“Poppy will understand. Anyway, I came to help Sykes.” He had come to make sure Willow was all right, but figured she didn’t want to hear that. “Did you put the gun in a safe place?”
“It will be within my reach all the time,” she said.
“You shouldn’t mess with it until you’ve learned how to use it.”
She raised one eyebrow.
Ben puffed up his cheeks. “O-kay, moving right along. Marley and Gray talked to me about you having second sight.”
She laced her fingers tightly in her lap.
“You can tell when someone has suffered violence. You know what was done to them and how they’ve been affected. And you are telepathic. Can you project yourself at all, mentally or physically?”
Her lips pursed.
“It’s useful if you can, Willow. You must know that. If you’re in a tight spot, you may be able to extricate yourself.” Or not, depending on the circumstances and how strong her power was. “I should have pressed you on this years ago. I never understood why you pretended you were…untalented. I guess I always thought I could take care of you so it didn’t matter what spin you put on things.”
“Arrogant,” she muttered.
“Can we continue with this topic?”
Not a word.
“Auras. Anything there? Do you see them, read them?”
She turned her face from him. God, she only made him want her more.
“Travel at all—out of body perhaps, like Marley?”
“Or whatever it was you did to me earlier?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Snatch people up and transport them against their will?”
He ignored that. “How about created reality? Pretty sophisticated stuff, but useful for creating a diversion under dire circumstances.”
Her face became blank again. The dog licked her.
“I enjoyed kissing you earlier.”
Willow turned red and looked at her hands.
“You enjoyed it, too. I could feel it.”
At least that got her looking at him. “That was a mistake,” she said. “A reaction to not seeing each other for a long time.”
“So you didn’t like it.”
Willow wasn’t into lies. She chose to be silent again.
“It wasn’t anything to do with our separation. That kiss was automatic. We both wanted it, and there’s plenty more where that came from.”
With every word spoken, the wiry-haired dog with his sprouting mustache, pointy little ears and fur jutting out over his eyes, watched first Ben’s then Willow’s face.
“He looks as if he’s got an opinion,” Ben said, trying a smile on Willow. “If you did pick him up somewhere, you’ll have to look for the owners.”
The troubled light in her eyes didn’t make him feel happy. Damn it, if this dog already had a home, he’d find another mutt for Willow.
“You look stressed,” he said.
“I don’t need a shrink, thank you.”
“How about a brandy?”
“I don’t have brandy.”
“Coffee? Come on, loosen up. You can’t hide your head in the sand, sweetheart.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You can hope no one figures out you made the mess with that ministorm of yours in the grounds of the Brandts’ house.”
He threw up his hands. “How could I have made any mess anywhere? We’re all normal, remember?”
“You can put a mug of coffee in the microwave. It’s in a pot, but it’s cold.”
He automatically curled his lips, but turned the expression into a smile. “Sounds great.” He hopped out into the hallway and the kitchen before she could change her mind and returned in minutes with two steaming mugs. Willow’s was half milk, which he remembered she preferred. He’d also found cookies and brought the whole package with him. Willow didn’t cook much unless she got in the mood.
He’d smelled the gumbo while he was in the kitchen and it made his mouth water.
Willow got up and took the tray from him. She put it on a marquetry table and stripped paper and cardboard from the box of cookies. “You didn’t bring a plate,” she said.
Ben grinned. He liked it that she could forget herself and behave as if they were still just Ben and Willow in the comfortable relationship they’d once had—if regular physical pain and intense sexual frustration could be called comfortable.
It would make his argument easier if he could talk about his visit to the morgue, but that would be revealing his whole hand and he wasn’t ready for that.
She gave him his coffee and curled up with hers. The dog sniffed her mug and she offered it to him. To Ben’s disgust, the creature lapped with obvious pleasure before Willow drank herself.
“Doesn’t that bother you?” he said.
Willow looked confused.
“A dog drinking your coffee, from your cup.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said and kissed the creature’s nose.
Ben could have sworn the dog’s eyes crossed.
He decided on a slight fabrication over the body in the morgue. “Gray called me.” She didn’t have to know how he had called him. “Apparently, he and his old partner, Nat, are still pretty close. They discuss cases.”
“I know,” Willow said. “I look after Gus’s cottage in the Marigny, you know. He’s Gray’s dad. I wish he was my dad.”
That didn’t say much for Antoine, her own father, who, with her mother, Leandra, had managed to be absent from their family most of the time since Willow was ten. The older Millets had gone in search of something none of them would discuss, but Ben figured it related to the Millet legend and the fact that Sykes’s dark hair and blue eyes were considered a danger to the future of his clan. Too bad none of his own attempts to ferret out more details about this mystery had worked.
He made much of drinking his coffee and eating chocolate cream-filled cookies. He’d never been close with his own parents, but for different reasons. They ran a retreat house, a very select retreat house for advanced paranormals in California. Fortunately for them, money was something Ben understood and made with ease so he ran the family businesses and kept the parents supplied with everything they needed.
“Can I talk about my conversation with Gray?” he asked, deliberately offhand.
“Of course.”
“He told me that the autopsy’s been done on your baker. He’s keeping the coroner scratching his head.”
Willow’s expression closed, and Ben didn’t imagine that tears filled her eyes.
“Hey,” he said softly. “It’s a shock. I’m sorry you’re going through this.”
“Billy’s dead—he’s the one we should be sorry for. What are they saying about what killed him?”
“Heart attack, like Nat thought.”
“I’m so sad about it,” Willow said.
Now he had to take a calculated risk. Somehow she had to be rattled into taking what was going on seriously, very seriously. “The question is why he had it. His heart wasn’t perfect, but he shouldn’t have had an attack.”
“What does that mean?”
The dog scooted back on the arm of the chair and rested his chin on Willow’s shoulder. She looked at him with such obvious affection, Ben felt jealous.
“Blades—he’s the medical examiner—said the man was frightened to death. By something he saw coming.”
“How could the medical examiner know that?” She sounded short of breath. Her small, high breasts rose and
