Blue Dahlia

with one of the sta-blehands. They got into a fight over something, and he killed her. Maybe an accident, maybe not. Violent deaths are supposed to be one of the things that trap spirits.'

'Murder,' Roz speculated. 'It might be.'

'You sound like my stepmother. I talked to her about it,' Stella told Roz. 'She and my father are willing and able to help with any research if we need them. I hope that's all right.'

'It's all right with me. I wondered if she'd show herself to one of us, since we started looking into it. Try to point us in the right direction.'

'I had a dream.' Since it made her feel silly to talk about it, Stella topped off her glass of champagne.

'A kind of continuation of one I had a few weeks ago. Neither of them was very clear—or the details of them go foggy on me. But I know it—they—have to do with a garden I've planted, and a blue dahlia.'

'Do dahlias come in blue?' Hayley wondered.

'They do. They're not common,' Roz explained, 'but you can hybridize them in shades of blue.'

'This was like nothing I've ever seen. It was ... electric, intense. This wildly vivid blue, and huge. And

she was in the dream. I didn't see her, but I felt her.'

'Hey!' Hayley pushed herself forward. 'Maybe her name was Dahlia.'

'That's a good thought,' Roz commented. 'If we're researching ghosts, it's not a stretch to consider that

a dream's connected in some way.'

'Maybe.' Frowning, Stella sipped again. 'I could hear her, but I couldn't see her. Even more, I could

feel her, and there was something dark about it, something frightening. She wanted me to get rid of it.

She was insistent, angry, and, I don't know how to explain it, but she was there. How could she be in

a dream?'

'I don't know,' Roz replied. 'But I don't care for it.'

'Neither do I. It's too ... intimate. Hearing her inside my head that way, whispering.' Even now, she shivered.

'When I woke up, I knew she'd been there, in the room, just as she'd been there, in the dream.'

'It's scary,' Hayley agreed. 'Dreams are supposed to be personal, just for ourselves, unless we want to share them. Do you think the flower had something to do with her? I don't get why she wants you to

get rid of it.'

'I wish I knew. It could've been symbolic. Of the gardens here, or the nursery. I don't know. But dahlias are a particular favorite of mine, and she wanted it gone.'

'Something else to put in the mix.' Roz took a long sip of champagne. 'Let's give it a rest tonight, before we spook ourselves completely. We can try to carve out some time this week to look for names.'

'Ah, I've made some tentative plans for Wednesday after work. If you wouldn't mind watching the boys for a couple of hours.'

'I think between us we can manage them,' Roz agreed.

'Another date with Mr. Hunky?'

With a laugh, Roz ate more caviar. 'I assume that would be Logan.'

'According to Hayley,' Stella stated. 'I was going to go by and see his place. I'd like a firsthand look at how he's landscaping it.' She downed more champagne. 'And while that's perfectly true, the main reason I'm going is to have sex with him. Probably. Unless I change my mind. Or he changes his. So.' She set down her empty glass. 'There it is.'

'I'm not sure what you'd like us to say,' Roz said after a moment.

'Have fun?' Hayley suggested. Then looked down at her belly. 'And play safe.'

'I'm only telling you because you'd know anyway, or suspect, or wonder. It seems better not to dance around it. And it doesn't seem right for me to ask you to watch my kids while I'm off ... while I'm off without being honest about it.'

'It is your life, Stella,' Roz pointed out.

'Yeah.' Hayley took the last delicious sip of her champagne. 'Not that I wouldn't be willing to hear the details. I think hearing about sex is as close as I'm getting to it for a long time. So if you want to share ...'

'I'll keep that in mind. Now I'd better go down and round up my boys. Thanks for the celebration, Roz.'

'We earned it.'

As Stella walked away, she heard Roz's questioning 'Mr. Hunky?' And the dual peals of female laughter.

FOURTEEN

Guilt tugged at Stella as she buzzed home to clean up before her date with Logan. No, not date, she corrected as she jumped into the shower. It wasn't a date unless there were plans. This was a drop-by.

So now they'd had an outing, a date, and a drop-by. It was the strangest relationship she'd ever had.

But whatever she called it, she felt guilty. She wasn't the one giving her kids their evening meal and listening to their day's adventures while they ate.

It wasn't that she had to be with them every free moment, she thought as she jumped back out of the shower again. That sort of thing wasn't good for them—or for her. It wasn't as if they'd starve if she wasn't the one to put food in front of them.

But still, it seemed awfully selfish of her to give them over to someone else's care just so she could be with a man.

Be intimate with a man, if things went as she expected.

Sorry, kids, Mom can't have dinner with you tonight. She's going to go have some hot, sweaty sex.

God.

She slathered on cream as she struggled between anticipation and guilt.

Maybe she should put it off. Unquestionably she was rushing this step, and that wasn't like her. When

she did things that weren't like her, it was usually a mistake.

She was thirty-three years old, and entitled to a physical relationship with a man she liked, a man who stirred her up, a man, who it turned out, she had considerable in common with.

Thirty-three. Thirty-four in August, she reminded herself and winced. Thirty-four wasn't early thirties anymore. It was mid-thirties. Shit.

Okay, she wasn't going to think about that. Forget the numbers. She'd just say she was a grown woman. That was better.

Grown woman, she thought, and tugged on her robe so she could work on her face. Grown, single woman. Grown, single man. Mutual interests between them, reasonable sense of companionship.

Intense sexual tension.

How could a woman think straight when she kept imagining what it would be like to have a man's hands—

'Mom!'

She stared at her partially made-up face in the mirror. 'Yes?'

The knocking was like machine-gun fire on the bathroom door.

'Mom! Can I come in? Can I? Mom!'

She pulled open the door herself to see Luke, rosy with rage, his fists bunched at his side. 'What's the matter?'

'He's looking at me.'

'Oh, Luke.'

'With the face, Mom. With ... the ... face.'

She knew the face well. It was the squinty-eyed, smirky sneer that Gavin had designed to torment his brother. She knew damn well he practiced it in,the mirror.

'Just don't look back at him.'

'Then he makes the noise.'

The noise was a hissing puff, which Gavin could keep up for hours if called for. Stella was certain that even the most hardened CIA agent would crack under its brutal power.

'All right.' How the hell was she supposed to gear herself up for sex when she had to referee? She swung out