“But we spoke mind to mind.”
Yes.
“We have to strengthen that skill.”
“Yes,” she answered again. “We have to see how far apart we can get and still do it.” She turned her head toward him. “Did you and Sam have to be touching to speak mind to mind?”
“At first we did. Then later we could do it farther and farther apart.”
Excitement bubbled inside him as he contemplated the possibilities, but he ruthlessly cut off those thoughts. The first thing he had to do was make sure they were safe. From Reynard and from whoever else was after them.
“Why haven’t you reported in?” John Reynard asked the men he had stationed outside Stephanie’s house.
“Nothing to report,” Tommy Ladreau replied. “She’s still home.”
“How do you know?”
“Her car is still where she left it when she came home from her father’s.”
John considered that assessment. He’d called the shop and found that Stephanie hadn’t come back in. But now he was beginning to wonder why she was holed up in her house.
The tracking device he’d had the men put on her car showed the vehicle hadn’t moved. But what if she’d left on foot. Or—in another car?
That question brought to mind the man who’d been stalking her. Craig Brady. There was no information about him, which probably meant that Craig Brady wasn’t his real name.
“Give her another hour,” he said. “Then go knock on the door and tell her you’re just checking in.”
He got off the phone and called a man in the police force who often did some work for him.
“This is John Reynard,” he said when his contact picked up.
“Yes?” came the cautious reply.
“There was an incident at Stephanie Swift’s gift shop earlier today.”
“Like what?”
“Two men came in and threatened her, and another guy charged in afterwards and fought them off.”
“Okay.”
“I want you to go over there and dust for fingerprints. I want to know who those men were.”
“I can’t do it right away.”
“I think you’d better drop what you’re doing and get busy,” he said, then hung up.
Craig drove back to the French Quarter and found a parking space around the corner from his bed and breakfast. He would have told Stephanie to wait in the car but he knew from her thoughts that she wasn’t going to let him go back there alone.
They held hands, trying to look casual as they clung to the sides of the buildings, heading back toward the antebellum mansion where he was staying. But all his senses were on alert as he scanned the area around them. Before they reached the mansion, he spotted one of the men who had kidnapped them, waiting in the shadows across the street. It was the bald guy.
Stephanie caught his thought and went still, then followed his gaze.
With the man was looking toward the house, they were able to back up and around the corner.
“We have to get out of here.”
“I need my computer.”
