Haunting Rachel (10 page)

“Rachel?”

Adam Delafield.

“Hello. What are you doing here?” After the first moment of surprise, her heart rate had returned to normal. Or almost.

“I was going to ask you the same thing.” He came in and crossed the space between them. “I was in a store across the street, and thought I saw you come in here.”

“I’m … thinking of starting a business. Fashions designed by me.”

“So you’re not going back to New York?”

Rachel realized it was a question she was going to hear a lot. “No. I don’t think so. I belong in Richmond.”

“Ghosts and all?”

Whether it was the cryptic note in his voice or simply the reminder, Rachel found the question a difficult one to answer casually, and confiding in this virtual stranger was impossible. So she tried to keep it light. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course not.”

“You thought I was Thomas Sheridan.” There was something almost insolent in his voice.

“Yes, I did,” she admitted. “Thomas—alive and well. Not his spirit haunting me. I never believed that.”

Not for a moment. Right.

“In any case,” she added, making her tone brisk, “it’s a bright, sunny spring day, and there are certainly no ghosts
lurking here.” She turned away from him and gestured to the space around them. “What do you think? A classy store selling unique designs? The label of Rachel Grant, a Richmond exclusive.”

“I think you’ll be a hit. A major hit.”

She looked at him, relieved that his voice was casual again but bothered by the intent way he looked at her. It made her feel self-conscious. No, more than that. It made her feel that no one else had ever really looked at her before. And that was disconcerting.

It was also a little scary.

She made a production of putting her notebook away in her shoulder bag. “Well, we’ll see. Who knows? Maybe I inherited a little of Dad’s business savvy.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it a bit.” He followed her from the store and stood just behind her as she locked up.

“I have two other places to check out,” she said as she turned to face him, “so—”

“Why don’t you let me buy you lunch? It’s after noon, and there’s a really good restaurant just down the block. Do you like Italian?”

“Yes, but—I really should take a look at the other stores.”

“You can do that just as well after lunch. And you have to eat.”

When Rachel hesitated just a moment too long, Adam nodded slightly and a wry expression crossed his face.

“Would it help if I promise not to ask any more dumb questions about ghosts?”

“Not dumb. Just …”

“Just not welcome. Especially from somebody who looks like me.” He smiled, but that intensity she had sensed earlier was still in him, lurking just below the surface. “I understand. Have lunch with me, Rachel, please.
I’d like to talk about a man I admired very much—to his daughter.”

That was an appeal Rachel could hardly refuse, especially since she wanted to hear more about her father’s relationship with this man. And he had a point. She had to eat.

“In that case, thanks. I’d love to have lunch with you.” “The restaurant is close enough to walk to. If you feel like it.”

“Sounds great.”

Adam offered his arm, and Rachel surprised herself by taking it. She was immediately aware of strength and leashed power, of hard muscles beneath her fingers, and other senses whispered to her of force and will. And darkness.
He isn’t what he wants me to believe he is. Who he wants me to believe he is.
That knowledge was so strong that Rachel almost pulled her hand away from him. But along with wariness and uneasiness was curiosity.

Who was he, really? And what did he want from her?

Despite Graham’s warning, Rachel didn’t believe it was her money Adam was after. She had never thought much about intuition, but hers was alive in her now, and it insisted there was much more to this—to him—than simple greed. She was sure of it.

And he looks like Thomas. That has to mean something.

Doesn’t it?

Nicholas Ross sat in his long black car and gazed down the block, watching Rachel and Adam stroll along the sidewalk toward him. As far as he could tell, they were pleased to be in each other’s company.

Then Rachel looked up at her companion and smiled that slow smile of hers, transforming her face into something
radiant. Even at this distance, Nicholas could see Adam’s reaction, see his free hand reach to cover the one resting in the crook of his arm in a gesture any other man would recognize as possessive.

“Slow down,” Nicholas murmured. But nobody heard him, of course. And even if the right person had, Nicholas doubted his warning would make much of a difference.

