Forbidden Temptation

Chapter Seven

“You see death.” Melissa’s posture, expression, tone of voice all conveyed rejection.

“I know, it sounds crazy-”

“It doesn’t sound crazy. It is crazy. First you say you can see true-love veils, but, oops, you don’t see those anymore because now you see death. Do you even hear what you’re saying?” Melissa reached for the car door handle.

Rose caught her arm. “I know it sounds impossible.”

Melissa whirled around. “Let go of me.”

“You know me. Would I say this if it wasn’t true?”

Melissa shook her head, her brow furrowed. “I don’t think I know you at all.” She turned to open her car door.

“I saw a death veil on Alice Donovan’s face,” Rose blurted.

Melissa froze.

“That night at the club,” Rose continued, “when she was dancing and she turned toward us, I saw it on her face.”

Melissa turned slowly, a dangerous glitter in her eyes. “Don’t even-”

“That’s why I left right after she did. I wanted to catch her before she left, to try to warn her.”

Melissa’s shoulders stiffened. “Did you?”

Rose nodded. “I told her what I was seeing.”

“And she called you crazy.”

“More or less,” Rose admitted, despair washing over her.

Enunciating her words slowly and carefully, Melissa asked, “Did you do anything to Alice?”

Rose stared at Melissa, hurt. “Of course not. I was trying to warn her.”

“Like you’re trying to warn me.”

The tears burning behind Rose’s eyes spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t care if you think I’m nuts. Could it hurt to be extra careful over the next few days?”

“You know I had a new alarm system put in my house last week. My car has a state-of-the-art security system. I’ll be fine.”

“Just remember what I said, okay? Maybe you and Mark should get away for a few days. For your anniversary-make it a long weekend. Give the police time to track this man down.”

Melissa’s eyebrows rose. “You think the slasher’s going to get me? Like he got Alice?”

Rose looked away from the shimmering veil marring Melissa’s pretty face. “Maybe not if you get out of town for a few days.”

Melissa shook her head. “I have a wedding to plan, and now I have to find a new planner. I’m not going anywhere.” She slid behind the wheel of her car and started to close the door.

Rose put her hand on the door, stopping Melissa from closing it. “Don’t go anywhere alone, Melissa.”

“Get your hand off my car door.” Melissa’s voice grated.

Rose stepped back. Melissa slammed the door shut, gunned the engine and whipped out of the parking slot, tires whining.

Knuckling the tears from her eyes, Rose trudged to her own car. She felt achy and heart-sore, weighted down by the shroud of despair blanketing every part of her life these days.

Considering her emotional state, it should have come as no surprise when she arrived home to find her sister Iris pacing the back patio. She’d probably sensed Rose’s agitation all the way from Willow Grove.

Rose parked her Chevy, peering through the windshield at her sister. Iris glared back, her posture tense.

Lovely.

“What the hell is going on, Rose?” Iris greeted her.

“Nice to see you, too.”

Eyes flashing with equal parts concern and irritation, Iris held up a newspaper with a large headline: Police Confirm Link Between Three Murders. “I was reading this story about a serial killer stalking your neighborhood when I came across your name. You helped set up a neighborhood meeting to address the issue? How civic of you.”

Rose sighed. “Since when do you get the Birmingham News?”

“Since my flighty sister pulled up stakes and headed to Birmingham without any notice.”

Rose pressed her lips together. “I’m fine.”

“And how did the neighborhood meeting go?”

“It went well. Lots of good information.”

To Rose’s surprise, Iris’s coffee-colored eyes filled with tears and her face crumpled. She sank onto the wrought iron bench by the door. “Rosie, what have I done?”

Rose sat beside her sister, putting her hand on Iris’s knee. “Done? Why would you think you’ve done something?”

Iris dashed away a tear with an angry jab of her thumb. “I don’t know, maybe because you moved out of the house on a whim and left me there alone, and now you won’t return my calls?”

