They sprinted off the side of the cliff, screaming as they fell, hand-in-hand, until the cool water enveloped them. Val broke the surface and gasped, taking in a lungful of air, her heart racing with the current. Max's head popped up a second later. He laughed, then swam to her. In the turquoise water of a tropical paradise, she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

"I love you," she whispered against his lips. "I love you."

The air-conditioning on their little boat had broken down again. Since they'd started sailing around the Fiji Islands in a thirty-foot-long yacht she wasn't sure if Max had rented or bought, they'd already fixed it once on the island of Vanua Levu. But it'd started whining again the day before, and now spat only warm ocean air into their cabin. She didn't know how long it would take them to get back to an island with a boat repair shop-she didn't even know how long they'd been sailing; a few weeks at least. Maybe they wouldn't bother fixing it again. A dip in the ocean was enough to cool them off in the day. At night, a myriad of possibilities presented themselves.

Max slid an ice cube over Val's heel, across her bare calf, and into the crux of her knee. Her skin p.r.i.c.kled in the wake of the cube's path.

"Cooled down yet?" he asked.

From where she lay on her stomach atop the bed, she glanced over her shoulder. A single dim lamp bathed his sun-kissed skin in sepia, hair mussed with salt water, bedroom eyes turned a dark brown. "The opposite, actually. Keep going, though."

She closed her eyes and felt the cube pa.s.s over her backside, then down the valley into the small of her back. It made a lazy zigzagging path up the slope of her spine, between her shoulder blades, and up to the nape of her neck.

"When I was with Lucien, I...felt something," he said.

Val opened her eyes and looked at him again. He hadn't talked about his time as Lucien's captive since he gave his statement to the police. In fact, neither of them had mentioned Lucien or the last couple of terrible months in more than pa.s.sing, instead relishing their newfound happiness as they ignored the rest of the world. She wondered if his broaching of the subject meant he was considering a return to reality.

"What did you feel?"

"It was..." He squeezed his lips together, then nudged her. She flipped over onto her back. He picked up another ice cube from the bucket and pressed it to her ankle. "It was something I've never felt before. Like an explosion of light in my gut." He snaked the cube up her leg, to the inside of her thigh. "A sun flare through my entire body." The ice slid across her belly, then between her legs. Her back arched when it touched her wet insides. Despite the cold, she felt heat building in her. "What does that sound like to you?"

Hot, cool, excited, dreamy, and dizzy, Val exhaled. So many sensations at once made her light-headed. She reached for him and played with the fine hair at the nape of his neck. "Sounds like a hallucination."

"I thought so, too, but when I was trying to escape, I heard him say into a tape recorder, 'Serum B triggered a euphoric response accompanied by the subject's e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n while he maintained a nontrivial level of consciousness.' I'm paraphrasing." The ice cube moved up, slow and lazy across her rib cage, then up the mountain of her soft breast and over the hard outcrop of her nipple. "He offered to turn your ability off."

"He was lying."

"What if he wasn't?" Water tricked down Val's breast, and Max licked it off. She let out a soft moan as her dizziness increased. "Technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. We saw him do stranger things."

"I don't know what we saw."

"What do you think the police did with all his notes?"

"In a just world, gave them to the National Inst.i.tutes of Health. In our world, Sten probably gave them to Northwalk."

Max stood and gently lowered himself on top of her. His skin slick with a fine sheen of sweat, his hardness pressed against her middle, he ran a thumb over her lower lip. "But wouldn't you like to know what other people feel? What normal people feel? Be normal?"

She threaded her hands through his hair. His chest rose and fell with hers, in time with the waves that lapped their boat. "Where would that leave us?"

His head fell and he kissed her neck, his full weight settled atop her. She closed her eyes and imagined a world where they'd been normal, awkward kids, grown into normal, boring adults, never knowing great pain, and never knowing each other. It was duller, gray, incomplete. Val's eyelids drifted open, the dim orange of their cabin a warm blur, air thick with musk and s.e.x. A pocket of pure love floating across the ocean. He pushed into her, and as the flare grew in slow steady strokes, his breath hot against her lips, chest sliding against hers, she knew whatever he'd felt would never be as good as this.

Val shot up from bed. Overcome with nausea, she ran to the toilet and threw up. After a couple of heaves her stomach calmed, but she stayed hunched over the bowl, clutching her belly, until she was sure the worst of it had pa.s.sed.

"You okay?" Max asked behind her, his voice still sleepy. She heard him get up, then felt his hand on her back.

Val wiped her mouth and tried to recall what she'd eaten the night before, now amorphous chunks floating in the toilet. Noodles, canned peaches...unlikely to cause food poisoning. Maybe the motion of the boat...

