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“Not. One guy wants another guy’s wife, he’s no friend.”
“Remove me from the picture. Closer then?”
“Unlikely.” Johnny scowled. “Maybe. I don’t know. Are you all right?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No more roses?”
Guilt and a trace of renewed fear trickled in, replacing amusement. “Not so far.” She rubbed her palm on the leg of her jeans. “Do you want coffee?”
He hesitated. “You were working, weren’t you?”
“Homework for an op tomorrow. I’m clear on the details. Why did you come back?”
“Because I felt like a wimp for leaving.”
“You plowed a fist into Chris Blackburn’s stomach. I wouldn’t call that wimpy.”
In the kitchen doorway he stopped, brows raised. “You changed the appliances.”
“They were my grandmother’s.”
“Were?”
Meliana opened the stainless steel fridge. “She died fourteen months ago, Johnny. I was going to tell you when your assignment was done, but—well, I didn’t.”
Johnny swore, raked a hand through his hair and began to pace. “I liked her.”
“I know. There was no funeral, only a memorial service on Maui. She wanted me to have her appliances. They were brand-new, and she knew how much I love to cook.”
“Hell.” Johnny dropped onto a tall counter stool. “I should have been there.”
She pushed two plates, a knife and half a coconut cake into his hands. “Don’t beat yourself up over something you can’t change. No one expected you to come, least of all me. I knew you were FBI when I married you. Anyway—” she ran a teasing finger along the line of his jaw “—I wasn’t alone.” His expression went from blank to suspicious so quickly that she laughed. “My brother was there, and Julie flew over with me.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You want me to tell you what I’m thinking right now?”
“No.” Because he wasn’t doing it, she picked up the knife and sliced into the cake. “But I think I should tell you something.”
“Good or bad?”
“You decide.” She licked frosting from her thumb. “The rose guy sent me a pair of white stockings, tied with a white ribbon and bow.”
Johnny trapped her chin. “It was this afternoon, wasn’t it? When you left your office.”
“The package was hand delivered, or at least hand placed. No one downstairs remembers receiving it. Reception said it just appeared. Probably true.”
His eyes held steady on hers. “Did you give it to Julie?”
“Not yet. I handled everything carefully—not that I think there’ll be prints.”
“Where’s the stuff?”
“Upstairs in my office.” She waited a beat, then added. “There was a card.”
“Damn it, Mel.”
She raised the cake knife. “Don’t give me that look. I’m not being stupid, and I’m not taking this lightly. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell you first or Julie.”
“What did the card say?”
She sighed. “‘Accept this token of my love, Meliana. Accept my love. Accept me. We are meant to be.’”
Anger sparked in his eyes. “And you sat on this?”
One thing Johnny Grand had never been able to do was browbeat her. She leaned forward on her elbows and said clearly, “Yes, I did. Make a fuss, and I’ll take my cake and leave you here in the dark.”
Johnny regarded her for several long seconds, then made a sound in his throat and reached into his back pocket. “This came for me today while I was here in Chicago. I sourced it to a South Side Internet Café.”
Meliana scanned the brief message. It was more malevolent than hers and, as a result, far more frightening.
“He threatened your life.” She glanced at the living-room window, visible across the open island. “Why do I think he’s serious?”
“Because people like this exist, Mel. Always have, always will.”
“Why choose me? And you?”
“Because you’re beautiful, bright and talented. And he figures I might be in the way….” He paused, looked away. “I think.”
She was quick enough to follow his sudden shift of thought. “This has nothing to do with your work, Johnny. Anyone who might want to hurt you the way you’re thinking would simply put a bullet through my head.”
“Not everyone uses a simple approach, Mel. One guy I was involved with prefers torture to a shot in the head. His name’s Enrique Jago. If something’s illegal, he’ll take it on. He pimps his own wife to business associates. My contact thought he might have made me near the end.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think so, but I could be wrong.”
She quashed the tendrils of uneasiness in her stomach. “Why would he send me roses? It’s a form of torture, I’ll admit, but there are much nastier versions if he’s really into it.”
“He’s different with women.”
“In what way?”
Johnny leaned forward, trapped a strand of her hair and brought it to his lips. His lashes shielded his eyes as he replied in flawless Spanish, “To invoke terror in the heart of a woman is to be granted power over her. Total power. The power to choose whether she lives…” Using her hair, Johnny tugged her forward until their lips touched. “Or whether,” he whispered against her mouth, “she dies.”
The last thing Meliana wanted to do was kiss him. It would get her all tangled up again, and she still wasn’t untangled from their separation. But she let herself tumble in because that’s how it had always been between them. A quick fall followed by a fiery meltdown.
She opened herself to him, let him explore while she touched him, tasted him, inhaled him—and tried very hard not to let reason sneak in.
He slid a hand into her hair, cupped her head and held her in place while he quite literally ravaged her mouth.
Deep kisses, she thought in a daze. They numbed her mind and sent her emotions spinning out of control. Only Johnny could do this to her. Only Johnny had ever really done anything to her. Only he had ever hurt her.
She wanted to push against his chest, but she didn’t rush it. The heat of him made her want to slide in deep and stay there. It wouldn’t be a safe or secure place, but it would be exciting. And Meliana lived for excitement. Or she had once.
