been the ticket that got her through. And Mikey... Mikey was only eight. He needed his mother. And Paul. What the hell was Paul going to do without her?
Black spots started popping in and out of her vision. She wasn’t getting any oxygen to her brain. She was suffocating.
And then the hand brought the scalpel sharply across her skin, leaving a path of fiery pain just below her rib cage. Inside her mind, Marissa’s screams drowned out every other thought. But on the outside, she just lay there, still and silent. Until she died.
1
Friday, December 15
If the bullshit I wrote was true, I wouldn’t have been standing with my back to the man I’d most love to bone, saying “No.” Because if the bullshit I wrote was true, the question he’d just asked me would have been an entirely different one, instead of the one he’d asked, which had been, “Will you help me investigate another creepy fucking case that might get us both killed?”
Okay, those weren’t his exact words, but they might as well have been.
I was in Manhattan, in a TV station greenroom, getting ready for my live segment, and having him there was throwing me way off my game. Way off. I was tingling in places I shouldn’t be tingling, and remembering our one-night stand two months ago.
I should be remembering what happened after. The serial killer who damn near offed us both.
Mason Brown moved his oughtta-be-illegal bod around in front of me so I couldn’t not look at him. I knew he knew that. “I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that. Should have started with hello. You look great, Rachel. Really great.”
“It’s the makeup. They overdo it for TV.”
“It’s not the makeup.” He tried his killer smile on me. A fucking saint would steam up at those dimples. “I’ve missed you. What’s it been, a month?”
Three weeks since I’ve seen him. Thanksgiving. Two months, nineteen days and around twenty hours since we’d had sex, last time I checked, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say that out loud. “Something like that.”
“Too long, any way you count it.”
“We agreed that we—” I waved my hand between us “—would be a bad idea.”
“Yeah, but I thought that meant we wouldn’t date.” And by date he meant screw. “Not that we wouldn’t ever see each other again.”
Except that seeing him made me want to jump his bones. Hence the not-seeing-each-other part. But I couldn’t tell him that, either.
“Look, Mason, I have five minutes before I have to be on that stage, in front of a live studio audience, hawking my new book, and you’re really throwing me off my Zen.”
“You have Zen?”
I closed my eyes. “No, but I fake it beautifully when I’m not...” Don’t finish that sentence. “What makes you think I’d be any help, anyway? I only connected with the Wraith because he had your brother’s heart, along with his penchant for murder, and I have your brother’s eyes, and we connected in some woo-woo way I’m still not sure I believe. It was a fluke, and it’s over. I’m no crime fighter.”
He put both hands on my shoulders. Yeah, that’s right, touch me and make it even harder for me not to rip your shirt off, you clever SOB. “Just give me a chance to tell you about the case. Come on, please?”
I closed my eyes, sighed hard and dropped my head to one side. When I opened my eyes again, he was flashing those damned dimples. He knew he had me. Hell, he’d had me at hello. The bastard.
“Buy me lunch after I finish up here and I’ll let you bend my ear, but that’s it, Mason.”
The door opened. “Two minutes, Ms. de Luca,” said the curly head that poked through.
I nodded and looked at Mason. His hands were still on my shoulders, and his smile had faded into an “I want to kiss your face off” sort of look.
I licked my lips, then wished I hadn’t. I reminded myself of all the reasons we’d decided not to “date.” I’d been blind for twenty years. Now I wanted to live my life as a sighted adult for a while before sharing it with anyone else. That made sense, didn’t it?
I couldn’t look at him. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Okay.”
“Fine.” I turned away from him and tried to school my face into that of a spiritually enlightened guru who could change every viewer’s life for a mere $17.99 in hardcover or $22.99 for the audiobook, plus tax where applicable. Only a fool would wait for the paperback or ebook versions, though they would be cheaper.
Mason sighed. Maybe in disappointment that I didn’t seem as glad to see him as he’d seemed to see me. A lot he knew. My inner idiot was doing cartwheels.
The door opened again. Polly-Production-Assistant came all the way in this time. “Ready?”
“Sure am.” Not even close.
She took my arm and led me out the door and through a maze of hallways. Mason was following right along behind us.
I turned to shoot him down over my shoulder. “I thought you were gonna wait in the greenroom?”
“I want to watch the taping. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Oh, sure, it’s fine,” said Polly or whatever the hell her real name was. “We’re in a commercial break, on in thirty seconds.”
She dragged me through a set of big double doors, and then we high-stepped over masses of writhing cables onto the set, stopping along the way so someone could run a mike up my back, under my dressy black jacket, over my shoulder and clip it to my flouncy lapel.
“Say something.”
“Mike check,” I said, looking through the window to where the sound guys wore headsets suitable for a firing range. “How’s it sound?”
They gave me unanimous thumbs-up, and I headed for the sofa. The show’s host, failed comedienne Mindy Becker, got up to shake my hand, then I sat down in the most flattering manner, uncomfortably on the edge of the sofa, legs crossed at the ankles, one hand resting lightly atop the other on my thigh. I wet my lips and plastered a great big smile on my face. I tried with everything in me to forget that Detective Mason Brown was standing a few yards away, watching my every move and hopefully wanting me as much as I was wanting him. He’d better be.
He knew my deepest secret, too, I thought. The secret only those closest to me knew. That I didn’t really believe in what I wrote. That I was a skeptic, feeding the gullible a steady diet of what they most wanted to hear—that the power to change their lives was in their hands—and laughing all the way to the bank.
And then the director said, “In three, two...” and pointed a finger at us.
“We’re back!” Mindy told the camera. “Joining us now is the bestselling author of Wish Yourself Rich, the book that’s sweeping the nation and changing lives,
