Island Flame (47 page)

Crack! Crack!

The sound still bounced off the buildings, still reverberated in Micayla’s ears, when Wendy crumpled. Just like that, like her bones had suddenly turned to dust. She toppled face-first into the snow, which instantly began to turn scarlet around her.

Micayla screamed.

And woke up.

Cold as if she’d actually been outside on that frigid night again.

Which of course she hadn’t been.

She was inside. The air around her was warm. The cold she was experiencing came from the frosty window glass she was doing a full-body press against. The curtain had been pulled back, and beyond the window—actually one section of a wall of sliding glass doors—the pool area glistened under the fresh layer of pristine white snow that had been falling since she’d arrived at her uncle Nicco’s lakeside mansion shortly after five p.m. Except for the pale gleam of moonlight reflecting off the snow, the world beyond the
window was black as ink. Earlier, at the stroke of midnight, an explosion of fireworks had lit up the night sky as cash-strapped Motor City had thrown its cares aside and celebrated the New Year. She’d watched, alone, through a downstairs window, then gone to bed.

If it hadn’t been for the glass, she would have been out there wandering barefoot in the snow right now, Mick thought, and felt her stomach knot.

At least, from the absence of sound echoing around her, she felt safe in assuming that the soul-shaking scream she’d let loose with had been all in her head.

Please God.

She didn’t need to see a clock to know that the time was right around 2:30 a.m. Just like it had been then. Plus it wasn’t long after Christmas, cold as a meat locker outside, spurting snow. And she’d been upset when she’d fallen asleep.

Of course she’d been sleepwalking again.

I’m twenty-seven fricking years old. Am I never going to outgrow this?

Peeling herself away from the window, Mick ignored the mild vertigo that she always experienced when she woke up abruptly under these conditions and took a deep, hopefully steadying breath. Her heart, which had been pounding like a SWAT team at an unsub’s door, started to slow down. Looking around, she tried to get her bearings.

Having gone to sleep in one of the eight second-floor bedrooms, she was now two stories below, in the part of the vast, elaborately finished walk-out basement that led to the pool and tennis court. With no memory at all of how she had gotten there.

Carefully she closed the curtain, blocking out the night.

Her hands shook, but she chose to ignore that. Just like she ignored the ringing in her ears, the dryness of her mouth, and the racing of her pulse.

With the curtain closed, she was left standing in the dark. A pinpoint-sized red glow up near the ceiling reminded her that security cameras were everywhere. At the thought that her unconscious perambulation might have been witnessed by one or more of the security guards manning the monitors from the gatehouse out front, she felt a slow flush of embarrassment creep over her body. The good news was, it chased away the last of the chill.

She slept in flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top. The bottoms were red and loose, the top white and snug. Her long, horsetail-thick chestnut hair trailed over her shoulders in two braids. Not a look meant for public consumption, and not the image she wanted to project to the security guards. At five-six, she was lean as a whippet and superbly fit. Hard-bodied. Cool, competent, tough as nails. Right now, though, to anybody who happened to be watching, she probably looked the exact opposite.

Current appearances notwithstanding, girly and vulnerable she was not.

Mentally flipping the bird at the invisible watcher who might or might not be behind the camera, depending on the degree of slacking that was going on, she padded back down the carpeted hallway. There was an elevator, but she preferred to take the stairs. A little exercise was what she needed to take the edge off. She didn’t sleepwalk much anymore, maybe two or three times a year, but she knew
the drill: her thought processes would be cobwebby for hours if she didn’t do something to shake them out.

By the time she made it up the semicircular marble staircase to the second floor, her head was on straight and she felt normal again. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The anger and sense of betrayal that had been with her for almost twenty-four hours now had come back, and had once again settled into her stomach like a rock.

“Bastard,” she said out loud to her absent ex-boyfriend. She’d said it to his face before she’d left, along with a lot of other things. She didn’t know why she’d been so surprised to learn he’d been cheating on her. She knew men. She knew cops.

What was surprising was how much it hurt to find out that Homicide Investigator Nate Horacki of the Detroit PD was no better than the rest of them.

This time yesterday, she would have said she was in love with him.

But now … no way. She wasn’t that big of a …

Clink.

Mick never would have heard the slight sound if she hadn’t been right where she was, striding along the open second-floor gallery that ran across the top of the enormous, eye-popping entry hall, nearly at the doorway of the bedroom she was using, the one she always used, that she’d come to think of as her way-luxurious home away from home. But she
was
there, and she
did
hear it. Stopping dead, she listened. To nothing at all except the hum of the heating system. Except for the faint glow of moonlight streaming through the windows, the house was dark. Not wanting to advertise her movements to anyone outside who might be
interested, she hadn’t turned on a light on her way back to her bedroom. Now every sense she possessed focused on the shadow-filled spaces stretching out all around her. The house was huge, and tonight, except for her, it was empty. At least, it was supposed to be.

Clink
.

There it was again. Mick went taut as a bowstring, every sense on the alert. The smell of pine from the Christmas garlands tied to the gallery’s wrought iron railing wafted in the air. Shimmery gold ornaments in a glass bowl on the console table to her left glinted as a shaft of moonlight played over them. Trying to remember how the house had looked before darkness had swallowed it up, she concluded that the tall, menacing shapes in the corners were the human-sized Toy Soldiers and Nutcrackers her aunt Hope, Uncle Nicco’s wife, had used as Christmas decorations, and relaxed a little even as she listened hard.

