Afterglow Page 4

  She backed away from his personal space until her ass hit the elevator wall, and she could catch her breath.

  Her jaw set and her shoulders tightened. Claustrophobia be damned, she wouldn’t show weakness now. “I’m not leaving.” She met his eyes.

  “Yes. You are.”

  “You can’t force me onto a plane.”

  His grim look promised he’d give it his best shot.

  She put her ace on the table. “You can’t hunt down the bad guy if you don’t have a clue. I’ll find it.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture he made when he was especially tense, and she was immediately transported back three years ago to when they met. A cocktail party, hosted by the lab where she worked with his father. One look and Dakota was sunk. She’d kept her hands to herself by sheer willpower. Just because she was civilized enough not to act on her impulse didn’t mean she hadn’t enjoyed the rush of sexual awareness pulsing through every nerve ending in her body. Chemistry at its finest.

  She’d never in her life experienced anything like the intensity of lust at first sight. It had been new and intriguing and wonderful. He’d been at the party at his father’s persistent request, and she’d offered him an Advil after watching him wince with the pain of a tension headache. They’d gotten into a lively discussion over waiting out the pain versus the immediacy of man-made pain relievers. It rapidly progressed from pain to pleasure.

  She’d thought it was real love, the kind that lasted forever. She’d been wrong. Unfortunately, she had some residual physical response to him after all this time. As long as Rand didn’t know about it, the fact that she was having heart palpitations just standing next to him was none of his business.

  God. When Zak told her what happened at the wedding reception, Dakota prayed the drug wasn’t DL6-94. After hearing the details, spare as they were, there was no doubt in her mind. None. She’d wait to confirm it until she saw the test results, but she knew what had been used.

  “In case you aren’t taking this, or me, seriously,” she told him quietly, “let me explain in layman’s terms just how bad the situation is. A person weighing one hundred and fifty pounds becomes addicted to DL6-94 after ingesting as little as five micrograms, be that one dose or five. It’s downhill from there, because the eventual outcome of continued use is death.”

  He glared at her. “And if it’s not Rydell Pharmaceuticals’ formula?”

  People will still die, but at least I can sleep easy knowing I had no part in killing them. “The drug needs to be taken off the street, Rand, no matter who’s making it. Not only am I familiar with the ingredients and what it can do, I can track down the person behind the scenes. If it is the same formula, Rydell Pharmaceuticals will be responsible.”

  “We don’t know that this is that far reaching,” he told her without looking at her. “Blackmail is still on the table as a motive.”

  “Maybe. But doesn’t it strike you as too coincidental that the drug your father was involved with was used at a wedding that you were working?”

  His jaw clenched as he turned his head to look at her. “Paul is behind bars. Rydell’s lab rats were all killed in the explosion. Do the math, Dakota. If this is Rapture, then the only person left is you. There is no one else.” The caustic edge of his tone ate at her like acid.

  In that moment she hated him all over again. “It’s in Dr. Maguire’s and my best interests for us to find the person responsible and put a stop to whatever’s happening. At least you’ll have to agree with me on that.”

  Rand speared her with an icy glare. “He’s sixty-seven years old and has spent the last twenty-five months in a foreign prison, because of you. If you do one more damn thing to make his life a living hell, I’ll come after you with everything I’ve got.”

  This had to be the longest elevator ride in the history of the hotel. Then she realized that he hadn’t inserted the keycard to get the damn thing moving. “Much as I’m enjoying this delightful conversation,” she said sweetly, “how about actually putting this thing in motion so we can get on with finding who we’re looking for?”

  With a shake of his head, he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, removed the card, and rammed it into the slot. “What’s your hurry?”

  “Have you considered that whoever has the formula might be the one who framed your father?” Dakota didn’t believe that for a moment. Paul Maguire had known exactly what he was giving his wife, and exactly what the ramifications were. Rand might buy into the accidental-death explanation, but like the prosecution, Dakota didn’t buy it at all.

  “The one-armed man? No. I know who did that.”

  She counted to ten, tired of proclaiming her innocence only to have it fall on deaf ears. “Let’s call a truce for the duration.”

  “As long as it’s a short duration.” He gave her a bland look. “Stark assured me he was sending his best man.”

  Dakota leaned against the wall and forced a smile. There was that whole flies-with-honey thing that she’d better remember if she expected this inflexible man to cooperate with her.

  No matter how much turbulent water raced under their shared bridges in the past. No matter how hurt, how angry, how damned well insulted she’d felt, looking at him now made her heart hitch on an annoying, primitive level. God, he was sexy. Not just in that haywire pheromone way. He looked damn good, always had. His eyes were a shade between chocolate brown and hazel, his face more craggy than conventionally handsome, and he had scars everywhere. Everywhere she could see. Many, she knew, in places she couldn’t. She remembered them all. “In this case, his best man is a woman.”

