woman he’d sworn to love through all his days.
The bitch who had betrayed him…And she was as sensual and gorgeous as she had been all those years ago. The fragrance of gardenias wafted through the air.
He swallowed.
Hard.
A ghost?
Or real flesh and blood?
The woman, a dead ringer for his first wife, stood deep in the woods, staring at him with wide, knowing eyes and that sexy little smile…God, that smile had turned him inside out.
His heart went still as death.
An eerie chill slid through his veins.
“Jennifer?” he said aloud, though he knew his first wife was long dead.
She arched a single eyebrow and his stomach dropped to his knees.
“Jen?” Bentz took a step forward, caught his toe on an uneven rock, and went down. Hard. His knees hit first. Bam! His chin bounced against the mortar and stone, rattling his jaw, scraping his skin.
Pain exploded through his brain. The crow cackled, as if laughing at him. His cell phone skittered across the flagstones.
“Shit!” he muttered under his breath as he lay still for a second, taking in a couple of breaths, telling himself he was a goddamned idiot, a freak who was seeing things that didn’t exist. He moved one leg, then the other, mentally assessing the damage to his already racked-up body.
Not that long ago he’d been paralyzed, the result of a freak accident in a lightning storm. His spinal cord had been bruised, not severed. Slowly he’d recovered to this point and he hoped to hell that he hadn’t reinjured his damned back or legs.
Painfully he rolled over and pushed himself onto his knees while staring over the edge of the veranda toward the spot where he’d seen her.
Jennifer, of course, had vanished.
Poof.
Like a ghost in an old cartoon.
Using a bench for leverage, he pulled himself to his feet and stood, solid and steady. Gingerly, ignoring the pain, he walked closer to the edge of the veranda. Squinting into the shadows, he looked for something, anything to indicate she’d been out there. Tempting him. Teasing him. Making him think he was going crazy.
But nothing moved in the forest.
No woman hid in the deep umbra.
No drop in the temperature indicated a ghost had trod upon his soul.
And, beyond all that, Jennifer was dead. Buried in a plot in California. He knew that as well as his own name. Hadn’t he identified her himself over twelve years ago? She’d been mangled horribly in the accident, nearly unrecognizable, but the woman behind the wheel in the single-car accident had been his beautiful and scheming first wife.
His stomach twisted a bit as a cloud passed over the sun. High in the sky jets streaked, leaving white plumes to slice the wide expanse of blue.
Why now had she returned—at least in his mind? Had it been the coma? He’d lain unconscious in the hospital for two weeks and he remembered nothing of those fourteen lost days.
When he’d finally awoken, staring through blurry eyes, he’d seen her image. A cold waft of air had whispered across his skin and he’d smelled the heady aroma of her perfume, a familiar scent laced with gardenias. Then he’d caught a glimpse of her in the doorway, backlit by the dimmed hall lights, blowing him a kiss and looking as real as if she were truly still alive.
Which of course she wasn’t.
And yet…
Now, as he stared into the shaded bayou where shadows lengthened and the steamy scent of slow-moving water filtered through the leaves of cypress and cottonwood, he second-guessed the truth. He doubted what he’d been certain was fact; he questioned his sanity.
Could it be the pain pills he’d been taking since his accident as his daughter—their daughter—had insisted?
Or was he just plain going nuts?
“Crap.” He glared at the woods.
No Jennifer.
Of course.
She was all a part of his imagination.
Something that had been triggered by nearly half a month of teetering on that razor-sharp edge between life and death.
“Get a grip,” he told himself.
Man, he could use a smoke right now. He’d given up the habit years before, but in times of stress nothing gave him a clear sense of what needed to be done like a hit of nicotine curling through his lungs.
Grimacing, he heard a series of sharp barks. The dog door opened with a click, followed by the scratch of tiny paws flying across the stones and a high-pitched yip. Hairy S, his wife Olivia’s terrier mutt, streaked across the veranda, sending a squirrel squawking loudly up the bole of a scraggly pine. Hairy, who had been named in honor of Harry S. Truman, Olivia’s grandmother’s favorite president, was going nuts. He leaped and barked at the trunk of the tree, his mottled hair bristling as the squirrel taunted and scolded from the safety of an upper limb.
“Hairy! Shh!” Bentz wasn’t in the mood. His head was beginning to pound and his pride had already suffered a beating with the fall.
“What the hell are you doing?” Montoya’s voice boomed at him and he nearly tripped again.
“I’m walking without a damned cane or crutch. What’s it look like?”
“Like a face plant.”
Bentz turned to find his partner slipping through the side gate and striding across the flagstones with the irritating ease of a jungle cat. To add insult to injury, Olivia’s scrappy little dog diverted from the squirrel to run circles around Montoya’s feet, leaving Bentz to dust off his pride. He tried not to wince, but his knees stung where his skin had been scraped off. No doubt bruises were already forming. He sensed the ooze of warm, sticky blood run down his shins.
“I was watching from over the top of the gate. Looked to me like you were attempting a swan dive into the concrete.”
“Very funny.”
“I thought so.”
Bentz wasn’t in the mood to be ridiculed by his smart-assed partner. Make that his smart-assed younger partner. With hair that gleamed black in the afternoon light, reflective sunglasses covering eyes that were as sharp as they had ever been, Montoya was younger and more athletic than Bentz. And not afraid to remind his older partner of it.
When he walked, Montoya damned near swaggered and the diamond stud in his earlobe glittered. At least today he wasn’t wearing his signature black leather jacket, just a white T-shirt and jeans. Looking cool as all get-out.
It bugged the hell out of Bentz.
“Olivia