“I’m sorry.” Guilt washed over Rose in a dark wave. “I wasn’t avoiding you. I guess I was trying to avoid me.”

Iris sniffled. “That doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.”

Rose chuckled through her tears. “I know.”

Iris put her arm around Rose’s shoulders. “The true-love veils still haven’t come back, huh?”

Rose rested her head on her sister’s shoulder, tears spilling down her cheeks. Iris’s strong arm reminded her of how much she’d given up by isolating herself from her family. Iris’s empathic energy radiated down Rose’s arm and into her aching chest, drawing out her pain like a magnet.

Iris took in a swift breath, tightening her hold on Rose. “Rose, my God-what’s happened to you?”

Rose withdrew from her sister’s embrace before Iris could feel the full brunt of her tortured emotions. “Everything’s gone so wrong, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“Maybe I can fix it.” Iris reached for Rose again, but Rose dodged her touch, not wanting to inflict more pain on her sister. Iris dropped her hand to her lap but held Rose’s gaze. “Tell me, Rosie. I promise it’ll be better if you share it.”

Rose haltingly explained about the death veils, from the first appearance on Dillon Granville’s face to her recent experiences. Iris’s gaze revealed equal parts compassion and horror, tears sliding over her cheeks and reddening her eyes.

When Rose subsided into soft sniffles, Iris straightened her back. “Okay. You have a different gift now, that’s all.”

“A terrible gift,” Rose muttered. “I don’t want it.”

Iris brushed Rose’s hair away from her face. “I don’t blame you, but it is what it is.”

“I hate that phrase.”

“You were spoiled, you know. Having such a happy gift.”

Rose nodded, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms. “I know you and Lily didn’t always like your gifts.”

“Lily ran away from hers for years.” Iris looked down at her hands. “I never ran from mine, but there’ve been lots of times I’ve wanted to. Feeling other people’s pain isn’t fun.”

“But you’ve been able to help a lot of people.”

“And maybe you can help people, too,” Iris pointed out. “Like with that meeting.”

“A lot of good that did.” Rose told Iris about seeing the death veils on the women in the audience. “What if I paraded the killer’s next victim right in front of him?”

“You may never know how many women’s lives you saved by helping them know how to avoid danger and protect themselves,” Iris countered. “Organizing that meeting and informing women what they’re up against was the right thing to do.”

“That’s what Daniel says, too.”

“Daniel?”

Rose flushed. “Daniel Hartman.”

Iris looked taken aback. “The criminologist?”

Rose quirked one eyebrow. “You’ve heard of him?”

“Uh, yeah.” Iris looked at her as if she were dumb as a stump. “Daniel Hartman, wonderboy profiler.”

He would hate that characterization, Rose thought.

“You’ve met him?” Iris asked, her voice tinged with awe.

The heat rising up Rose’s neck intensified. She’d done a bit more than just meet him, much to her embarrassment. “Yeah.”

“Is he as cute in person as he is on TV?”

“I guess.” Rose tried to sound noncommittal.

Iris’s eyes narrowed. “Just how well do you know him?”

“We’ve met a few times.”

“Met.”

“Stop it, Iris.” She couldn’t deny that she found Daniel attractive. But his rebuff after she’d kissed him left her with little indication he returned her feelings. She’d tried to convince herself that he’d kissed her back, that maybe the glitter she’d seen in his eyes had been desire.

But the sad fact was, for all her expertise in bringing couples together, her own experiences with romance were limited. She’d been waiting for the true-love veils to tell her when she’d met the man who would own her heart.

What came easily to other women was a puzzle to her.

“Rosie, do you have feelings for him?” Iris asked.

“I can’t see the true-love veils anymore,” Rose blurted.

Iris’s dark eyes narrowed. “Not what I asked.”

“How can I know any man is my one true love?”

Iris’s lips tightened into a thin line. “What makes you think you ever could?”

