each other was laughable in the extreme. The two of them were too great together, in every way that mattered, for them to be apart. Weird how it had taken her so long to realize that.
Out of habit, she peered through the peephole before opening the door, and saw Turner standing on the other side. Evidently he was too impatient to wait for her to come back to his place, impetuous boy that he was. Though the fish-eye lens distorted his appearance, she could make out his attire of blue jeans, hooded black sweatshirt and the disreputable-looking denim jacket he often wore. Clearly, he was planning for an evening in. Which, of course, was fine with Becca. She didn’t have any big desire to go out anywhere. And not just because of the weather, either, she realized with a smile. Staying in on a snowy night with Turner sounded like quite a delectable way to pass the time. Maybe they’d get lucky and the power would go out, and they’d have to stay very, very close in order to keep warm.
As if they needed a power outage to do that.
She slung her towel over her shoulder with one hand as she opened the door with the other. She was smiling, leaning forward to give him a kiss hello, but the expression on his face stopped her before she even got started. He looked like a man who’d just lost his best friend.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, her smile falling.
“We need to talk,” he said without preamble. Or without greeting, for that matter.
She stepped to the side in a silent invitation for him to enter, but he didn’t move an inch from where he stood. He only continued to stand with his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his jeans, scowling. Unbidden, an eerie chill seeped into Becca’s belly.
“Aren’t you going to come in?” she asked.
For a moment, he continued to just stand there, gazing at her in a way that only compounded the chilliness inside her. Finally, though, he shook his head. “I can’t stay,” he replied quietly.
“Why not?” she demanded. Not that they’d made any firm plans for the evening, but it was pretty much a given that they’d spend the weekend together. And if he couldn’t stay, then why had he come in the first place? Especially in weather like this? If he needed to tell her something, he could have picked up the phone and called her.
Instead of answering her question, Turner asked one of his own. “Remember when we went to see the hypnotherapist? Dorcas Upton?”
Becca nodded. “Sure. It was only a few weeks ago.”
“Well, I ran into her today downtown,” he stated.
“So that’s where you ran off to,” Becca said. “Why did you need to go downtown?”
Instead of answering that question, either, Turner continued. “Dorcas asked me something really weird, and I couldn’t figure out why, and then one thing led to another, and—” He halted abruptly, his gaze glancing off of Becca’s face now to focus on something over her left shoulder. “And she told me something that you need to know about, too.”
Becca frowned in confusion, wondering what Dorcas Upton had to do with anything. “Turner, what are you talking about?” she asked.
He inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly, still looking over her shoulder instead of at her face. “Becca, when she put us under, she thought we were other people.”
“Other people?” she echoed. “But why?”
“Because we were so early for our appointment,” he told her. “She thought we were late for an earlier appointment, one she had with a married couple who never showed up. So when she hypnotized us and gave us a posthypnotic suggestion, it wasn’t to quit smoking, the way we wanted, it was to help this other couple—this married couple—she thought we were instead.”
“But that’s great,” Becca said. “That explains why we’re still smoking. We can go back and try again.” And then the rest of Turner’s admission hit her. “Wait a minute, though. If she didn’t hypnotize us to quit smoking, then what did she hypnotize us for?”
Turner’s gaze darted back to Becca’s again, long enough for two bright spots of color to blossom on his cheeks, then flickered away again. “Like I said, she thought we were a married couple,” he said, though what difference that should make, she couldn’t imagine. “A newly married couple who were having trouble, um, consummating their marriage.”
Becca narrowed her eyes at him. “Meaning?”
He sighed heavily again, and what