To the Edge (3 page)

Forcing herself to hum to the CD, she made concentrated work of soaping her body. It was like a test. If she could make herself stand there for a full five minutes, Norman Bates's previously unknown spawn would get tired of waiting, sheath his butcher knife, and leave her jugular be.

Snorting at the ridiculous turn of her thoughts, she rinsed and twisted off the faucets.

The plush white towel was warm from the heated rack. She wrapped it around her body and fastened it with a tuck between her breasts. Snagging another towel, she worked it over her hair, not yet used to the color change she'd let Victor talk her into last week.

"You need a new look, darling," her beautician—or, as Rachael fondly referred to him, her half man/half hairdresser—had announced with a pouting scowl when she'd gone in for her monthly trim. "I'm thinking auburn and sassy and regal. What do you say? Tell me you're game."

She'd been a brunette long enough. "Why not?" She'd grinned at Victor's spiky gilded do and challenging smile. "Go for it."

She'd been due for a change. And once her producer, Diane Kleinmeyer, had gotten past her shock—Diane did not like even the smallest corner of her world rocked—she'd been good with it, too.

"Makes you look more mature," Diane had decided. "It'll lend credibility with our older viewers."

"I wasn't aware that my credibility was an issue."

"Oh, it's not, Jillie," Diane scurried to mollify her. When she saw Jillian grin, she relaxed. "You know it's not. But a power boost can't hurt, right?"

"Riiight," she'd said with a bewildered shake of her head, and wondered, as she often did, at the workings of Diane's mind. That Diane was brilliant was without question. That she was also often certifiable—especially right before air-time and during ratings month—was also a given.

As the steam slowly dissipated from the bathroom mirror, Jillian shoved her fingers through her damp hair, moving her hips in time to the beat of the music.

With a critical eye she studied her face. She was looking at thirty-one next fall. Like Rachael said, she wasn't exactly Methuselah, but tonight every year showed. She hadn't been getting enough sleep lately. Shelly had chewed on her about it again before the newscast when she'd done her makeup. Smudges of fatigue shaded the area just below her eyes. She touched a fingertip to that soft, bruised skin as she reached for her eye cream—and froze.

A shadow of movement drifted in ghostly slow motion behind her cloudy reflection.

She whirled around, a scream of terror trapped in her throat, and prayed it had been her imagination.

Nothing.

She let out a fractured sigh.

It
was
nothing.

Then he moved into the light.

Oh God.

And she prayed he'd make it mercifully quick.

The eyes that met hers were so arctic cold and penetratingly blue, they stopped her heartbeat.

Dead.

The word blasted through her mind like a bullet. So did images of a blood-splattered Bates Motel—only it was
her
body slashed and hacked like a gutted doll, her blood flowing down the bathtub drain instead of Janet Leigh's.

Time stopped as she held his chillingly calm gaze. She saw no mercy in his eyes. Only cold-blooded intent. Dispassionate purpose.

The aching pressure in her chest expanded, threatened
to
burst as the horrifying truth rose like bile.

They will find me dead in the morning.

3

"Breathe."

The stern command registered through a fog of terror.

"Breathe," he repeated, a gruff demand this time, "before you pass out."

Jillian breathed. Sucked in air on a rush, let it out on a gasp.

"Again," he said in a voice as hard as his eyes.

Her options were as limited as cognizant thought. She did what he said. Drew several ragged breaths. And finally found her voice.

"How... how did you get in here?"

The fact that she was capable of speech amazed her. The utter banality of her question and the weakness in her knees didn't when he merely leveled those unsettling ice blue eyes on her face, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned a broad shoulder against the door frame.

She sagged back against the counter so she wouldn't drop like a stone, then groped for and gripped the marble edge with the hand that wasn't latched in a death grip on her towel.

Details, erratic and disjointed, registered in stabbing little jabs of surreal clarity. He was dressed in black. As black as his scowl, as unyielding as the power in his leanly muscled frame. A long, thick scar ran the length of a heavily veined forearm. A large, lethal gun was holstered in black leather beneath his left armpit. The rock-hard bulge of his bicep pressed against it. She wondered if the gun felt cold against the heat of his skin. If he would feel remorse when he killed her.

Out of place amid such terrifying images was her awareness of the tropical, floral fragrance of her shampoo. It mingled with the scent of her fear, the feel of cool damp tile beneath her feet. Hard marble pressed against her hip. The piston-fire beat of her heart—in her throat, in her ears—was out of sync and out of time with the sultry strains of Nogueira's guitar.

Mixed somewhere in the midst of it all was the realization that she wasn't dead. Yet. Despite her knee-jerk prayer for a swift and sudden death, she didn't want to die. She wanted very much to stay alive ... and she was going to have to pull herself together if she was going to stay that way.

Her mind raced in pathetic and frantic circles, around and around the possibility of getting to her gun. That wasn't going to happen. It was in her bedside table. His was a hand span away.

The drawer handle prodded her hip. Her gun may be in the other room—but there were weapons in the drawer at her back. Hair spray. A metal nail file. A pair of cuticle scissors.

"Watch the hand," he said with a notch of his chin when she attempted to ease the drawer open. "Get it up here where I can see it."

Jillian did as he ordered, all the while searching for some way to gain an advantage—any advantage—and get herself out of this alive. If only she'd listened to Rachael. If only she'd let her father hire that damn bodyguard.

"What do you want?" she managed in a voice so thick with tension she hardly recognized it as her own.

"Let's back up to question number one. Getting in here was child's play. Slipping past your security guard was the first hurdle. Nice kid. Too trusting. Someone needs to have a chat with him."

