“How did you do this?” he murmured. “It looks three-dimensional. And the color ...” He fell silent, moving on to the next painting, a sunset in Manhattan with the dark, faceless buildings silhouetted against a brilliant sky. She had painted the sky a glowing pinkish orange, and what could have been an ordinary skyline was turned into something exuberant. It had taken her two days of experimentation to get that exact shade.
He didn’t say anything, and finally she couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “Well?” she demanded, the word tart with impatience.
He turned to face her, eyeing her taut stance. “You’ve always been good, and you know it. Now you’re better.”
Her shoulders relaxed and she ran a hand through her hair. “I can’t paint the way I used to,” she confessed. “Like everything else, my style changed a year ago. I look at what I’m doing now and it’s almost as if a stranger painted it.”
“You’ve changed, and that’s what changed your style. Maybe all of this is linked, maybe it isn’t, but I’m damn glad it happened.”
She gave him a curious look. “Why?”
“Because you never saw me before. Now you do.”
He was serious, his gaze intent and unwavering. He could probably hypnotize a cobra with that look, she thought. It was certainly working on her, because she couldn’t look away. She started to protest that of course she had seen him before, but then she realized what he meant. She hadn’t seen him as a man before. In her mind men had been desexed, neutralized, of no importance to her. She hadn’t wanted to deal with the messy complications of sex and emotional demands, so she had closed herself off from them. With her parents’ example of what not to do always before her, and her own desire to concentrate on her painting, she had turned herself into an emotional nun.
Whether the weird changes had something to do with the shift in her attitude or the simple passage of time had healed her fears, that phase of her life was over and she didn’t think it would ever be possible for her to return to it. Her eyes were open, and she would never again be oblivious to Richard’s sexual nature, to the male hunger in his eyes when he looked at her.
“Did you see me?” she asked. “Before, I mean. We met. . . what? Three times?”
“Four. Yes, I saw you.” He smiled. “I’ve always known you’re a woman.”
The way he looked at her then made her nipples tingle, and she suspected that if she glanced down, she would see they were nothing more than tight little points poking at her sweatshirt. She didn’t look. She didn’t want to draw his attention, in case he had missed it.
“Are you turned on, or cold?” he asked softly, and she knew he hadn’t missed a thing.
She cleared her throat. “I guess I’m turned on, because I’m sure not cold.”
He threw back his head and laughed. She wondered if she should have feigned ignorance, or maybe played it cute and flirted with him. She had a lot to learn about this come-hither stuff, but for the first time she realized the process could be fun.
But not now. Not yet. She cleared her throat again and turned to the closet behind her. “The painting’s in here.” She had to steel herself to open the door, reluctant to face the ugliness of death. She couldn’t avoid looking at it; because the paint hadn’t been dry when she put the canvas in the closet, it was turned facing out. The artist in her wouldn’t let her do anything to deface even this painting, though ordinarily she would never put anything in the closet to dry.
Hurriedly she reached in and got the canvas, then propped it on the wall next to the closet. Richard walked over and stared down at the painting, his expression hard and shielded. Sweeney went over to the window and stood looking out.
“You did this before you knew he was dead.” It was a statement, not a question, but then in any case, she had already said so. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“No, he looked okay to me.” She bit her lip. “But they all do, you know?” All the ghosts looked in the pink of health. Talk about ridiculous.
“What was his name?”
“Stokes. I don’t know his first name. But his sons are David and Jacob Stokes. They’re both attorneys.”
“I think I’ll check into this, if you don’t mind.”
“Check into what?” Curiosity made her turn to look at him.
“How he died.” He rubbed his thumb against the underside of his jaw. “Maybe it was an accident.”
“Because of the blood? I don’t know how realistic that painting is; he could have had a stroke, or a heart attack. Maybe the blood’s there because—I don’t know—I associate blood with death. Or maybe he fell down a flight of stairs.”
“I’ll check into it,” Richard repeated. He turned toward the door. She followed him as he went into the living room and picked up his shirt. She watched him shrug into it, feeling a pang of regret as he covered that broad chest. Without a hint of self-consciousness, he unfastened his pants and began tucking in the shirt. A wave of warmth washed over her. She actually felt flushed.
“I have an appointment I can’t put off,” he said as he rebuckled his belt. “Get a pen and paper; I’m going to give you my private number.”
She didn’t have to search for either one; she was an orderly creature, so both were right beside the phone. “Okay, shoot.”
He recited the number. “Don’t wait until you’re so cold you can’t function. Call me immediately. If you’re right about it only happening when you’ve had an episode of sleepwalking, then you’ll know as soon as you check the studio whether or not you need to call.”
“There’s no way to tell how often that will be. You can’t take the time to come over here every time I get cold.”
“The hell I can’t. It isn’t just a chill; it’s more serious than that and you know it. Look, for my peace of mind, call me every morning when you get up, okay?” He took her chin in his hand and bent down to kiss her. The kiss was light, his lips soft and barely moving on hers. Sweeney kept herself from clinging to him, but it was a struggle; the man was addictive. She wanted more of him, all of him.