Rose glared at her sister. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Iris held her gaze, her expression serious. “Dillon and Carrie Granville were true loves. Soul mates. And he ended up killing her and himself because she was going to leave him.”

Rose bit her lip. “I must have made a mistake-”

“What if you didn’t?” Iris asked. “What if you saw exactly what you always see? What if they were soul mates? True loves? What if all that was true, but they still weren’t supposed to be together because Dillon wasn’t stable enough to handle it?”

Rose shook her head. “That’s not how it works.”

Iris laughed, though there was little humor in the sound. “We don’t know how our gifts work. Lily doesn’t really know how her visions work. I don’t know why I feel other people’s pain when I touch them, and why sometimes it’s stronger than other times. And maybe all you ever knew about true-love veils was that they were signposts, pointing to people with the capacity for a forever kind of love. A signpost, not a guarantee.”

Rose shook her head again, her sister’s words clanging like chaos in her head. That’s not the way things were. It couldn’t be. From childhood, she’d known with utter certainty that the true-love veils were signs that two people were destined for lifetime happiness with each other. And she’d never been wrong, not in all the years she’d been seeing them.

Not until Carrie and Dillon Granville.

“I kept you from doing something stupid with Paul Abernathy,” she reminded Iris. “I saw the true-love veil of Ann Curtis on his face, and I saved you a heart-ache. And I was right about Lily and McBride, too-”

“There’s a difference between probabilities and certainties,” Iris said. “The true-love veils told you about probabilities-these two people have what it takes to be happy together if they play their cards right. But it can’t promise a good outcome. That’s up to the people involved, isn’t it?”

Rose pressed her face in her hands. “Then, what was the point of even having that gift, if it was only a maybe?”

Iris touched Rose’s cheek. “I guess, that’s what you have to find out now that it’s gone.”

Rose stood, pulled her keys from her pocket and let them in the back door. She led her sister into the living room, crossing to the mirror above the fireplace mantel. She gazed at her haunted reflection and asked the question she dreaded most. “Why do you think I’m seeing death veils now?”

Iris crossed to stand just behind her. Their eyes met in the mirror. “Maybe you’re meant to stop the murders.”

Rose closed her eyes. “How?”

“I wish I could tell you.” Iris put her hands on Rose’s shoulders, the touch electric. Tension flowed out of Rose’s arms, pouring through the connection between them. Rose opened her eyes and saw the hollows that seemed to form, like dreadful magic, under her sister’s dark eyes.

Rose pulled away from Iris’s touch, turning to face her. “You can’t heal this. You’ll hurt yourself trying.”

“I wish I could take it all away from you.”

Rose caught Iris’s hand in hers, enfolding it between her palms. “Just being here helped. I didn’t know just how much I needed to tell you about this.”

Iris’s smile was pained. “A lot’s changed with you. I wish I’d known before now. I wish you’d told Lily or me something so we could have helped you out.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You want me to tell Lily so she’ll know what’s going on?”

Rose shook her head. “I’ll tell her. I’m a big girl.”

Iris tugged Rose’s hair. “I brought a bag, just in case. I can stay here tonight. We could do each other’s hair and watch cheesy movies.” Her eyes took on a teasing glint. “That is, unless you’ve got a date with the wonderboy profiler.”

Relief bubbled up in Rose’s throat; her self-imposed estrangement from her sisters had hurt more than she realized. Why had she thought keeping secrets from them would make her life easier? “No date,” she assured her sister. “But I have a whole tin of chocolate.”

Iris laughed. “I’ll go get my bag!”

“HOW MANY of the death veils have you seen?” Iris asked Rose over breakfast Thursday morning.

Rose washed down her bite of bagel with milk. “Twelve.”

Iris cocked her head. “Exactly twelve?”

Rose put down the rest of her bagel, her appetite gone. “It’s not something I could forget.”

