Twisted By Love, Reincarnation Tales, Book 1 (24 page)

He didn’t want Livie to know. He didn’t want
to scare her. “I’m fine,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’m sorry if
I was rough just now.” He’d taken her hard and fast, not an ounce
of tenderness.

“You need to stop apologizing all the time. I
loved it. It’s every girl’s fantasy to wake up in the middle of the
night for something hard and fast and oh so good.”

Thank God. He’d distracted her. “Good. Now go
to sleep.” He ran a hand down her flank to take away the terseness
of his words.

But as he drifted back down into sleep, he
couldn’t stop the thought that time was running out. They were no
longer safe.

* * * * *

“So good to meet you. Come back anytime.” His
mother clasped Livie’s hand in hers.

Mom was seeing wedding vows in his future,
maybe even babies. They’d had a good weekend with the family, and
he and Wade had nailed down the agenda for Gillespie on
Wednesday.

But dammit, Bern hated that Livie was going
to be alone.

While the women were handing over snacks for
the drive home, leftovers, et cetera, Nana oversaw all, sipping
lemonade and eating the last of Clare’s tarts. A breeze fluttered
through the willow trees in the front yard, and the tabby cat was
chasing a few leaves. Bern stood aside with Wade and Jake. Jake had
returned this morning. Bern figured he didn’t want to miss out on
another of Clare’s home-cooked meals.

“I’ll be here no later than eight on
Wednesday,” Bern told Wade. They’d have enough time to get up to
Red Cliff by nine o’clock.

“I thought you were coming the night before,”
Wade said. “There’s plenty of room.” The house was too damn big for
Wade and Clare, even with Nana living there.

“Since we were here this weekend, I’m better
with driving up in the morning,” he insisted. “I don’t want to be
gone overnight.”

Wade shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He’d have to leave by five to make it through
the city before the morning commute, but he’d still have the
Sacramento rush hour to deal with. Four o’clock would be
better.

Livie edged down the steps, a bag of snacks
in one hand, two plastic bowls balanced on the other. “We better go
before she ends up with the rest of Nana’s tarts,” Bern said
dryly.

Wade barked a laugh. “Try to take her tarts
and you’ll lose a couple of fingers.” He broke away to give Livie a
brotherly good-bye pat on the shoulder.

“Good to see you,” Jake said as he looked at
Livie with something close to envy in his eyes.

Bern thought about telling his brother he no
longer thought he was crazy, though that was a strong word. A
little left of center better defined it.
I believe you, man. And
Nana’s right, Dorie will be back.

But if he said anything, he’d have to explain
everything. He wasn’t ready for that. He might never be. So he said
nothing at all.

The farewells dispensed, he and Livie were
finally on their way. The leftovers sat on the floor in the back,
out of the sun, and Livie had tossed the bag of snacks onto the
backseat. Neither of them was hungry after another of Clare’s
feasts.

“I like your family.” Livie tapped her
fingers idly on the armrest.

“I wouldn’t disown them,” he said with a
smile.

She shifted, stretching the seatbelt as she
leaned close, her elbow on the console between them. “You are not
going to believe this.”

He glanced at her before making a left turn.
“Why does that frighten me?”

She laughed. “Because the last time I said
that, I’d decided we had
another
past life together.”

“Don’t tell me you remembered one more.” He
wasn’t sure he could handle another specific.

“No, this is even better.” She sat back with
a cat-that-ate-the-cream smile. “Clare is volunteering with the
county library. It’s part of the Northern California library
system.”

“Wow, that sounds really interesting,” he
mocked.

“It’s the
county
library,” she
stressed. “And that includes Red Cliff.”

“I do know that Red Cliff is in the same
county.”

She fidgeted in her seat and he could see she
was terribly proud of her discovery. “They’ve been working on a
huge project.”

“And?”

She
really
wanted to milk it for all
it was worth. “They’ve been doing a lot of historical preservation
work, scanning old documents, letters, periodicals, newspapers,
stuff like that.”

