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But this wasn’t about her.
She turned to watch the man sitting beside her. It was about him. His posture was stiff and taut, as if he maintained such discipline over himself that moving a muscle except to steer the car would snap him like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point.
His expression was as bleak as the rolling desert vista that abutted the highway, and he kept his eyes straight ahead, not even glancing toward her.
She struggled to think of something to say that would not sound too much like psychobabble, yet be of some help to this man who had once meant so much to her.
But what was there to say? His daughter had been kidnapped. A five-year-old child. And whether or not Hunter believed her, she had already told him there could be no happy ending.
And despite his earlier apology, she knew he somehow blamed her for this, as he once had blamed her for another situation she had written about that had gotten so terribly out of control.
She had packed and changed clothes quickly before leaving home. Now she wore a pink buttoned shirt tucked into navy slacks, a matching navy vest and sandals. L.A. wouldn’t be as warm as Arizona, so she’d stuffed a sweater into a small suitcase with a couple of changes of clothes and her night paraphernalia.
She considered turning on the radio, for the only sounds were the growl of the engine and the unending road noise of tires humming on pavement.
First, though, she needed to make a call. She pulled her cell phone from the bottom of the burlap tote bag that doubled as her purse and pressed buttons until the number she called most frequently showed on the display screen.
It was answered on the second ring. “Fantasy Fare. Hi, Shauna. Are you okay? Where are you going?”
“Hello to you, too, Kaitlin.”
Shauna smiled to herself in bittersweet irony. Kaitlin Verona, a lithe and exuberant dynamo, was her closest friend, and the manager she’d blessedly hired to assist her with running Fantasy Fare.
Kaitlin had dropped in one day when a child had fallen at the restaurant and his father was threatening a lawsuit. Not only that, but food deliveries were late. In short, when things had been particularly hellish.
Kaitlin had simply taken over, made both the kid and his parents laugh, and used her sense of humor to persuade the superintendent of the food warehouse where Shauna bought supplies to send her order after hours.
Later she had told Shauna she’d heard her cries for help and responded. Of course, Shauna’s pleas had been strictly internal.
As they’d gotten to know each other better, Shauna understood that they had something in common: they shared abilities that most people would believe bizarre and unreal, though each one’s manifestation was unique.
They both perceived when someone else’s emotions roiled.
Shauna’s abilities translated to her fingertips, from which her stories spilled onto computer keyboards.
Kaitlin simply knew and reacted. Like now.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Kaitlin demanded over the phone. “That guy from your past, Hunter.”
This was one time Shauna wished Kaitlin didn’t have her uncanny perception. “Yes,” she said briefly.
“You wrote a story about him and now you’re back together.”
“Not exactly. Look, I need for you to—”
“Manage Fantasy Fare on my own for a while. Yes, I’ve got that. But tell me what’s going on.”
“Some other time.”
“You’re with him.”
“Yes,” Shauna acknowledged.
“And it’s not because you want to be. Oh, heck, it’s really bad, isn’t it? I’m so sorry, Shauna. Can I help?”
“Just take care of things for me. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Okay?”
“Sure. You take good care of yourself, you hear? Don’t take any unnecessary risks. And call me when you can talk.”
As Kaitlin hung up, a shower of shimmering rainbows suddenly appeared in Shauna’s mind, gently tumbling toward the ground. As they fell, they turned upside down till they formed a myriad of colorful, happy smiles.
Despite herself, Shauna laughed aloud. That was one ability she didn’t share with her friend. Kaitlin had the power to implant images into the minds of those whose emotions she sensed, the better to soothe them. Shauna had frequently enlisted Kaitlin’s help in the therapy sessions she held to assist those whose stories she had written.
But where had that warning come from? It wasn’t characteristic of what Kaitlin usually did. Did she see something that Shauna—
“What was that all about?” came a chilly masculine voice from beside her.
Shauna glanced toward Hunter. He still sat stiffly as he watched the road, gripping the steering wheel, as if by manipulating it he could reverse the diabolical incident that had suddenly taken control of his life.
“I had to tell my manager at the restaurant that I was going away for a while and that she’d need to take care of things.”
He finally darted a look at her, his green eyes quizzical but not as icy as before. “It didn’t sound like you did much talking, let alone giving directions.”
