Bridal Jitters Read Free Page B

pocket. “Call it.”
    “Heads.” He moved toward her.
    She flipped the coin into the air. He caught it before it struck the polished surface of her desk.
    “Heads,” he said without bothering to look at it.
    She wrinkled her nose. “You’re in luck. I’m too tired to argue.”
    At the door of the office, she paused to switch off the lights. He followed her out into the front hall and locked up. Together, they climbed the elaborately carved central staircase to the second floor and went down the corridor to the small suite of rooms she used as an apartment.
    She opened her door, stepped inside, and swung around to face him through the narrow opening. Her green-and-gold eyes were big and deep in the shadows. He could feel the tingle ofawareness in his paranormal senses and knew that he was responding to her on the psychic plane as well as on the physical level. Sensual psi energy shimmered disturbingly in the small space that separated them. Couldn’t she sense it? he wondered. Was she really oblivious to the attraction between them?
    The wariness in her eyes made him uneasy. With each passing day, she appeared to be growing more restless. His fears of being driven crazy by sexual frustration were submerged beneath a new concern: What if she changed her mind? What if she canceled the MC?
    Stay focused
, he told himself.
This will work.
It had to work.
    “Good night,” he said as casually as he could manage. He forced himself to take a step back. What he really wanted to do was pick her up and carry her through the small living room, straight into her bedroom. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
    She hesitated. “Sam?”
    “Yeah?” He realized that he had stopped breathing.
    She sighed. “Never mind. It’s not important. Good night.”
    Very gently, she closed the door in his face.
    He reminded himself to breathe.

Two
    He did not sleep well that night. It was not the noise from the crowds in the street or the whispers of Dead City psi energy that kept him awake. It was the realization that Virginia was getting ready to tell him that she did not want to go through with the marriage. He knew it as surely as he knew that when she called off the engagement, his world was going to become as bleak and gray as the tide of fog that had boiled up out of the river.
    He rolled out of bed at dawn, shaved, showered, and dressed for the meeting with Ewert. He was still mulling over various means of convincing Virginia that the MC was a terrific idea when he went downstairs to collect the morning edition of the
Cadence Star.
He opened the front door and was greeted by a wall of gray mist. The fog was so thick that it had blotted out the early-morning sun, creating an artificial twilight that looked as if it would last all day.
    Perfect Halloween weather.
    He shrugged off the fog. It would not affect today’s job. He and Virginia would be working underground in the catacombs.Down below in the endless miles of glowing green corridors, there was no day or night.
    He saw the small package on the step just as he started to reach for the newspaper. A faint hiss of all-too-familiar psi energy whispered through his para senses in silent warning.
    “Damn.” Hell of a way to start the day.
    He crouched on his heels to get a closer look at the square object wrapped in brown paper. It was addressed to Gage & Burch Consulting. There was no return address. He did not pick it up.
    “Something wrong, Sam?” Virginia called out from halfway down the stairs.
    “An unscheduled delivery.” He did not take his eyes off the package.
    “What is it?”
    “I think you’d better take a look at this. If I’m right, it falls into your area of expertise, not mine.”
    She descended the rest of the stairs quickly and hurried across the wide front hall to the door. She came to a halt beside him and looked at the package.
    She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Uh-oh.”
    “I hate it when you use that professional jargon.” He glanced at her.