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“Your granny was a shaman. I remember that.”
“You do?” A swell of pleasure crested through her body.
“I remember a lot about you, Scarlett Easton.”
His dark eyes burned into hers and she felt like that schoolgirl peeking at his geometry test again.
She shook her head. “Anyway, I have these abilities, too.”
“And when you touch me...what? You see my future?”
“More like your past.”
Jim bolted upright. “You see into my past?”
“Not exactly.” She tapped her wineglass with her fingernail. “It’s so hard to explain. I’m not really seeing anything real. I have visions, experience feelings, sensations.”
“No wonder you recoil every time you grab my hand.” He lifted one eyebrow. “It’s enough to give a guy a complex.”
She stared into the shimmering surface of her wine. “What is it I’m experiencing, Jim? There’s so much darkness, so much terror and something else...something unknown.”
“Where do I begin?” He rolled the glass of water between his hands.
Leaning forward in her chair, she tapped his bad leg. “Why don’t you start with this? What happened to your leg? Why do you suffer from PTSD?”
“I was captured by the enemy, kept in a confined space, tortured and threatened with beheading on a daily basis.”
Gasping, Scarlett folded her arms over her stomach. “Wh-what did they do to your leg?”
“They broke it and never set it. It healed improperly.” He shrugged. “I could endure the physical pain more than the psychological. Seeing people I’d grown to like and respect being dragged out and tortured and in some cases beheaded—” his jaw hardened “—was worse than the physical torture.”
“How’d you get out?”
“Three of us escaped—me, a Dutch journalist and a German contractor. Just like a prison break, we tunneled out of there. We had help from a few locals who got us across the border.”
“I can’t even imagine.” She collapsed back in her chair. “Was it in the news?”
“My companions were in the news. The U.S. Army kept me out of it, had managed to keep my capture out of the headlines, too. I’d been in Syria on a classified mission. Technically, I was never there.”
“You’d worked through the PTSD until you came back here to Timberline?”
“Pretty much.”
“Then why come back here? Your memories of home, of family, are hardly healing material.”
“I want to deal with everything in my past, put it to rest so it can’t come up and sabotage me later.” He stretched his legs in front of him, almost touching the toes of her boots. “When I saw the Wyatt Carson copycat kidnappings in the news and then read that the TV show Cold Case Chronicles was going to do a segment on the Timberline Trio, I took it as a sign.”
“I helped the host of Cold Case Chronicles, Beth St. Regis. She thought she was one of the Timberline Trio, which turned out not to be the case. I know you don’t think you were one of the Timberline Trio, so what’s your connection to the case?”
“I wasn’t one of the Timberline Trio, but I could’ve been.”
“What are you talking about? Three kids were kidnapped—Kayla Rush, Heather Brice and Stevie Carson, the only boy and Wyatt’s brother.”
“During that same time, a man appeared in my bedroom and tried to put a foul-smelling rag over my mouth. I fought him off and made enough of a commotion that it woke up my old man from his drunken stupor in the living room.”
“Oh, my God. I never heard about any of that. Did he run away when your father got there?”
“No.” Jim massaged his temples. “That’s just it. Slick stopped him, but then they moved to the other room and Slick told me to go back to bed. Of course, I didn’t. I listened at my bedroom door while the two of them argued. It’s like they knew each other and Slick was trying to weasel his way out of something.”
“That’s crazy, Jim.” She picked up her wineglass and took another sip. She could use a shot of whiskey about now, but Jim obviously didn’t drink and she didn’t want to scare him off.