Shauna replayed her end of the conversation in her mind. He was right. But knowing Hunter’s antipathy toward anything that smacked of extraordinary abilities, she said simply, “I’m sorry you haven’t met Kaitlin. She’s been my manager for a couple of years, and we’re good friends. To other people it might sound like we talk in code, but we’re close enough that we understand each other.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t sound convinced, but Shauna doubted he’d push this issue further. She had known Hunter to be intelligent and intuitive in the past. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made such a good cop. He had also been stubborn, refusing to acknowledge what he chose not to accept or understand. Right now, she suspected he’d gotten the gist of what she wasn’t saying.
But at least he was talking to her again.
“We’re not far from the airport now,” she said, eager for some conversation—any conversation—to avoid their former uncomfortable silence.
He nodded. “I haven’t been away long enough to forget my way around.”
Just long enough to forget her, Shauna thought. Or so he must have wished.
If only their reunion could have been under other circumstances. But there would have been no reunion between them if she hadn’t written that horrifying story.
And now they could only both wish they had never seen each other again.
The plane was finally in the air. The trip to Los Angeles International Airport, abbreviated LAX by most Angelenos, would take about an hour.
An hour too long.
Ignoring the aircraft’s typical loud engine noise, Hunter forced himself to lean back in his narrow seat that, despite the height of its backrest, was too short to cradle his head comfortably. He had to concentrate on something other than his edginess. He had become an adopted Angeleno, like so many other immigrants to the sprawling urban complex. Yet, despite his reason for being there, he’d felt a sense of nostalgia visiting Oasis and his mother. And—though he despised himself for admitting it—seeing Shauna again.
L.A. was home now. His business was there.
His daughter was there…
His restlessness was a demon sitting on his shoulder and taunting him to stare at the still-lit seat-belt sign. He looked at Shauna, who occupied the window seat. He had the aisle, and they were fortunate, in their row of three, that the middle seat was vacant. Shauna had obviously decided to take advantage. She’d pulled her carry-on bag from beneath the seat in front of her and rested it between them. She wrested her laptop from it, opened her tray table and placed the computer on it.
After she turned it on, a look of concentration etched a small furrow between the soft arches of her brows. They were darker than the deepest blond shade of her long hair, which was still highlighted in soft streaks by the Arizona sun. Her unique hair color was something he had found extraordinarily appealing about her long ago. One of many things.
If there hadn’t been a vacant seat, Hunter wondered if he’d have offered to trade with the person unlucky enough to have been assigned the uncomfortable middle. Would he have wanted to spend this hour separated from Shauna that way?
Not that he had any desire to be close to her…although desire was a poor choice of words. Hell, yes, he still desired her. But long ago he’d made self-control an unbreakable habit. It was the only way his P.I. business could survive.
The only way he could survive.
Without so much as a glance toward him, Shauna began to type. Was she writing another of her damned stories that she would use to drive some other poor jerk mad by claiming it would come true?
Muttering something without quite knowing what, Hunter bent to retrieve his small briefcase from under the seat in front of him and yanked out Shauna’s story. He started to read it…until pain forced him to close his eyes.
When he opened them again, Shauna was watching him.
“Hunter, do you want to talk about—”
He hadn’t brought her along to practice her psychology mumbo jumbo on him. “Is that another of your fortune-telling fairy tales?” His words spit out as he nodded toward her computer. Her graceful fingers still rested on the keyboard as if poised to peck out more nonsense.
“That’s not your business.” Her tone was conversational, but the glint in her eyes told him she was peeved.
She was right. It wasn’t his business, unless it concerned Andee. That didn’t make him any less curious. Or less peeved with himself, too, for taking his anxiety out on her. Again.
Maybe she couldn’t help writing that story. How would he know? It wasn’t like he’d bombarded her with questions before, when they’d been together.
He looked around. At least with all the plane noise, no one could have heard what he’d said.
When he turned back, Shauna’s smile was forced. “Actually, I’m writing the story I started out to do when…when the story about Andee came out. I do that, you know—write little tales I read aloud at story time at Fantasy Fare. Kids who come in tell me what they want to hear, and most often that’s what comes out when I sit at the computer. A boy whose parents bring him about once a week asked for a story about his dog Duke, and that’s what I’m working on.”
“Why didn’t you just write your shaggy-dog story before and leave Andee alone?”