Silence once again blanketed everything. But she knew she hadn’t imagined the sound. And it hadn’t been a random creak that she could put down to the settling of floor joists or something equally innocent, but sharper and metallic. Purposeful, was how she characterized it. Which meant she needed to check it out.

She embraced the thought with relish. Checking it out was something to do, something to think about, something she was good at. And it was a whole hell of a lot better than lying sleepless in her bed trying not to think, which she knew was the fate that awaited her for the rest of the night.

Uncle Nicco had hired her to house-sit while he, his wife, and their five grown children and their families spent
New Year’s and the week after at their place in Palm Beach. Because of the bust-up with Nate, she had arrived a day early, just a couple of hours after the family left. The house should have been empty for this one night.

New Year’s Eve.

So if the house was empty except for her, what was the source of that sound?

Moving swiftly, Mick slipped into her bedroom and retrieved her gun from the nightstand. The familiar, solid weight of the Glock 22 felt good in her hand. Her handcuffs were on the nightstand too. She grabbed them, tucked them into her pocket just in case, and thrust her feet into terry flip-flops, which had been part of the spa basket her longtime best friend, Angela Marino Knox, Nicco’s daughter, had left on her bed as a Christmas present and which she had been using for slippers after painting her toenails with the hot-pink passion fruit polish that had also been in the basket. Then she retraced her steps, quiet as a whisper, moving cautiously but quickly back along the gallery, listening.

Clink
.

There it was again. Probably it was nothing. Still, her heart rate accelerated as she focused in on the location of the sound: first floor, toward the rear. Padding down the stairs, the marble hard and silent beneath her feet, she tried to pinpoint the location more exactly. Left, past the huge formal living and dining rooms and the music room and the library. Slinking purposefully along, moving from shadow to shadow, she gave a fleeting thought to hitting one of the panic buttons that had been placed in strategic locations for the purpose of instantly summoning
the security guards. The odds were high that the sound was something entirely innocent, but backup was always a good thing. Then Mick considered the possibilities for who had pulled security guard duty on this icy New Year’s Eve, and made a face.

She didn’t need backup, anyway.

No longer hearing anything out of the ordinary, she proceeded with quick caution, clearing each dark room as she passed it. As Uncle Nicco was always bragging, the security system was state of the art, not the kind of thing a burglar could easily breach. Plus, given the presence of the guards, the cameras, and the fact that the estate was ringed on three sides by a twelve-foot-high fence (the fourth side was secured by the lake) and every outside door had at least two top-of-the-line double-bolts, the house was a virtual fortress. What were the chances that … ?

Boom.

Okay, that wasn’t nothing. It was a soft boom, a muffled, barely audible boom, but a boom nonetheless. As if something had exploded, maybe, only quietly. Mick’s eyes widened as she rounded a corner and spied the faintest of yellow glows emanating from a door about twenty feet away. A click, a boom, a glow—good God, could the house be on fire?

The security system included state-of-the-art fire detection. If the house was on fire, by now the system should be wailing its little heart out.

Unless something had compromised the system.

Adrenaline pumping, Mick glided quickly and silently to the open door, then flattened herself against the wall beside it. The yellow glow was gone. The hall, the room,
the house were once again silent and dark. A quick, careful peek around the door frame revealed exactly nothing: there was just enough moonlight filtering through cracks in the floor-to-ceiling drapes to help her ascertain that the room was empty. But there was a smell: a kind of acrid, smoky scent that reminded her of a detonated cherry bomb. And barely audible sounds—a shuffle, a click, a thunk. Although she liked to think she possessed a highly honed sixth sense, one wasn’t required to deduce that she was not alone. Her heart lurched. Her stomach clenched. She wet her lips.

Then professionalism kicked in, and icy calm descended like a curtain.

She was still peeping around the door frame formulating her next move when a man, tall and lean, dressed all in black and wearing a black ski mask with one of those miner’s lights affixed to a band around his forehead, walked out of an open door on the opposite side of the room as brazen as could be. She hadn’t previously been more than vaguely aware of that door. If she had thought about it at all, which she couldn’t recall ever having done, she had probably assumed it led to a closet. Only no burglar—and a burglar this certainly was—would bother to blow open a closet door, and it was clear from the sulfurous smell, from the boom she’d heard, and most of all from the fact that the door appeared to be hanging drunkenly from one hinge, that it had been blown open.

The room was Uncle Nicco’s private office, which meant the door almost had to belong to a safe. A closet-sized, walk-in safe that held God only knew what in the way of valuables. A safe she’d never even known existed.

Which it was nevertheless her job to protect.

The man was maybe six-two, broad-shouldered, and athletically built, with a young man’s confident gait. Open military-style jacket over a tee, pants, and boots. With—she squinted to be sure—surgical gloves that made his hands look white as a cadaver’s against all that black. Still absolutely unaware that she was anywhere in the vicinity.

Having registered all this in the space of a split second, Mick did what she had to do: stepped into the doorway, planted her feet, and jerked her weapon up.

“Freeze,” she barked. “Police.”

Continue reading for an exclusive excerpt from

FORBIDDEN LOVE

By Karen Robards

February 2013
From Pocket Books