"I'm-"

Faint light through a porthole told her it was early morning. Morning sickness. When was the last time she had her period? Over a month ago. She felt the blood leave her face.

"I'm p-pregnant."

"What?" His voice didn't sound sleepy anymore.

She tried to think as nausea still roiled through her. "I think I'm pregnant."

Max sat on the floor with her and leaned back against the wall. His eyes wandered to his feet. "Whose is it?"

Val laughed. "It's yours, Max."

His gaze cut back to hers, eyebrows raised. "How?"

Whatever really happened during her rape, Lucien had ensured she stayed STD and pregnancy-free. Since then, she'd only been with Sten and Max. She'd always used protection with Sten, whenever they'd done anything capable of making a baby anyway; never with Max. It hadn't been necessary, since he couldn't have children. Or so they thought.

"When you were shot in the stomach last year and went into surgery, they could have reversed your vasectomy at the same time."

"That's...that's crazy."

"Yeah, but our world is f.u.c.king crazy."

He chewed his thumb. "Abby never got pregnant."

Val shrugged. "Maybe she's infertile for some other random reason, I don't know." She took a swig from a bottle of water on the sink, then sat across from him. "Of course it's yours. There's no way Northwalk would go to all this trouble if it wasn't yours."

"But they dispatched Lucien to steal your eggs and my sperm. Why would they do that if they'd already ensured I could get you pregnant the old-fashioned way?"

"Probably as a fail-safe. Maybe"-Val drank more water as she thought-"maybe their ability to manipulate the future has limits. Maybe they're not all-powerful, even with their Alpha."

Maybe they can be hurt. Maybe Sten and I can kill them all.

His eyes found the floor again, and she could see the gears of his mind working furiously. After a moment he looked up. "What are you going to do?"

Val hugged her legs to her chest and shook her head. She didn't know. She'd envisioned a future where they grew old together, just the two of them. Even though she'd never seen it, she still thought it was possible. She thought she'd changed their future. She hadn't.

"Keep it," Max said.

Keep it? "I thought you didn't want children."

"That was before I had a family-a real one. You're my family now. Josephine's my family. And Michael. And Toby, I guess. Turns out it's not so bad. In fact, I think I like it. Kids round it out. h.e.l.l, at that point we'd almost be normal." His eyes lit up at the possibility. He'd always dreamed of being a regular person with a regular life, and this was his chance.

Val pulled at her hair. "But not only will we be constantly looking over our own shoulders, we'll have to watch out for our child as well. I don't think I can live like that."

"We can." He held his hand out to her.

This was why they'd broken up before. He'd wanted to fight for their future; she couldn't. Now he wanted to fight again, and her first instinct was to run, to end it. But she'd been wrong before, and the result had been an agony for them both.

Val took his hand and gripped it tight. His eyes filled with a warm glow that spread across his face, and he smiled. She imagined the warmth traveling through his hand, into her, fusing them together as two bonfires meeting to become one blaze.

"Okay," she said. This time, they would fight together.

Epilogue.

Val stood in front of the Northwalk conspiracy diagram on the wall of her office-or crazy wall, as Sten called it. Hopefully Max wouldn't mind her transporting it to his study. He could even help her with it, maybe tease out connections she hadn't seen before, if he was willing-which he probably wouldn't be. Despite returning to reality and making plans for their future with gusto, he didn't want to talk about the evil organization stalking them and planning to one day steal their children, changing the subject whenever she brought it up. He preferred to revel in their newfound happiness while ignoring the coming danger, and she obliged him for the time being. He'd been miserable almost his entire life; eventually he'd have to face the threat with her, but for now he had every right to enjoy being a husband and expectant father.

With her finger, she traced the string that went from the top of the wall-Northwalk-to the single pin below her and Max-their child. She picked another pin from her desk drawer and stuck it next to the original pin. Twins. The corners of her lips ticked up. My babies. Not only was she having a kid she hadn't expected, she was having two of them at once. And already she loved them. She hadn't expected that feeling so soon, either. By her obstetrician's guess, her pregnancy wasn't more than four months along, but already she felt tired and distended all the time. She had to put up with this for five more months? And it would only get worse? At least now, with her future children already claiming a ma.s.sive spot in her heart, she was sure it would be worth it.

Eyeing the dozens of strings, pictures, newspaper clippings, article printouts, and handwritten notes, her gaze kept coming back to those two pins. Though Northwalk was all the way on the opposite side of the mess, they were still too close for comfort. She couldn't take on the organization in her current state, but she could still follow them, plan her next move, and be ready to strike when the opportunity came. She could certainly work on bringing down Delilah, starting with whatever info Zach gleaned from the pieces of Lucien's hard drive.

