Harlequin Nocturne March 2016 Box Set Read online

  “Do you do anything else?” Jase leaned forward to look at it.

  “Well, I usually write more than that.” She frowned, looking at the document. “But otherwise, no. Not really.”

  She laughed. Then a bit louder. She shook her head. Jase gave her a curious look.

  “All of this is a little hard to take in, that’s all.” She nudged him with her knee. “Right? I’m sure you’re used to it. But I’m not.”

  Jase grinned. “Trust me, every time I start a new case, there’s something I’m not used to.”

  She couldn’t stop herself from touching his face, tracing the line of his jaw and then letting her thumb run across his lower lip for a second before she leaned to brush a kiss against his mouth. “Just making sure this is all still real.”

  “Write a little more, maybe,” he suggested when she pulled away.

  She did, spinning a little tale about balloons and rainbows and pots of gold. Nothing happened. With a sigh, she saved the file into the Works in Progress folder.

  The room filled with balloons. Hundreds of them, multicolored, bouncing and bobbing. Every time one popped, a rainbow shot out, covering them with glitter. Chelle laughed, hands out to catch it, watching as the colored and sparkling bits of light cascaded through her fingers.

  “Boom,” Jase said.

  She looked at his face, cast in rainbow-shaded shadows. Glitter had settled in his fair hair. She brushed it off his shoulders.

  “Now we know,” she said. “The default setting to save files is the drafts folder. But if I put it in that one, it happens. I just don’t know how.”

  He shook himself to let the glitter fall away. “We don’t need to know. We just need to know how to stop it from happening anymore.”

  She thought about writing good things. Winning the lottery, finding a cure for cancer, world peace. A roomful of balloons had been fun and easy and hadn’t hurt anyone. What if she used whatever this was, as crazy as it seemed, to make a better difference in the world?

  “Jase...”

  “Do you want that responsibility?” he asked quietly, though she hadn’t said anything aloud. “Think about it, Chelle. You don’t know the limits of this. Do you want to be in charge of the entire world?”

  She definitely did not. More than that, she suspected she wouldn’t have been allowed to be. Jase might’ve kissed her breathless no matter what she’d written, but he was here to do a job, and that job was to stop all this stuff that had been going on.

  “I’m going to delete it,” she said.

  “The story?”

  She shook her head. “No. The program. I know Grant wrote it for me because he wanted me to reach my dreams, but he couldn’t have meant for it to hurt people. That’s why he didn’t give it to me outright—he was still working on it. He must’ve known it had issues. And he’s gone and will never be able to fix it. I’m going to trash it.”

  Jase looked solemn. “I think that’s a good idea. But all your work...”

  “None of it was much good,” she told him. “Besides, you do your best work in the revisions. I’ll be okay.”

  “Trash it, then,” he told her.

  Her fingers nudged the trackpad to position the cursor, then dragged and dropped the program’s icon into the trash. She waiting, expecting a warning or something to pop up, but nothing happened except that small crinkling sound that always occurred when she deleted something.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s that, I guess.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She’d expected a sense of loss. Months of work, tossed aside. Sorrow, certainly, at deleting something Grant had left her. Yet all she felt was unburdened. A weight, lifted. She twisted in her chair to look at him.

  “I feel...inspired.” She grinned and put her hands on the keyboard, fingers resting lightly on the keys but not typing anything yet. “I feel free, Jase. Is that weird?”

  “What isn’t weird in this world?” he replied with a laugh and sat back in his chair.

  Chelle laughed, too. “Maybe you can tell me all about it sometime.”

  “So you can write a book?”

  She pressed her lips together on another laugh. “You never know. Might be a huge bestseller. Romance sells, you know. Especially when it has a happy ending.”

  “Would you say this has a happy ending, then?”

  She leaned forward in her chair to offer him her mouth, hoping he would kiss her. “You tell me.”

  He did. Sweet and slow and smooth, exactly what she’d been wishing for. His hand slipped beneath her hair, cupping the back of her neck.

  “I think it’s a good possibility,” he said against her lips.

  His phone buzzed, not a normal text tone but something harder. Jase pulled away, leaving Chelle confused, eyes half-closed, mouth half-open. He pulled his phone from his pocket with a muffled curse.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “It’s Reg. He says we should get our asses over to the beach. Now.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “I was on the phone with Eggy, seeing if she’d had anything she could put together about this thing you said about the computer program,” Reg said from his place on the condo’s deck. “She hasn’t, by the way, though there were a couple cases of computers being possessed by former owners and stuff like that. Nothing about a program that makes hallucinations with physical manifestations, though. And then... Shit. That.”

  He pointed. This time of year, there weren’t many people on the beach, not like if it had been the height of summer, but you still had a few dog walkers and joggers and shell seekers strung out along the sand. All staring out at the way the ocean had retreated, not a normal low tide but much, much farther than that. Several sandbars had been exposed. Some flopping fish.

  “Is it what I think it is?” Jase asked around the tightness in his throat. “Shit, Reg. It is, isn’t it?”

  Chelle, face drawn, touched his arm to turn him to face her. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s what happens before a tsunami,” Reg said. “The water pulls back, way back, because the wave is gathering.”

  “We don’t get tsunamis in Delaware,” Chelle said.

  Jase took her gently by the upper arms and looked into her face. “Chelle. Did you write about a tsunami?”

  She let out a choked gasp. “Oh my God, Jase, I never wrote about it, but I did make some notes about it in one of the plotting folders. I never researched it or anything. It was a ridiculous plot point I was thinking of using to beef up word count. It never went anywhere—”

  “But you put it in the program.” His stomach twisted, dropping.

  She nodded and looked out again to the vast expanse of sand the retreating sea had left behind. “Yes. It was in there.”

  “What did you do with the program?” Reg asked.

  “I deleted it,” Chelle said.

  Reg shook his head with a frown. “Right to the trash? You didn’t run an uninstaller?”

  “No. I didn’t know I had to,” Chelle said with a look at Jase.

  “Yeah, he wouldn’t, either,” Reg said. “Shit. We have to do something about this. And fast.”

  “We’ll take my car. C’mon.” Jase grabbed his keys and headed for the steps, Chelle and Reg on his heels.

  The gorilla stopped him at the bottom of the stairs with a single punch to the gut that sent Jase to his knees. With a roar, the ape then grabbed him by the back of the shirt and shook him until his teeth rattled. When his head connected with the wooden railing, everything went dark for a moment, though he could hear Reg and Chelle both shouting.

  When he came to, it was under a stinking, sweating pile of fur. He couldn’t move. His head hurt like a sonofabitch. He blinked, catching sight of Reg to one side and Chelle to the o