He was starting to get it. “And Red Cliff has
some old”—he raised a brow—“newspapers?”

The beam of her smile warmed him.

“Exactly.” She leaned close again, the
seatbelt taut across her breasts. “She gave me her library password
so I can look up whatever I want. Including the Red Cliff
Gazette.”

He hit the freeway entrance ramp, and once
he’d merged, he set the cruise control. Then he curled his fingers
around the wheel. His knuckles went white, until he released, but
the knot of tension in his gut was growing.

“Aren’t you going to say something?”

“That’s a pretty big coincidence.”

She gasped out her next words. “Of course it
is.” Then she gave in to her nonstop flow of thoughts. “That’s my
point. Everything is falling into place like we were
meant
to find out all this stuff. First Nana thinks I’m someone named
Myra and that I knew you as some guy named George. When we get up
to Red Cliff, we just
happen
to stumble into an old real
estate office run by an elderly man who knows exactly who we’re
talking about and tells us where to find that house. Now this, your
sister-in-law just happens to be working on a project which will
probably contain all the answers we’re looking for?” Her voice rose
on a question, as if she expected him to endorse that it was a
great miracle of coincidences.

“You know, if it was this easy to find out
about your past lives, everyone would do it.”

She glared at him. “You’re being
negative.”

But he simply remembered the nightmare and
the sickening pitch of his stomach as he stood outside that house.
He remembered the stench of its evil.

He didn’t know how to stop her, how to get
her to see that she was tempting fate with her searching and her
need to know. It was his fault. He was the one who’d started saying
none of it was coincidence. Now she wouldn’t let go.

“It’s like someone up there is handing it all
to us on a platter,” she said.

He clenched his teeth.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” He knew what she was thinking:
Said just like a man who doesn’t want to say anything.

“I thought you’d be excited.”

“I’m excited.” Not.

“You are not.”

“Look, it doesn’t prove anything even if we
find out who they were or what happened to them. It doesn’t mean
it’s
us
. And it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.” If
she’d stop digging and he kept an eagle eye out for Toni, maybe he
could keep them safe.

“But I thought you wanted to know.”

“I don’t care. I don’t like that house. I
don’t need to know. Those people are all long-dead, and I’ve got
you in the here and now. That’s all that matters.”

“But—”

He cut her off with a slash of his hand in
the air. “Let’s pretend none of that ever happened. Let’s be
normal.”

It was fear, plain and simple. He didn’t know
how to protect her. Toni hadn’t bothered them all weekend, but that
didn’t mean she wasn’t planning something. Maybe he should have
called the police about the squirrel and the snake in Livie’s car.
But he’d screwed up, and it was too late for that.

Beside him, Livie sat in hurt silence. Yeah,
he knew; his reaction was coming out of the blue.

He should tell her about the nightmare.
“Look,” he started. The car was heating up as he debated, and he
turned the air conditioning on low.

So what exactly to tell her? That he’d been
murdered. That Toni had done it in another incarnation. That she’d
do it this time around, to one of them, both of them. If he told
Livie about the carcass on his porch, she’d be pissed he hadn’t
mentioned it before. If he ranted about her sister, she’d think he
was paranoid. She’d leave him.

He’d be completely lost without her.

“What?” she prompted.

He stared at the long, straight road ahead.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what bug crawled up inside me. Let’s see
what you find on the library site.”

“Okay.” Her excitement had fled. She didn’t
trust his acquiescence.

And they rode in an uncomfortable
silence.

Chapter Twenty-three

Livie could not understand Bern’s attitude.
Yesterday he’d had that little tantrum in the car on the way home.
Then last night, he’d seduced her into giving him her complete
attention. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Okay, it was
exceptionally good, but...

She was seated at his kitchen table because
her back couldn’t take it when she was hunched over the computer on
the couch. “Do you want to know what I found?” she asked.