He paused at the door. “Does the gallery have exclusive rights to sell your work, except for your portrait commissions?”
“Except for any directly commissioned work, yes.”
He nodded. “I want that one with the running water. Take it to the gallery to be framed, and I’ll arrange the purchase through another person so Candra won’t sell it to someone else just to keep me from getting it.”
And so Candra wouldn’t know there was anything between them, she thought. She had been right to be reluctant to get involved with him; even though he and Candra had split, the situation was awkward, and finalizing the divorce probably wouldn’t help a lot. In that moment she made the decision to dissolve the agreement between herself and Candra and begin the search for another gallery to represent her.
“I’ll call you,” he said, and hesitated for a moment, looking back at her. She had the impression he wanted to kiss her again. Evidently he thought better of it, though, and he stepped out into the hall. He had probably made the right decision, she thought wistfully, as she shut the door and locked it, but the right decision wasn’t always the most pleasurable. They had already become far more involved than was right, but at least he’d had the self-control to keep from taking things any further. Until his divorce was final, she thought, they couldn’t risk a repeat of today’s situation, because the temptation was too great to resist many times.
* * *
Richard frowned as he left the building. Edward saw him come out of the door, and within seconds the car slid to a halt in front of him.
“Just a minute, Edward, let me make a call.” He dialed directory assistance, and asked for the number of David Stokes, attorney, then asked to be connected.
A young male voice answered on the second ring. “Mr. Stokes isn’t in,” he said in answer to Richard’s request. “There was a death in the family, and he’ll be out of the office for the rest of the week.”
“This is about his father’s death,” Richard replied, taking the chance that Sweeney had been right about the vendor. Her story defied logic, but he wasn’t inclined to dismiss it out of hand as nonsense. Something was going on, something that was causing her to go into shock, or something resembling shock, and everything she had said could be verified either by investigation or observation.
“Oh, are you a cop?”
“I’m investigating the death,” Richard replied easily.
“Everyone is shaken up by this. Have you found out anything?”
“I can’t discuss that. Give me Mr. Stokes’s home number.”
Richard scribbled down the number. He saw Edward watching him in the rearview mirror and their eyes met. Edward was normally the most impassive of men, but he looked interested in this new development.
Richard dialed David Stokes’s number. A child answered, and when Richard asked for Mr. Stokes, the little voice said, “Just a minute,” then yelled, “Daddy!”
“Hello.”
“Mr. Stokes, my name is Richard Worth. I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this, but if you feel up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions about your father’s death.”
“His murder, you mean,” said David Stokes.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Elijah Stokes had been murdered, the victim of a violent mugging. He had been attacked, dragged between two buildings, and beaten to death. He had died from severe head injuries, inflicted by a blunt object. A reluctant witness had finally told police she had seen a young man running from the alley on the afternoon in question.
Richard pondered on the details he had learned from the bitter, grief-stricken David Stokes. He didn’t like any of them.
His daytime staff had long since gone home, and he was alone in the town house, his favorite time of the day. He usually worked at night, and in fact, he needed to study some reports that he should have read that morning, but he wasn’t in the mood for profit margins and stock options.
He snagged a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and sat down in front of the television. His fondness for the occasional beer had always reminded Candra of his peasant origins. Though she seldom said anything about it, he had always been aware of her mingled distress and disdain. When they were first married, when he had cared what she thought, he had restricted himself to her approved list of wines, mixed drinks, and whiskeys. Projecting the right image hadn’t been important to him, then or now, but it had been to her. When she started cheating, he stopped caring, and from then on there had always been beer in the refrigerator.
He suspected Sweeney wouldn’t know one wine from another, and furthermore wouldn’t care to know. It was a refreshing attitude.
He propped his feet on the coffee table and turned to a news channel, but he already knew the Dow Jones, and Standard and Poor’s averages. He knew the latest price of gold; he knew what the Asian markets were doing, what the money markets were doing, what the Chicago futures were doing, and he didn’t give a shit. Work would wait. He had more important things on his mind.
Sweeney’s claim to see ghosts and affect electronics didn’t bother him. He didn’t necessarily believe it, but it didn’t bother him. She was patently sane, so at worst her convictions were eccentric. The electronics effect was easily explained; some people couldn’t wear battery-operated watches because their personal energy field made the watches go haywire. If she really did affect traffic signals, that was fine with him.
Several things did bother him, though. Those severe chills she was having, whether caused by shock or something else, were serious enough to incapacitate her. He didn’t know if she was in any true physical danger, but judging from what he had seen that morning, he thought it was more than a little possible. Whether triggered by her imagination or some physical condition, the events were real.
He wanted to believe there was some underlying physical cause, something easily adjusted with medication. That would be the simplest, most logical cause and solution.
Unfortunately, there was that painting of Elijah Stokes. He couldn’t find any possible explanation for its existence.
