The old nightmare struck out of the darkness.
The rear wall of the barn was on fire now, and there was no way out because Zane had locked the big front door for the night. The other children were screaming but she was too terrified to utter a sound. One of the older boys was ordering all of them to get down on the floor to avoid the smoke. She crouched, clutching her prized possession, the book her mother had given her a day earlier…
Virginia came awake on a full-blown panic attack. The crashing waves of anxiety were made even worse by the maddening knowledge that she could not control the terrible rush of energy. The experts said that, from a physiological point of view, it was as if her system was suddenly jolted into full fight-or-flight mode but with no obvious threat. The disconnect was unnerving. But as far as she was concerned, that explanation didn’t even begin to describe the infuriating sensation.
She was too far into the deep, dark waters of the anxiety attack to even attempt to stave it off with the self-defense routine. You’ve been here before. This isn’t your first rodeo. Do what you have to do.
She pushed the covers aside, made it to the bathroom, yanked open the cupboard and grabbed the bottle of meds. She got the lid off, shook out one pill and washed it down with a glass of water. Shivering, she gripped the edge of the sink and tried to breathe.
She hated having to resort to the meds. Doing so made her feel weak. But lately the panic attacks had been coming on more frequently, and there was no question that they were getting worse.
She went back into the bedroom, pulled on her robe and went out into the hall. In the weak glow of the night-light she could see that the door of Cabot’s room was closed.
Relieved, she hurried down the hall to the living room. But she came to an abrupt halt when she saw the otherworldly glow of a computer screen coming from the vicinity of the kitchen counter.
“How bad is this one on a scale of one to ten?” Cabot asked from the shadows.
And suddenly, the stone-cold normal way in which he was dealing with her weirdness had a calming effect.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Let’s just say I’ve been there.”
“Nine point nine,” she said, her voice very tight.
She was still jittery but she was regaining control.
“Did you take the meds?” Cabot asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Good. Do whatever you need to do until they kick in and then I’ve got a question for you.”
“Okay.”
She started pacing. Cabot went back to work. It was a relief not to have to explain everything to him, she thought. He knew better than to try to hold her or even touch her. He didn’t tell her to get a grip or attempt to soothe her with calming words. He just gave her the space she needed to deal with the attack.
To outsiders the scene probably would have appeared bizarre, she thought – one person having a serious anxiety attack while the other one acted as if such attacks were perfectly normal.
After a while she got her pulse and her breathing back under control. She drifted across the room and perched on one of the stools at the counter.
“I’m all right now,” she said. “What was the question?”
“I’ve been thinking about Zane’s first compound.”
“That ghastly old house outside Wallerton? What about it?”
“Early on when my brothers and I started looking for Zane, we checked out that first house. Like I told you, one of his followers handed it over to him. Zane sold it to raise cash to make the move to California.”
“So?”
“It was a dead end as far as leads go,” Cabot said. “But tonight when I got my one thirty a.m. wake-up call, I decided to review some of our old files on Zane. Out of curiosity I looked up the Wallerton house to see what had happened to it.”
“And?”
“It went through a number of hands but eventually wound up in foreclosure. The bank took possession. It stood empty for years but it suddenly sold – an all-cash deal – late last month.”
“Really? Who bought it?”
“That’s where things get interesting,” Cabot said. “I can’t ID the buyer.”
“What do you mean? That kind of information is public.”
“Not when the buyer purchases the property under the cover of a trust. It isn’t uncommon for wealthy people to buy real estate through a trust, but usually it’s possible to get some idea of the identity of the owners. Not in this case, however. Whoever constructed this trust wanted to be sure his identity remained hidden.”
Her anxiety was under control, but Virginia was aware of another kind of excitement sparking somewhere inside her.
“After years of rotting into the ground, the Wallerton house is suddenly sold to an unknown party,” she said. “What we’ve got here is another amazing coincidence.”
“It’s the kind of thing we conspiracy buffs take very seriously.” Cabot closed his laptop and looked at her. “Want to drive to Wallerton in the morning? Have a look around for old time’s sake?”
She shuddered. “Not really. But given all the things that have happened lately, yes. No stone unturned, et cetera, et cetera. My gallery is closed on Sundays and Mondays anyway and my back room will be a crime scene for a couple of days. So, yes, I’m free to accompany you on a little trip down memory lane.”
He smiled.
“What?”
“You’ve got plenty of what Anson calls grit. You know that?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve suffered from anxiety attacks off and on for most of my adult life.”
“That’s got nothing to do with grit.”
“What’s your definition of grit?”
“Murder goes down in your back room, followed by an anxiety attack that ranked at nine point nine on the scale of one to ten, and yet you’re up for taking a trip to the place where your nightmares got started. That, my friend, is grit.”
She grimaced. “Not like there’s much of an alternative. I need to know if Quinton Zane is still out there. I need to know what really happened to Hannah Brewster.”
“So do I.”
She saw the shadows in his eyes and knew that when he dreamed about the past, he, too, heard the echoes of the other children screaming and felt the heat of the flames. They had both lost their mothers to the fires of hell, but Virginia had been one of the lucky ones. Her grandmother had come to claim her. No one had stepped forward to claim Cabot.
Driven by an impulse she did not stop to analyze, she leaned forward and brushed her lips gently across his.
