely an inch above his own. There was something strangely arousing about standing so close to her, just short of touching. He had only to reach out to bury his fingers in her ripples of silky gold hair, trace the line of that fairy chain along the smooth white column of her throat.
With her eyes closed, a delicate flush coloring her cheeks, she almost appeared as though she were in some sort of trance, like that sleeping princess in those sappy stories his one foster mom had insisted upon reading to him. If Sleeping Beauty had looked anything like Sara, no wonder that dopey prince had risked burning his a—fighting dragons to get to her bedroom.
“Are you experiencing anything yet, Mr. Parker?” she asked.
“Not a blessed thing,” Mike denied, but he was disturbed to notice his hand begin to tremble. A tingling sensation started in his fingertips, quickly spreading along his arm, through the rest of his body to become the most intoxicating rush of desire he’d ever known.
Sara’s eyes fluttered open to stare straight into his. She frowned. “You haven’t really been trying. Didn’t you feel any impulse at all?”
Mike shook his head. Oh, he was having plenty of impulses all right, but none, he feared, that Sara would approve of.
“Let’s try it again,” he murmured. “Close your eyes.”
She looked a little wary, but obeyed. She stood before him, her lips half-parted in unconscious invitation. This was too easy, Mike thought with a groan. He should be ashamed of himself. He should resist the temptation, but he didn’t seem able to help himself.
Bending forward, he covered her mouth with his own. He felt Sara stiffen with surprise, but then he was a little surprised himself. He’d never kissed any woman this gently before. At least, it started out that way.
But when Sara didn’t resist, he folded her in his arms, deepening the embrace. She tasted and felt just like she smelled—all softness, innocence and seduction. He kissed her with increasing hunger, passion and heat rushing through him, warming places inside him that he had not even realized had gone cold.
Two
Sara clung to Mike’s shoulders, his mouth wreaking havoc with her senses, even her sixth one. Since she’d set foot in the door, this interview had gone nothing like she’d anticipated. Not only had Mike Parker turned out to be more rough-edged than she’d expected, he was now kissing her in a way to make her curls stand on end.
Any protest she should have voiced was swept away beneath the hot mastery of Mike’s lips on hers. Her purse dropped from her nerveless fingers, hitting the carpet with a soft thud. She melted closer, her head reeling. Her mind felt like she was floating, her body like it was on fire.
It was only when his tongue breached her lips, exploring her mouth with even greater intimacy, that alarm set in. Struggling to be free, she insinuated her hands between them, breaking off the heated contact of their mouths.
His breathing ragged, Mike blinked at her. For a moment, he looked as dazed as she felt. She had never experienced a kiss like that in her whole life. It would have been rather wonderful... if only he had really meant it.
But Mike was already making a rapid recovery. The tender set of his mouth hardened into the familiar sarcastic smirk.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess my psychic—um—gizmo got a little out of control.”
Sara felt her cheeks heat, but this time with humiliation. Mike’s arms were still wrapped loosely about her waist. Bracing both hands against his chest, she squirmed away from him.
“You don’t have to believe in the same things I do, Mr. Parker,” she said. “But you don’t have to make fun of me, either.”
“I wasn’t making fun of you.”
“Then what do you call this?” Sara raised a trembling finger to her bruised lips.
“I was kissing you.” A shade of irritation crept into Mike’s voice. “You can’t go feeling up a guy’s aura and not expect him to react.”
“That wasn’t the sort of reaction you were supposed to—Oh, never mind.” Sara bent down to retrieve her purse from the carpet, gathering up the tattered remains of her dignity, as well. By the time she straightened, she managed to face Mike with some degree of calm.
“I’m sorry you’re such an unhappy man, Mr. Parker. But that doesn’t give you the right to mock and hurt other people.”
“I’m not unhappy, just hung over. So if you don’t mind, close the door quietly on your way out.”
“I’ll go,” Sara said. “But that doesn’t change anything. You’re a miserable and lonely man with a very disturbed aura, full of bitterness and a pain that’s as old as—as your wound.”
“Wound?” Mike scowled at her. “What wound?”
