Manhunt. Carla Cassidy
lips as his mouth took possession of her own.
His hands were everywhere, stroking across her breasts, moving down her ribs, sliding across her hips and creating fiery flames wherever he touched. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before…heights of splendor she’d never climbed. As quickly as a blink of an eye, the scene in her head changed.
She and Nick were no longer in between the pale blue sheets, but rather someplace outside. She recognized nothing about the area, saw a misshapen tree in the distance and smelled the odor of an approaching storm.
In this scene, she and Nick weren’t making love, although she straddled him like a lover. Gripped in her hand was the longest, sharpest knife she’d ever seen and she plunged it over and over again into Nick’s chest.
Blood splattered as she hit him again and again with a strength she didn’t know she possessed. Each time the knife disappeared into his chest a surge of power filled her…a frightening, overwhelming and seductive power.
“Are you all right?”
The deep, male voice pierced through the vision of blood and death and she jumped and whirled around to see Nick standing in the doorway.
It took a moment for her to separate vision from reality. There was a time when her visions left her feeling oddly refreshed and invigorated, but lately they left her drained and half-dizzy, as if she remained in a sort of limbo between the surreal world and the real one.
She knew he had spoken to her, could tell by the look on his face that he awaited a reply. But she couldn’t remember what he’d asked her.
She stepped away from his bed, her knees threatening to buckle beneath her. “Excuse me?”
Those eyes of his, those intelligent, intense blue eyes held her gaze for what seemed like an eternity. I asked if you were all right.”
He stepped into the room, closer to her, close enough that she could smell the scent of his cologne. It was a familiar scent. She’d smelled it only moments before when she’d had the vision of the two of them in bed.
“Of course…I was just doing your turndown service.”
He eyed her skeptically. “I stood in the doorway and watched you for almost five minutes. You were frozen like a statue. Are you an epileptic? Do you suffer from seizures?”
Her initial instinct was to tell the truth and say no. But then she realized that might be a perfectly good explanation for the visions she knew would be increasing because of his nearness.
“Yes…I suffer from petit mal seizures,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t be punished for the tiny white lie.
“Are you okay now? Do you need me to get you anything?”
“No, I’m fine.” What she needed more than anything was to escape this room and his presence.
She still felt the impending doom that the vision had left behind. She feared that Nick Mead’s arrival to the town of Cherokee Corners had put into motion events that would forever change her life.
Chapter 3
It was still dark outside when Alyssa pulled herself out of bed the next morning, still dark when she finished showering and got dressed.
Exhaustion weighed her down as she left her small, private quarters and entered the large kitchen. Now she would begin the process of baking muffins and biscuits, browning sausage and frying bacon and all the other tasks that would result in a breakfast to remember at the Redbud Bed-and-Breakfast.
There had been a time when she’d done these chores with joy, but lately the daily grind was beginning to take its toll on her. She was tired, tired all the time, but this morning the weariness weighed heavier than usual.
Of course, it didn’t help that she got very little sleep the night before, she thought as she rolled out the dough for biscuits. Knowing Nick Mead was beneath her roof had kept sleep at bay.
As she worked, she thought about the handsome FBI agent. Just because she’d had horrible visions about him didn’t mean they would come true. She’d long ago learned not to take what she saw in them at face value.
Sometimes they were just what they were, but other times they were filled with symbolism and meaning she only understood after the events in the vision had come to pass.
But, no matter how she twisted and turned the images her latest vision contained, they still frightened her, especially now that the man in her vision was here in town.
She tried to shove thoughts of Nick and her visions out of her head as she worked. She needed to concentrate on what she was doing in order to make the kind of meal guests had come to expect from her.
Dawn was breaking in the east, a sliver of light peeking over the last of the night clouds when she sat at the island with a cup of coffee.
It was almost six and even though breakfast officially started being served then, guests were rarely up that early. It was usually seven before anyone appeared in the dining room.
This was Alyssa’s favorite time of day, when all the preparations for breakfast were finished and she had these few precious moments to sit and reflect.
It was at this time of the morning when whisper-thin memories of her mother visited her. There were few memories, as Alyssa had lost her mother when she’d been four. But she still remembered a familiar scent, a sweet voice and loving hands roughened from basket weaving.
Her grandmother had been a basket weaver, as well. Alyssa had lived with her maternal grandmother until she was eleven, then her grandmother had passed away and Alyssa had been taken into the James family and raised with Savannah, Breanna and Clay by the loving, exuberant Rita Birdsong James and her husband, Thomas.
“Good morning.”
She gasped and tensed at the familiar deep voice. She turned on her stool to see Nick standing hesitantly in the kitchen doorway.
If she’d thought he looked handsome the night before, today he practically made her breathless. Clad in a lightweight, light gray suit, he looked coolly professional. “Something smells wonderful,” he said.
“If you’ll take a seat in the dining room, I’ll be glad to bring you some breakfast,” she replied.
“Actually, a cup of coffee will do me just fine for the moment.” Without waiting for an invitation, he walked over to the coffeemaker, poured himself a cup of coffee, then carried it over and sat on the stool next to hers at the kitchen island.
He was close enough to her that she could smell the scent of a subtle expensive cologne, see the long, individual lashes that framed those startling blue eyes of his.
Before his bottom was firmly planted on the stool, she jumped up from hers, not wanting to be near him. “Would you care for a muffin or something to eat with your coffee?”
There was a small part of her that resented that he was an early riser, that his presence had cut short the time she always allowed herself to just sit and relax.
There was a small part of her that resented that instead of sitting in the dining room like other guests, he’d invited himself into the kitchen area and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“No, thanks. I’m not much of a morning eater,” he replied, looking as comfortable as if he’d spent the last five years’ worth of mornings sitting in her kitchen.
“If you aren’t a breakfast eater, then you probably would have been better off getting a room at the motel out by the highway. It would have been cheaper.” She sounded like a disgruntled crab even to her own ears.
“Yeah, but they don’t offer turndown service.” His eyes twinkled, and there was a tone to his voice as if he was trying to flirt with her.
She turned her back and stirred a pot of gravy warming on the stove. Drat the man anyway. The last thing she wanted was him flirting with her.