He didn’t mean to ask that. Worse, though he could have taken another of her indignant glares, he hated the renewed look of sympathy she turned on him.
Shauna reached over with her closest hand and pulled his from where it clutched the armrest. He didn’t fight her as she rested it on top of her bag on the seat between them, and squeezed gently. Her hand was much smaller than his, but it was strong. He stared at the point of contact between them, at the light polish on her short nails, her slender, curled fingers, feeling as if her strength suddenly radiated through his skin and up his arm.
But it wasn’t her strength that singed him with that deceptively innocent touch.
“So tell me,” he said, trying to sound conversational as he restrained his anger with this woman and her sympathy and her seemingly unconscious seduction.
Or was he angrier with himself? He had been the one to coerce her into accompanying him. And now that they were together, he acknowledged to himself that he wanted her.
He’d missed her.
“Tell you…?”
“About your stories.” He kept his voice even. “You sit down to write something about a dog and a kidnapping comes out instead?”
Her eyes grew huge. Why were they dampening that way? Was she trying to lay a guilt trip on him for just asking a simple—well, maybe not so simple. Even if he believed it.
“You never asked before,” she said in a soft, husky voice. More forcefully, she continued, “And I know how hard it is for you to even pretend to give credence to my…my—”
“Let’s just use ‘fairy tale’ again,” he said wryly. “It’s all-purpose enough to suit many situations, right?”
The smile on her full, kiss-me-quick-or-die-from-wanting lips quivered for an instant, then grew wistful. “Sure,” she said. “You know I don’t ask for that kind of…fairy tale to come out. The firstborn woman in each generation of my family has the ability. It’s easier in some ways for me since I’ve grown up having computers. My Grandma O’Leary would just be sitting at a table somewhere, go involuntarily into…well, let’s call it a trance, and when she woke up, she found she’d engaged in automatic writing, pen to paper. My mother used a typewriter. I just sit at the computer and what I write is there on the screen when I…when I become conscious of it. I don’t know if I actually go into a trance, but my eyes close.”
“And these stories always come true?” He made little attempt to hide his scorn, especially since he knew what she was going to say. He’d heard this part of her claims before.
“You know the answer,” she said quietly, trying to withdraw her hand for the first time. He didn’t let her, exchanging her firm grip for his own. “It’s not so much that they come true. They are true.”
“Because you sense someone’s emotions? How bizarre is that? Is that why you became a shrink as well as a restaurant owner? To come up with an explanation of how those supposed emotions come from people you don’t even know, like this ‘Big T’? And Andee.” His voice grew hoarse on those last couple of words, and he cleared his throat.
“I never said I could explain why, Hunter. And I became a therapist for other reasons. But, yes, the stories emanate from someone else’s strong emotions while they’re feeling them. Like the people in this one. And those years ago when I picked up on those vicious bank robbers you were after.”
“I didn’t ask about that,” Hunter snapped.
“No, you never did.” Shauna’s voice was sad. “Or at least not in any helpful way. You didn’t want to hear about it then, but if you’d like to now—”
Hunter used the excuse of a slight rumbling behind him to turn his head. A flight attendant asked someone what he wanted to drink. “Some other time,” he said to Shauna. Yeah, like the twenty-second century. Pulling down his tray table, he considered ordering an alcoholic drink but discarded the idea. He needed his wits about him.
“Coffee,” he growled when the flight attendant asked what he wanted. “Black. Thanks.”
But what did he really want?
To be in L.A. a lot faster than this plane was going.
And then, his daughter.
Peace.
And Shauna back in Oasis. Out of his life again.
Every time she was in it, she messed with his mind. Made him feel like he’d lost control of everything important to him.
And that wasn’t all. Even now that he wasn’t touching her, he felt uncomfortable. Physically.
For now, and much too frequently since he’d been in her presence again, the involuntary reactions of his much too impulsive body reminded him vividly of some of the reasons Shauna had once been such an important part of his life.
Shauna took a sip of apple juice, then returned the plastic glass to the tray table of the seat between Hunter and her.
He was sipping his coffee.
And reading, again, her story about Andee’s kidnapping.
Anguish knit his thick, dark brows into a single tortured line. Anguish that she, however unintentionally, had helped to paint there.
She couldn’t change the story. But maybe she could ease the rest of this flight for him, if only a little.
“Tell me about Andee, Hunter,” she said.
