Her face hardened. "Go home, Professor."
Professor? She hadn't called him that in days. "I'd rather . . ."
"This is my house, and I'm asking you to leave." She looked him up and down. "As it is, you're going to raise a few eyebrows crossing the street half-dressed at dawn. Wait an hour, and everyone in the neighbor-hood is likely to see."
"You care what the neighbors think?"
She hesitated, then said, "No, but you need to leave anyway."
This was her house, and he could not insist on staying. "i thought we were . . ."
"You thought wrong," she said, long before he was finished.
As he walked through the living room toward the front door, Zane looked at the jade cat, which remained on the coffee table. Ruby hadn't wanted to touch it after it had made its unexplained trip from the garbage can to the living room, so there it had remained all night. He could offer to take it with him, but when it reappeared close to Ruby, where it should not be, she would only be freaked out all over again.
"I'll check on you later," he said as he opened the front door on a cool morning.
"Don't!" she called, and Zane wondered what had happened in her most recent dream to make her afraid of him.
Chapter 5
After a breakfast of bacon and eggs, Ruby showered, hoping the spray of water and the familiar routine would wake her up and chase away the lingering dreams. It didn't work. She dressed in a faded pair of jeans and a lightweight blue sweater, trying for normalcy even though at the moment her life felt anything but normal.
In all three of the dreams, it had been a friend or lover who offered a woman's soul to the demon. They had all been betrayed by men they loved or cared for. A husband, a lover, an old family friend.
She sat on the couch and stared at the jade cat. It seemed to stare back at her, but there was no purring, no distant and creepy meow. Not yet, at least. The feline's green face was pointed and sharp, primitively feral, not at all like a normal cat. Ruby didn't believe in ghosts and demons, she didn't believe in Zane's woowoo. But something was going on, and this damn cat was at the center of it.
Trust no one.
The only man Ruby trusted, the only man she had trusted in more than two years, was Zane Benedict.
She was not going to sit here and wait to see what might happen next! It took her no more than three minutes to grab her coat, her keys, her cell phone, and her purse. She had credit cards and some cash, and she was, by God, going to get as far away from Holland Court as she possibly could.
As Ruby locked the front door, Hester Livingston was walking up the driveway with a loaf wrapped in foil grasped in her hands. "Hellooo," the older woman called, and she flashed a smile. "Did I catch you going to work? You're later leaving than usual. When I saw your car in the driveway, I thought you might be ill, so I brought you a loaf of my homemade cheese bread."
"I'm just on my way out," Ruby said.
Hester was not deterred. "This will just take a minute. I know you make your own baked goods, and you're quite talented, but my chees