  “We’ll see.” He didn’t ask why a chemist was working for his friend, or in what capacity, and Dakota figured that was a truth that would have to come out sooner than later. Her special skill had never been relevant when they’d been together. Oh, she’d planned on telling him once all the excitement of their wedding was over, and their lives went back to normal. But normal had gone to hell in a handbasket, and that had never happened. She shrugged out of her jacket just as the doors opened, letting in the refined and subdued susurrus of multilingual conversations and the soft light cast by the antique crystal chandeliers. No one in the lobby gave them a second glance as they crossed the plush gold-and-blue carpet and emerged into the heat of the afternoon.

  Across the street, the Mediterranean sparkled like diamonds on rippling aqua satin. Small white sailboats danced in the gentle swells, and larger oceangoing yachts, gleaming white and sinfully expensive, filled the nearby marina. Dakota lifted her face to the sun and breathed in fresh air scented with floral notes and brine.

  Somewhere out there, someone was using what she and the team at the pharmaceutical lab had worked years to produce, to do … what? Drugging wedding guests seemed a strangely petty act, given the devastating potential of the drug.

  Who? Who had escaped the lab explosion? No one but her. Yet here she was, halfway around the world—searching for a ghost. She rubbed the goose bumps on her upper arms the heat of the sun did nothing to warm. All those prayers as she flew here had been for nothing. What she’d dreaded and feared was. She’d thought the day Rand walked out on her had been the darkest day of her life, but if someone had the formula for Rapture, that episode would turn out to be a cakewalk by comparison.

  She pulled her jacket back on.

  “You can’t be cold,” Rand told her shortly. “It’s eighty degrees.”

  “It’s the temperature change from Seattle. I’ll acclimatize.”

  “You won’t be here long enough.”

  “We can’t all have what we want, Rand. Like it or not, you need me, so you might as well stop flogging this dead horse. The sooner we find whoever’s responsible, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair.” He didn’t need anyone of course. He never had. He’d flicked her off his sleeve like a pesky fly the moment the going got tough.

  “I’ll reserve judgment.”

  A black midsize luxury car was waiting ben
eath the portico. Rand took the keys from the attendant, and within seconds, they were on their way. The rental smelled new. Rand smelled … hot, sexy, achingly familiar. The aura of danger vibrating about him was new, though. She stared out the window instead of at him.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, realizing he was heading in the opposite direction of the airport.

  “My men found the body of one the waiters at a hotel just outside of town. How did you get involved with Stark and Lodestone?”

  She watched the naked people frolicking on the beach as they drove by. “He was my friend too. And we had something in common.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  She suppressed a sigh of frustration and turned to face him as she fastened her seat belt. “I have the same sixth sense as he does.”

  “Yeah?” He couldn’t have sounded more skeptical and unimpressed if he’d tried. “Do you see dead people?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Rand.” There wasn’t any heat in it; she couldn’t summon the energy. She’d had this argument before, with everyone who’d ever learned about her ability. And subsequently dismissed it. “It’s not that Holly-wood.”

  “How convenient. How long have you had this?”

  “As far back as I can remember.”

  “We dated for a year, and it never occurred to you to mention this incredible phenomenon?” If his tone got any drier, the Mediterranean outside her window would sink into a desert.

  They’d been engaged, but it hadn’t taken much to convince him that she was a liar and worse. She could only imagine how he would have responded to this news early in their relationship. Maybe they wouldn’t even have made it to the engagement. Maybe that would have been for the best.

  She kept her voice level. “It wasn’t relevant.”

  His knuckles turned white on the leather-covered steering wheel. “Everything about you was relevant at the time. This is just one more thing you lied about and hid.”

  The injustice of the accusation didn’t hurt less the more times he said it. “I didn’t lie about it. I chose not to share it,” she told him, her voice flat. “This isn’t something I usually talk about, unless I want to spend lots of quality time with shrinks.”

  “Hard to understand how you didn’t think it was something to share with your future husband.”

  “Maybe I had the sense you wouldn’t ever be my future husband,” she snapped, rewarded when a muscle ticked in his jaw. “It didn’t have anything to do with who we were as a couple. And frankly, mentioning it has only ever caused me problems.”

  Her parents were vaguely loving, if they weren’t distracted, but even they preferred she never talked about her gift. For two pragmatic academics, a daughter with an inexplicable sixth sense was awkward. It couldn’t be explained or measured. They didn’t understand it, and she was pretty damn sure Rand wouldn’t have been any more accepting and open than they were.

  The sun was hot on her arm as it shone into the car, but she felt none of its warmth.

  “Suppose I suspend my disbelief,” he began, tone cool, his white-knuckled grip no longer evident. He’d always had the ability to turn off his emotions like a calibrated drip line. “How does this ‘sixth sense’ work?”

  “When I hold an item belonging to a missing person, I can track the person and/or the item.” It might be an unusual sense but it wasn’t that complicated. She saw numbers in a concise, endless stream. Data she’d learned how to process. She watched Rand’s face to gauge his reaction.

  He shot her an incredulous glance before looking back to the palm-lined road flanking the beach. “Have a crystal ball in that purse as backup?”

  “Of course.” She kicked off her high heels and wiggled her bare toes in the plush carpet as she got comfortable. He wasn’t going to get to her. She couldn’t allow him to get to her. “It’s magical. All-seeing, all-knowing. How did you guess?” She’d had twenty-seven years of the same skepticism. Make that twenty-five, since no one had asked how she did what she did when she was a baby.