His voice was as hard-edged as his mouth, completely at odds with the conversational cadence of his words. It was also as uncompromising as the muscle stretched across the breadth of a chest covered by a snug black T-shirt and the strap of a leather shoulder holster that looked as natural on him as a tie on a power broker.

"As to the security system—" His voice snapped her gaze back to his face with a start. "It's a joke, fair game for any amateur with a good set of tools and a sensitive touch."

"I'll file a complaint in the morning." Which implied that she had to be
alive
in the morning.
Plant the seed. Watch it grow.

Oh God. She would
not
get hysterical "And your security code?" He shook his head, snapping her out of her little side trip to panic. "Shame on you... and happy birthday—late, Ms. eleven twenty-four nineteen-seventy-four."

He knew her birth date? Terror melded with bafflement and a latent but burgeoning anger.

"What do you want?" she repeated. The steadiness of her voice surprised her. The fact that his mouth didn't yield the slightest fraction of an inch didn't.

"What do I want?" He pushed out a bored grunt. "Right now, to be just about anywhere but here."

Confusion was now running a close second to fear. She narrowed her eyes—then sucked in a breath as he shifted his weight to one leg.

The result of his minuscule movement was a ripple effect on his hard, honed body. It also drove home a very salient point. She kept in shape and knew some basic self-defense moves, but she was no match for him physically.

He stood almost a head taller than her five-six frame— and every inch appeared conditioned to kill or maim. His upper body was fluid muscle. His hips were lean; his legs were long. In the unlikely event she managed to get past him somehow, he could outrun her without working up a sweat. And yet he hadn't actually made a single threatening move towards her.

Even in her waffling state of terror, it didn't compute. She'd be dead by now if that was what he wanted. Unless that was his plan. To terrify her first. Play with her like a cat swatting a mouse.

I wish you were dead, Jillian. What do you wish for?

She looked up again, and into his face. The razor's edge of fear had dulled marginally, enough, at least, to allow her to look—really look—at him without shock masking her vision.

She'd never seen him before. Of that, she was certain. She'd have remembered that face; it was the face of a fallen angel. The dark, thick stubble of a five o'clock shadow covered carved angles and sculpted lines. The set of his jaw was unyielding. Dark brown brows were tautly drawn over the intelligent blue eyes that regarded her with distant but studied disdain. Hair the same color as his eyebrows curled softly at his nape, sable soft, shiny as silk—an incongruous anomaly in this otherwise stone-cold machine standing before her.

That such stark male beauty could disguise the soul of a killer made the thought seem even more unholy—and less and less likely—as time ticked by. He merely watched her in a dispassionate silence completely at odds with the passionate strains of the Brazilian guitar playing softly in the background.

Her gaze slid from his face back to the holstered gun— the one he hadn't yet used, she reminded herself to help deal with the fear—then flicked back to his eyes. None of the ice had left them. In spite of the chill he generated from four feet away, for the first time since his shadowy presence had materialized in her mirror, a tiny fissure of hope slogged through her blood.

"Did you come here to kill me?" Grim-faced, he swept a look down the length of her body, lingering at her breasts before crawling back to her face. His gaze fastened on her mouth. The muscles in his throat worked as he swallowed. Then he met her eyes. "Now, why would I want to kill you?" The sandpaper-coarse texture of his voice and the insolent way he watched her had her clutching the towel closer as his implication registered, took root, and grew to heart-pounding comprehension.

She closed her eyes. Felt the sting of tears behind them as the steamy rhythms pulsed in the background... and fear shifted to another unthinkable dimension.
Oh God Oh God Oh God

She steeled herself, told herself she could survive it. She'd fight like hell—and lose—but she could endure it. More important, she would live through it. She would recover. But she would never listen to Nogueira again.

"OK. I think you've had enough," he muttered, startling her eyes open. "Rein in the theatrics, Ms. Kincaid. Your body's safe with me."

He shook his head, one corner of that hard mouth tipping up in what passed for a smile, like he'd made a joke he found both amusing and ironic.

So why wasn't she laughing?

In wary silence, she watched him dig into the black sleeve looped through his belt and pull out a cell phone. Then he turned and walked away, punching in a series of numbers.

Jillian blinked. And stared at the doorway—where he no longer stood.

She clutched her arms around her ribs to keep herself from splintering into a million pieces. For several rough heartbeats she stared at the door before letting out the air that threatened to burst her lungs.

Above the intricate licks of the acoustic guitar, she heard mm in the hallway, talking softly. Wetting dust-dry lips, she inched toward the door, only then realizing how hard she was trembling. When she spotted him standing with his back to her, she didn't hesitate. She raced for her bedroom and tore open her nightstand drawer.

"Please, please, please," she pleaded in a coarse whisper as she rifled frantically through magazines and lotions and tissue. "It's got to be here."

"Looking for this?"

With a painful intake of breath, she whirled around. He stood in her bedroom doorway; her little .22 automatic dangled from the index finger he'd hooked through the trigger guard.

Pathetic,
his expression said as, with a shake of his head, he tucked the gun into his waistband.

"Yeah," he said, turning his attention back to his cell. "That's right."

From beneath lowered brows he cast a frowning glance her way; then with a curled finger and a notch of his chin he motioned for her to come closer. "I think you could accurately state that I've made a believer out of her."

"Yes. Yes sir. No doubt." he continued, then scowled when she stood rooted to the spot. "Here she is."

He held out the phone.

"Come on," he said with a grunt of impatience when she stood there, stalled by the bed.

She darted a glance from his face to the phone, disoriented, distrustful.
What the hell is going on?