She pressed her palm to his heart, felt it beating hard and fast against his ribs. “Johnny, stop,” she managed, and drew back. “Just—stop.”
He did, with an effort that was visible even to her blurred mind.
He closed those stunning eyes of his and let his head fall forward. “Sorry,” he said, then gave a soft laugh and breathed out, “No, I’m not.”
In his real life he’d never been much of a liar. Meliana collected what composure she could and stepped away. When she saw the dogs staring at them with lolling tongues, she found her sense of humor and felt a smile work its way across her lips.
“We had to go and complicate a perfectly workable situation, didn’t we?”
“I did it, Mel. You just…”
“Tripped and fell against your mouth?”
“If it keeps things level, yeah.”
She hesitated a moment, then brushed the hair from his face. “Nothing’s ever been level for us, Johnny. Not then or now.”
“And we’re doing our utmost to see that it stays that way.” He flicked a finger between them. “This is why I slept at Andy’s last night and will again tonight.”
She glanced next door. “He’ll love you for waking him at this hour. Andy’s sleeping habits tend to follow the sun.”
“He got a parking ticket last week. I’ll ask Julie to fix it. That’ll square us. Can I take the cake?”
She nodded, but stopped him before he could leave. “It wasn’t your fault, Johnny.”
From the doorway, he regarded her. “Tonight or overall?”
“Both. I don’t need to blame you for anything.”
“You never did.” He sent her a miserable look and wrapped his fingers briefly around the door frame. “But I do.”
SHE WOULD KEEP HER BALANCE, Meliana promised herself. She repeated that every time her thoughts strayed into dangerous territory for the next three days.
Johnny hadn’t meant to mess with her head, or her emotions, but how could he not when she’d loved him so much it hurt. Still did love him, if she was honest with herself. Always would, no matter how divergent their life patterns became.
He’d worried that she would grow to fear him. Although she never had, she’d glimpsed the violence inside him. They’d fought, bitterly, when he’d returned. Over what, Meliana couldn’t say, but at the root of it had been both a lifestyle and an alter ego he’d embraced just a little too fully for a little too long.
Determined not to dwell on that now, she went about her business as usual at the hospital.
She made her rounds, turned the envelope, stockings and card over to Julie, covered the overload in the E.R. and even sat in on one of Charlie’s clinics for twenty minutes during an afternoon break.
The man was amazing. She knew serious skeptics who were willing to give his methods a try.
“He’s a whacko genius.” Julie came up behind Meliana, who’d paused in the doorway to observe Charlie’s newest group. “Do you think he does hypnotism?”
“I doubt it.” Meliana swiveled her head. “Are you looking to get hypnotized?”
“No, I’m looking first for you, whom I’ve found, and second for Sam, who’s been complaining of headaches again.”
Sam Robbins was Julie’s stepbrother, a quiet young man with a talent much more freakish to Meliana’s mind than Charlie Lightfoot’s. He was one of those rare people who could scan a page in a phone book and memorize it instantly, names and numbers.
“Sam’s probably downstairs unloading food trays.” Meliana gave Charlie a quick wave before closing the door. “I’ll talk to Elizabeth Truman in Neurology. Maybe she can schedule a round of tests. It could be that Sam’s brain takes too much in at one time and can’t cope with the overload of information. Tell him to stop reading for a while.”
“Maybe I’ll send him fishing with Johnny up at Blue Lake. No praise intended, and no idea why, but Johnny’s really good with Sam. Must be a big-brother thing.”
“You’re worried about him, aren’t you?”
“A little. Don’t forget, his father died of a brain aneurysm.”
“I’ll talk to Liz,” Meliana promised. “So what’s the deal with the stockings?”
“Zip so far. Whoever this guy is, he’s taking all the necessary precautions. Is Johnny still around?”
“He went back to Blue Lake. Broken pipe in the downstairs bathroom. Eileen Crawford found it when she came to clean.” She nodded forward. “There’s Sam now.”
“With an overstuffed cart as usual.”
“It’s a long way down to Food Services.” Meliana grinned. “He’s saving himself a trip.”
“Sam!” Julie called.
He halted so abruptly he almost rolled the cart into a housekeeping trolley.
“Head in the clouds,” Julie muttered.
“Hi, Sam,” Meliana greeted. She saw him press his temple under a messy cap of dark curls. “Headache?”
“They come and go.” He sent her an affable grin. “Julie says it’s all the junk food I eat.” The smile faded and he stared at her lab coat. “Your pager’s going off.”
“It is?” Surprised, Meliana felt her pocket. “I don’t hear it.”
He regarded her with innocent brown eyes. “That’s because it hasn’t…”
When the device began to beep, Meliana and Julie both frowned at him.
“It just—came to me,” he said and checked the cart for slippage. “I need to get this downstairs. Later, okay?”
Meliana started for the nurses’ station. “This is a new thing, right?”
“I have no idea.” Julie strode along beside her. “Do you think—He couldn’t be, like, psychic or something, could he? I mean, we use psychics from time to time on impossible cases. My captain half believes they’re for real.”
“That seemed pretty for real to me,” Meliana said. “Problem?” she asked the duty nurse.