  Rand tapped an impatient tattoo on the upper curve of the steering wheel with one finger as he maneuvered through the traffic. Eyes narrowed, he glanced her way again. “You’re kidding. Right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. I don’t have anything so mystical and cool as a crystal ball that tells the future.” The beaches were crowded, the road bumper-to-bumper cars, and throngs of scantily clad pedestrians clogged the sidewalks in front of the hotels, high-end boutiques, and casinos. Normally she’d enjoy the smooth, powerful ride of the luxury car, but Rand’s agitation, no matter how well masked, was boosting her own stress level.

  She rested the back of her head against the passenger-door window, willing her clenched muscles to relax one by one. “Call it a … tracking sense, for want of a better description. Holding something the person I’m trying to locate has touched shows me where they are. I see their coordinates, latitude and longitude, like a continuous stream of numbers in my head.”

  He shot her an incredulous glance. “Seriously? A human GPS?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Does it work every time?”

  She got her sunglasses out of her bag and perched them on her nose. “One hundred percent.”

  “And this has been proven?”

  “Many times. You must know that Zak built Lodestone after he acquired his extra sense, following a near-death experience last year in Venezuela.” It was oddly appropriate that the owner and developer of the incredibly successful online search engine ZAG Search would become a kind of search engine in the physical world. “When we realized we had the same weird ability, it made perfect sense for us to work together.” It had been such a relief to find someone who completely understood and accepted her.

  “I was skeptical when he told me about it.” Rand tapped an uneven beat as he waited to dart between two luxury vehicles with black-tinted windows. There was maybe an inch to spare as he took the gap. Dakota helped out by holding her breath until their vehicle was safely squeezed between them.

  “Hell,” he muttered, “I’d welcome voodoo if I thought it would solve this quickly and quietly.”

  “Sorry. No dolls with pins in them. But like Zak, I can track someone for you. His new company was built around this skill, and we’re incredibly busy doing what we d—” Oh, God help her. “What we do,” she finished gamely, as he whipped around a Porsche. So close she saw the whites of the driver’s eyes as they passed. Rand was the most skillful driver she’d ever ridden with. And the most impatient.

  Even when he took seemingly reckless chances, he was always completely in control and anticipated what was coming in the next few seconds almost before the other driver made the call. The other drivers, of course, didn’t know this. Though she felt safe with him—in a vehicle—she still held her breath a few more times as he slalomed between cars.

  His concentration on driving gave Dakota a few minutes to look at him, and she looked her fill. He had a new scar bisecting his left eyebrow, dangerously close to his eye. She used to run her tongue across the one on the bridge of his nose and the thin white mark just under his jaw. She contemplated the dark stubble, remembering how prickly it was when he stroked his face over her belly, or her breasts, or—oh, damn it to hell. She couldn’t think like this. Not here. Not now. Not ever again.

  “Trying to go fast in this traffic is impossible, and since Monaco is the size of Central Park, it can’t possibly be necessary to kill someone to get wherever we’re going a little quicker,” she pointed out. Quite reasonably, she thought.

  “Can you direct me if I give you an address?”

  Dakota’s smile felt strained. “Afraid not. It doesn’t work that way. I’ll plug that into the GPS for you.” He rattled off the address, and she punched it into the system. They headed for a tunnel, and he passed half a dozen cars at an alarming speed. Although he handled the car like an expert race-car driver, she still dug her fingers into the center console.

  He honked to let a
white sports car filled with blondes know he wanted to pass. The car moved over, and the blondes waved and blew kisses. Irrationally, the gesture annoyed the hell out of her. “You always were a chick magnet, but it never crossed my mind to accuse you of cheating on me.”

  “Because I never looked at another woman when we were together.”

  “And I never looked at another man, so—”

  His jaw tightened. “Shut up, Dakota.”

  “I shut up about this before only because you slammed down the damned phone before I could challenge your accusation,” she said, her simmering annoyance at his shitty attitude starting to boil over. “You accused me of sleeping around. Where’s your proof? You had none!”

  “If you’re going to bring up old news, I’ll drop you off at the airport.” His voice was cold and hard as glass. “I’m taking you along against my better judgment.”

  “Let’s agree not to drag the past into the present,” she suggested tightly. “It’s inflammatory and counterproductive.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Fine. Perfect. Back to the business at hand. “Rapture is administered on a pullulan wafer—an edible, tasteless polymer paper made from starch that’s placed on the tongue or dissolved in liquid. So your theory that it was dissolved in the champagne makes sense. If everyone was out of control for only a couple of hours, it was a small dose, thank God.”

  Dakota knew exactly what behaviors presented. She’d observed test patients in clinical trials. The program had been shut down, on her recommendation, that same day. “It would be a simple matter to carry the wafers in. Hundreds of wafers and a small vial of the drug would fit into a matchbox. It’s possible someone stole samples from the lab before the explosion and administered the drug here as a joke.”

  “Or a form of blackmail.”

  “Either would be a thousand times more acceptable than …”

  “Than?”