He understood obsession.

He watched the couple until they disappeared into an Italian restaurant, the door of which was barely twenty feet from the hood of his car. Rachel hadn’t appeared to notice the car, and behind the tinted windows Nicholas knew he was virtually invisible.

Adam hadn’t so much as glanced this way.

Once they’d vanished into the restaurant, Nicholas started his car and pulled away from the curb. He reached for his mobile phone and punched in a number. The phone rang a long time before anybody answered.

“Yeah.”

“Simon, it’s Nick. I have a job for you.”

In her bed that night, Rachel thought about the interlude with Adam, but she still wasn’t sure what she felt about it. Adam was a charming man, no doubt about that, and all her instincts told her he had sincerely liked and respected her father. Though they hadn’t talked much about Duncan Grant, now that Rachel thought about it.

They had, she realized, talked mostly about themselves.

Or had she done most of the talking, with Adam asking questions and offering little except agreement now and then?

He was not an easy man to read. There was that intensity
she sensed lurking in him, a kind of force that was very much belied by his casual, almost lazy exterior. He struck her as the kind of man who would make a very good friend and a very bad enemy, and she thought he could—and would—be ruthless if the stakes were high enough.

But what were the stakes now?

He had said no more than that he had been “down on his luck” when Duncan Grant had made him the loan. No one else had believed in the design he had invented. So Rachel had no way of knowing what his life had been like then. But if he had built up a prosperous engineering and design company in less than five years, he had clearly worked hard and made all the right business decisions.

He had to be tough, that was certain; he was obviously smart.

In the course of the conversation, it had emerged that they had similar taste in books and movies, shared a love of horses and cats, preferred baseball to football, were staunch independents, loved to look at the ocean, and were vehemently opposed to AstroTurf and the designated hitter. Both liked to sleep with the windows open unless it was too hot—it was never too cold—enjoyed putting together jigsaw puzzles, and loved the sound of wind chimes.

He seemed to smile more quickly than frown, and his voice could be serious one moment and filled with amusement the next, but his blue eyes gave nothing away, and had once or twice even appeared to be shuttered, deliberately veiled with secretiveness.

Rachel couldn’t deny to herself that she was attracted, but she was wary. Very wary. Because he looked so like Thomas. And because she didn’t trust her own feelings— about him or anything else just then.

A week ago she had been in limbo, feeling little, refusing
even to grieve for her parents. But now, suddenly, she was feeling too much. What little Adam had said about Duncan Grant during lunch had pulled the tears so close to the surface that she’d had difficulty holding them back. Twice during the remainder of the day she had found herself crying unexpectedly, once because she’d found one of her mother’s old handkerchiefs in a drawer and once because she could have sworn she had caught the scent of the cologne Thomas had always worn, the kind she had bought him for his birthday when she was fifteen and that had become his signature scent.

But the scent was only another ghostly reminder of fact.

Dead. Thomas was dead. Her parents were dead.
Ghosts and all?

She had lived a long time with ghosts. One in particular. And as simple as it was to tell herself that Thomas was long dead, her heart had never been able to believe that. He had lingered in Richmond for her, his memory filling all the corners. And because she had run away rather than face those corners, his memory was still vivid.

How could she be sure that it wasn’t his memory coloring her feelings for Adam? Could she trust her own mind and heart not to latch on to him eagerly because he was the nearest thing to Thomas she had found?

That was a creepy thought.

Rachel turned over in bed and told herself to stop thinking. She told herself that several times.

By the time it finally worked and she fell asleep, it was past the witching hour, and she dreamed vivid dreams in which a man wearing a mask of Thomas’s face was Adam, and when he removed the mask of Adam there was another mask underneath that was Thomas again.
“I tried to reach you,”
he said urgently.
“I tried over and over. But
you shut me out for so long, for so many years. Don’t shut me out now, Rachel, please, it’s so important. Listen. You must listen to me….”

