Trial By Seduction. Kathleen O'Brien

dinnertime tonight.

      So why was she here now, prowling this empty, seaweed-strewn beach in the half-light of dawn? Wasn’t this gesture a little too melodramatic for a woman who prided herself on her practicality and emotional control?

      Morbid, that’s what it was. And she did not do morbid—except perhaps in her dreams.

      She should at least have brought her camera. This haunted landscape would make wonderful pictures—especially her kind of pictures. Purcell Jennings might be the acknowledged king of lush, colorful coffeetable books, but Glenna was getting fairly good with black-and-white film.

      She checked her watch, making an automatic note of the time. Five forty-five. Dawn was only a pearly promise on the horizon. The water was gunmetal gray, and the shore was a ribbon of silver, dotted blackly with bits and pieces of seaweed, shells and driftwood. Playthings of the sea gods, dropped carelessly like toys at bedtime when the tide receded.

      But what difference did it make what time it was? She wasn’t going to return some other morning to take photographs no matter how interesting the lines and shapes of this monochromatic landscape.

      She hated the Gulf of Mexico. She had no desire to capture its undulating malevolence and hang it on the living-room walls.

      Look at it now... Like a patiently crouched jungle beast, it hardly moved, the rhythmic breathing of the tide its only sound. Its surface was calm, giving no hint of the strange creatures that peopled its depths or the blind currents that blew across its floor, stronger than any human could imagine—or withstand.

      But she knew. God help her, she knew.

      Glenna shivered though it was not cold. Try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of the fantasy that the water was waiting for her. It was as if, in her long years of hating it, she had made herself its enemy. Now it recognized her, and it was deciding what to do with her.

      “Hogwash.” Embarrassed by her lapse into melodrama, she spoke aloud. She had always rather liked that word, which was used frequently by the son of her neighbors back in Fort Myers. She had heard him say it to his boastful friends and had admired the succinct but encompassing disdain it conveyed. “Hogwash,” she repeated, but it didn’t have the same authority out here in the strange, misty dawn. She shivered again.

      She’d been standing too long in one place and she felt the soggy sand give slightly under her heels. She pulled her sandals off and held them behind her back, but that didn’t help much. The ooze of the sand between her toes was disturbing, too, and she had to will her legs to start walking.

      If she kept going, she thought, she would soon walk right into the Gulf. Would the water recognize her? Would it associate her with Cindy? Or would it even remember Cindy? Had it perhaps swallowed her so greedily it hadn’t taken time to know her?

      A bird burst suddenly from the mangrove trees just behind the hotel, its wings beating the air noisily. Her heart beat, too, with great, swollen thumps, and she had to fight the urge to run back toward the hotel. She’d been running for ten years, damn it. It was time to face the enemy.

      Somehow she held her ground. But what, she asked her stabbing heartbeat, had she hoped to accomplish here, at this ungodly hour, ten years after Cindy’s death?

      Had she thought the ocean would speak to her, giving up its secrets?

      Was she trying to vanquish her nightmares by reliving them? Did she really expect to see Cindy floating here now, her blond hair matted with seaweed, her blue eyes wide with dead horror, the way she floated through Glenna’s dreams? .

      Cindy...

      Touching her face, she realized that salty tears were running down her cheeks, dropping to endless anonymity in the sodden sand. She looked at her damp fingertips, confused. She had never cried over Cindy, not even ten years ago, when as a scared twelve-year-old kid she had been told that her glamorous, golden sister was dead.

      But maybe, she thought in numbed surprise, that was what she had come for. To cry. To let go.

      Surrendering with a strange sense of relief, Glenna fell to the sand, lowering her face to her hands. She doubled over tightly, almost unaware of the small shells that dug into her forearms. Cindy...

      And then suddenly she was sobbing openly, harsh, desperate sounds that rang through the misty air. It was as if ten years of tears had been magically preserved, waiting for this day.

      She wept for Cindy, who had been so willful. If only she hadn’t been so determined to snare one of the wild and sexy Connelly boys. The boys flirted carelessly with all their pretty guests. But only one of them had died.

      She wept for herself, too, for the loneliness and the guilt she’d held inside so long. If only she had called out the moment she saw that darkly tanned male hand reaching in through the window, balancing Cindy as she climbed over the sill.

      “I’m awake,” she should have cried. “Don’t go.”

      She buried her face deeper into her hands, trying to shut out the visions. Her sister’s blond hair in the moonlight, the man’s hand....

      On the inside of the wrist was a small tattoo, just two inches long but unforgettable. The moonlight gleamed on the design, and Glenna had recognized it instantly—the legendary moonbird, its outstretched wings undulating eerily.

      The moonbird. Only three people wore the moonbird tattoo—Edgerton, Philip and Mark Connelly.

      For years, the bird had flown through her dreams every night. Strange and ghost white, silent and menacing, its wings pumping up and down slowly, beating with some primitive rhythm that was both sensual and dangerous. Oh, God, Cindy... If only they had both been a little older, a little wiser.

      The flood of tears had finally begun to slow. She rested her forehead on her knees, not caring that her hair was mopping the muddy sand. How long had she been crying? Her chest hurt; her eyes burned. She felt as limp as a strand of seaweed. No wonder she had postponed this emotional storm for so long. It hurt. It hurt like hell.

      Lost in the pain, she didn’t hear the footsteps approaching. The cool hand on her back was a shock, and with a gasp she lifted her head, peering with swollen eyes into the glimmering dawn light.

      A man knelt beside her, hovering protectively, the way he might have bent over a wounded bird. His faint scent of clean masculinity mingled with the musky smell of the mist. He smiled, just a little.

      “You know,” he murmured softly, skimming his fingers lightly across her shoulder blades, “an old Indian legend says that the ocean was created from tears. And all mankind will have to share in the making of it.”

      She blinked at him, bewildered, half-mesmerized by the gentle touch, the unexpected words. His voice was low, sensual—but somehow casual, as if he was merely continuing a conversation they had begun a long time ago. As if he was completely comfortable with both legends and tears.

      “But surely,” he went on, drawing aside a strand of hair that had stuck to her forehead, tucking it behind her ear, “no one heart should have to contribute so many.”

      She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. His eyes were impossibly green, she noticed irrelevantly, fringed with the blackest lashes she had ever seen. And his hands were strong. Masculine. Deeply tanned. Hands that women dreamed about...

      Her gaze fell slowly to the inside of his wrist. His white shirtsleeves had been rolled back almost to the elbow. She knew what she would see. She had known ever since she had heard the first mellow syllable of his hypnotic voice.

      And there it was. Like fear made visible, like the mark of Cain. The outstretched wings of the moonbird tattoo.

      CHAPTER TWO

      NO! SHE WANTED to cry the word aloud, cursing the fate that had brought him out here. Not Mark Connelly. No...

      She couldn’t be so unlucky. She’d known she would see him eventually, of course—but she had expected to meet him in an