Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

She shook her head, gave a mild lift of her slender shoulder. "It's not important. I guess I'm just curious to know more about you. Who you really are."

"You know enough," he said. A ripe curse slipped off his tongue. "Trust me, Dylan Alexander. You don't want to know anything more about me than you already do."

He was wrong about that, Dylan thought, watching Rio stalk away from her and out of the spacious suite. He closed the door behind him, leaving her alone in the softly lit apartment.

She pivoted off the side of the big bed. Her legs were wobbly, like she hadn't used them for several hours. Like she'd been out cold for the better part of the night. If what he'd said was true - that they'd left Berlin and arrived in the States - then she figured she was missing about nine hours of conscious memory.

Could that really be possible?

Had he truly put her into some kind of trance this whole time?

She'd been stunned to feel his fingers caressing her face as she woke up. His touch had felt so soothing, so protective and warm. But it had been fleeting too, gone as soon as he realized she'd become aware of it.

She didn't want to feel any warmth from Rio, nor toward him, but she could hardly deny that there was something electric in the way he looked at her. There was something unmistakably seductive in the way he touched her. She wanted to know more about him - needed to know more. After all, as his captive it would be in her best interest to learn everything she could about the man who held her. As a journalist hoping to break a big story, it was her duty to gather even the smallest fact and chase it down to its bare truth.

But it was her interest as a woman that bothered Dylan the most.

It was that very personal desire to know more about the kind of man Rio was that sent her gaze roaming around the bedroom. The decor was lush and sultry, an explosion of jewel-tone colors, from the plum silk bedding to the gold-hued paint on the walls. A collection of abstract paintings, so bright they hurt Dylan's eyes, crowded one entire wall of the bedroom suite. Another wall sported a giant, ornately framed mirror...strategically placed to reflect the big four-poster bed and whatever might be going on atop it.

"Subtle," Dylan murmured, rolling her eyes as she wandered over to a double set of doors on another side of the room. She drew them open and felt her jaw go slack as she looked in on a walk-in closet that had more square footage than her studio apartment in Brooklyn. "My. God."

She went inside, vaguely aware of even more mirrors in here - and why wouldn't you want to admire yourself from every angle when you had half of Neiman Marcus to choose from?

She was tempted to nose around in what had to be many thousands of dollars worth of designer clothes and shoes, but a bleak thought registered at once: only about a quarter of the closet contained men's clothing. The rest belonged to a woman - a petite woman, with obviously very expensive taste.

These might be Rio's quarters, but he sure as hell didn't live here alone.

Oh, shit. Was he married?

Dylan backed out of the walk-in and closed the doors, wishing she hadn't looked in the first place. She drifted into the living area of the apartment, seeing a woman's touch everywhere now. Nothing remotely close to her own style, but then what did she know about quality interior design? Her best piece of furniture was a Crate and Barrel sleeper sofa she got secondhand.

Dylan let her hand trail over the back of a carved walnut, claw-footed chair as she took in the garishly elegant furnishings of the place. She wandered over to a gold velvet sofa, and paused as her gaze caught on a small assortment of framed photographs on the table behind it.

The first thing she saw was a picture of Rio. He was seated in the open passenger side of a vintage cherry red Thunderbird convertible that had been parked on a moonlit stretch of beach. Dressed in an open black silk button-down and black trousers, he lounged in a lazy sprawl, as much in the car as out of it. His thighs were parted in a casual vee, his bare toes dug into the fine white sand. His dark topaz gaze gleamed with private wisdom, and his smoky smile made him seem equal parts danger and decadent fun.

Good Lord, he was handsome.

To be fair, he was about a hundred miles ahead of handsome.

The photo didn't seem very old. There were no scars riddling the left side of his face, so the injury he sustained must have been fairly recent. Whatever happened had robbed him of his classic, impossibly good looks, but it was the anger he carried inside him that seemed the bigger tragedy. Dylan looked at the picture of Rio in happier times and she had to wonder how he'd fallen as far as he apparently had in the time since.

She glanced to another picture, this one an antique. It was a sepia-toned studio image of a dark-haired woman with a Gibson Girl updo and a high-necked, frothy lace Victorian dress. Dylan bent down to get a better look, wondering if the exotic beauty with the coy smile might be Rio's grandmother. The dark eyes stared directly into the camera lens, a look of pure seduction. She was gorgeous and sensual, despite the prim fashion of her time.

And her face...it seemed strangely familiar.

"Oh, my God."

Disbelief, as well as an overriding sense of wonder, swamped Dylan as her gaze traveled to another photograph on the sofa table. This one was full-color, obviously taken within the past decade or less...and it featured the same woman from the antique picture. This later one was a nighttime shot of a woman standing on a stone bridge in the middle of a city park, laughing as her long black hair blew playfully around her head. She seemed so happy, but Dylan saw a sadness in her dark eyes - pained secrets hiding in the deep brown gaze that was fixed so tightly on whoever it was that took the photo.

And she recognized that face for certain, she realized now, though not merely from the impossible time range of photographs displayed on Rio's sofa table.

This was the same face she'd seen on the mountain in Jicin...the face of a dead woman.

The beautiful ghost who led Dylan to the cave where she found Rio was his wife.

Chapter Fifteen

It was almost as if he'd never been gone.