Sara blinked as she realized the words she’d just blurted out. She stared at Mike and suddenly an image came to her of Mike’s bare chest in all its glorious detail—hard-sculpted muscle from the flat plane of his stomach to the broad reach of his shoulders, smooth skin as bronzed and warm as sunlight. Except for—
“You—you have a scar on your left shoulder,” Sara said haltingly.
Mike’s eyes widened. “What have you got, X-ray vision or something?”
“N-no.” Sara flushed, feeling as if she’d been caught sneaking peeks at Mike naked in his shower. “I told you I was psychic, didn’t I? Sometimes these perceptions just come to me. That scar on your shoulder goes as deep as your soul, Mike Parker. It was made by something cold...something sharp.” Sara shivered. “A knife perhaps? With a long—”
“Enough, already,” Mike snarled, breaking her concentration. “Who the hell put you up to this?”
“Put me up to—Why, no one. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Either some jerk with a warped sense of humor sent you here to yank my chain or else you really are one total spook. Either way, I want you out of my office. Now!”
Sara took a hasty step back at Mike’s menacing approach. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, but I assure you no one sent me. I came to you because I honestly needed your help, Mr. Parker. What am I supposed to do about finding John Patrick? If you won’t take the case, could you at least—”
“Out!”
Before Sara could say another word, she found herself being roughly shoved into the tiny outer office. Mike slammed the door closed between them with a bang that was both loud and final.
“Recommend another detective?” Sara finished weakly, realizing she was addressing dead silence. She sensed that Mike Parker had just closed more doors than the one to his office. Any extrasensory perceptions she’d been having about Mike had ceased as abruptly as a phone line being disconnected.
Which was probably just as well. She’d definitely struck some kind of nerve when she’d started to probe into the mysteries of the scar on his shoulder. She’d never meant for that to happen. She tried not to invade the privacy of anyone’s personal life or thoughts unless invited to do so. But she hadn’t been able to help herself in Mike’s case.
The vision had caught her completely unaware. It had been as exhilarating and frightening as standing on the brink of some dark chasm, unable to see what lay at the bottom, but watching a ray of light slowly starting to stretch downward. Even if Mike hadn’t stopped her, Sara would have snatched herself back. Beneath his teasing wise-guy manner, she sensed something dark and disturbing about the man. She didn’t want a closer look at the secrets of his mind...or his body.
“You didn’t come here today to do a psychic reading or to be mentally undressing Mike Parker,” she reminded herself. “You came here to hire a detective.”
And in that she had just failed miserably.
Sara stole another look at Mike’s closed door and issued a long sigh of frustration and disappointment.
“So what am I supposed to do now?” she murmured, sagging down dispiritedly into the office’s sole waiting chair. On the secretary’s desk, the phone console burred softly, the incoming call light blinking off and on. Between throwing paying customers out of his office and ignoring his phone calls, Sara wondered how Mike Parker managed to stay in business.
She thought of reaching for the battered telephone directory she saw perched on the corner of the absent Rosa’s desk, thumbing through it for the listing of another private detective, but after her failure with Mike, she couldn’t seem to summon up the heart to do so.
She had been just so blasted convinced that Mike would be the man to help her find Mamie’s lost son. She’d already tried everything she could think of, even going so far as to insert an ad in the newspaper, asking that anyone with information on Mamie or John Patrick contact her at once. When Sara had met with no response, the sympathetic Mrs. Jenkins had suggested she hire Mike Parker, the old lady showing her the glowing article written about the man.
Sara had come to Atlantic City with high hopes, expecting to find a man with the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes, the dapperness of Hercule Poirot and the sophistication of Nick Charles all rolled into one.
But instead of the storybook detective she’d envisioned, Mike Parker was more like an older version of one of the Dead End Kids, lean and sexy in his formfitting jeans and T-shirt, street tough and smart mouthed.
Yet despite his disconcerting appearance and the less-than-successful look of his office, she could not rid herself of the impression that Mike was damned good at his job when he wanted to be. A shrewd intelligence lurked behind those lazy brown eyes, and the set of the man’s jaw had a bulldog tenacity about it. Sara had a feeling that he could have easily found Mamie’s missing son if he had cared enough to do so.
