She'd dressed in a long, black skirt and white blouse, flawlessly pressed. She was perfect. The perfect daughter, perfect wife, and perfect employee.

Tonight she longed to be the perfect lover. Her body hummed, with anticipation, with guilt, with fear.

She'd parked her silver Nissan Maxima in the farthest corner of the San Francisco International Airport long-term lot, caught the shuttle bus to the United Terminal, then used the stairs instead of the escalator. She'd done everything he asked. Except wait outside. She wasn't supposed to come up the escalator. She wasn't supposed to pace in front of the arrival monitor, trying to decide if she liked the anxiety, the foreboding.

She slipped her wedding band and sapphire engagement ring into the inside pocket of her leather purse. His plane was five minutes late. Checking the gate number for his flight one last time, she crumpled the bit of green paper with the flight information he'd given her, threw it on top of an already full trash can, then walked to the lounge area to take a seat.

His gaze swept her as he exited the plane, and her heart sank to the toes of her sensible pumps. The glare he shot made her tremble. Was he pissed she'd come to the gate? Had she ruined everything?

Two confused, blank-eyed children clung to his big hands.

And his estranged wife waited for them.

He neither kissed nor touched the pretty, plump blonde. Her sole purpose was to pick up her kids after he'd taken them for a visit with his parents.

His hands now empty and his bag slung over his shoulder, he walked down the causeway several steps behind. His wife chattered at the children and ignored him. Clusters of travelers engulfed them until they completely disappeared.

She lingered in the boarding area another five minutes, then rose, dragging her leather bag up her arm to her shoulder, and headed for the stairs, a lump in her throat. Once outside, she stood at the curb for the next long-term bus. He was at the other end of the island, the way they'd arranged. His wife had unknowingly played into the scheme, telling him she'd pick the kids up and drop them off but he'd have to take a taxi.

She wondered why they still played this silly game.

The night had cooled. Her silk blouse was thin, but the heat from rumbling buses swept beneath her skirt and set her on fire. She could feel the hot lick of his gaze as if ten feet didn't separate them, his anger and desire a potent combination.

Need, hunger, dread, and excitement formed a squirming package in her stomach. Butterflies. Spontaneous combustion.

He sat in the back of the bus, she in the front. They neither spoke nor looked at each other. The ride to long-term was the longest fifteen minutes she'd ever known. Finally they turned down her aisle. She couldn't believe she was doing this, couldn't imagine stopping it now. Wouldn't stop it even if her life depended on it.

She exited from the front of the shuttle, he from the rear, the overnight bag now in his hand. She pulled out her keys, pressed the remote alarm.

The bus pulled away. Her heart hammered.

His bag was on the ground beside them and his hands were up her skirt before she had the car door open.

He dragged her into the back seat. She spread her legs over him, straddling his thighs. The roof of the car scuffed her hair. She tugged on his zipper, took him in her hand. He sucked in a breath; in the past, he'd always initiated. There wasn't time to fish the condoms out of her purse. When she slid down onto him, he groaned, but he didn't take his eyes off her face.

She'd never been so wet, so vocal, or come so willingly in her life.

Three power-thrusts later, he came.

She screamed.

CHAPTER ONE

She screamed out her orgasm. Tears gummed her lashes and rolled down her cheeks. Hands circled her throat. From the floor of the car, the rumpled bit of green notepaper, the one she'd thrown away, taunted her, and the empty condom wrapper shouted her shame. How had it all come to this?

In that moment, before fear gripped her, before instinct took over, when her guilt was strongest, she welcomed Death. Welcomed it as the life was choked from her, welcomed it until her eyeballs ached and colors exploded behind her lids. Until blood from her bitten tongue leaked down her raw, bruised throat. And then her body fought for survival.

She tore at the fingers, shrieked, twisted, kicked, scratched, and punched. And still she couldn't drag in a breath. Terror fisted around her heart and squeezed. Fear of death. Fear of life. Fear like she'd never known. Not even the night someone put a bullet in Cameron's head.

Max Starr woke clawing at her throat, Cameron's name breaking the thrall of the dream. Blood drummed in her ears. Her heart pounded against the wall of her chest.

But she could breathe. Oh God, she could breathe, sweet, clean air smelling of early morning, green leaves, and hope. She was here, in her bedroom, where she belonged. Safe.

"Are you all right?" Cameron's voice, not spoken but inside her head, comforting, familiar, the way a dead husband's voice should be, the way a crazy, grieving widow should hear it. But she'd have given anything to feel his arms around her right now. For real, not just in the erotic dreams he brought her.

Sometimes fantasies just weren't enough.

Like now, when her throat still ached and each breath seared the tissues. She lightly caressed the flesh, her fingers cool. The damage was only in her mind.

"It was a dream," she murmured for both their benefits. Maybe her worst nightmare - - except for that night two years ago when Cameron was killed - - but still just a dream. After a deep inhale, then a long sigh, the tension dribbled out her fingertips, the soles of her feet.

Physical, reality-based sensation returned - - sheets tangled around her legs, her back stuck to the cotton. She kicked the bedclothes aside to let cool air from the open window blow across her naked body. The stray black cat gave a pathetic mewl from the elm outside her window. She shouldn't have fed it yesterday, but knew she'd do the same thing today. Her racing heart eased into a steady, normal beat.

