Oh, God, she could actually see Bartoli again, because suddenly Garland wasn’t altogether solid anymore, but she couldn’t hear him over the agitated roaring in her ears. What was he saying to her?

“Lover boy wants to know if there’s anyone special in your life.” Garland could hear Bartoli, apparently, and passed the message on with an undertone of malicious enjoyment.

“No,” Charlie replied out loud, concentrating on the reassuringly solid features of the real, live man behind the phantom. The man she was actually dancing with and talking to.

“What, you’re not going to tell him about me?” Garland’s eyes swept her face. His hold on her tightened so that she could feel the power in the arm around her, feel the rock-solid muscularity of the body she was suddenly pressed tightly against. “Don’t tell me you’re a love cheat, Doc.”

Go fuck yourself. But she managed not to say that out loud.

“I’d rather fuck you,” Garland said.

She must have looked shocked, or horrified, or something pretty transparently wigged out, as much at Garland’s apparent ability to read her thoughts as at his words themselves, because he laughed.

“I’ll be around.”

Then he shimmered and was gone.

Just like that.

The sense of being tightly held against a muscular male body was gone, too. There was space between her and Bartoli again.

Had there ever not been?

Charlie’s heart pounded like a hammer.

Garland was many things (most of them unprintable) but corporeal he definitely was not. No way should she have been able to feel him.

On the other hand, no way should he have been able to come back from wherever she’d sent him, either.

So maybe on the Highway to Hell (which was the best name she could come up with for the purple-twilighty-monster-filled place he’d described) there were a few twists and turns with which she was unfamiliar.

The thought sent tingles of alarm down her spine.

“Dr. Stone?” As if they were traveling to her from a long way off, the words Bartoli had just finished uttering finally reached her brain.

He’d said, “Is something wrong, Dr. Stone?”

“No,” Charlie got out, hoping that she hadn’t taken too long to reply. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. She felt as if she were speaking to him from the bottom of a well. Then she realized that she was stiff as a poker and gripping his hand hard and digging her nails into his (dark-suited) shoulder and was probably pale and tight-lipped, too, and he must think that all that tension was somehow directed at him.

“You sure? Because it almost sounded to me like you just told me to go fuck myself.” The only saving grace was that he was looking down at her with a quizzical gleam of humor in his eyes.

Oh, God, so I did say it out loud. As she heaped a thousand curses on Garland’s head, that thought was instantly followed by two others: At least Garland can’t read my mind, and Think fast.

“What?” An actress she wasn’t, but the surprise in her reaction was convincing because it wasn’t in fact fake. It was just rechanneled from her very real surprise that the thought she’d flung at Garland had actually emerged from her mouth in spoken words. “It must be the music.” Which wasn’t really that loud, but still. “I’m having trouble hearing, too.” She took a deep breath. “What I said was, I’m just like yourself.” Whew. Close enough. “In being currently uninvolved, that is.”

“Oh. Well. Good to know.” He grinned at her with a sudden boyish charm that made her despise Garland even more. This guy was handsome and smart and decent, and if he didn’t think she was at least two parts clumsy fruitcake it wasn’t for want of evidence. “I thought I might have hit a nerve with something I said.”

“No, of course not.”

A sardonic laugh in her ear sent goose bumps racing over her skin. Garland! She couldn’t see him, the SOB, but he was still nearby. Close enough to listen in. Right behind her, she guessed.

It was all she could do not to whip her head around to check.

But she couldn’t, not while she was dancing with Bartoli, and Kaminsky and Crane were darting around the sidelines filming their every move. She had to ignore one more phantom one more time. She had to be calm. She had to be cool.

Where is he?

Not knowing was driving her insane. Her nerves were so on edge that she imagined every whisper of the warm breeze against her skin, every curl of gray smoke from the tiki torches, every stray snippet of conversation that reached her ears from the other couples, crowding close in around them, was just one more manifestation of him.

From somewhere fairly close, Crane called, “Yo, bro, can you look this way?”

Charlie and Bartoli—clearly the “bro” Crane was jokingly addressing—both glanced in the direction of Crane’s voice. Sure enough, there was Crane, waving and grinning and filming from the sidelines, on the opposite side of the floor from where Kaminsky continued to film. Charlie realized with the part of her mind that was still capable of processing anything tangential that she and Bartoli had completed almost one full circuit of the floor.

Bartoli had far more presence of mind than she did: he grinned at Crane just like a tourist mugging for the camera.

Charlie summoned a weak wave.

“Holy shit, that’s the FBI guy from the Ridge you’re dancing with. Tell me you’re not hitting that.” Garland’s growl in her ear made Charlie’s breath catch and her lips tighten. But by the time Bartoli looked back down at her, she had regained enough command of herself to dredge up a smile.

“You should’ve told me you were that hard up, Doc. We could’ve worked something out,” Garland said. “All you had to do was walk around the table in that room where you showed me your inkblots. We could have had a good time. Don’t tell me you didn’t fantasize about it, because I sure did.”

Charlie’s shoulders tensed. Her smile froze in place. She could feel the hostility bubbling up inside her.

Ignore him, she ordered herself.

“Probably we ought to try to engage in some general conversation,” she said to Bartoli. Maybe she sounded a little stiff, a little pedantic, but, hey, she was talking and making sense, and with Garland uttering foul things in her ear, that was no mean feat. Discussing the case was out; talking about anything personal with Garland listening was out, too, although of course Bartoli wouldn’t know that.

Bartoli said, “Let’s see, general conversation; suppose you tell me a little bit more about yourself? I know that after … what happened, you and your mother moved to South Carolina and you finished high school by correspondence. I know you graduated from the University of South Carolina with a major in biology, you were top of your class at USC med school, and you did your internship and residency at Johns Hopkins. I know that both your parents are still living, but not together, and according to what you just said you are currently unattached. Any other pertinent information about your life you want to fill me in on? Pets? Food allergies? Hidden talents? We probably need to do one more circuit of the dance floor before we stop, so now would be a good time to let ’er rip.”

Charlie blinked at him in surprise as he so casually reeled off the basic facts of her life. Then the answer hit her like a brick: “You did a background check on me.”

“You bet your big blue eyes he did,” came Garland’s voice from somewhere to her right. “Don’t let him snow you, Doc: he knows everything you ever did in your life. He can tell you what color panties you have on right now. Even supposing he hasn’t already seen them.”

Charlie refused to so much as flicker an eyelash in the direction of the voice in case Garland took it as admission that she’d heard him.