But even after one brief meeting with the man, Sara could sense that that would always be the trick with the cynical Mr. Parker—to make him care.
It was certainly quite beyond her abilities, she thought ruefully. Maybe she could have persuaded Mike to have taken the case if she had just presented it to him differently, as a simple missing-persons matter, told him nothing about ghosts or auras or psychic impressions.
There was only one problem with that. She was tired of pretending. She’d done it for far too many years, stifling the extraordinary perceptions that made her feel strange and different from everyone else, that frequently got her labeled as crazy, even by her own family.
It was only during the past year that Sara had finally developed the courage to face herself in the mirror and say, “My psychic abilities are as real and natural as the color of my eyes and the shape of my nose. I am not crazy.”
She certainly didn’t need a cynic like Mike Parker to chip away at her newfound confidence. Sara touched one hand to her mouth, still tender from the force of Mike’s kiss. Or to cause other disturbances of a less spiritual nature.
“No,” Sara resolved, forcing herself up from the chair. Setting her chin to a stubborn angle, she cast one last wistful look at the closed office door. “I will manage just fine without the services of Mr. Michael Parker.”
Mike lowered his office blinds and peered between the slats, watching as Sara emerged from the building, her gypsycolored skirt and golden tumble of curls a splash of color on the gray concrete of the pavement below.
Furtively observing her movements, Mike frowned, still not certain what he was expecting to see—Sara being met by one of those idiots from down at Boom Boom’s, to have a laugh over the good one they’d just put over on poor old Mike. Or perhaps someone more sinister from his past, melting out of the shadows to congratulate Sara on a performance well-done, the first phase in some elaborate revenge plot to drive Mike Parker round the bend.
“It’d be a real short trip, doll,” Mike muttered, at the same time chiding himself for letting his usual suspicious nature and imagination run away with him. He couldn’t make either of those scenarios he’d conjured up fit with the wide-eyed and earnest young woman he’d tossed out of his office.
Sara was doing nothing more sinister than pacing distractedly along the sidewalk, totally unaware of her surroundings, the obscene come-on gestures from the construction workers across the street or the interest she was drawing from a gang of street punks hanging out on the corner.
Mike’s office wasn’t exactly located at one of the swankier addresses in the city. He caught himself tensing, watching until Sara managed to hail herself a cab and was spirited safely away.
Not, he assured himself gruffly, because he cared in the least what happened to Little Miss Blue Eyes. He just wanted to make sure she was really gone. Mike let the blind fall back into place and turned away from the window with a dismissive shake of his head.
Now that he’d had a chance to calm down, he was pretty convinced that Sara had been acting all on her own, that she was nothing more than she seemed, a harmless kook, an angel with her halo screwed on a little too tight.
But she really had you going for a minute there, didn’t she, Parker? a voice inside him taunted. In more ways than one.
“The hell she did,” Mike growled, seeking to deny both the surge of attraction he’d felt for Sara and the fact that she’d managed to shake him. Not even in that one moment when she’d seemed to look straight through him, her blue eyes so clear and honest and searching?
No, not even then. But Mike did admit to an uncomfortable twinge. He had no objection to a woman trying to see through his clothes, but he didn’t want anyone probing deeper than that. There were places in the dark, murky backwaters of his mind even he didn’t want to go, memories he didn’t want dredged out into the light of day.
But Sara Holyfield was no mind reader—not even close. She was about as psychic as...as the wilted plant his secretary had insisted upon leaving on his windowsill to die.
All right, then. So how’d she know about your old wound?
Mike shrugged. A certain knack for perception and a few good hunches. Maybe Sara had even felt the outline of his scar when they had been locked in that clinch. His T-shirt was thin enough. And how’d she known about the knife? A lucky guess, that was all.
And as for all that stuff she’d spouted about him being such a miserable and bitter man... The lady was completely off the mark there. Hell, he was doing better now than he had in the two years since he’d quit his job at the police force. Business was good, at least good enough that he could now afford to have a secretary—when Rosa bothered to show up. And his divorce had become final last fall. He was a free man again, free to go out cruising for gorgeous honeys, free to get lucky every night if he wanted to.
