Third Sight

With much love to my husband, always.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

She woke in pitch darkness.

Nina Phillips rolled over, gasping at the searing pain caused by the movement. Her head throbbed, and for seconds, she could only focus on taking one breath at a time, her eyes open but blind. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t know anything but the darkness, nightmarish and unearthly.

Then she registered the cold and with it, her surroundings—the storage rooms housing items not currently on display in the Washington, D.C., Institute of Art and Culture. The rooms were environmentally controlled for the collections’ preservation—which meant they were always too cold for her liking. Cold and windowless. And now dark.

Awareness came back to her in dazed increments, and she struggled to order her thoughts. She remembered clicking her security card in the slot, the sound sharp in the stillness of the museum after closing time. She remembered opening the door to Storage Room One. Switching on the light, she’d set down her purse and walked down one of the aisles to the drawered cabinets in the rear, where the El Zarpa stones—ancient, irreplaceable and vital to her research—were kept.

And then she remembered turning, hearing a sound, seeing a shadow near the door, the room plunging into darkness.

Hadn’t she shut the door, secured it, behind her?

She was certain she had. She’d worked at the museum, on and off between research expeditions, for nearly ten years. She knew the drill. Security was the top priority. Didn’t they repeat that at every staff meeting? And she above all believed in it. Her research—her career as an anthropologist—depended on it.

Especially now.

Yet someone had been there in the storage room. The someone who had turned out the lights.

She remembered shooting pain. Then nothing.

How long had she been out?

Panic crawled up Nina’s throat. She sat up, swallowing another gasp of discomfort as fresh pain washed through her temples. She reached for the waistband of her pants, clumsily tore her cell phone from its clipped position. The phone felt dead in her numb fingers, but when she fumbled over the keypad, the display lit.

A sound broke through her focus. Her heart all but tripped over itself.

Then she realized the sound had come from outside the building. Thunder. The spring storm that had been threatening all day was breaking loose.

She pressed the number for help on her cell phone.

“Tremaine.”

Emotions smashed into her. She dropped the phone. The clatter of it hitting the concrete floor shattered through her panic. She grabbed the phone back.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed hoarsely. “I didn’t mean—” Instead of hitting 911, she had simply pressed 1, Riley’s number on her speed dial.

She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why more than a year later she hadn’t deleted it. Or why, when she’d meant to call help, she’d simply, instinctively, pressed 1.

“Nina?”

His voice killed her. Deep, intense, rich with a familiar West Texas drawl. So much—too much—rushed back into her mind, her heart, just from the sexy slide of his voice. Her pulse beat crazily and she struggled to think. It had been thirteen months since they’d broken up, but his image remained fixed in her memory every day, every night—his thick brown hair, straight nose, diamond-cut jaw, eyes caught between blue and black, the casual way he walked, his body filling worn Levi’s as if they’d been invented just for him.

“I meant to call the police.”

“I am the police.”

“I meant 911.”

“What’s wrong?” Riley asked. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the museum.”

She wanted to say, Where do you think I am? What do you think has been my whole life since you left me?

How quickly the anger tumbled over heartbreak, even in the midst of fear. She worked to shove the emotions away.

“I was just assaulted.” She heard something through the wireless connection, like a sharp intake of breath. “I mean, someone hit me on the head, knocked me out.”

“I’m in my car and I’m on my way right now. I’m radioing it in to the station just in case there’s already a black-and-white closer to the museum than I am. I’ll have an ambulance on the way, too. Are you alone?”

Oh, God.

Fear sickened her stomach. What if she wasn’t alone? The pitch darkness closed around her with a new menace.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. She listened so hard, her ears felt as if they were throbbing. “I think so.”

“Don’t hang up.”

She heard him speaking in the background, radioing in the call for police and paramedics, his voice clipped, businesslike. She didn’t let herself think about that sharp intake of breath when, for just a second, he might have thought she’d meant another kind of assault. She didn’t dare let herself think he cared on any level other than a professional one. She knew better.