Twisted By Love, Reincarnation Tales, Book 1

Reincarnation Tales, Book 1

A sexy paranormal romance/mystery

Jasmine Haynes

Copyright 2012 Jasmine Haynes

Cover Design by Rae Monet Inc

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Summary

A love that spans lifetimes, an evil that has
followed them through the ages...

Bern Daniels doesn’t believe in ghosts, UFOs,
or reincarnation, but when he sees Livie Scott, it’s as if he’s
known her forever. Now he can’t get her out of his mind. He wants
her in his bed and in his life. For keeps. He’s even starting to
believe they’ve lived past lives together.

Will jealousy out of the past come back to
destroy their future?

Livie is unaccountably drawn to the tall,
dark stranger. He literally sweeps her off her feet. And she’s oh
so willing to let him. But her sister Toni is planted firmly in her
path to happiness. Livie has been forced to choose between a man
and Toni before; is she destined to play the same twisted game with
her sister over and over?

Livie and Bern soon discover there are
shadows lurking from their past, past lives that is, which threaten
everything they believe in, everything they want. And even their
lives.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my special network of friends who
support me, brainstorm with me, and encourage me: Bella Andre,
Shelley Bates, Jenny Andersen, Jackie Yau, Ellen Higuchi, Kathy
Coatney, Pamela Fryer, Rosemary Gunn, and Laurel Jacobson. And a
special thanks to Rae Monet for the fabulous cover!

Prologue

He saw her out of the corner of his eye as he
crossed the lobby. She was just a flash in his periphery. His
immediate thought was that he hadn’t believed he’d ever see her
again, accompanied by emotions of loss, need, desire, and even
anger. Quickly on the heels of that came the understanding that
yes, of course, she was here in San Francisco, right where her
sister said she’d be. Vast relief. Intense joy. Her name was on the
tip of his tongue, yet the moment he turned, ready to call it out,
the name vanished. It was like a dream you suddenly woke from,
where one moment you were convinced it was real, and the next, the
details were gone. He realized he didn’t know the woman at all.

Her mahogany hair, damp from the rain, swayed
across her back as she walked at a fast clip, her tennis shoes
incongruous with a tailored skirt that outlined her trim curves.
Her blouse, also damp, clung to her enticingly. In profile, her
eyelashes were long and lush, the color of her eyes darker than her
hair. She didn’t smile, didn’t look at anyone, not even him though
he’d stopped to watch her.

No, he didn’t know her, her fine-boned
features unfamiliar, yet he still felt that original smack of
recognition. It was something in the way she moved. But her
name...her name was gone, not even a hint of its rhythm or the
letter it began with.

She joined the throng in front of the
elevators, shuffled forward as the middle car arrived, and filed
inside amid the dense crowd. She turned to face front, meeting his
eyes—though he could have imagined that.

He stood a moment longer, a rock in a stream
of office workers. Perhaps she’d had surgery, changed her nose or
altered her delicate jaw line. Something...he couldn’t put his
finger on it, because really, she wasn’t familiar. At least not in
looks.

Someone jostled his arm, he shook himself,
then dashed to the elevator, making it on just before the doors
closed. The car stopped and started at several floors, then she
brushed past him to exit on the twelfth.

His skin heated with the brief contact, his
heart raced. And he was struck anew with the sense that he’d known
her. Intimately.

Chapter One

No one would ever call the man drop dead
gorgeous, nor would his face grace the cover of
Gentleman’s
Quarterly
. Yet the features reflected in the silver elevator
door were arresting. Livie Scott’s three-inch heels put her at five
feet seven, but standing behind her in the reflection, he was a
head taller. A head taller than the rest of the elevator’s
occupants, too.

He might not be GQ material, but Livie could
pinpoint precisely what attracted her, why she’d noticed him in the
first place a couple of weeks ago. Why she kept on noticing him. It
was his eyes, a light green in marked contrast to his dark hair.
The color of a pale jade gemstone, she could lose herself in those
oddly familiar eyes. As if his gaze had at one time known every
inch of her naked body. Yet she hadn’t met him before nor even seen
him in her office building until that day two weeks ago.

She remembered the day clearly. Still
breathless from her brisk lunchtime walk, Livie had crammed herself
into the packed car. It had started raining during her outing,
which was unusual for the middle of September, even in San
Francisco. Her hair had been damp, her blouse clinging to her. In
the blurry reflection, she hadn’t been able to tell if he returned
her inspection, but the hairs at the back of her neck had prickled.
Love at first sight was a myth—it took at least six months to
discover a man’s idiosyncrasies and figure out if you could love
him despite them—but
lust
at first sight, now that was a
completely different issue. It had clearly been at work in the
elevator that day.

It was still at work now.

Liberally applied cologne mingled with
overdone perfume and the tang of sweaty bodies. Her nostrils
twitched. The air in the badly ventilated elevator was
suffocatingly warm. Livie tugged at her blouse, the collar suddenly
constricting around her throat.

Which reminded her of last night’s dream. A
nightmare really. Something tightening around her neck. Until she
couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t scream. Something
cold and rough and too thick to sink her nails into. Something with
scales and the strength to squeeze her to death. What was it that
killed its prey that way, a python? Lying awake in the dark, limbs
trembling, an hour had passed before she could shake off the
dream.

