Free Relative Strangers by Kathy Lynn Emerson Page B

brushed across her palm. He felt her delicate shiver. His own reaction was both immediate and powerful.
    He stared at her, thunderstruck. Why her? Why now?
    For Corrie, the erotic shock waves began as a tingling sensation in her hand, then shuddered through her entire system. The embarrassingly sensual reaction was even more powerful than what she’d felt the day before when he’d touched her at the cabin, or kissed her in her room. She had to fight an urge to close her eyes and moan aloud.
    She knew the smart move would be to extricate herself from his grip, but her willpower just wasn’t up to the task. Instead she cleared her throat and tried to pretend he wasn’t affecting her at all. The effort seemed futile when she realized he must be feeling the pulse leap in her wrist.
    Slowly, he released her, his hand curling into a fist on top of his blotter. Corrie struggled against the temptation to reach out again, to seize his hand and restore that tantalizing contact.
    Bad idea! Get back on track, she warned herself.
    “As I was sitting in the lobby just now,” she said in a voice that sounded a trifle breathless, “I was trying to think of an explanation for what I’ve experienced. Something other than the supernatural one.”
    “Any luck?” The huskiness in his own voice betrayed him. He was as affected by the chemistry between them as she was.
    “Not unless someone’s trying to trick me,” she said.
    “How?” He put more distance between them by rolling his chair to the far end of the huge desk. Absently, he aligned the day-by-day calendar with the edge of the blotter. Anything, she surmised, to avoid meeting her eyes.
    The theory she’d devised while waiting for him was a last-ditch, rather desperate attempt to explain Adrienne away. She didn’t hold out much hope it would wash, but she voiced it anyhow.
    “Could a ghost be faked by using a hidden projector or something? I don’t know a thing about high-tech special effects, but I’ve heard people talk about lasers and holograms. Sometimes it seems to me that just about anything is possible.”
    “Other people would have seen something if that were the case.”
    He was right. She should have realized that herself. “I guess it was silly to think anyone would go to that much trouble just to set up a hoax.” She managed a weak, self-deprecating smile.
    “One person might,” Lucas muttered. “I’d love to be able to pin this on Stanley Kelvin, but I can’t see him having the know-how to rig special effects. He doesn’t have the cash to hire someone who would be able to do it, either.”
    Stanley Kelvin, Corrie thought. The man who’d kissed Joyce’s hand.
    At the image, she again felt the tingling sensation of Lucas’s thumb on her own palm. A ghostly caress. How appropriate!
    In spite of jangled nerves, she managed to speak calmly. “Will you tell me about him, Lucas? I saw the way you two looked at each other at the party. I could feel the animosity between you from all the way across the room.”
    “There’s not much to tell. Some years ago, my father gave Kelvin a job here. Pop felt sorry for him and, I suppose, he might have been hoping to mend some fences.”
    “Your mother told us about the feud.”
    “Pop should have known better.” With a sound of disgust, Lucas at last looked at her. His eyes were hard and lacked their usual sparkle. “Kelvin repaid his kindness by embezzling a small fortune from the Sinclair House. By the time Pop discovered what Kelvin was up to and fired him, we were nearly ruined.”
    Genuinely shocked, Corrie sagged back in her chair. “How awful.” Almost as awful was the way her attention kept wandering. She’d come in there to sort out the facts about a ghost, but she was having a hard time keeping her eyes off Lucas’s broad shoulders.
    “He was prosecuted and did some time, but the money was never recovered.”
    If Lucas had seemed tense earlier, now he was drawn tight as a bowstring, but it was