And then somebody was laughing, and someone else was calling her name with Thomas’s voice, and in the distance she could hear something else, a rustling sound that made her skin crawl.

Then she smelled something like rotten eggs, and the voice that sounded like Thomas whispered,
“Run, Rachel. Get out. Hurry. Don’t trust—”

She sat straight up in bed as the alarm buzzed insistently on her nightstand, and stared around the room with wide eyes.

Morning sunlight slanted in, brightening the room. A slight breeze lazily moved the curtains. The alarm clock buzzed.

She was awake.

Rachel turned off the alarm and got up, trying to shake off the dream. She didn’t believe in signs and portents, and certainly not in the clairvoyance of dreams. What she did believe was that her uncertainty about her feelings for Adam, her confusion about two men who looked so much alike, had followed her into sleep.

That was all.

She showered and dressed, and her morning routine soon pushed the dream into the back of her mind. Breakfast, with Uncle Cam and Fiona sniping at each other. The arrival of Darby and her guys, all briskly determined to get as much accomplished as possible on this Friday.

Rachel left them to it. Though she wasn’t quite sure how it had happened, she had somehow, during yesterday’s lunch, invited Adam to meet her at the real estate office that morning, where more keys awaited her. There
were two more stores she wanted to check out, and he was going to keep her company while she did.

Or something like that.

She didn’t even bother to chide herself, especially once she reached the real estate office and saw Adam waiting for her.

He isn’t Thomas. That isn’t why.

“So where are we going today?” he asked when she emerged from the office with keys.

“Two more stores. One on Evans, and the other on Claiborne. Unless you know the city better than I think you do, I’ll drive.”

“Fine by me,” he said agreeably.

They left his rental car parked there, where it would remain until they returned the keys later, and were quickly on their way to the first of the two addresses. As the day before, Adam was a pleasant companion, casual and humorous, keeping her mind occupied with unimportant things. He told her a funny story about the room service waiter he’d had the night before, and another about a hotel message system that had suddenly gone nuts and notified him every ten minutes for more than an hour that he had a call from someone in Cairo.

“I gather you don’t know anybody in Cairo?”

“Not the one in Egypt, no. The hotel finally pulled the plug on their system and sent me champagne as an apology. I decided to save it for later. In case I want to celebrate something.”

Rachel let that pass. “Good idea. Let’s see … I think the first address is just ahead….”

It was, and they didn’t have to get out of the car. The store was obviously tiny, and the seedy pawnshop next door argued against the sort of upscale image Rachel had in mind.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“No, I’d agree. Onward.”

More casual conversation occupied them for another five minutes, until they reached the second address.

“Possible.” Rachel stood beside the car and studied the storefront. It was just about the right size, and the neighborhood was a good one. The only drawback she could see was that the store, with parking on one side and a narrow street on the other, seemed isolated.

“Which could be a good thing,” Adam suggested when she brought that up. “Make you look even more exclusive.”

“Umm. Let’s take a look inside.”

The key stuck a bit, but finally turned with a faint click, and they went into the store. It was a very plain space, virtually unfinished, with concrete floors and white block walls, and their footsteps echoed hollowly. An interior wall held a single door, which presumably led to either office or storage space in the back.

“Not much personality,” Adam noted.

“No, but that could be—” Rachel caught a faint whiff of an odor like rotten eggs, and a chill chased up and down her spine. It was what she had smelled in her dream. “Do you smell something?”

Even before he spoke, Adam was grabbing her hand. “Gas. Let’s get out of here.
Move,
Rachel.”

He hadn’t shouted, and didn’t seem to move hastily, yet Adam had her outside the store in seconds.

Seconds later, the whole world seemed to blow up.

he storage room was bigger than it looked, and it was full of gas.” Adam’s voice was level. “That’s why the explosion was so big even though we barely smelled the stuff.” Rachel winced as the paramedic stuck a small Band-Aid on the cut on her cheek. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t quite keep her voice as steady as his. “Will there be enough of the building left for them to figure out what caused the spark?”