Partner-Protector. Julie Miller

      She bit her lips to bring their color back. She lowered her arms to show him everything he’d come for. She dropped her voice to a husky pitch that had seduced before.

      She looked up into his shadowed expression. “Just tell me what you want. Anything you want. I’ll do it. No charge.”

      He reached into his pocket and pulled out a scarf. It was long and narrow, tattered as if it had come from an old woman’s attic or a flea market. Its mustard-yellow trim and fuschia dots were the only colors that registered in the darkness.

      Mustard and fuschia, with the hard wall cutting into her back and his nonsense words condemning her.

      The damn thing was ugly. But she didn’t look away.

      She held her breath as he let it unfurl, shivered as the silk slid over her breasts.

      “That’s pretty,” she lied. “Is that for me, too?”

      Her entire body jerked at the exact moment she realized it wasn’t another gift.

      “No!”

      Suddenly it was too dark to see anything, to know anything beyond the pain that clutched at her throat. She pounded her fists. She twisted. She fought.

      Scratches flayed open as he shoved her brutally against the wall. Her hair tangled in the wood’s coarse texture and ripped from her scalp.

      As darkness closed in, fear dragged her down into its frigid grasp. Her screams gurgled in her throat. Her windpipe snapped. Starved for oxygen, her lungs imploded. Lights danced before her eyes. Her knees buckled. Blackness caved in all around her.

      No more pain.

      “Wake up! Wake up!”

      Kelsey Ryan was clawing at her own throat when the voiceless words roused her from her nightmare.

      Only, she knew it was no nightmare.

      She snapped her eyes open and looked straight into two round, dark eyes, a black nose and a pair of paws on the pillow beside her. “Frosty?”

      Real dog. Real time. Real world.

      Not dead.

      Kelsey grabbed the miniature poodle and sat up, hugging him tight, burying her nose in the soft mop of silver curls atop his head and inhaling his familiar scent. The rasp of his friendly tongue along her jaw and neck warmed the winter chill that clung to her skin.

      “Did I scare you, sweetie?” She swiped her spiky bangs from her eyes and leaned over to turn on the lamp beside her bed. No wonder her faithful guardian had been so concerned. She’d trashed half her room this time. “Mama’s sorry. I’m okay.”

      She kissed his furry head, then set him on the floor. Her reassurance was apparently all he needed to hear before trotting back to whatever chair or rug he’d deemed his bed for the night.

      Kelsey untangled her legs from the wedge of sheets she’d thrashed between her legs and climbed out of bed. The late December deep freeze radiated from the polished wood floor through her stockinged feet. But even bundled in the gray sweats she wore for pajamas, she knew she wouldn’t feel warm any time soon.

      She righted the clock that had tipped over. Three-thirteen in the morning. Hopefully, she hadn’t screamed out loud. Not that her retirement age neighbors paid her too much mind. As long as she kept her sidewalk shoveled in the winter and her yard trimmed in the summer, they seemed content to leave her alone in her cottage-style house in an old neighborhood on the north side of Kansas City.

      Still, a random scream in the dark of night…

      Wave after wave of shivers cascaded down Kelsey’s spine. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and hugged herself, trying to block out the memories. But they wouldn’t stop. She pursed her lips and breathed deeply, but the remembered terror wouldn’t go away.

      There’d been nothing random about what she’d sensed.

      She’d felt that woman’s pain.

      She’d lived that woman’s fear.

      She’d seen that woman’s death.

      A crushing sense of destiny opened Kelsey’s eyes. Something had triggered that episode. She had to find it.

      Moving quickly now, she methodically put her room back in order. Her eyes burned with unshed tears as she waited for the inevitable attack.

      Kelsey picked up the wad of blanket she’d kicked to the floor, and tucked in the sheet she’d ripped from the corner of the mattress. After retrieving the pillow she’d tossed against the wall, she picked up the dolls that had toppled over on the nightstand where she displayed them. She must have knocked them over when, barely awake, she’d reached for a tissue in the middle of the night.

      One by one, she stood her little treasures up and rearranged them. The porcelain-head doll her grandmother had sewn such exquisite dresses for. The brocaded Beast doll she’d made herself with paints and thread and love. The fairy-tale princess—a Christmas present to herself—she’d found in an antique shop to go with him.

      Kelsey picked up the princess by her narrow waist.

      Cold. Fear. Pain. “Help me!” Death.

      The same bombardment of words and images jerked through her.

      She dropped the doll as if her fingers had been burned.

      It lay on the bed now, a seemingly innocent package of old silk and beads and embroidery. She stared at it. Hard. Knowing what she must do. Hating it.

      Gandalf the Grey hadn’t dreaded touching the One Ring as much as she was loathe to touch that doll again. But she pulled the afghan from the foot of the bed and tossed it over the doll. Careful not to touch it directly, she carried it into the kitchen, dug the box it had come in out of the trash and carefully placed it inside.

      Then, with every light in the kitchen blazing, she pulled out the phone book and looked up a number. The call could wait until morning, but there’d be fewer people around to laugh this time of night.

      She knew that woman had been all alone. Wouldn’t be missed.

      Kelsey understood the feeling without having to see it in a dream or vision or impression.

      That meant she was the only one who could help.

      Conscience, and a promise to her grandmother said she must.

      Pushing aside her own fears and stiffening her spine, Kelsey took a deep, fortifying breath and dialed.

      “K.C.P.D. Crime Hot Line,” a tired, bored voice answered.

      Not for the first time in her life, Kelsey wondered why she’d been cursed.

      “I’d like to report a murder.”

      Chapter One

      “You’re assigning me to The Flake?”

      Detective Thomas Merle Banning stared across the office at his captain, Mitch Taylor. Nice back-to-work-after-Christmas present.

      Yeah, right.

      “Actually, I’m assigning her to you.” The distinction wasn’t any comfort. “You’re the detective, she’s the departmental consultant.”

      “She’s the nutcase everybody jokes about in the coffee room.”

      “Nonetheless, she’s expecting to meet with you later this morning.”

      How the hell had he gotten so lucky? He no longer had anything to prove, did he? His arrest record was solid, his aim good enough to earn a marksman’s pin, his reports spotless down to the minutest detail. And no one who knew him—with two rare exceptions—dared call him nerdy Merle to his face anymore. He’d long since outgrown terms like rookie and computer geek.

      But this smacked of some kind of practical joke or penance.

      “Why