Daring Fire: Paranormal Romance (Bad Boys Of The Underworld Book 2) (3 page)

“I don’t want you to be my mistress or anything,” he continued. “I want you to know I have more respect for you than that.”

“Really?” she asked with a disbelieving tone. He must have a very strange definition of respect. “Why me? I’ve worked with you for a year and you’ve hardly said two words to me. What changed?”

“I changed.” Ryan leaned back against the table and crossed his arms over his chest. Her chances went higher and higher the more he let his guard down. “My dad has been telling me to get clean for years, but I never believed life could be better sober. Until I saw you.

“I don’t want you temporarily,” he continued. “When I walked into work yesterday and saw you for the first time with nothing in my system, my entire world crashed around me. We’re meant to be together, don’t you see that?”

He tried to make eye contact with her, but she shifted her gaze to the floor. “You stopped doing drugs and suddenly realized you were in love with me?” she asked.

“No, I stopped doing drugs and could see you clearly for the first time in my life. You are so different than anyone else I’ve ever met.” He stood straight and walked toward her.

With shaking hands, she lowered her glass to the counter, but she never lifted her palm from the laminate surface. The knives were just six inches from her fingers.

Once again, Ryan stood much too close to Gena. “You radiate so much light and brightness. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“I’m going to take care of you. You’ll never have to live anymore in places like this. The best houses, clothes, cars... Anything you want is yours.”

“I want you to leave. How many times do I have to say that?” She wanted to scream at him to get the hell out, but she somehow forced herself to remain calm.

“I want you to marry me,” he said, completely ignoring her request.

Gena couldn’t contain herself anymore. “I don’t want to marry you! I want you out of my life and out of my home!”

Her hand reached behind her and closed on a wooden handle that protruded from the knife block. Without hesitation, she brought the blade in front of her.

Ryan stumbled back a step and held both hands up as though he could somehow appear nonthreatening. “You don’t understand.”

Gena pushed the knife closer to him and he backed up another step. “Oh, no,” she said. “I understand.
You
are not understanding me, so let me make this clear. I don’t care who your family is or how much money you have. I. Don’t. Want. You. Now get out!” She tried to keep her nerves under control, but the knife shook in her hand.

Ryan’s face changed. A cold anger took over his features, and Gena’s hand tightened on the knife. “You are meant for me!” he shouted.

The shout combined with her mounting fear and adrenaline caused her to jump. She adjusted her grip on her weapon to give her a better swing at him if she needed it. “This is your last warning,” she said.

But he didn’t turn tail and run. He moved closer. Gena’s adrenaline kicked in full gear and she struck at him. The moment seemed to play in slow motion. She lifted up her arm while deciding where to strike. She could aim for the neck, but that would most likely kill him. She angled lower toward his chest.

He twisted to the left as the knife came down. The sharp point pierced his jacket, but it didn’t plant in his chest.

She frantically tried to bring the knife up for another swing, but he grabbed her wrist and slammed it into the sharp edge of the counter. The knife clattered to the floor.

The fear she’d been trying to hold back exploded inside her. She screamed in panic and pain. Ryan’s free hand curled into a fist and struck her in the jaw.

Her scream was abruptly cut off and his fist connected with her face a second time. This time her knees gave out and she fell to the floor.

Agony shot through her head and radiated out from her wrist. Her eyes tried to focus as the room spun around her. She saw the knife a foot away, but when her good arm reached for it, a foot connected with her ribs.

Her body instinctively curled up to protect itself. Ryan bent down and picked up the knife. She didn’t want to know what he was capable of doing with that weapon, considering he obviously had no problem using his fists.

She used her good hand to push herself up and tried to run. She didn’t even make it out of the kitchen when she felt an arm snake around her waist and a burning in her side.

She was thrown back to the ground and her head hit hard. For a second, she was dazed and could think of nothing but the throbbing throughout her body. The burning in her side was drowning out everything else, and she lifted a hand to the pain on her left side.

She felt a warm wetness cover her hand. When she managed to open her eyes, she saw her hand was covered in blood. Ryan had stabbed her.

She looked up at the menacing figure that stood above her. He held the bloody knife in one hand as he stared down at her. Anger still clouded his features, and his chest heaved up and down as he tried to catch his breath.

“Look what you did!” he shouted. “I could’ve given you everything!”

The cold realization she was about to die washed over Gena. She’d never get a chance to say good-bye to her parents or finish med school. Who would take care of Lady? How would Joy take it? Would the police ever know who killed her?

Ryan knelt down next to her. “Why didn’t you want me?” he yelled.

“Please don’t,” she whispered. The plea set him off. He raised the knife and brought it down with all of his strength.