A great stillness came over him.
“Please don’t do that again,” he said.
Shocked, she sat back quickly. In that next instant a furious tide of embarrassment swept through her.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “That was a mistake. I apologize for putting you in a difficult position. Please, just forget that happened. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my room now.”
He got to his feet, moving in the smooth, fluid manner that somehow managed to cross the invisible line from the merely well coordinated to the intensely sensual, and stood in her path. He closed his hands around her shoulders.
“What I’m trying to say is, please don’t do that again unless you mean it,” he said. “I don’t need to be comforted. I don’t need your gratitude.”
His voice was husky, as if he was exerting a fierce control over some dangerous emotion. His eyes were stark with desire. She could feel the need radiating from his hands on her shoulders. But there was also a lot of raw willpower, a lot of control.
She raised a hand and touched the side of his face with her fingertips.
“I don’t generally kiss people unless I do mean it,” she said.
“Did you kiss me because you felt sorry for me? For what happened in the past?”
She hesitated, telling herself he deserved honesty. “Well, maybe it started out that way. I was remembering you as a fatherless boy who had just lost his mother and how no one from your family came to claim you.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought was going on. For the record, I do not want you to kiss me for that reason. I don’t want any pity kisses.”
“Okay.” Feeling more certain of herself now, she flattened her palms against his chest. “But just to be clear, you don’t object to me kissing you for other reasons?”
“Depends.”
“I want to kiss you because I would like to find out what it’s like. Is that a good enough reason?”
He gave that half a second’s thought and then used his grip on her shoulders to pull her hard against his chest.
“That’s the only reason you can come up with?” he asked.
“No.” She gripped fistfuls of his T-shirt. “Here’s the bottom line: I know some of your secrets, Cabot Sutter. And you know some of mine. A long time ago you and I spent some time in hell together. We were both wounded while we were there but we both survived. I’d say that’s reason enough for a kiss.”
“That works,” he said. “For now.”
He tightened his grip, pulled her even closer and covered her mouth with his own, all in one swift, relentless, irresistible motion.
The kiss went hot and deep, overwhelming her, swamping her senses. She was not sure what she had been expecting, but this shattering, disorienting sensation was not it. She clung to him, holding on for dear life.
She had learned long ago not to get her expectations raised too high at the start of a relationship. She made it a rule to go in clear-eyed, anticipating very little in the way of actual fireworks and, sure enough, she had never been surprised. A little mild heat and a fleeting sense of intimacy were as good as it got for her.
“Home by midnight” was her rule.
Lately she had been forced to shelve even those limited expectations because the anxiety attacks had started to become more frequent, striking with unnerving unpredictability. The turning point had occurred one memorable night a few months ago.
Brad Garfield was a very nice man but she knew he had probably been traumatized for life when an anxiety attack exploded through her just as things reached the intimate stage.
In the wake of the disaster, she had sworn off dating, at least until what she thought of as the Storm Season had passed.
Tonight was not the time to rethink her decision, she thought. The last thing she wanted to do was wreck the fragile bond she was developing with Cabot.
Kissing him had probably been a mistake.
But it was Cabot who ended things. He eased them both out of the kiss before it could drag them under.
“We should probably stop here,” he said, his voice more than a little rough around the edges.
He was right, although his reasons for calling a halt were probably quite different from her own. “Never sleep with a client” was one of his rules.
“Yes,” she said, going for a bracing tone. “We’re involved in a very serious situation. We don’t want to make things more complicated than they already are.”
He appeared to give that some thought.
“You think going to bed together would complicate the situation?” he asked.
“Well, yes. Don’t you?”
“No.”
She glared at him. “Then why did you stop?”
“Because I could tell you were having second thoughts.”
“I see.” She drew a breath. “That was very… intuitive of you.”
“That’s me, Mr. Intuitive. Mind telling me why you were having those second thoughts?”
She spread her hands. “For all the obvious reasons, starting with we hardly know each other.”
“Seems to me we know a whole lot about each other. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re scared to go to bed with me, aren’t you?”
Now she was getting angry. She made to step around him, heading for her bedroom.
“I’m not afraid,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m a serial dater, remember? But I do learn from experience. And for the past year, all of my experience has been bad. The last time I got to the hot-and-sweaty stage with a man, I had a full-blown panic attack. Poor Brad thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I had to talk him out of calling nine-one-one at the same time I was trying to find my meds in my purse.”
“Virginia, wait —”
She reached the bedroom, moved through the opening and turned to face him. “The word humiliation does not even begin to describe what I experienced that night. It happened months ago and I still can’t get that scene out of my head. So, yes, I’m having second thoughts about trying to have sex with you.”
She closed the door with rather more force than was necessary and stood for a moment, seething.
When she had her emotions back under control, she opened the door again. Cabot was standing right where she had left him.
“I apologize for that incredibly ridiculous display of high drama,” she said.
“No problem.”
“I deal with a lot of dramatic artistic types but I’m not usually into the theatrics myself.”
Cabot propped one shoulder against the wall and folded his arms. “Like I said, not a problem.”
“Yes, it is a problem, but it’s my problem, not yours, so, again, my apologies.”
“No prob —”
“Don’t say it.”
She closed the door again, this time with exquisite control. She crossed to the window and stood looking out at the city lights for a long time.