Iris reached across the table and squeezed Rose’s hand. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t a topic you want to talk about, especially over breakfast, but-”

“But I’ve been running away from it long enough,” Rose finished for her. “I know. You’re right.”

“Do you remember who those twelve were, how they died-”

“Only eleven are dead, but I can even tell you the dates they died.” Those faces, those names were etched in Rose’s memory.

“Melissa’s the twelfth?”

Rose nodded, the memory of Melissa Bannerman’s death veil making her stomach roll.

“Okay. So tell me who the others were.” Iris crossed to the refrigerator and removed a magnetized notepad with attached pen that hung on the door. She sat across from Rose. “I know about Dillon. Who’s next?”

Pushing aside her revulsion, Rose answered, “Jenny Maitland. She died in a car accident on New Year’s Eve. Drunk driver hit her. I saw her earlier in the day, at the grocery store. I tried to tell her to be careful, but she looked at me like I was crazy.”

“Nothing new for us Browning girls, right?” Iris smiled, but her eyes were full of empathy as she jotted down a few notes on the notepad. “Who else?”

As Rose named the others, a pattern began to appear. “All foul play of some sort,” Iris pointed out.

She was right. Of the twelve death veils Rose had seen over the past ten months, none of the eleven had died of natural causes or simple accidents.

“Violent deaths that might’ve been prevented.” Iris pushed the notepad toward Rose. “Maybe that’s why you’re seeing them.”

“To stop their deaths?” Rose grimaced. “Then, I’m failing miserably.”

“Nobody ever said having a special gift would be easy-” A soft trilling sound interrupted Iris. She crossed to the counter where she’d left her purse and answered her cell phone. “Oh, hi, Shelley. What’s up?”

Shelley Daniels was a college student who helped Iris at the plant nursery Iris owned. Probably some business question. Rose turned her attention to the list of names.

Eleven people dead. Melissa in grave danger. And apparently Rose was seeing death veils because there was a chance to prevent the deaths.

But how was she supposed to do that?

“And you can’t get it going at all?”

Rose looked up at the sound of concern in her sister’s voice. Iris’s mouth tightened. “No, I know it’s a hunk of junk, but it’s all I can afford at the moment. I can be there in an hour. I can usually get it running again.”

The generator, Rose guessed. Her sister had been fighting with that piece of machinery for four years, ever since she’d started growing tropicals at her nursery.

Iris disconnected and gave Rose an apologetic look. “That was Shelley. The storm that blew through last night knocked out the power at the nursery and she can’t get the generator going. I’ve got to get there within a couple of hours or we’re going to lose all the tropicals in the hothouse.”

“Go. I’ll be fine.”

Iris frowned. “Are you sure? Maybe I could call someone to go check on it-”

“You know you’re the only one who can ever get that old thing going. Hurry, before the orchids die.”

Rose helped Iris pack up her things and walked her to the back door. “Drive carefully, and call me when you get there.”

Iris hugged her. “I love you. Thanks for telling me what was bothering you. I promise, you’ll figure everything out. You’ll know exactly what the veils mean and what you’re supposed to do about them. I have faith in you.”

Tears pricked Rose’s eyes, and she gave her sister a second, fierce hug. “I love you, too. Thanks for everything. You’ve already made me feel so much better.”

Wiping her eyes, she watched her sister drive down the back alley, wishing she could return to Willow Grove with her, back to the life she used to know, the security of a world where the only thing she saw was happiness and hope.

But that world didn’t exist, anymore, and Iris was right about one thing: No matter how much she hated the death veils, they obviously weren’t going away. The only thing left was to figure out how she was supposed to use them.

And she had to start with Melissa.

“I WAS SURPRISED by your call,” Daniel confessed as he entered Melissa Bannerman’s office. He’d figured Rose would have already clued her in on his real reason for seeking her out.

Melissa’s knowing look as he took the seat across the desk from her gave him little reason to think otherwise. “I wonder why that could be?”