Gena’s arms reached up to block the blow and the intense burning filled her right forearm. His hand repeated the stabbing motion. The third blow hit her right side. The fourth hit her left forearm.

She felt the next blow in her stomach, but that was about the time she stopped feeling anything. Her arms laid limply at her side as the puddle of blood that surrounded her got bigger and bigger. Her eyes started to lose focus and her head lolled to one side. Right as her world started to turn black, she saw the brightest light she’d ever seen.

A few things struck Gena as she gained consciousness. The first was that she’d just had the most horrible nightmare of her life. The second was how odd it was that she remembered her nightmare. Usually her dreams were forgotten the moment she realized she was awake.

Well, whatever caused this strange, violent nightmare, it sucked. Gena tried to get off the bed and pushed herself up. Instead of meeting the resistance of her soft mattress, her hand hit the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor.

Her eyes shot open. Cold, dead blue eyes stared back at her. A gut-wrenching scream escaped her as she shot away from the dead woman.

Dead. Woman.
There was a dead woman in her kitchen. Not just any woman either. Whoever this person was, she looked exactly like Gena. She even wore the same jeans and shirt Gena had walked Lady in earlier.

She pushed herself away from the body and the massive amounts of blood that surrounded it. She looked down at herself and saw where the dead woman had gotten her clothes. Gena wasn’t wearing any.

Before that fully registered in her mind, she noticed all of the red that covered the room. Judging by the large gashes in the dead woman’s arms and smears on her stomach, the red liquid was her blood.

And that’s when the smell hit her. The overwhelming copper she was all too familiar with from working at the hospital. Gena’s throat constricted in disgust. She lifted her hand to her mouth and saw it had gotten smeared in blood while she pushed away from the dead woman.

She couldn’t stay in the room any longer. She stood and ran to the bathroom. She turned on the faucet and wiped her hands with soap frantically to get every last trace of the blood off her.

Thoughts rushed through her mind at a lightning-fast pace.
Who was that woman in the kitchen? How did she get Gena’s clothes? Why did she have memories of Ryan attacking her, only to wake up next to a dead woman with the same wounds Gena remembered receiving?

As Gena reached for a towel to dry her now clean hands, she became entranced by her right palm.

The skin was smooth and clear with no marks on the skin, but that wasn’t right. As a child, she’d played in the woods near her home whenever the weather would allow. During one excursion, her foot had caught on a root and in the process of tumbling to the ground, she’d thrust her hands out to catch her fall.

A rusty nail that stuck up from a piece of wood strewn about the forest floor pierced her hand. Her parents had constantly warned her against playing in the woods alone, and she was afraid to tell them about the injury. She’d kept the wound hidden for three days before the infection was too severe to hide anymore.

Her furious father had rushed her to the hospital to treat her fever and inflamed hand. The infection and fever had been chased away by the antibiotics, but she’d been left with a scar to remind her of her own foolishness.

Now her hand bore no scar to remind her of the fall. The chill of the house crept into her.
What was going on?

She grabbed her bathrobe off the rack on the bathroom door and she wrapped the terrycloth around her. Immediately, she felt a bit more normal, just being covered up.

She looked down at her now smooth palm once more when a strange thought struck her. The woman in the kitchen looked exactly like Gena and wore the same clothes Gena had worn earlier in the evening. Did she have a scar on the bottom corner of her right palm? It was impossible.

Gena cautiously approached the kitchen she’d previously run from. As the body got closer and closer, Gena realized the house was saturated with the scent of death. It caused her stomach to clench and she brought her hand up to cover her nose.

Every surface in the kitchen had some form of blood splatter on it. Ryan must have hit some powerful arteries in his haste, the nurse inside of her thought.

Gena carefully stepped into the room, trying to avoid any of the red liquid on the linoleum tile. She stopped at the edge of the puddle of blood that surrounded the woman. Her palm faced down, and Gena couldn’t see any scar from the angle she was at.

She tiptoed around the blood to her cabinets and grabbed a serving spoon from the top drawer. She bent next to the body and used the spoon to lift up the lifeless arm. It was heavier than she expected, but after adding extra force, the arm moved so Gena could see the palm.

Gena’s breath left her body. Staring back at her was the exact scar that was supposed to grace her hand.

She made herself look into the cold face of the woman. It was the same face she’d looked at in the mirror for the past twenty-seven years. When she bent closer, she even saw the healing remnants of a pimple that had shown up a week ago.

“This can’t be happening,” she said to herself.

Once again, Gena was up and running to the bathroom. This time she stared in the mirror intently, looking for anything different.

The same light blue eyes stared back at her. She took a fistful of hair and held it to the light. The color seemed the same as she remembered, but the length was different.

