“Everyone needs a Tiger in their corner. Maybe my good luck will bleed into you.”
“Does good luck bleed?” she asks.
“Many people will do anything for good luck, even bleed.”
“Yes,” she says, lowering her lashes, but not before I’ve seen the shadows in her eyes. “I suppose they would.”
“What would you do for good luck?”
Her lashes lift, her stare meeting mine again. “What have you done for good luck?”
“I came here tonight,” I say.
She narrows her eyes on me, as if some part of her senses the far-reaching implications of my reply that she can’t possibly understand, and yet still, the inescapable heat between us radiates and burns. “You’re still touching me,” she points out, and this time there’s a hint of reprimand.
“I’m holding on to that good luck,” I say.
“It feels like you’re holding on to mine.”
With that observation that hits too close to the truth, which I have no interest in revealing just yet, I drag my hand slowly down hers, allowing my fingers to find hers before they fall away. Her lips—lush, tempting, impossibly perfect for someone I know to be imperfect—part with the loss of my touch, and yet there is a hint of relief in her eyes that tells me she both wants me and fears me.
A most provocative moment, indeed.
“Have a drink with me,” I say.
“No,” she replies, her tone absolute, and while I don’t like this decision, I appreciate a person who’s decisive.
“Why?”
“Good luck and bad luck don’t mix.”
“They might just create good luck.”
“Or bad,” she says. “I’m not in a place where I can take the risk for more bad luck.” She inclines her chin. “Enjoy the rest of your visit.” She pauses and adds, “Tiger.”
I don’t react, but for just a moment, I consider the way she used my nickname as an indicator that she knows who I am, and why I’m here. I quickly dismiss that idea. I’d have seen it in those pale green eyes, and I did not. But as she turns and walks away and I watch her depart, tracking her steps as she disappears down the path, I wonder at her quick departure and the fear I’d seen in her eyes. Was the root of that fear her guilt?
That idea should be enough to ice the fire in me that this woman has stirred, but it stokes it instead. Everything male in me wants to pursue her again, and not because I’m here for a reason that existed before I ever met her, when it should be that and nothing more. It is more. I’m aroused and I’m intrigued by this woman. She got to me when no one gets to me. Not a good place to be, considering I came here to prove she killed my father, and maybe even her own mother.
Chapter Two
Faith
I stand at the library window on the second level of the mansion that I’ve called my family home, but not my home, my entire life. Nick Rogers exits the front door, pure sex and arrogance. He stops to talk to the doorman, both men laughing, before Nick palms the other man a tip and then rounds his shiny black BMW that I’m fairly certain is custom designed. He begins to get in but hesitates, scanning the grounds immediately around him, and then, to my complete and utter shock, his gaze lifts and lands on my window. Stunned, my heart begins to race all over again, the way it had when he’d touched me in that garden, but it’s impossible for him to see me. I know it is, but somehow, there is no question that he knows I am here. He holds his stare in my direction for several beats, in which I cannot breathe, and then lifts two fingers, giving me a wave before he disappears into his car. Moments later, he drives away, and I let out the breath I’m holding. Hugging myself, I am both hot and cold, aroused and unsettled, exactly as I had been when I was with him in the garden. Every look and word I exchanged with that man was both sexual and adversarial.
Rotating, I sit on the window seat of the grand library that was once my father’s, bookshelves filled with decades of books lining the walls left and right, all with answers to questions that we might not even ever ask. Which is why I read incessantly and why I wish I knew which one to open for the right answers to why Nick Rogers felt so right and wrong at the same time, and why so many other things are wrong in ways I’m not sure I can make right. But that would be too simple, and I am suddenly reminded of a poem I wrote long ago in school that started out with: The apples fall from the trees. The wind blows in the trees. I’d proudly handed it into the teacher and quickly found myself scolded for my display of simplistic writing. I didn’t understand. What was wrong with being simplistic? The words and the concepts fit together. That is what mattered. That was what was important to me. The way the pieces fit. The way it made sense. It seemed so simple to me, when in truth, little in life is simple at all. And that’s exactly why I keep that poem pinned on my bedroom wall. To remind me that nothing is simple.
Except death, I think, my throat thickening. One minute you’re alive, and the next you’re dead. Death is as simple as it gets. At least for the person it claims. For those of us left behind, it’s complicated, haunting. Mysterious and maybe even dangerous. And death, I have learned, is never done with you until you are gone, too. My mind returns to Nick Rogers and the way he’d known that I was in the window. The way he’d stared up at me and then given me that wave, and every instinct I own tells me that Nick Rogers is a lot like death. He’s not done with me, either.
Chapter Three
Faith
Gasping for air, I sit up in bed, my hand on my throat, my breath heaving from my chest, seconds passing eternally as I will my heart to calm. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe. Just breathe. Finally, I begin to calm, and I scan the room, the heavy drapes that run throughout the family mansion that I grew up in casting it in shadows, while my mind casts the horror that woke me in its own form of darkness. Every image I think I can identify dodges and weaves, then fades just out of reach, like too many other things in my life right now.
Suddenly aware of the perpetual chill of the centuries-old property, a chill impossible to escape seeming to seep deep into my bones, I yank the blanket to my chin, the floral scent of the gardens that my mother loved clinging inescapably to it and to me. I glance toward the heavy antique white nightstand to my right to find the clock: eight a.m., a new dawn long ago rising over the rolling mountaintops hugging this region to illuminate the miles and miles of vineyards surrounding us. It’s also the dawn of my thirtieth birthday, and really, why wouldn’t it start with a nightmare? I’m sleeping in my dead mother’s bed.
It’s an uncomfortable thought, but not an emotional one, a reality that makes me even more uncomfortable. When my father died just two years ago now, I’d cried until I could cry no more, and then did it again. And again. And again. But I’m not crying now. What is wrong with me? I didn’t even cry at the funeral, but I’d been certain that when alone, I would. Now, eight weeks later, there are still no tears. I had my problems with my mother, but it’s not like I don’t grieve for her. I do, but I grieved for her in life as well, and maybe I grieved too much then to grieve now. I just don’t know.