She screamed out her orgasm. Tears gummed her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. Hands circled her throat. From the floor of the car, the rumpled bit of green notepaper, the one she’d thrown away, taunted her, and the empty condom wrapper shouted her shame. How had it come to this?
In that moment, before fear gripped her, before instinct took over, when her guilt was strongest, she welcomed Death. Welcomed it as the life was choked from her, welcomed it until her eyeballs ached and colors exploded behind her lids. Until blood from her bitten tongue leaked down her raw, bruised throat. And then her body fought for survival.
She tore at the fingers, shrieked, twisted, kicked, scratched, and punched. And still she couldn’t drag in a breath. Terror fisted around her heart and squeezed. Fear of death. Fear of life. Fear like she’d never known. Not even the night someone put a bullet in Cameron’s head.
Max Starr woke clawing at her throat, Cameron’s name breaking the thrall of the dream. Blood drummed in her ears. Her heart pounded against the wall of her chest.
But she could breathe. Oh God, she could breathe, sweet, clean air smelling of early morning, green leaves, and hope. She was here, in her bedroom, where she belonged. Safe.
“Are you all right?” Cameron’s voice, not spoken but inside her head, comforting, familiar, the way a dead husband’s voice should be, the only way a crazy, grieving widow should hear her husband’s ghost. But she’d have given anything to feel his arms around her right now. For real, not just in the erotic dreams he brought her.
Sometimes fantasies weren’t enough.
Like now, when her throat still ached. She lightly caressed the flesh, her fingers cool, her skin tender with residual effects of the nightmare.
“It was a dream,” she murmured for both their benefits. Maybe her worst nightmare—except for that night two years ago when Cameron was killed—but still just a dream. After a deep inhale, then a long sigh, the tension dribbled out her fingertips and the soles of her feet.
Physical, reality-based sensation returned—sheets tangled around her legs, her back stuck to the cotton. She pushed the bedclothes aside to let cool air from the open window blow across her naked body. In the elm outside her window, the stray black cat gave a pathetic mewl. She shouldn’t have fed it yesterday, but knew she’d do the same thing today. Her racing heart eased into a steady, normal beat.
“That was a vision, Max, not a dream.” Cameron’s voice again, always with her, inside her.
It had been his name that woke her. It wasn’t part of the dream, vision, whatever it was; his name was something she’d interjected into a reality that didn’t belong to her. Even now she sensed remnants of another’s strong emotions inextricably linked with her own.
In the dark corner across the room, dear departed Cameron’s eyes flashed. Despite the two years since his death, those glittering points of light, all she ever really saw of him, still gave her a little jolt, part excitement, part fright. The red tip of his spectral cigarette glowed. He’d loved them when he was alive. They’d been the death of him in the end, not by cancer, but by gunshot at the corner 7-Eleven where he’d gone to buy his last pack.
That was all Cameron was now, sparks of light the same color as his eyes, that damnable glow of his cigarette, and his voice inside her head. Nothing more.
“Please don’t start with the psychic stuff. It’s way too early.” Max rolled over to squint at the digital clock. Five a.m. She had another hour before the alarm went off, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep again. Sitting up too quickly, she wrapped her fingers around the edge of the twin-size mattress as a wave of dizziness blurred her vision. She swept the feeling aside and stood, her legs weak beneath her.
“Sit,” Cameron urged. “Give yourself a minute to recover.”
“What’s there to recover from?” Her shrug belied the lingering effects of terror, shame, and resignation. “I’ve had worse nightmares.”
But none so tangible as this, right down to the coppery taste of blood at the back of her throat. Max slipped back down on the bed, her head spinning. Such a strange sensation. She didn’t feel quite...alone in her own body.
“That was a vision, Max.”
No. “I’m not psychic. I prefer to be called crazy.” It was easy to say. Even flippant.
“What about that little girl? You led the police right to her body. I think that would be construed as psychic, not crazy.”
Damn. She’d been calming down. Sort of. Cameron’s words in her head started the anxiety all over again. “I walked by. I saw her feet in the bushes.”
“You climbed a barbed wire fence because you thought you heard a child crying. Then you saw her feet.”