"I said it was possible. And it is. But until we know who that victim was, we can't know who might have wanted him dead."
"Are you going to suggest that to Jake?"
Riley once again had the vague sense of undercurrents, of some kind of long-simmering tension between Ash and the sheriff, but couldn't bring it into focus enough to even be sure whether it was professional or personal.
Something there, though. Definitely something there. And strong, if she was aware of it even with all her senses out of whack.
Mildly, she said, "I imagine Jake's cop enough to know the basics without needing to be reminded."
Ash returned his gaze to his menu. "Jake's a politician."
"I can't tell him how to do his job, Ash."
"No, I suppose not."
His tension was still there. She could feel it.
Barely.
Where's my clairvoyance when I need it? Hell, where are any of my senses?
They were still dulled, blurred, as if she saw and heard and touched and smelled her surroundings through some kind of wispy veil. It felt weird and cold and scary, this sensation of being distanced from the world.
Being unconnected.
She was alone, that much she could sense.
Even stranger, her head was hurting again, but not in any way that was familiar to her. Not a dull ache of tension or weariness, nor the rare "hangover" head-in-a-vise agony of having pushed herself way beyond her limits, but sharp little bursts of pain every few seconds, one after the other, in random spots from just above her eyes over the top of her head and back to the nape of her neck.
Riley'd had a tooth go bad once; it was that sort of pain, like a nerve or nerves pulsing.
In her tooth, the nerve had been dying.
She was afraid to even think about what might be happening inside her brain.
And here she was, in the middle of a tangled situation she didn't remember or understand, painfully aware that a killer or killers on the loose almost certainly knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on than she did.
As independent and self-reliant as she was, Riley had never felt so unsure of herself. She was adept at role-playing-it was one of her strengths-but this? This was a very, very dangerous game of blind man's bluff, and the one wearing the blindfold-her-had cotton in her ears and a clothespin on her nose as well.
With the exception of Gordon, she didn't know who to trust, and he could offer little more than moral support since, if she had even reached any conclusions or formed any theories since arriving here, she had not confided them to him.
As for the other man she was intimately close to…
"Riley? Ready to order?"
She looked across the top of her menu at this pale-eyed stranger whose bed she apparently shared, and ignored the cold knot in the pit of her belly to say calmly, "I'm ready."
It was the second time she'd said that in the last couple of hours. She only hoped it was true.
3 Years Previously
"You realize what this will mean?" Bishop said.
A little amused, Riley said, "You're a telepath; you know I realize what it will mean."
"I'm serious, Riley."
"Are you ever anything else?" She got a sudden flash of a strikingly beautiful face and electric blue eyes, understood in an instant who the woman was and what she meant to Bishop, and her question suddenly didn't seem so funny anymore.
"Never mind," he said. "We all have our ghosts. And not many secrets between a telepath and a clairvoyant."
"You really must believe we can do some good," she said slowly. "To…willingly expose yourself to so many of us."
Deadpan, he said, "I didn't think it through."
Riley had to laugh, but she shook her head and got the conversation back on its original track. "I do understand what you're asking of me. I know it could take months. Will, probably."
"And you'll have to work alone, at least to all appearances."
"Well, if you're right about how this killer chooses his victims, and right that the first sign of a task force or police focus is what causes him to change towns, then the only way to track him is alone and off the official books. Assuming I can do that."
"I believe you can. I believe you're the best-equipped of anyone in the unit to track him. And to make sure he's caught. But, Riley, you don't get too close. Understand?"
"He only kills men."
"So far. But a cornered animal can kill whatever's threatening it. And he's smart. He's very, very smart."
"Which is why I hide in plain sight. And don't threaten him."
"Exactly."
"That's what I do best," Riley said.
Present Day
In the small part of her mind not occupied with the strain of pretending everything was normal, Riley had struggled to come up with some reasonable excuse for ending up, at the conclusion of this date, in her beach house alone. Short of telling Ash the truth-which she still wasn't ready to do-nothing seemed likely to work without rousing either his suspicion or his anger.
Her senses might be AWOL, but that earlier brief flash of memory plus her instincts as a woman told her he had every reason to expect to spend the night with her-and, despite his calm and almost detached manner during their date, quite definitely the desire to do so. Still, right up to the moment they walked inside the house and he closed the door behind them, Riley believed she might yet come up with a reasonable, acceptable excuse.
She was going to offer coffee or a drink but never got the chance.
Ash picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.
The sheer suddenness of the action, never mind its high-handedness, should have roused some sort of negative reaction in Riley. She was almost sure it should have. Instead, what she felt was an overwhelming sense of familiarity and the first flush of sensual heat sweeping her body.
There was, she realized dimly, something incredibly seductive in the certain knowledge that a man not only wanted you but wanted you now, with no patience for small talk or any of the other social niceties. He wasn't interested in coffee or conversation, he was interested in her, and she was left in absolutely no doubt of that fact.
He was just a little bit rough, more than a little bit urgent, and Riley found the combination impossible to resist.
So she didn't try.
And she didn't try to pretend a response to him, because she didn't have to. Whatever else he was or might be, Ash Prescott was a skilled lover, and her body remembered his touch even if her mind didn't.
She'd left a lamp burning low on her nightstand but kept her eyes closed because the only senses that mattered were the ones he was bringing to life. For the first time since waking up in the afternoon, there was no veil, no distance-and no questions.
Not about this.
Their clothing seemed to just vanish; set on her feet by the bed, Riley almost instantly felt the erotic shock of flesh on flesh, and then the cool smoothness of the sheet beneath her. She had no idea which of them had thrown back the covers and didn't care.
His body was amazingly hard, with the packed muscle of a man who was very athletic, genetically blessed, or both. His skin was smooth and hot beneath her fingers, and the thick, springy hair on his chest teased her breasts with a raw sensuality that only intensified the heat building inside her.
His mouth on hers fed that fire, as hard as his body, as urgently demanding as the hands stroking her flesh. That mouth-to-mouth connection was more than a kiss, more like a melding, a merging, and she had the dim understanding that this was why she had tumbled into bed with a relative stranger.
Because he wasn't. Because they weren't.
Their bodies strained together to be closer than they were, closer than they could be, and she heard herself make a wild sound that would have astonished her if she'd been able to think about it. But there was no time to think or wonder about anything, there was only pleasure that built to an incredible peak and a stunning wave of emotion she'd never known before and couldn't begin to define.