As soon as he had seen the painting, he had known it depicted a violent death. Sweeney didn’t seem to realize quite what she had painted, but then she hadn’t seen a lot of death and violence. He had. In the army, he had been trained to be efficiently violent, to perform his mission and avoid capture, and to kill. He had been good at it, and not just in exercises. The rangers, like all other special-forces groups, were often sent on clandestine missions that were never reported in the news. He knew what death looked like, what blunt-force trauma looked like, so he had been expecting David Stokes to say his father had been murdered.
Sweeney didn’t live in Elijah Stokes’s neighborhood; she hadn’t even known his name until she learned the names of his sons. Nor could she have found out about his death afterward and done the painting, because the paint had been completely dry today While Sweeney’s back was turned, he had touched the paint, especially the thick red of the blood, and it hadn’t been sticky. No, she didn’t know Elijah Stokes had been murdered, and he didn’t intend to tell her. She was already upset about the painting, and he didn’t want to do anything that might trigger another episode of hypothermia or shock.
If anyone had told him a month ago, even a week ago, that he would be entertaining the notion such psychic phenomena could be real, he’d have laughed in his face; that was tabloid fodder. But this was Sweeney; she wasn’t a good liar, wasn’t good at any sort of deception. Watching her reaction to the McMillans had made him want to laugh out loud, because her growing repulsion and desperation to get out of there had been plain on her face. When she didn’t want to tell him something, she didn’t pretend not to know the answers he wanted; she just got a mutinous, stubborn expression. She didn’t play games, didn’t know how.
After Candra’s deceptiveness, after the social snobbery he had observed for ten years, some of which he had endured, Sweeney was like a drink of fresh water. She was direct and honest, so even if he didn’t believe some of the things she had told him, he had to believe that she did. And he had to believe she had painted Elijah Stokes’s death scene without having seen it, without having known the old man was dead.
So, with the evidence at hand, he had to discard logic and take a leap of faith. She wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t deceptive. He had to believe she’d had at least one true psychic experience.
If he loved her, he had to believe her.
Son of a bitch. Shocked by the thought, Richard surged to his feet and restlessly paced the room. Wanting her was one thing, a healthy sexual reaction to a desirable woman. He liked her. When he first asked her out, only a few days before, he had known he would like to have a steady, exclusive, and very sexual relationship with her. He hadn’t thought about love. He was just getting out of a bad marriage, though the divorce was only the legal epitaph on the tombstone of something that had been dead a long time. Loving Sweeney wasn’t convenient. The timing was bad, and he suspected she could be a real pain in the ass. She was difficult and prickly, and probably didn’t compromise worth a damn.
But she was honorable, and this morning when she woke in his arms, the smile she had given him had been as sweet as an angel’s. His heart had literally skipped a beat. He had known then he was in real trouble. A man would do a lot for a woman who smiled at him that way, all warm and drowsy and satisfied. He would move mountains for the privilege of making love to her, of watching her face while he brought her to orgasm. Having had a taste of Sweeney’s passion, he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. One way or the other, Candra would sign those papers, and he would call in every favor owed to him to get a hearing before a judge as soon as possible. Sooner. Within a week.
Money could work miracles, and he had a lot of money. He couldn’t think of a better way to spend it. It was time he did something satisfying with his money, and he couldn’t think of anyth
ing more satisfying than getting Sweeney in his hands, in his bed, in his life.
He was going to make some drastic changes in his life, and he was going to make them soon. Sweeney was the most drastic change, but the others weren’t minor. He was tired of playing the market, tired of the life he led here. It had never been what he wanted on a permanent basis, just the means to an end. He didn’t like what he was seeing in the market, and it was time to get out. He thought he’d have at least a year, but liquidating his assets would take time, and he didn’t intend to wait until the last minute to do it.
The computer problem looming at the end of 1999 looked like a bitch. From the information that passed through his hands, he knew a lot of companies weren’t going to have their computer programs fixed by that time. What that would do to the market was anyone’s guess, but if enough companies shut down, the market would crash. If he had been satisfied with what he was doing, with his life here, he might have tried to ride it out. Under the circumstances, though, it was time to get out.
He didn’t want to try to predict what would happen, or shift his investments to companies with computer systems that were millennium compliant. He had never intended to spend his whole life playing the market and amassing wealth, anyway. All along he’d had other plans, and now it was time to put them into action.
Sweeney complicated matters, and not just because the timing was inconvenient. He didn’t want a long-distance romance. He wanted her with him, and he had no idea how she felt about relocating.
Big plans, he thought in self-mockery. He tilted back his head and killed the rest of the beer. He was planning her future without even asking if she wanted to spend it with him. Hell, why not? She had disrupted his life, so turnabout was fair play. He thought he had a good chance of success, considering what she had given away that morning with her comment about being terrified something had happened to him. He grinned to himself. He wasn’t above taking ruthless advantage of her feelings for him; hell, he needed any advantage he could get.