Page 65 of The Night Before (Savannah 1)

Carefully, she backtracked a bit.

It seemed that Nikki Gillette hadn’t managed to follow her, so she took a circuitous route back to the car, stubbed out her cigarette on the street and climbed inside. The leather interior was hot against the back of her legs, the steering wheel nearly burning her fingers. Quickly she twisted on the ignition and turned the air-conditioning up full blast while opening the sun roof, hoping to push the hot air outside. A woman pushing a stroller passed by on the street, and Kelly felt a tug on her heart. It seemed she’d never have a child of her own. It just wasn’t in the cards.

Before you could have a child, you needed a man, and Kelly wasn’t in the market for one of those. She’d been through her share of heartaches, and most of the men she knew were losers. Take Josh Bandeaux. May he rest in peace. What a joke. There was no rest for the likes of her dead brother-in-law. A bastard if one had ever walked the earth. He’d even had the gall to come on to her. To her. His wife’s twin sister, for God’s sake. She’d put him in his place, of course, but she had the creepy feeling that he’d wanted not only to get her into bed, but to have Caitlyn there waiting for them. As if either she or Caitlyn would be interested in a threesome. What kind of sick male fantasy was that? Well, forget it!

She managed to put the car in gear and ease into the afternoon traffic. Damn that Caitlyn anyway. Had she always been weird? Well, maybe a little bit. But things had gone from bad to worse after the boating accident. Kelly’s jaw tightened at the memory. An explosion in the motor, Caitlyn’s terrified screams, the boat collapsing in on itself and then all that water. Long, dark stretches of water.

Her throat suddenly tight, she slowed for a red light.

The boating accident.

That’s when everything had really gone to hell.

Adam was missing something. Something vital. And he was running out of time. He sat in the desk chair long after Caitlyn had left the office and stared at the corner of the couch where she’d sat. Sometimes frail, other times remarkably strong, she bared her soul to him and he had to fight the oppressive feeling that he was using her unjustly, that she was leaning on him, depending on him, trusting him, not suspecting that his motives were far from pure.

“Hell,” he muttered.

He needed to speed things up.

His sessions with Caitlyn had gone well enough, but he hadn’t uncovered anything that he was hoping for. In fact he was beginning to think he was treading in waters that were rapidly deepening and darkening. Emotionally turbulent waters. Waters that could easily drown a man. He glanced at his wall of credentials and winced.

Does the end justify the means?

In this case, yes. And yet . . . he remembered her huddled on the couch, her arms drawn around her knees as she looked at the floor, studying the patterns of the carpet as she explained about her family. There was more to learn about her, so much more. She was complex and compelling and contradictory.

And fascinating as hell. But she may not be the one. She may not be able to help.

He turned in the chair and stared at Rebecca’s computer. There were no backup disks with Caitlyn’s name on them. Nonetheless, Adam had searched through them all. And nothing on the hard drive. At least nothing he could find. But there was a way to retrieve deleted files; he’d heard that from one of his computer-nerd friends. Always a way to get old information, sometimes even if the hard drive crashed. So all he needed now was some help. He wondered vaguely if there was a book entitled Computer Hacking For Dummies. If so, he needed a copy.

He glanced back at her untouched coffee cup and remembered her holding it as if for warmth. In a room where the temperatur

e was pushing eighty. He suspected she wanted to talk about her husband. All the preliminary stuff about her family was important, to him, as a psychologist, and surely if he wanted to treat her, but she really wanted to talk about Josh Bandeaux, her marriage to him and his death . . . but first, Adam thought, to seem legitimate and to balm his conscience a bit, they had to lay the groundwork.

So she was coming back tomorrow. He tented his hands and rested his chin on his knuckles. He’d encouraged the appointment. He needed to move things along faster.

But there was another reason as well, one that he hated to admit to himself, one that he didn’t want to face. Caitlyn was a troubled and troubling woman. The simple truth was that he wanted to see her again and not necessarily as a psychologist to a patient, but more in the line of a man to a woman.

Which was totally out of line.

Dangerous to them both.

If he were to get involved with her—with a patient—it could cost him his license.

And if she were to get involved with him—with someone she trusted—it could cost her everything.

The phone jangled.

Sugar, dusting the television, stuffed her rag into a back pocket and snagged the receiver before the third ring. “Hello?”

Nothing.

“Hello? Hello? Who is this?”

Again no answer. She thought about those incessant telemarketers trying to sell her everything from new telephone service to dildos. “Listen, I’m hanging up now!” She had another thought. Maybe it was some pervert who was in the club last night and had watched her dance. She’d had it. “Drop dead!” she ordered.

“You drop dead,” someone whispered on the other end.

Her blood turned to ice. She slammed the receiver down. “Shit.” She glared at the phone. Who had found her? She paid good money to have her number unlisted, but that didn’t keep the telephone sales people from finding her. Or the sickos. “Shit.” Then there was the weird call she’d gotten when no one had answered, but she’d thought she’d heard “Die, bitch,” just before Caesarina had come into the house injured. Her skin crawled. Were they related?

---