Finally managing to sleep again, she’d woken
to the sun already rising in the sky versus her usual
oh-dark-thirty wake-up, which was why she’d had to run to catch the
elevator. In the morning rush, it took forever for the lifts to
make it all the way to the top floor then back down to the garage,
and she could ill afford the extra ten minutes. For the Wednesday
morning budget review, she needed to update her backlog numbers
with the month’s activity at the company’s three San Francisco area
manufacturing facilities. Being the only female director added a
lot of performance pressure, especially as she planned to be the
first female vice president on the executive team within the next
couple of years.

The doors whooshed open, disgorged a couple
of passengers, partially relieving the crush, then slid shut again.
With fewer heads in the way, she could see the man more clearly in
the silvered reflection.
Arresting
wasn’t the right word to
describe him. Or how he made her feel. He was somehow primitive.
Powerful. Dangerous. An intoxicating mixture all wrapped up in suit
and tie.

She couldn’t determine his age any better
than she’d been able to on the other occasions she’d noticed him in
the building over the past few days. Late thirties, early forties
maybe, yet his hair was still a thick, dark brown. His brow ridge
was complemented by harsh cheekbones. His sensual lips, just short
of being girlishly plump, were tempting. She undid the top button
of her blouse. For fresh air. Or something. His eyes seemed to
track the movement. Or was that just her overactive imagination?
Maybe she wanted him to notice.

She could feel herself breathe now, a little
faster than before. A pulse throbbed at her throat. Her nipples
tightened, and warmth swept down between her legs.

The doors opened again. A businessman jostled
her to the side as he exited. When the doors closed, the man’s face
was now obscured by the join.

A soft
excuse me
fluttered in the air
behind her, then the scent of some musky aftershave tantalized her
nose. No, not aftershave. Something distinctly male-generated.
Jungle rain and animal heat. His minty toothpaste breath ruffled
her hair. She had the urge to lean back, but remained rigidly
still.

The grinding elevator gears threw her
slightly off balance, her suit jacket brushing the hard male chest
behind her. A hand at her waist steadied her. And stayed there. His
touch heated her through. She wanted more. She wanted to turn,
touch him, explore him. See him. And she wanted his hands all over
her, everywhere. She was dizzy with desire.

In front of her, the doors parted to reveal
the gray utilitarian carpet of her floor. For a frozen moment, she
failed to move, the warmth of his hand almost mesmerizing.

He pushed her gently.

Gathering her wits about her, Livie marched
directly across the hall and threw open the suite’s lobby door more
forcefully than necessary. It was only when safely in her office
that she thought to wonder how the man had known this was her
floor. The answer was obvious, of course, he’d seen her enough
times in the elevator.

Yet her body was suffused with heat, and
Livie knew it was so much more.

* * * * *

Bern Daniels wasn’t particularly fond of
small, cramped spaces, but he wouldn’t allow a mere sensitivity to
get the better of him. He’d never given in to it. This lunchtime
was no exception as he took the crowded elevator to the lobby
level. He pondered his mystery woman. The aroma of her
garden-scented shampoo was lighter now, just a memory from this
morning’s elevator ride. He’d breathed her in as if she were a
life-saving potion. Her navy skirt, while circumspect, had hugged
her shapely rear. He’d braced her at the waist, but now he wished
he’d cupped the tempting outline. He wanted a touch, a taste, a
stroke of her heat.

He closed his eyes. She did things to him he
couldn’t explain. Her scent saturated him. She filled a space deep
inside that he hadn’t even known was empty until the moment he’d
laid eyes on her.

He’d watched her for two weeks, since that
day he’d first seen her in the lobby. He’d moved into his new
office space in the San Francisco high-rise only a couple of weeks
before that, at the beginning of September, but from the moment he
saw her, her face had haunted him. He knew every feature. Her eyes
were a deep earthy brown that matched one shade of her hair, which
was an array of dark reds, russets, and deep golds. He knew her
office was on the twelfth floor, that she usually worked an
eleven-hour day, arriving at seven and leaving at six. Except on
Wednesdays when, for some reason, she arrived late and left early.
Most days, she exited the building at noon and returned forty-five
minutes later. She wore high-heeled pumps in the morning and the
evening, but donned white tennis shoes for her lunch-hour jaunt in
the fall sunshine. He could set his watch by her regular
habits.

He knew small, meaningless details about her.
They whet his appetite for more. The need to know was an ache in
his gut. He hadn’t mentioned her to his brother, Jake. He knew
exactly what Jake would say:
You knew her in a previous
life.
If Jake wasn’t his brother, Bern would have called him
crazy long ago. Yet for the first time, in the face of his extreme
reaction to a woman he didn’t know, Bern wondered if it was
possible.

No,
that
was crazy.

She intrigued him beyond measure. What did
she think about on her walks? What lay beneath the smartly tailored
suits she wore? That first day he’d glimpsed a taste of lace when
her blouse had been damp with raindrops. Knowing nothing more about
her than her work routines, her shampoo preferences, and her
penchant for dark-colored suits gave her a captivating air of
mystery, but he hungered to know more, to learn everything.

With her, the possibility of soul mates
didn’t seem like a myth. Yet why he should think that was beyond
his comprehension. He’d never even spoken to her. It was crazy. But
the fact remained that he lusted in equal parts for her mind, her
body, and her heart, and in all his forty-three years, he’d never
felt this way about any woman.