About a month ago, she’d gotten more layers added to her shoulder-length hair. Now it was all an even cut that hung a couple of inches below the shoulder.

Gena stared in amazement at the changed locks. Another realization struck her. Her skin tone had changed as well. Because of the frequent long walks she took with Lady, she got a lot of sun and tended to have a darker tan in the summer and a light tan in the winter.

Now her skin was paler than she’d ever seen it. “Shit,” she muttered. She looked out the bathroom door to the dead body. Her dead body.

If that was her body, then what was she walking around in? This couldn’t be natural. This was something other. This was something supernatural.

People don’t die and wake up with a brand new body. But why would this be happening to her? Nothing even remotely strange had ever happened to her.

The swirling questions in her head were too much to take. She had to deal with the immediate problems. The most immediate of those problems being that her dead body was lying in the middle of the floor and half of her house was covered in blood.

She was a law-abiding citizen, so she wanted to call the police and have them take care of everything. They would take the body away, recommend a cleaning service that deals with these situations and then arrest Ryan for murder. After that, she’d probably stay with her parents until she found a good place to live.

At this point, she’d kill for a hug from her mother. But none of that could happen. She couldn’t explain any of this to the police.

She was in so over her head. She grew up with a mother in pharmaceutical sales and a dad who worked as an engineer for a car company. What did she know about coming back from the dead or spells?

Spells! Joy’s sister’s job was making love spells. If anyone could help her with this mess, it was her. It was a half-day drive from her house to Hope’s shop in New York City. If she drove all night, she could make it by mid-day tomorrow.

Gena went to the bedroom to pack a small bag of necessities. Poor Lady was frantic when Gena opened the door. Gena knelt down and hugged the poor thing. She had no idea how much the dog comprehended about what happened.

Lady had surely heard Gena’s screams, and if Gena could smell the blood, she was sure Lady could as well. Gena stroked Lady’s soft brown coat until she calmed down and the trembling stopped.

Gena tucked Lady’s big head under her chin and held her tighter. The dog wiggled out of her grasp and gave Gena a couple of delicate licks on the face. For once, she didn’t push the dog away. It just felt damn good to take a moment and breathe.

But it couldn’t last. She had work to do.

Gena moved her head away from the attention, but one corner of her mouth curved up. Even if she did have a new body, it was comforting that Lady knew she was still Gena. “We have to pack,” said Gena to the dog. “We’re going on a road trip.”

The dog’s ears perked up at Gena’s voice, but Gena knew the animal did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. Hell, at this point Gena didn’t think she understood the gravity of the situation.

Hope would help her. Gena was sure of it. If Hope didn’t have a clue, at least she had connections she could use to investigate what had happened.

Gena quickly dressed. Her favorite jeans and newish tennis shoes were now ruined, so she was left with ratty old pants and tennis shoes with splotches of paint the same color as her bedroom.

It was going to be a long car ride with no sleep, so she had to make herself as comfortable as possible.

After dressing, she grabbed a backpack left over from nursing school and packed it with the essentials. She threw in a few necessary hygiene products, another set of clothes and extra undergarments.

Not exactly how she’d like to pack for her first trip to New York, but it would have to do. When she had everything she thought she might need for a few days, she took Lady’s leash and led her out the back door. She tried to avoid Lady seeing the kitchen. Gena didn’t even want to look at that horrendous scene; she wouldn’t submit Lady to that.

As she put Lady in the car and opened the driver’s side for herself, it occurred to her that the only person who might have seen what happened was Ryan. If that was the case, Gena might never know the truth, because she hoped to God she never saw Ryan Stone again.

~~~~~

Ryan watched with disbelieving eyes as Gena got into her car. Was it Gena? He had no idea what this thing was.

One minute, he stared at Gena as the puddle of red got larger and larger and her white glow got dimmer. The next, there was a flash of light so bright it blinded him. When he could focus again, this abomination was there.

She looked like Gena, but he knew better. This thing was an imposter. Not even human.

Ryan refused to let this aberration get away from him, but he had a plan. He’d known she was fleeing when she loaded a bag into her trunk. After she turned to go back in the house, he made his move.

It was pathetically easy. The imposter left the doors unlocked. All he had to do was toss his cell phone under the passenger seat and hightail it out of the driveway before she came back.

The battery on the phone would last about thirty-six hours, so for the next day and a half, all he had to do to find her location was pull out his laptop and find somewhere with wireless Internet.

He thought Gena and he were meant to be together.

He’d been wrong. When he’d seen Gena glowing so beautifully, he’d assumed she was an angel. He forgot that the most attractive things were the most dangerous.

He thought she was meant for him, but he now saw the truth. He was put on this Earth to kill Gena Dodd. The next time, he’d make sure she stayed dead.