Chapter Five
E mma turned to Connor, dumbstruck. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“You are Violet and Violet is you.”
She snorted. “Maybe I’m not the only one with a head injury here.”
“You’ve no memory of that life. But your soul is hers. Here on Earth, once again, looking…nearly the same.”
A frown tugged at her brow. “Are you saying…I’ve lived before?”
“What it is goes by many names,” he allowed. “But ’tis a choice the soul makes.”
“And I chose to return.” She gestured to her body. “As this?”
“And I”—he spread his arms wide—“am this.”
She was about to question him further, when Jacob came running down the hallway, a look of panic on his face.
She and Connor exchanged looks, knowing he’d seen the house. Emma followed him. Connor did, too.
At the ICU, Jacob skidded to a stop at Emma’s glass door. Sweat stained the front of his shirt as if he’d been running. “Where is Aubrey?” Jacob asked no one in particular. “Where’s my girlfriend?” He turned to the nurse sitting at the nurses’ station. “Have you seen Aubrey? I need to find her.”
“It’s okay,” the nurse they knew as Riley told him, coming around the desk to calm him down. “Aubrey is resting. She’s fine.”
Nearly breathless, he braced his hands on the desk. “Are you sure? Where is she?”
“We found a bed for her on the next floor down, in the—”
Before she could even finish the sentence, Jacob was running toward the open elevator doors.
Riley called after him. “I can call down to the nurses’ station for you—”
But he was already pushing buttons. Riley picked up the phone anyway and called down.
By the time they’d found Jacob downstairs, he was banging an impatient hand on the nursing supervisor’s desk as she pointed down the hall to a closed door.
He burst through the door of the room where Aubrey was sleeping. She shot up in bed, eyes wide with surprise. “Jacob! Wha—?”
Jacob sagged with relief at the door before sitting down beside her on the bed. “Thank God.”
“What’s wrong? Are you all right? You’re…you’re scaring me.”
“I couldn’t find you,” he said, gathering his breath. “I needed to find you.” He took her hand.
“You knew they were letting me rest here.”
“Yeah, I knew. But…listen to me. Something happened.”
“What?”
“Emma’s house. Your house—”
“What about it?” She squeezed his hand now, looking scared, too.
“Someone…someone tore it apart. It’s a mess. There’s stuff everywhere.”
“Wait, what?”
“I don’t think it’s a simple robbery. That would be a big freakin’ coincidence. They didn’t even take the usual stuff. TVs. Computers—”
“Oh my God.”
“—jewelry, even. It was all there. I don’t know what they took or what they were looking for. Your room was tossed, too. I mean, it’s bad. Winston’s still there,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “Looks like these freaks actually fed him, too.”
“ What? ”
“Yeah, there was a pile of dry food on the floor. A fresh bowl of water. No way he got that food out of that closed Tupperware thing by himself.”
Emma slid a look at Connor, who shrugged.
“Winston,” Aubrey breathed. “I forgot all about him in this craziness. Was he okay?”
“Freaked out, but yeah. Okay. But the house, Aubrey. It just proves that what happened to Emma was no accident. Someone is after her. After something she has.”
“Did you call the police?”
He shook his head. “I had this feeling, this panic that whoever is after her might hurt you.”
“Why would they? I have nothing.”
“Anyway, I’m calling the police,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “And I’m going to get them to send someone over here.”
“Do you think Emma’s still in danger?”
Jacob swallowed hard. “Now I do.”
He’d worked for the local prosecutor’s office prosecuting criminal cases in their smallish town for the last three years. If Jacob was worried, they should all be worried.
“None of this makes any sense,” Aubrey told him as they left the small room together. “I mean, I could have as easily been driving there that night.”
“What?”
“Do you remember that I was supposed to be taking that meeting Emma was on her way to? With the seller of that penthouse down by the beach? You asked me to come to dinner to meet your parents instead?”
“Right. You felt bad about ducking out on Emma. But she was okay with it.”
“That meeting had been set up for days, and Emma had wanted me to do it because she thought it would be good experience for me to close that deal. Bruce Waller, the owner, was close to signing a sales contract, and since I’d been doing a lot of the negotiating, Emma wanted me to close.
But, of course, she let me go with you instead.
But it would have been me going that night.
I would have been driving Emma’s car, with mine still in the shop.
