Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set Read online

  If there was any part of this that she regretted, it was definitely not that he’d touched her in “that” way or any way. “I’m not.”

  He looked back at her, and the blaze of desire in his eyes glittered a little brighter. Neither of them moved. She licked her lips and watched him follow the tracing of her tongue along them.

  “I haven’t had a lover in about a year and a half,” she told him. “I tried a couple one-night stands, but they never were more than that. I tried going out with my friend the other night, tried to pick up a guy in Ocean City, but I only kissed him. When it came time to go upstairs with him, I wasn’t into it. Not like this. Nothing like what just happened.”

  “You were in Ocean City on Friday night?” Jase ran a hand through his blond hair until it stood on end.

  It only made him more attractive, that rumpled look. Chelle ran a hand along her chin, feeling the burn from his stubble there. Her nipples, too, she realized, though she didn’t dare cup her breasts to feel the sting he’d left behind.

  “Yes.”

  Jase stood so suddenly his knee hit the coffee table. Cold coffee sloshed, but he ignored it as he moved away from the couch to pace. He ran both hands through his hair this time before turning to face her with a grim look.

  “Did you go home and write after? Like two or three in the morning?”

  The heat was fading, leaving behind a seminauseated ache in the pit of her stomach. She nodded. “Yes?”

  “Shit.” Jase shook his head. “I think it’s you. It’s not just happening to you. You’re doing this.”

  Chelle flinched. “Doing this? Look, I know I wrote that sci-fi story, and yes, I definitely used you as a model for the hero, but it really was just fiction. I had no idea—”

  “Not just this thing with us. Damn, I wanted you from the minute I saw you,” Jase cut in. “All the other stuff that’s been going on around here. Flying monkeys and zombies and shit.”

  “You did?” She grinned, not sure what the hell he was going on about but not really caring. “That night at the Cottage Cafe, I saw you turn around to look back at me, but I didn’t think much of it. Wait. What? Zombies? What?”

  “Yeah. I saw you. Yeah, I turned around.” His small smile turned tight in a second. “You started writing about me right after that. Didn’t you?”

  She blushed, more heat, not nearly as pleasant as the sort that had come from his hands on her. “Yes.”

  “I know. I felt it. The same as what just happened. Only, I was alone. I was that guy, that scout guy.”

  “And I was the regent?” Chelle asked in a whisper. She had to sit, or she was going to fall. She shook her head, not understanding. By the look on his face, Jase had only a little more clue.

  “Yes. You were the regent and I was in love with you. And when I came out of it, there was all this stuff, this glowing remnant of something. It was the same as the other cases. I knew they were connected. I just didn’t see the connection until now.”

  Chelle twisted her hands together in her lap to keep them from shaking. Chills had replaced the heat, though she was still sweating. She swallowed another rush of nausea. Her head was starting to hurt.

  “I don’t understand, Jase.”

  He moved toward her so fast that she let out a yelp and retreated against the couch. That stopped him. He moved slower then to sit beside her without touching her.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said.

  She was a little scared, though not of him. She ought to be, Chelle thought at the sight of his expression, which had gone dark and stern. She knew nothing about him except that everything he’d told her had been lies.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” she asked him.

  Jase shook his head, pulling out his phone from his pocket and tapping a quick text. “No. But Reg might be able to put it together. If he can’t, someone on the team should be able to figure it out.”

  “The team?”

  He looked at her, then put away his phone. “Yeah. I belong to a team called the Crew.”

  “And you don’t investigate insurance fraud,” Chelle said.

  Jase’s smile shouldn’t have sent another glittery slice of heat through her, not with all this other weird stuff surrounding them. But it did. The slight brush of his hand on hers did, too, when he moved a smidgen closer.

  “No,” he said. “Let me tell you what we do.”

  * * *

  “When I was seventeen, my family and I went camping in Yellowstone Park. We’d gone every year for as long as I could remember. Sometimes we had an RV. Sometimes we stayed at one of the lodges. This year was the first time we’d gotten passes to go far back, off the marked trails. Me, my dad, my sister. My mom had stayed home with my younger brother, Corey, who’d broken his leg playing soccer.

  “The three of us carried only what could fit in packs on our backs. My dad had camped like this plenty of times. He even served as a guide sometimes during the summer. He was a schoolteacher. Geometry. But he loved being outdoors more than anything else.

  “We knew to watch for bears, of course. And there are wolves in Yellowstone, too. But my dad knew how to be careful, how to keep our food locked up in scent-proof containers so we didn’t attract anything. We spent the first night hiking as far back off the trail as we could. We made camp right near a waterfall. There was a hot spring there, too, one of the small ones, but still pretty amazing to see. Every so often, it would bubble up a little higher, then settle down. Nothing like Old Faithful, but enough to make the evening entertaining without much else to do but play checkers.

  “I beat my sister every time. She was laughing about that when the thing came after us. They would tell us later it was a bear, but I can tell you, Chelle, I saw that thing and it was not a bear. It was about nine feet tall and had teeth like swords. Claws to match. If it was anything, it was something out of the Stone Age, some kind of saber-toothed tiger hybrid that had been hiding out in the wilds forever. Like the Loch Ness monster, like Sasquatch.

  “It killed my father and my sister. It left me for dead, and I wasn’t faking—I was as close to death as I’ve ever been, and I’ve been hurt pretty damned bad since then.

  “I lay in the backwoods of Yellowstone for three days before a ranger found us. By then the thing had taken my father’s and sister’s bodies. They were never found. It ate them. Everything, even the bones. I don’t know why it left me behind. Maybe it was full.

  “What I do know is that when I got out of the hospital, a man named Vadim came to see me. He told my mom he was a grief counselor. That’s one of those things we learn to do, see. Tell lies in order to get where we need to be so we can figure out what the hell is happening.

  “I knew he wasn’t any sort of counselor. I didn’t want to tell him anything. Nobody would’ve believed my story, I knew that from the start. If the rangers said a bear or bears had taken my dad and Karen, then that’s what I was going to say, too. The nightmares were bad enough without anyone trying to also psychoanalyze me.

  “Vadim, though, had a photo of something that looked a helluva lot like what had come out of the trees that night. Blurry—maybe it could’ve been faked—but as soon as I saw it, I turned and puked into the trash can by my bed. It didn’t faze him. He’s an unshakable bastard, Vadim. One of the bravest men I’ve ever known, and that’s saying a lot.

  “He told me others had seen this thing, close to where it had killed my family. The picture had been found on the phone of someone who’d gone missing, leaving behind that as the only evidence they’d come to harm. He never told me how he got hold of it, but it didn’t matter. Once I saw it, I knew I had to help him find it.

  “My mother thinks I joined an elite branch of the marines, and I aim to keep her thinking that. She worries about me, but at least I never had to convince her I wasn’t insane, not with