Page 78 of Dangerous Secrets

This was an entirely new level of slick horror added to the grief, the terror that she was losing her mind.

With each step toward the bedroom, she could feel his presence more strongly. It was insane. Her mind was telling her she was crazy but every sense was on alert, sending frantic signals to her brain.He’s here he’s here he’s here!Like the beat of a jungle drum.

In the week they’d been together, her entire body had become a tuning fork, attuned to Nick’s body. He was here, shecould feel it. No amount of reasoning could convince her he wasn’t.

This was beyond horrible.

She’d observed first-hand Aunt Vera’s slow, awful slide into dementia and it was the most terrifying, horrific, heart-breaking thing she’d ever seen. Aunt Vera, too, saw long-lost loved ones in the shadows in the corners.

Terrified, Charity reached out a shaking hand and pressed it flat against her bedroom door. There was nothing behind that door but an unmade bed and tear-sodden handkerchiefs strewn about the floor. She knew that. Sheknewthat. But on an entirely different level, her body knew something else.

She stood for long moments with her trembling hand on her door, afraid to open it because behind it would be nothing but proof that she was losing her mind.

Chilled, sick, trembling, she finally gave a little push. The door slowly yawned open, the sound loud in the still of the house. The room behind was shrouded in shadows. She hadn’t bothered to open her bedroom shutters.

Nick’s presence was very strong.

Charity was rooted to the spot, utterly unable to enter her own bedroom. Her perfectly ordinary bedroom had suddenly become a place of monsters, waiting to eat her alive. A black pit with her sanity on the bottom, forever lost to her.

The door opening had created currents of air that brought Nick’s scent, Nick’s presence even more strongly to her.

There was a slight noise inside her bedroom.

She couldn’t stand this, simply couldn’t. There was nothing left in her that could withstand this kind of madness. She tried to lift her foot, tried to chide herself into walking into her own bedroom, but she couldn’t. Her feet were anchored to the floor, as if mired in quicksand. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

The shadows in the room swirled, or maybe it was her vision blacking out. Her legs were trembling now, barely able to hold her up.

The shadows shifted and shifted again.

The sound of a boot heel striking her hardwood floor. The darkness coalesced, gained an outline.

A tall, broad-shouldered figure dressed in black stepped forward. A deep voice said, “I won’t let you go to Worontzoff’s house, Charity.”

Nick. Back from the dead.

Her eyes rolled to the back of her head.

Fuck!

Nick leaped forward to catch Charity before she collapsed on to the floor, cursing himself as he did. He hadn’t war-gamed it. He hadn’t run it through his head in any way, which is what he always did, no matter what the move. This time, for the first time in his life, he just barreled ahead without any thought for consequences.

Otherwise, he might have thought about the shock to Charity’s system at seeing her dead husband alive once more.

Nick eased Charity down, icy dread flooding his system. People died of shock, he knew that. Fuck, fuck,fuck!

Charity’s face was bone white, almost waxen. Her system was sending as much blood as possible away from the periphery toward the heart, as always happened in moments of great stress. Some shocks are so great blood circulation slows and eventually stops.

In Bosnia, ten days into his first assignment, Nick had seen a mother keel over dead from shock upon viewing the remainsof her daughter’s body after Serb soldiers had finished with her. There hadn’t been much left.

Shock kills.

He took Charity’s ice-cold, slender hands between his, trying to warm them up. Her hands were completely still. She wasn’t moving at all, not even her chest.

In a sudden panic, he put a hand under her sweatshirt, feeling for her heartbeat. She wasn’t wearing a bra and Nick was half-ashamed of the surge of desire as he felt her soft breast under his hands. He loved her breasts.

A Delta teammate, Kit Sanderson, once said he worshipped at the Church of Big Tits and without thinking about it too much, Nick had, too.

The first time he’d touched her there, cupped her in his hand, feeling the velvety pink nipples harden to a point, he’d become an instant convert to the Church of Small Tits, this classy little Greek temple, where they played Bach on an organ, so unlike the other church—loud with raucous country music.

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