We’ve been sharing her car for weeks. It could have been me. ”
Emma shook her head, moving closer to Aubrey. “No, Aubrey…that’s—”
The possibility seemed to shake him. “But why would anyone want to hurt either one of you? That’s the question that needs an answer. What were they doing in your house, and what were they looking for?”
“That is the question,” Connor said, leaning closer to Emma as they followed the pair down the hallway. “Can ye not think of anything?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t even take anything I could see. What could they want?”
“Somethin’ ye don’t see as valuable?” he suggested, ushering her onto the elevator alongside Aubrey and Jacob, who had no idea they had company.
“But if they were after some thing ,” Emma said. “Why try to kill me to get it? Why not just break into my house when we’re gone?”
“What if they thought ye had it wi’ you?”
“But I didn’t. I had nothing of any value with me. Nothing.”
He tipped a look at her niece. “What if they thought Aubrey did? What if they thought it was her in the car?”
“But…she’s practically a college student. Her parents left her with virtually nothing. I’m all she has. What could they possibly want?”
They turned to look at the young woman who was cradled against her boyfriend’s shoulder.
Connor said, “Perhaps we need to figure out the ‘they’ before we can figure out the ‘what.’”
*
The police interviewed both Aubrey and Jacob again.
Another team investigated the break-in at Emma’s home.
But they seemed no closer in figuring out what had happened or why.
The “who” was just as mysterious as the rest. The police had taken impressions of tire marks at the scene and had a make and model of car that had run Emma off the road, based on the paint scraped off her car.
But there were a thousand cars like that in this part of the state.
Narrowing that down seemed a herculean task.
Emma had watched all of this with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It seemed like some clock was ticking down. She just might run out of time to protect Aubrey.
Connor either didn’t know or wouldn’t say whether Emma herself would live or die, but she had resigned herself to being in the moment now. There was no use worrying about death while she still had time to live.
“Connor?” she said as they watched the sun rise the next morning. Orange feathered the dark blue sky in wispy streaks that brightened as they watched.
“Aye?”
“If I live, after all of this will I remember you?” Her voice broke the tiniest bit as she asked the question. The notion that she would forget him seemed impossible.
“Hard t’ say.” He peered out the window harder, as if something had caught his attention.
“What does that mean exactly?”
“To be truthful, mortals who encounter us down here…when we’re physical…canna remember after. Their memory of such a thing disappears. ’Tis a protection for ye, after all.”
“It must be a rare thing, I suppose.”
“Now and then,” he said with a shrug, “we’re allowed a mingle. We stay for a time as nearly mortals. ’Tis usually for a task that needs doin’, canna be done any other way.”
“You’ve done one of these mingles ?”
“I’ve done them.” A muscle worked in his jaw.
“So, will I remember you?”
He turned her way at last, his beautiful eyes fixing on hers. “I will remember you.”
Her heart gave a heavy thump, and for a moment, she thought he meant to kiss her.
His gaze scanned her face, her mouth, the way she moistened her lips with her tongue.
She closed her eyes, leaning closer, parting her lips for that kiss.
But a humiliating heartbeat later, she opened her eyes to find he’d turned away again.
“Wow. Even in the in-between,” she murmured, “I can’t seem to get my timing right.”
He seemed embarrassed somehow, not at all like the arrogant angel who’d spent the last day or so feeling righteous. “’Tis naught to do with ye, Emma. I canna.”
“You ‘canna’ what? Kiss me? Have feelings for me?”
“’Course I have feelin’s for ye.”
“Bad feelings, maybe. Or indifferent. That’s fine. I mean, I’m practically dead. What can I expect?”
“I’m a celestial and you’re a mortal—more or less—and those two things, they canna be…together.”
“But I’m not exactly mortal here, am I, Farm Boy? I can’t hold a spoon between my fingers, but I can hold your hand. So, what does that make me? A temporary distraction?”
He slid a dark look at her, clearly wanting to say something but holding back.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t mind me. I’m just going through something here. Anyway, kissing is such a mortal thing. Unnecessary, really. And pointless.”
Without a beat of warning, he pulled her to him and proceeded to refute that point.
Wrapping his powerful arms around her, his mouth moved over hers with the hunger of a man who’d starved himself for too long and had found his salvation, kissing her deeply and without any of the caution he’d only a moment ago been preaching.