Walking to the kitchen, Val plopped down in a chair at her kitchen table. She flipped through the nearly two months of mail stacked on the table. Stacey hadn't kept up with it since Val had been gone, because her friend had taken off to travel the world-so said Stacey's note anyway. Val had followed up with a phone call to make sure Stacey was really alive and somewhere she wanted to be. Stacey confirmed she was fine, though she refused to entertain the idea of coming home anytime soon, or talking through the rift between them. She needed time, and there was nothing Val could do about it. If Val had been a better friend, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Hopefully, she'd have an opportunity to make things right.

On to the future. While Max and a contingent of hired help cleaned up his condo, she was supposed to begin cataloging which items in her house she wanted to toss and which she'd move into her new husband's place. Before reviewing the conspiracy diagram, she'd gotten as far as picking up her undelivered mail from the post office and dumping it on the kitchen table. Now she needed to rest.

From the stack of mostly junk mail, she pulled out a manila envelope with an odd bulge in the middle. No return address. A slow drip of dread began in the back of her mind. Max had warned her they might start getting mail from crazy people, now that they were a local celebrity "power couple." He'd received it sporadically all his adult life, courtesy of his high-profile millionaire bachelor status. Now that he was officially off the market, all those spurned, delusional men and women could begin directing their wrath at her. Maybe this piece of mail was just the first.

She'd dealt with worse. Bring it on, loonies. Val ripped the top of the envelope open and jiggled the bulge out. A big, silver ring shaped like a skull and crossbones clinked onto the tabletop. The slow drip of dread turned into a deluge. It was Zach's ring.

Val yanked her phone from her pocket and called Zach's number. She'd talked to him only a couple of weeks ago, reminding him to keep everything he found on Lucien's computer to himself, while quietly getting her hopes up that maybe, finally, she'd have something to nail Delilah with. She was so close...

A woman answered his cell.

"Hi, I'm looking for Zach?" No one besides the teenage hacker had ever answered before. Maybe he'd changed his number, or got a girlfriend.

"He's not here anymore," the woman said, a deep sadness in her voice.

"Where did he go?" It couldn't be. "Who is this?"

"I'm his mother, and he's not here because he's pa.s.sed on."

Oh G.o.d no. "But...but I talked to him just recently."

"He"-Zach's mom paused to take a ragged breath-"he took his own life eleven days ago. He's always been troubled, and...I'm sorry. He's gone."

Val's mouth went dry. "I'm so sorry for your loss," she choked out, not knowing what else to say.

"Thank you. Good-bye." Zach's mom hung up.

Val sat frozen, the phone still pressed against her ear. There was absolutely no way Zach would kill himself, no matter what his mother said about his state of mind. Dropping her cell, she stared at the ring as if it were the bony finger of death pointing at her. You did this, it whispered.

There was something else inside the envelope. Swallowing hard, she pulled it out with trembling fingers. It was a plain white piece of paper with two words written on it: Nice try.

Val slapped a hand over her mouth. She knew Delilah was capable of manipulating people into killing for her, but to murder a kid? Poor Zach. She shouldn't have gotten him into this. Now his blood was on her hands.

She wrapped her arms around her belly. She'd be d.a.m.ned if that evil woman, or Northwalk, or anyone else got anywhere near her babies. Protecting her family had to be her number one priority now-which meant staying away from Delilah and Northwalk.

With tears in her eyes, she crumpled up the letter, walked back to her conspiracy wall, and started pulling pieces of it off and throwing them in the trash. "You win," she said. "For now."

Also by Shana Figueroa

Spice of Love Vengeance

Please see the next page for a preview of Reckoning, the next book in the

Valentine Shepherd series!

Chapter One.

Five years later Valentine Shepherd sat cross-legged on her son's bed, gritting her teeth as she watched Simon dig through a pile of brightly colored books. The kids' room sported an abundance of short bookcases, but still they had too many books to fit, the excess strewn across the floor as miniature mountains of knowledge. Like father, like son.

"Just pick one, Simon."

He kept rooting. Val took a deep breath and tried to control her annoyance. It was already an hour past the twins' usual bedtime, as they'd insisted on "helping" her bake a batch of gingersnaps for the holiday cookie exchange between her group of playdate moms the following day. As she juggled cookie trays, they had decided to have a raw egg fight in the living room. She'd ordered them upstairs, then cleaned up the slimy mess. Toby, their Jack Russell terrier, helped by licking egg yolks off the walls. Then he puked them up on the carpet. At that point, she'd smelled the cookies burning.

"Just pick one, Simon."

After a minute he s.n.a.t.c.hed up a book he liked, sprinted back to Val, and dropped it into her lap.