Free Haunting Rachel by Kay Hooper Page B

with the dope on the company, I imagine, and think about a possible criminal record afterward.”
    “Shit. That isn’t much time.”
    “No. But all you’ve got, so make it count.”
    Adam gave him a look. “Cheap advice.”
    “If you want the more expensive kind, you have to pay for it.” Nicholas smiled.
    “Yeah, yeah.” Adam leaned back and continued to stare across the table at his companion. “What about you,Nick? Just what do you mean to do if Rachel decides not to sell out?”
    Wide shoulders lifted and fell in a shrug as Nicholas said indifferently, “I’ll land on my feet. I always do.”
    The conversation broke off for a few moments as a noisy fight erupted at the center pool table and threatened to spill over into the entire room. Adam and Nicholas watched with wary interest, returning their attention to each other only when the tattooed bouncer tossed both combatants out into the street.
    “You don’t have much time either,” Adam noted.
    “No, damned little.”
    “Want me to encourage Rachel to sell to you?” Nicholas laughed. “Do you plan on having so much influence over her decisions?” “You never know.”
    “Take some more cheap advice. Do what you came here to do and don’t fuck around along the way.”
    “I have to get close to her.”
    “You don’t have to crawl into bed with her.”
    Adam shrugged. “There was a spark. Damned hard to ignore it.”
    “Do your best,” Nicholas advised. “Unless you really do like being a stand-in for another man, and a dead one at that.”
    Adam smiled a bit wryly. “There is that. She must have been crazy about him. The way she looked at me when she thought I might be him …”
    “She was, so they say. Never the same after he was killed.” Nicholas took a sip of his beer and added almost absently, “Some people love only once, it’s the way they’re made.”
    Adam didn’t reply, and after another moment of silence Nicholas pushed his barely touched glass away andslid from the booth. Pleasantly, he said, “Don’t drag me out of my warm bed again, Adam. I get cranky when I lose sleep.”
    Just as pleasantly, Adam said, “I’ll remember that. Next time.”
    Nicholas strode toward the door, the sea of mostly drunken men parting for him the way the Red Sea must have parted for Moses. Adam was amused by the comparison, for a less holy man than Nicholas would have been hard to imagine.
    Not that he himself could afford to cast stones.
    Amusement fading, Adam went back to using the base of his dewed glass to connect water rings. That occupied him for some minutes, and then he sighed and stopped. He wiped his damp fingers on his thigh and reached into the slightly open neckline of his white shirt, pulling out a small gold locket on a fine chain.
    In the center of the elaborate designs on one side of the locket were the initials
RG,
and on the other side the initials
TS.
    Adam used a thumbnail to open the locket. Inside on the left was a silver St. Christopher medal, sized perfectly to fit as a photo would have. On the right side was a photo, protected by a tiny clear shield. A girl smiled radiantly. She was so hauntingly lovely that Adam’s breath caught even though he had seen the picture countless times before.
    It was Rachel.
    The tip of his thumb gently brushed across the picture, and then he closed the locket and dropped it back inside his shirt. On a long, rough sigh, he muttered, “Goddammit.”
    •   •   •
    Nicholas stood outside the bar for several minutes, his breath misting in the chilly night air. He gazed off in the direction of Mercy’s apartment, even took a step that way. But then he halted, swore, and reversed direction.
    He called himself a damned fool all the way to his car.

FIVE
    hat?” Cameron Grant stared at his niece across the dining table. “You’re going to keep the house? But I thought you were planning to go back to New York.”
    “I was. I changed my mind.”
    Rachel was still surprised at