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“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?”
The gorilla’s face scrunched up into a mighty scowl beneath the brim of his driver’s cap. “It’s Mr. George to you, Parker.” He jerked one large callused thumb in the direction of a long black limo that stood idling at the curbside. “Mr. Storm is waiting in the car. He’d like to have a word with you.”
“I’ve got one for him.” With a dark smile, Mike spat out the expletive between clenched teeth.
“That’s two words,” George objected.
“What d’you know? The ape can count.” Mike tried to elbow his way past, but with a low growl the driver clamped his hand around Mike’s upper arm.
Mike shot him a black, warning look, but the goon only tightened his grip, snarling, “Mr. Storm ain’t got no time to waste with you, wise guy. He told me to request your presence and I’m requestin’. Now, it can either be at your convenience or your inconvenience, if you get my drift.”
Mike’s hand clenched into a fist, his immediate impulse to deliver a solid blow to the big ape’s solar plexus. He didn’t know what stopped him. It was what a younger Mike Parker would have done. But maybe he was finally starting to get a little older and wiser. Maybe he remembered too well the result of his last encounter with good old George—three cracked ribs, a dislocated jaw and a night in jail.
And maybe it was nothing more than the besetting sin that had landed Mike in a heap of trouble more than once in his life—curiosity. It had been a couple of years since he had crossed paths with Xavier Storm and they hadn’t exactly parted on friendly terms. What the hell could Storm possibly want with him now?
After a brief hesitation, Mike forced himself to relax. “All right,” he said, breaking George’s grip with a quick, sharp movement. “I’ll go see your boss. Just keep the paws to yourself. I wouldn’t want to have to do anything that would mess up your pretty uniform.”
George gave a contemptuous snort but retreated a step. As Mike sauntered over to the car, the driver dogged his heels like a suspicious pit bull preparing to chomp into Mike’s ankle at any moment if he showed any signs of attempting to escape.
Mike noted the limo awaited him, eased next to the yellow curb of a no-parking zone. But that was typical of Storm’s arrogance, Mike thought sourly. From his penthouse high atop his hotel casino at the end of the boardwalk, the man thought he owned the whole damned town.
George stepped forward to open the rear door. He barely gave Mike time to scramble inside the limo before slamming it closed again. Mike sank down into an air-conditioned interior that was better outfitted than his office—dark luxurious leather upholstery, a minibar, a TV, a personal computer and printer. All of it was as sleek, cool and expensive as the man who sat in the opposite corner, speaking into a cellular phone.
Xavier Storm gave Mike a brief nod of greeting and continued with his conversation, which seemed to consist mostly of dictating orders to whoever was on the other end. Storm could have been an ad for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, not a strand of his thick black hair out of place, his tailored linen trousers crisp, his necktie perfectly arranged, his subtle pinstripe shirt immaculate, the square links that fastened the cuffs simple in design, but obviously solid gold.
He gave an impression of height and power even while lounging in the back of a limo, his hooded green eyes dispassionate, faintly bored as he listened to whatever excuses the subordinate was apparently whining into his ears through the phone. The cast of his features was gaunt, almost predatory. Mike supposed Storm could have been called handsome, if you liked that lean, arrogant look that many women appeared to, including Mike’s own ex-wife.
The chauffeur resettled his large bulk behind the wheel of the car. Never missing a beat in his phone conversation, Storm depressed a button, raising a tinted glass, turning the back seat of the limo into a very private, sealed-off world.
“How cozy,” Mike muttered, his fingers drumming out an impatient tattoo on the armrest. Between the minibar and a seat large enough to be a bed, Storm really had it made. Make-out city if the rumors about Storm were true. An unwelcome image surged into Mike’s head no matter how hard he tried to fight it.
So was it here in the back seat that Storm had seduced Darcy, or had he deemed her worth the cost of a hotel room?
The thought no longer had the power to burn Mike with a jealous rage, but the cold ashes of his hate for Storm remained.
Even if it hadn’t been for the bad blood between them over Darcy, Mike feared his dislike of Storm would have still been intense. There was just something about the man and his mocking arrogance that brought out in Mike a side of himself he didn’t like. Storm’s wealth and breeding was like a slap in the face, a constant reminder to Mike of who he was and where he came from. The son of a no-account gambler and petty con man from the wrong side of the tracks. Little Mikey Parker, the throwaway kid, worth more dead than alive even at the tender age of twelve.
Mike felt familiar bitterness chum through his gut and mumbled, “The hell with this.” He reached for the door only to discover it was locked and there was no sign of a release button. Storm chose that moment to end his conversation. Snapping the phone shut and tossing it on top of the minibar, he turned toward Mike with an urbane smile.
“So sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Parker,” he said in a low purring voice. “It was good of you to agree to meet with me on such short notice.”
Mike shot him a glare. “It’s not as though I had a helluva lot of choice.”
Storm hunched one shoulder in a dismissive shrug. “Mr. George is a very devoted employee. But you have my apologies if he was a little...overzealous in carrying out my commands. I trust I didn’t drag you away from anything too important.” Storm arched one thin black brow as his gaze roved over Mike’s disheveled appearance. “May I offer you anything? A drink perhaps? Or a comb and razor?”
“No thanks, Storm. If I wanted to slit your throat, I would’ve brought my own.”
A glimmer of amusement appeared in Storm’s hooded green eyes. “Do I still detect a note of hostility, Mr. Parker? After all this time, I would have thought the little misunderstanding between us long forgotten.” After a brief hesitation, Storm asked, “How is Dulcie?”
Mike’s jaw clenched. The son of a bitch didn’t even remember her name. “Darcy is doing just fine for all I know. She’s probably living quite well down there in Florida with all the money she managed to clean out of me after the divorce.”
“Pity you didn’t think to have a prenuptial agreement,” Storm drawled. “You could have hardly expected to have formed a permanent relationship with a woman you found in a cake.”
“And you’d know all about permanent relationships, wouldn’t you, Storm?” Mike said with a sneer. “Didn’t I just see in the papers that you finished up your third divorce? In most ball games I’ve ever heard of, three strikes and you’re out.”
For a moment, Storm’s imperturbable mask slipped and his mouth tightened with what might have been pain if he’d been anything other than the coldhearted man he was. “Perhaps it would be better if I come right to the point.”
“Oh? You’ve got a reason for wasting my time? I’m dying to hear it.”
Storm ignored the sarcasm and went on. “I have reason to believe that you may soon be receiving a visit from a woman seeking the services of a detective. A woman from Aurora Falls named Sara—Sara—” Storm frowned slightly as he groped for the name.
Mike gaped at him. He didn’t know quite what he’d been expecting this little tête à tête to be about, but it certainly wasn’t this. He was so stunned, he forgot his usual caution about volunteering information and supplied, “Holyfield. Sara Holyfield.”
