Brittany Bends (22 page)
She had a sense, just a sense—and she wasn’t even sure if it was accurate because her senses about herself often were not—that staying in Portland would be dangerous.
“You’re going to mail me your next comic, right?” Vivian asked.
Kyle’s gaze returned to hers. His eyes were a pale blue, like his father’s. He would be reedy and handsome someday, just like his father. The relationship showed.
Of course Kyle’s relationship to Vivian didn’t show. Vivian, like her brother and sister, had been adopted. All three looked very different. Vivian was small, skinny, and dark. Travers was tall, slender, and blond, and Megan was a green-eyed redhead who, at twenty-five, still hadn’t lost her baby fat.
“Mail?” Kyle made that sound as if Vivian were talking about communicating by Pony Express. “I was planning to scan it and e-mail it to you.”
She ran her hand gently over the comic he’d just given her. “I like the way this feels. I can see the work you’ve done, watch the paper curl—”
“And my original can get lost in the snail mail. C’mon, Aunt Viv. Let’s move into the twenty-first century.”
It was an old tease and an accurate one. It had taken Vivian years to get a computer. She had refused to buy a VCR, and now VCRs were almost obsolete. When she moved here, Travers had given her a DVD player as a housewarming gift, and Kyle had made certain she knew how to use it before they left.
They were both afraid she’d be lonely. They were right. She’d never lived so far from her family before.
But it wasn’t just her family she would miss. She had no friends here. All her friends in L.A. thought she was moving for a man. But there was no man either. There never had been.
That loneliness seemed permanent.
Then, for no particular reason, she thought of Travers, his hands on the steering wheel of his SUV, the radio playing Clint Black’s “No Time to Kill.” Travers was thinking about the words, worrying about Vivian, and trying to figure out a way to get her to come back to L.A.
“He’s almost here,” Vivian said to Kyle.
“Can’t we just stay here with you?” Kyle asked. “I’m scared for you, Aunt Viv. Dad told Aunt Megan that the old lady was murdered. What if that same person comes after you?”
“Aunt Eugenia wasn’t an old lady,” Vivian said. At least, she never seemed like an old lady, although she had to be at least eighty. She had looked the same all of Vivian’s life—and, apparently, all of Vivian’s mother’s life as well.
One of Vivian’s many tasks would be to track down a birth certificate—if that was possible. Aunt Eugenia’s mansion had burned down the morning after the police found her body.
“But what if, Aunt Viv?”
Travers had turned onto Burnside, which wasn’t very far away. He had the radio blaring in his SUV, and now the station was playing Alan Jackson. Vivian wanted to put her hands over her ears, but knew that wouldn’t solve the problem. Somehow Travers’ environment was leaking into her own.
“Aunt Viv?”
“Sorry,” Vivian said. “Your dad’s listening to country again.”
“Yech.” Kyle wrinkled his nose. “I’m not going to listen to that going home.”
“Good luck,” Vivian said.
“You’re not going to answer me, are you?” Kyle said. “Are you scared, Aunt Viv?”
“Scared?” She turned toward him. She was scared, but not of dying. Of living in a strange town for several months. Of testing new skills with her psychic powers. And trying to figure out all the clues Aunt Eugenia had sent her the week before she died.
Oh, and visiting the attorney who had contacted her about Aunt Eugenia’s will—the one that dated from the day Vivian was adopted. Apparently, Eugenia had left her entire estate—worth several million dollars—to Vivian.
Vivian couldn’t believe that Eugenia hadn’t updated the will after Travers’ and Megan’s adoptions. There had to be another version somewhere. She just had to find it.
“I’m not scared,” she said to Kyle. “Not of being murdered, anyway. They think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I don’t,” Kyle whispered. “I think she knew something.”
That dramatic comic-book imagination of his. Vivian would have to quell this right away. “Why do you think that?”
But as she asked the question, Travers’ SUV turned onto her street and sped past the parked cars in front of the other apartment buildings. He drove twice as fast as anyone in Oregon, and Vivian was afraid he’d get pulled over.
Oregon cops wouldn’t be lenient on Travers. He had California plates and a California driver’s license. She’d learned, in her short week in Portland, that the only people Oregonians consistently discriminated against were Californians.
“That’s Dad!” Kyle said, standing and waving as if Travers had forgotten where Vivian lived during the hour he’d been gone.
The moment passed. Vivian clutched the comic book, careful not to crease its pages, and followed her nephew down the stairs. Travers stopped right in front of the building. The booming bass from his SUV’s speakers blended with the sounds in her mind.
When he shut off the ignition, Vivian heaved a sigh of relief.
Kyle stopped at the bottom of the stairs, waiting on the edge of the cracked concrete sidewalk. When Vivian stopped beside him, he whispered without turning his head, “I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want you to either,” she said. “But there’s no point in staying. I might be home in a month.”
Although she doubted it. Eugenia’s estate was a mess. The fire created even more problems, and the murder—well, there were things about the murder that Vivian hadn’t told anyone. Things she had seen, things she had felt, while Aunt Eugenia had been dying.
In spite of herself, Vivian shivered.
“You won’t be home in a month,” Kyle said. “I don’t think you’re coming back to L.A. at all.”
Vivian peered at him. Her glasses had slid down her nose again and she saw a dual image of him—the young eleven-year-old, crisply outlined against the backdrop of his father’s black SUV, and a fuzzy, larger version, the man Kyle might become.
Vivian shoved her glasses back into place, pushing so hard she poked a fingernail into the soft skin on the bridge of her nose.
“You don’t know that, Kyle,” she said as she watched her brother get out of his car. He looked sleek, put-together, and expensive, something she always wondered how he managed to do on his accountant’s salary. “None of us know that.”
“You’re psychic,” he whispered.
“Yeah, but I’m not able to see the future. Just the present.” And sometimes that was more than enough.
“I thought psychics see the future,” he whispered.
“I wish I did,” Vivian said. “Sometimes I think it would make life a whole lot easier.”
“I don’t think it does,” Kyle said, and for the first time in Vivian’s recollection, he sounded a lot older than eleven.
She looked at him, feeling an odd sensation, as if she were missing something. But he was already running down the sidewalk to greet his father, as if they’d been separated for years instead of hours.
Vivian followed, sighing. For the first time, she realized just how difficult life was going to be here. She wouldn’t have Travers’ common sense to rely on, or Kyle’s jokes to give her joy.
But she didn’t want them facing the same thing Aunt Eugenia had faced. Vivian could take care of herself, but she couldn’t handle it if something happened to her family.
Her sixth sense had been working overtime—and she knew Kyle and Travers were leaving none too soon.
Read more in the first book of the Fates Trilogy,
Simply Irresistible,
available from your favorite bookseller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Called “The Reigning Queen of Paranormal Romance” by
Best Reviews,
bestselling author Kristine Grayson has made a name for herself publishing light, slightly off-skew romance novels about Greek Gods, fairy tale characters, and the modern world.
She writes romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter and historical mysteries as Kris Nelscott. She also writes in a variety of genre, from literary to science fiction to contemporary romance, under her real name—Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She has won dozens of awards for her writing
As Kristine Grayson, she also edits the romance volumes of
Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine.
For more information about her work, go to the Kristine Grayson
website
and sign up for her newsletter.
Look for These Other Titles from
Kristine Grayson
The Interim Fates:
Tiffany Tumbles
Crystal Caves
Brittany Bends
The Fates Trilogy:
Simply Irresistible
Absolutely Captivated
Totally Spellbound
Holiday Novellas:
Up on the Rooftop
Visions of Sugarplums
Dressed in Holiday Style
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Table of Contents
Simply Irresistible Sample Chapter