From his easy chair in the family room, Bern
looked at her over the rim of his reading glasses. They were pretty
damn hot, though God only knew why.

She waited for him to show a little
enthusiasm. He didn’t. Okay, fine. “It’s an article about the
younger sister’s death. Myra.” A chill raced down her spine. She
hadn’t felt a thing when she read the article, but saying the name
aloud to Bern, suddenly it was different. This was
her
. She
was reading her own obituary.

“You couldn’t possibly have found it that
quickly.” They’d sat down only an hour ago.

“I’m telling you there’s something cosmic
going on because I did find it and it wasn’t all that hard. They’ve
put together an awesome little program with an excellent search
function. You can search on things through the different issues, so
if you want to follow a particular news story over time, you can
find every reference.” And yes, she did think that was some sort of
divine intervention. If she’d had to go through each issue
individually when she didn’t have a year or a date, only a decade,
it could have taken months.

“All right. What’d you find?”

There was still that lack of enthusiasm, but
she plunged ahead. “It wasn’t murder. She”—Livie didn’t want to say
the name again—“died of cancer. She’d never been diagnosed, no
doctors, nothing, and she died in the house. The sister Betty
didn’t call anyone at all, and it was the mailman who reported a
suspicious smell emanating from the mail slot in the front door.”
It wasn’t until she read the article that she remembered the
old-fashioned mail slot, its brass plate tarnished.

“I’m surprised the mailman went all the way
up to the house. These days they’d make the family put a mailbox at
the end of the road.”

She stared at him as he turned back to his
report. “That’s all you have to say?”

“What year was it?”

“1966.” She’d died in 1966. It had been May.
May was a lovely month with temperatures rising and flowers
blooming. Maybe it was a good month to die.

“What did you find about the older
sister?”

Amazingly, she’d found that obituary, too.
Divine intervention at work. “Cancer got her in 1978.”

Toni was born in 1979. The timing was right.
But Myra died in 1966 and Livie wasn’t born until ’77. That meant
people didn’t always get reincarnated right after they died. If
Bern had been George and he’d died in the war, then it was decades
before he was reincarnated. Did the powers that be wait until they
could all come back together?

“What does it tell us, Livie?” He was looking
at her over the rim of his glasses again.

Livie went to him, took the folder from his
hand, setting it on the side table. Then she climbed onto his lap,
straddling him. It felt like the most natural thing for him to put
his hands on her butt and haul her forward until they were
chest-to-chest and he was solidly between her legs.

She felt him, wanted him, but she wasn’t
ready to indulge. “It tells us that something happened. They became
recluses after the war. And Betty never even used her married name.
The article said only that she was a war widow. They didn’t go to a
doctor. She just let her sister whither away and die in that
house.”

“I told you it was evil,” he said softly, his
gaze on something far beyond her shoulder. “It even smelled
rotten.”

If she hadn’t been touching him, she never
would have noticed the slight tremor along his shoulders, but she
felt it beneath her fingertips. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

Why wouldn’t he tell her?
Something
was going on, but he was shutting her out.

He laid his reading glasses aside. “What
about the husband?”

“Without a last name, I couldn’t find
anything. I searched on local men named George who were war
casualties. I checked on locals who enlisted, but he wasn’t there
either.”

Bern looked up sharply. “He didn’t
enlist?”

“I don’t know. All those names were something
the newspaper got out of the Red Cliff enlistment office. He could
have enlisted in Sacramento or San Francisco. Or maybe George was
his middle name. Who knows?”

He played with the hem of her sweater,
thinking. “You got all that out of old newspapers they scanned into
the computer?”

“It’s an amazing database. Who even needs
print newspapers anymore when you can get it like this online,
searchable and everything?”

“So, your cosmic something found all the
answers except the one we really needed. About what happened to
George.”

She shrugged. “Maybe your sister can regress
me again. With these specifics, she could direct me right there.
And you should do it, too.”

His throat worked as he swallowed. “No.”