He didn’t bother to feign ignorance. “I really am in the market for a publisher for the book we discussed, but you’re right, that wasn’t my primary reason for coming here.”

“You could have just told me that.”

“Maybe I should have. Wasn’t sure at the time, and I needed information.”

“About my relationship with Alice Donovan.”

“Someone said you and Alice had plans to go out the night before she died. I wanted to know what you knew.”

“What about Rose Browning? You seemed awfully interested in her when I saw you together at the meeting Tuesday night.”

He kept his expression neutral, though the memory of Rose Browning’s lips, soft and warm beneath his, still lingered. “You mentioned that she was there at the club, as well, and that she’d left soon after Alice.”

“You wanted to pump her for information, too?”

“Yes.” And he’d wanted to know what she’d been looking for in the bar where he’d seen her earlier, and why she’d fled Alice’s apartment when the police had arrived. But he wasn’t going to share that information with Melissa.

“There’s something you need to know-” Melissa’s phone buzzed, stopping her midsentence. Frowning, she picked up the receiver. “Melissa Bannerman.” Her frown deepened as she listened to whoever was on the other end. She rose from her chair and walked to the window behind her desk, the phone cord stretching out behind her. “Oh, for God’s sake-”

Daniel craned his neck, trying to follow her gaze, but from his seat, he could see little more than the building across the street.

“No, just make sure she doesn’t leave. I’ll be right out.” Melissa hung up the phone, meeting Daniel’s curious gaze with flashing blue eyes. “Come with me. I have to deal with something, and I think you may find it of interest.”

Puzzled but intrigued, Daniel walked with Melissa outside to the fenced-in parking lot behind the redbrick loft building that housed the publishing company. There were about twenty cars in the small lot.

One of them was Rose Browning’s Chevy Impala.

A uniformed security guard fell into step with them as they headed across the lot. “Is she dangerous?” he asked Melissa.

“I don’t think so.”

Daniel stared at Melissa’s grim expression. “What the hell is going on?”

She didn’t answer, striding forward as the driver-side door opened and Rose stepped from the car.

Rose’s eyelids fluttered briefly as she looked at Melissa, almost like a flinch, Daniel noted with surprise.

“I told you to stay away from me,” Melissa snapped.

Rose’s chin came up. “Not in those exact words.”

“Well, let me be clear. You need help. And, until you get it, I don’t want you anywhere near me, my home or my business.” Melissa folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve already talked to the police about you. They know everything you told me. It’ll take one call to get a restraining order.”

Rose’s lower lip trembled, but she didn’t drop her gaze. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“What’s going on here?” Daniel asked.

Both women turned their gazes to him. Melissa’s fiery, Rose’s apprehensive.

Melissa was the first to answer. “There’s something you don’t know about Rose, Daniel.” She looked at Rose. “Should you tell him or should I?”

Rose’s gaze dropped, her hands trembling.

Melissa looked back at Daniel. “Yesterday, Rose informed me that I was going to die if I didn’t get out of town.”

Daniel frowned, not understanding. “What?”

“How’d you put it?” Melissa asked Rose. “Oh, yeah. She sees death.”

Rose looked at him, her expression a mixture of anger and shame. But there was no sign of denial, no hint of refutation.

“You see death?” he repeated.

Her mouth tightened, her eyes locking with his. “Right now, Melissa’s face is covered with a translucent image of itself. Sort of like a veil.”

Daniel couldn’t keep his gaze from shifting to Melissa’s face. He saw nothing but her pretty, even features.

“You can’t see it. Only I can.”

“And that’s all there is? The image of her face?” That made no sense, Daniel thought. None of this makes any sense.

Rose shook her head, her eyes welling with tears. “The death veil is covered with bloody slashes. Several crisscrossing gashes on her forehead and cheeks.” Her voice weakened. “And her throat is slit.”

Images flashed through Daniel’s mind. Body after body, disfigured by a killer’s escalating rage.

She was describing the marks of Orion.