Strangers in the Night Read online

  Her hands were clasping his head, stroking, trying to soothe him. “Jackson? What’s wrong? What happened?”

  He couldn’t speak for a minute, still in shock from what he had said. The words had just boiled out, without thought. He hadn’t said those words to any woman since his high school days, when he fell in love on a regular basis.

  But they were true, he realized, and that shocked him almost as much as saying them. He loved her. He, Jackson Brody, was in love. It had happened too fast for him to come to terms with it, to think about it as they gradually became enmeshed in each other’s lives. Logic said he couldn’t possibly love her after so short a time; emotion said to hell with logic, he loved her.

  “Jackson?”

  He tried to pull away from that emotional brink, to function as a sheriff instead of a man. He had come here because a man had been murdered, and somewhere along the line he had forgotten that and focused, instead, on the woman at the center of the situation. But he was still inside her, still dazed from the force of his orgasm, and all he could do was sink more heavily against her, pressing her into the tree trunk. Birds sang around him, insects buzzed, the river murmured. Bright morning sunlight worked its way through the thick canopy of leaves, dappling their skin.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. “Did I hurt you?” He knew he had entered her far too roughly, and she hadn’t been aroused and ready.

  “Some.” She sounded remarkably peaceful. “At first. Then I enjoyed it.”

  He snorted. “You couldn’t have enjoyed it very much. I think I lasted about five seconds.” The sheriff still hadn’t made an appearance; the man held full sway.

  “I enjoyed your pleasure.” She kissed his neck. “It was actually rather … thrilling.”

  “I was scared to death,” he admitted baldly.

  “Scared? About what?”

  Finally, belatedly, the sheriff lifted his head. Jackson discovered he couldn’t question her, or even talk about Thaniel, while in his present position. Gently he withdrew from her and eased his weight back, holding her steady while her legs slipped from around his hips and she was once more standing on her own two feet.

  “We’d better hurry,” he said, picking up her clothes and handing them to her, then pulling up his own pants and getting everything tucked back in place. “The Rescue Squad could be here any minute.”

  “Rescue Squad?” she echoed, brows lifting in surprise.

  He waited until she was dressed. “I was afraid you’d been hurt.”

  “Why would I be hurt?” She still looked totally bewildered.

  As a man, he hated having to question her. As a sheriff, he knew he had to do it or resign today. “Thaniel Vargas’s body was found this morning.”

  A stillness came over her, and she looked at him but somehow she wasn’t seeing him, her gaze turned inward. “I knew he’d die,” she finally said.

  “He didn’t die,” Jackson corrected. “He was murdered. Shot in the face with a shotgun.”

  She came back from wherever she had gone, and her green eyes focused sharply on him. “You think I did it,” she said.

  9

  Iwas afraid he’d come back and y’all started shooting at each other again. I was afraid I’d find you dead, or dying.” His voice was remarkably calm, considering how shaken he felt.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t seen Thaniel since day before yesterday, but I don’t have any way to prove it.”

  “Lilah.” He gripped her shoulders, shaking her a little to get her attention. “You seem to think I’m going to take you in for murder. Baby, even if you did kill him, after what happened no D.A. would prosecute, at least not the DA. here. But I don’t think you could murder anyone, not even Thaniel, and he was one worthless jackass. If you say you didn’t kill him, then I believe you.” The man was speaking again. The sheriff struggled to regain his detachment, though he thought it was a losing cause. He would never be detached when it came to Lilah.

  She stared at him, a sense of wonderment coming to her eyes. In a flash of intuition he knew then she hadn’t believed him when he blurted out that he loved her. Why should she? Men said “I love you” all the time in the heat of passion. And they had known each other less than two days. He was acutely aware that she hadn’t said anything about love in return, but that would wait.

  “But one thing keeps eating at me. Day before yesterday, you looked at him and said, ‘You’re dead,’ and damn near scared him to death right then.” He didn’t ask anything, didn’t try to form her answer in any way. He wanted her response to come from her own thoughts.

  To his surprise, she went pale. She looked away, staring at the river. “I just—knew,” she finally said, her voice stifled.

  “Knew?”

  “Jackson, I—” She half-turned away from him, then turned back. She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “In English. That’s my only requirement.”

  “I just know things. I get flashes.”

  “Flashes?”

  Again the helpless gesture. “It isn’t a vision, not exactly. I don’t really see anything, I just know. Like intuition, only more.”

  “So you had one of these flashes about Thaniel?”

  She nodded. “I looked at him when I came out on the porch and all of a sudden I knew he was going to die. I didn’t know he was going to get killed. Just … that he wasn’t going to be here anymore.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. In the distance he could hear the droning of an outboard motor: the Rescue Squad was getting close.

  “I’ve never been wrong,” she said, almost apologetically.

  “No one else knows what you said.” His voice was as somber as he felt. “Just me.”

  She bent her head, and he saw her worrying her lower lip. She saw his dilemma. Then she raised her head and squared her shoulders. “You have to do your job. You can’t keep this to yourself, and be a good sheriff.”

  If he hadn’t already known he loved her, that moment would have done it for him. And suddenly he knew something else. “Are these ‘flashes’ the reason Thaniel thought you’re a witch?”

  She gave him a rueful little smile. “I wasn’t very good at hiding things when I was young. I blabbed.”

  “Scared him, huh? And all these people who come to you for treatment—you just look at them and have flashes about what’s wrong with them?”

  “Of course not,” she said, startled. Then she blushed. “That’s something else.”

  The blush both intrigued and alarmed him. “What kind of something else?”

  “You’ll think I’m a freak,” she said in dismay.

  “But a sexy freak. Tell me.” A little bit of the sheriff was in his tone, a quiet authority.

  “I see auras. You know, the colors that everyone has around them. I know what the different colors mean, and if someone’s sick I can see where and know what to do, whether or not I can help them or they need to see a doctor.”

  Auras. Jackson wanted to sit down. He’d heard all that New Age mumbo-jumbo, but that’s just what it was, as far as he was concerned. He’d never seen a nimbus of color around anyone, never seen proof such a thing existed.

  “I haven’t told anyone about the auras,” she said, her voice shaking. “They just think I’m a … a medicine woman, like my mother. She saw them, too. I remember her telling me, when I was little, what the different colors meant. That’s how I learned my colors.” She gave a quick look at the river, where the boat had come into view. Tears welled in her eyes. “You have the most beautiful aura,” she whispered. “So clean and rich and healthy. I knew as soon as I saw you that—”

  She broke off, and he didn’t pursue it. The Rescue Squad boat had reached her dock, and the two men in it were getting out. One was Hal, who had come along himself to take charge if the Squad was needed, and the other was a tall, thin man Jackson recognized as a medic, though he didn’t know his name.

  Lilah did, thoug