Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,36

in a situation where nothing was what it seemed. So Felicity had a sixth sense for deceit.

The Sacramento connection was tenuous, but definitely there. A reference her parents had given when opening a bank account in Boston. Their first. No previous bank accounts in the city of Boston or in the state of Massachusetts could be found. Digging, Felicity had seen that there was absolutely no record of them in Boston before 1996, though their birth certificates said they had been born there.

On the first application for a bank account, her father had given a reference in Sacramento, California. It puzzled her because they had no connection with Sacramento, or California. But there it was. Their reference was a Bernard Teller, manager of Happy Trails, a trailer park on the edge of the city.

But what was unusual was that two days after giving that reference, it was deleted and another reference given, a man with a Boston address. The new reference was a man Felicity could find no trace of.

Bless her thorough heart, Felicity had found this in a cache of digitized documents covering the ’90s.

But the link to Sacramento was there and so they were pursuing it.

Hope was reading this for the first time. She sat there for a long moment, her mind completely disengaged. Feeling her heart beat, slow and steady, feeling her breath moving in and out of her lungs, her fingers numb, her brain a blank.

“ — ten minutes.”

She turned her head slowly, as if her neck muscles had suddenly turned to wood. Inch by inch toward the sound, feeling as if something were going to crack.

“Hope?” Luke’s ash brown eyebrows were drawn together. “ — okay?”

She was processing one word out of ten.

Luke raised a big hand and cupped her shoulder. Later, when she was able to think, she’d remember that his touch had been like someone touching a wounded comrade, to see if they were still alive.

His hand shook her shoulder slightly. “Hope?”

Happy Trails. Bernard Teller. Bernie?

Thoughts raced, jumbled in her head. So very frightening because she was used to reasoning through things calmly. The world was knowable if you approached it rationally. Things in her head were always clear, never a jumble.

What was in her head wasn’t reasoning, it wasn’t verbal or mathematical, it was visual. Broken images floating in front of her eyes, disappearing so quickly she barely had a chance to see them. A park, swings, a jungle gym. A swimming pool. The sounds of men’s voices, a friendly rumble in the background. A blonde woman, there and gone immediately.

Her heart gave a painful thump, then another and another, faster, rattling against her rib cage. She brought a hand to her chest, where it hurt. Was she having a heart attack?

“Hope?”

She stared at Luke, wide-eyed. Her chest seized up, her throat closed, her muscles froze. She couldn’t breathe! Trying to pull in a deep breath, but only wheezing painfully.

“Hey.” Luke leaned forward. “Hey.”

His face was close to hers, so close she only saw him, those ice blue eyes looking deeply into hers. So deeply that she wondered whether he understood what was happening to her, since she didn’t.

She tried to breathe but no air would come.

And then Luke put up the arm rest, leaned closer and took her gently in his arms. She froze, uncertain what to do. He simply held her so close she could feel his broad chest moving and hear his strong, calm heartbeat. A minute went by, two. Neither of them spoke.

Then something in her chest unlocked and she drew in a deep gasping shuddering breath. Luke dropped his head to rest his cheek on the top of her head and her arms went around him, as naturally as if she’d been doing it since forever. She leaned against him and time stopped. She didn’t think about the trouble she was in, the mysteries she couldn’t penetrate, the puzzling images in her head, the dangerous men pursuing her, what might await them in Sacramento.

She thought of absolutely nothing at all, she only felt. She felt Luke’s warm, hard, lean muscles, the steady beat of his heart. The hard muscles of his back against her arms. That feeling of utter and complete safety. She was safe because she was in a plane, of course, but she was safe because she was in this man’s arms.

Her breathing slowed, her heartbeat slowed, she no longer had flashes of frightening images that meant nothing to her yet made her heart beat