"That was a vision, Max, not a dream." Cameron's voice again, always with her, inside her.

It had been his name that woke her. It wasn't part of the dream, vision, whatever the hell it was; his name was something she'd interjected into a reality that didn't belong to her. Even now she sensed remnants of another's strong emotions inextricably linked with her own.

In the dark corner across the room, dear departed Cameron's eyes flashed. Despite the two years since his death, those glittering points of light, all she ever really saw of him, still gave her a little jolt, part excitement, part fright. The red tip of his spectral cigarette glowed. He'd loved them when he was alive. They'd been the death of him in the end, not by cancer, but by gunshot at the corner 7-11 where he'd gone to buy his last pack.

That was all Cameron was now, sparks of light the same color as his eyes, that damnable glow of his cigarette, and his voice inside her head. Nothing more. Ever.

"Please don't start with the psychic stuff. It's way too early." Max rolled over to squint at the digital clock. Five a.m. She had another hour before the alarm went off, but she knew she wouldn't sleep again. Sitting up too quickly, she clenched her fingers around the edge of the twin-size mattress as a wave of dizziness blurred her vision. She swept the feeling aside and stood, her legs weak beneath her.

"Sit," Cameron urged. "Give yourself a minute to recover."

"What's there to recover from?" Her shrug belied the lingering effects of terror, shame, and resignation. "I've had worse nightmares."

But none so tangible as this, right down to the coppery taste of blood at the back of her throat. Max slipped back down on the bed, her head spinning. Such a strange sensation. She didn't feel quite . . . alone in her own body.

"That was a vision, Max."

No, no, no. "I'm not psychic. I prefer to be called crazy." Easy to say. Even flippant. She waved a hand in the air.

"What about that little girl? You led the police right to her body. I think that would be construed as psychic, not crazy."

Damn. She'd been calming down. Sort of. The words in her head started the panic all over again. "I walked by. I saw her feet in the bushes."

"You climbed a barbed wire fence because you heard a child crying. Then you saw her feet."

"Climbing the fence was a short cut." But to what? She hadn't known then, didn't know now.

"And how'd you know who killed her?"

A trail of goosebumps raised the hair on her arms. She didn't know how. And she didn't want to talk about it. That was a year ago. She'd put the whole thing behind her.

"Ever considered this has something to do with my death?" The room chilled around her; the perspiration on her skin turned to ice. He went on. "You never had visions before I died. Now you hear me, even though no one else can." His voice gentled. "You opened a door when you couldn't let me go, Max. It's too late to shut it now. You heard a dead child's cries. Now you're seeing that woman's last moments on earth. You know she's dead."

She had three choices, make a joke, pick a fight, or slash her wrists right then and there. She chose the first two. "By jove, I think you've got it, Watson." She shook her finger at him, just barely keeping the quake out of her voice. "Watching your husband get shot by thugs, planting him in the ground, and throwing a few clods of dirt on his coffin does something to a person."

In fact, it drove a person crazy. And that's just what she wanted to be. She didn't want psychic. She wanted crazy. Crazy was better. Crazy meant no obligations to anyone. It meant control, that she could keep on talking to Cameron as if he were alive, that she could swear he was there in her bed, teasing her breasts, putting his tongue between her legs, and filling her body full, every last empty corner of it. In sane moments, she craved the real thing with gut-gnawing intensity, but she'd never give him up. Never. Being crazy meant he was hers forever. Dear God, for-absolute-ever.

She didn't have to say it aloud. He knew her thoughts, lived in her mind, her soul. He knew her.

"What a pair we are, Max. You're slowly dying. And I'm already dead." He shed his tears for her in his voice, in his words, in the pitiful cry of the cat outside.

She could have doubled over with the pain knifing through her. His voice in her head was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because even in death he'd never left her, a curse because her life had stopped the night he died.

But God help her, as much as she knew she had to let him go, she prayed every night he'd still be there in the morning.

Max tested her legs, almost surprised to find that enough feeling had returned to support her. She'd thought the limbs were dead. As dead as she felt.

Grabbing her short robe from the straight-back chair beneath the window, she pulled it on, skirted the bed, and headed to the bathroom. Her studio apartment was small, five steps, and she was there.

The interior of the bathroom was dark except for Cameron's phosphorescence. After two years, she should have been used to the way he moved faster than her eye could follow.

Max flipped on the light and banished his glow.

Like a bad omen, a crack, running the length of the medicine cabinet mirror, bisected her face. Dark pouches clung beneath her eyes, fine blue veins traced through the pale skin of her cheeks. Dilated pupils almost obliterated the brown irises. Her short, dark hair stood on end. Party hair. Or fright.

"You've lost more weight, Max."

He was right. She looked worse than a drunk on a weekend binge. She rubbed the flesh beneath one eye, the red rim and strident corpuscles visible, then moved to one side of the mirror's fissure.

Dear God. Long furrows, just short of bleeding, marred the flesh of her neck. She started to shake from the inside out.

"Cameron?"

"Yes, my love?"

She ran a hand down her throat, the phantom roar of jet engines in her ears. "If that dream was real," and it wasn't such a big if, "then the woman's body is somewhere in the long-term parking lot at San Francisco Airport."

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