Pushing inside, she didn’t turn on the lights, just pulled him in after her, reaching up to devour his mouth like a woman starved for kisses. Man, she was hot.
She tore away from him. “Bed is upstairs.” She toed off her shoes and hurried up the spiral staircase inside the entryway of her room. He was right behind her.
***
Dylan must have fallen asleep because the alarm clock read three o’clock when a sound awoke him from a pleasant dream hours later. Alexandra grumbled and snuggled deeper into the sheets as he maneuvered his way to the end of the bed and found his phone.
Speaking quietly, he answered, “Collins.”
“Sorry to interrupt your beauty sleep, but we’ve got another one,” his partner’s voice was brisk. “Same calling card as the one last month. Pretty sure we’ve officially got a serial on our hands.”
Dylan swore and glanced at the woman sleeping peacefully behind him. It had been nice while it lasted. Reedus gave him a few details and the address while he tugged on his pants.
Picking up the rest of his clothes, he ended the call and moved quietly to the stairs. He hesitated, glancing back toward the bed. A smile tugged at his lips as he walked over, knelt beside the mattress and just looked at her for a minute.
He leaned and kissed her lips softly, quickly, so as not to disturb her.
“See ya later, beautiful.”
And he had every intention of doing so.
She was alone.
Alexandra wasn’t sure if she was relieved or not by that revelation when she opened her eyes, looked around the unfamiliar hotel room and stretched lazily the next morning.
Oh, not because of the guy she’d brought back to her hotel room last night. She’d expected him to be long gone—her first one-night stand. Had she really done that? A painful tug in some of her more underused muscles reassured her she had.
Her confusion was because she had fully expected Rebecca Collins to be sitting in the chair beside the bed, tapping her foot and waiting for Alexandra to wake so she could start complaining about her sons again.
But Alexandra was alone.
No one-night stand. No ghost.
It was so quiet. How freaking weird was this? How long had it been since she’d woken up to this kind of peace? Months, maybe.
She showered and dressed, glancing around often and expecting the dead woman to pop out of the wall and start making her please-you’ve-got-to-help-my-son demands. Nope, nothing. She’d heard someone say at a spiritual conference once that ghosts couldn’t travel over water. Was that the case here? She shook her head. Rebecca had followed her from Atlanta to Denver and back again. But not here?
Weird.
It was next to impossible to keep her guard up while she was sleeping, so the first thing Alexandra did each morning before leaving her apartment was close herself from communication with the dead. She hesitated in doing it now. What if Rebecca finally made an appearance? She peeked out the curtains, saw that weird gray aura shooting up, and decided she’d better be safe than sorry until she figured out what the anomaly meant.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Released it. And another. She envisioned a brick wall.
Only the living can communicate with me. No spirits can pass beyond this barrier.
Over and over, she repeated the mantra until she felt…almost normal. Another deep breath, and she opened her eyes.
Alexandra’s stomach rumbled, so she set out in search of food. She found a small café serving breakfast, asked to borrow the phone book, grabbed a newspaper and sat down to make a plan.
She started by checking for Dylan Collins in the phone book, hoping the good, old-fashioned resource would trump her Internet searches. She found only one, called and reached an older-sounding man with a strong Southern accent.
Nope. Not him.
She went down the list of D Collins and knew each time a woman claimed a variation of the name she wasn’t getting any closer.
And it sucked that every time she marked off a name from the list, her mind happily somersaulted to an image of Mr. Delicious’s handsome face.
Had he ever told her his name?
Heat warmed her face as she realized she hadn’t noticed. She couldn’t believe she’d slept with a total stranger when she’d needed to be focused on the reason she came here in the first place. But she had.
This would have been a lot easier to do if her mind didn’t prefer to think about Mr. Delicious. Oh, yes, he’d rocked her world last night. Was she only one in a long line of women, or was casual sex as new to him as it was her?
She snorted. Who was she kidding? That man had been on the prowl before she’d walked into the room. If she hadn’t taken him back to her hotel, no doubt some other lucky woman would have been charmed into doing so. Ridiculous that she felt the hot rush of jealousy blur her vision at that idea. No one that good in bed was a saint, and she had no claim on him anyway. Nor did she want a claim on him. She’d done the long distance thing once, and her marriage hadn’t survived it.
Slamming the phone book shut, she sighed, feeling a little depressed by that memory.
She looked up and caught a young woman on the other side of the window staring in at her. Tiny sparks of orange electricity shot off from her body, just like they always did from dead people. Another ghost. Alexandra tensed and tore her eyes away. She’d done the proper meditation to disconnect. She knew she had.
She glanced back and the young woman was gone.
She must have been mistaken. Her shoulders relaxed, but a feeling of unease lingered in her belly.
As she spread cream cheese over her bagel, she glanced at the newspaper. In a side strip on the front page with no photo, a smaller headline immediately grabbed her attention.
Woman found murdered in cemetery.
The sudden image of a cartoon figure dressed in a black robe and holding a scythe overtook her vision. She’d always likened the experience to someone holding up huge flash cards in front of her eyes unexpectedly. Sometimes a word was written for her to see. Sometimes it was a symbol or a photograph. Alexandra braced herself for more, but her gaze saw nothing now but the newspaper article.
Her hand lowered to her abdomen, which rumbled with anxiety. This wasn’t good. Her morning disconnect hadn’t worked if a ghost—the young woman in the window?—was sending her this information.
She puzzled over the image of a grim reaper that had been relayed to her, but then again, she usually did until she learned more information to give it substance. She felt an immediate urge to turn the page and found herself flipping to the article’s reference on page 3 of the Metro section and zeroing in on a different article buried in the middle of the page. Homicide investigation launched after body found in alley. Again, the grim reaper cartoon flashed before her.
Were these two murders related?
Yes. She didn’t have to read the details of either story. She just knew they were. Did the police realize it?
She flipped back to the first page and skimmed