Which didn’t help to explain why he’d reacted to Sara like a man stranded for years on a desert island, pulling her into his arms and kissing her that way. Or why when Mike tried to dismiss the whole episode, he couldn’t seem to get Sara out of his mind.
Settling back into his chair, he reached for the report he’d been working on, but somehow he kept seeing Sara’s woebegone face when he shoved her into the outer office and slammed the door closed.
“I came to you because I honestly needed your help, Mr. Parker.”
Mike experienced a brief twinge of conscience. He supposed he hadn’t needed to get that rough with the poor kid, but she could always find some other investigator. There was bound to be someone who would be happy to play ghost hunt with her and sucker her out of her money.
Another unpleasant thought. Mike thrust it ruthlessly aside. No, he’d done right by getting rid of Sara and forgetting about her.
Because a woman who thought she could read minds and see ghosts, well she was bound to be nothing but trouble. Especially packaged the way Sara was. Her pretty face all vulnerable and innocent, filling a man’s head with stupid noble impulses to fight the baser urges her body was arousing in him.
And what a body. Mike stretched back in his chair, latching his hands behind his head. Good thing he’d resolved to stop thinking about Sara. Because if he closed his eyes, he could still remember how tempting her breasts had looked outlined by the sun, how good it had felt to have those soft curves pressed against him. A faint trace of her perfume still lingered in the air and it brought with it the memory of the kiss they shared. He could still feel the sweet surprise of Sara’s lips yielding beneath his, the imprint of her body in his arms, warm, fragile and feminine. It was almost as though she had left some—some sort of aura behind.
Aura? Mike straightened abruptly, his eyes flying open wide. Had that thought really come from him? His gaze darted around his office like a man who’d misplaced his mind and was trying to locate it again.
Oh, man! Mike rubbed one hand across his unshaven jaw. If he was starting to entertain thoughts about Sara’s aura, he really needed to get out of here for a while, go get himself a cup of coffee or some breakfast. Yeah, likely that was what was wrong with him. He’d gone hungry enough as a kid to know that the world always made more sense on a full stomach.
Shoving an unfinished report in the top drawer, Mike leapt up and strode out of the room. In the outer office, Rosa’s modest switchboard was lit up like the neon sign at a strip joint. Mike paused long enough to switch on the answering machine before trudging down three hot airless flights of stairs that connected his office to the outer world.
He emerged into the heat and noisy blare of the street just in time to catch some little blue-haired punk painting graffiti on his office sign.
“Hey,” Mike bellowed.
The kid dropped the spray can and took to his heels. Swearing, Mike gave halfhearted chase for half a block, slowed by the heat and the lingering effects of his hangover. As the kid darted down a narrow alley, Mike gave it up in disgust and turned back to see how much damage had been done.
Instead of the usual obscenities, the kid had merely altered the sign to read Ma Parker’s Detective Agency, Two Flights Up.
“Great,” Mike muttered. Just what he needed—a graffiti artist with a wit. Grabbing some paper napkins that lay tumbled by a nearby trash can, Mike sought to repair the damage before the paint had a chance to dry, but he only succeeded in smearing it worse.
Preoccupied by his cursing and rubbing, he forgot his own cardinal rule about always being aware of what was happening on the street around him. He didn’t realize he had company until a finger poked him sharply in the back of his shoulder.
Mike spun around to find himself all but hemmed to the wall by a burly gorilla of a man attired in a chauffeur’s uniform, salt-and-pepper hair bushing out from beneath his driver’s cap, his coarse ruddy features and slightly crooked nose shoved in Mike’s face. It was a nose Mike remembered well. He’d broken it himself. Though he had trouble recollecting the big ape’s moniker—Greg or George perhaps—Mike knew all too well the name of the man who held his leash—
Storm. Xavier Storm.
Every muscle in Mike’s body went taut, but he masked his tension behind an insolent drawl. “Well, well, if it isn’t George of the Jungle. What brings you to this part of town? Isn’t the zoo the other way?”