The Pagan Stone by Nora Roberts Page A

late, not early, but on the button. Cybil had that preciseness about her. She wore a shirt the color of ripe, juicy peaches with bark brown pants that cropped off a couple inches above her ankles, and sandals with a couple of thin straps that showed off those intriguing narrow feet with their toes painted to match the shirt. She’d scooped that mass of curling hair back at the temples so he could see the trio of tiny hoops on her left ear, the duet of them on her right.
    She carried a brown handbag the size of a bull terrier.
    “I heard you had a visitor. I’ll need you to tell me about it so we’re sure nothing gets lost in translation.”
    And right to business, he thought. “Fine.” He started back toward the kitchen. If he had to run through it again, he wanted his coffee.
    “Mind if I get something cold?”
    “Help yourself.”
    She did. He watched as she pulled out the grapefruit juice and the diet ginger ale. “I’m a little put out she hasn’t talked to me yet,” Cybil said as she filled a glass with ice then proceeded to mix the two liquids in the glass. “But I’m trying to be big about it.” She glanced over, cocked an eyebrow as she lifted the glass. “Do you want some?”
    “Absolutely not.”
    “If I drank coffee all day the way you do, I’d be doing cartwheels off the ceiling.” She glanced at the cards spread out on the counter. “I interrupted your game.”
    “Just passing the time.”
    “Hmm.” She studied his card layout. “It’s often called Réussite —or Success—in France, where some historians believe it originated. In Britain, it’s Patience, which I suppose you have to have to play it. The most interesting theory I’ve come across is that in its early origins the outcome was a form of fortune-telling. Mind?” she asked, tapping the deck, and he shrugged his go-ahead.
    She turned up the card, continued the play. “Computer play’s given the game a major boost in the last couple decades. Do you play online?”
    “Rarely.”
    “Online poker?”
    “Never. I like to be in the same room as my opponents. Winning’s no fun if it’s anonymous.”
    “I tried it once. I like to try most everything once.”
    His mind took a sidetrip into the possibilities of “most everything.” “How’d you do?”
    “Not bad. But, like you, I found it lacked the zip of the real thing. Well, where should we do this?” She set her drink down to pull a notebook from the massive area of her purse. “We can start with you giving me the details of this morning’s visitation, then—”
    “I had a dream about you.”
    Her head angled slightly. “Oh?”
    “Given the X rating, you can have the option of sharing it with the others, if you think it applies, or keeping it to yourself.”
    “I’d have to hear it first.” Her lips curved. “In minute detail.”
    “You came to my bedroom upstairs. Naked.”
    She flipped open the notebook, began to write. “That was brazen of me.”
    “There was some moonlight; it gave the room a blue wash. Very sexy, very black-and-white movie. It didn’t feel like the first time; there was a sense of familiarity when I touched you. The kind that said, maybe the moves would be a bit different, maybe we’d change up the rhythm, but we’d danced before.”
    “Did we speak?”
    “Not then.” There was interest in her eyes, he noted, and amusement—both on the cool side. And no pretense of embarrassment. “I knew how you’d taste, knew the sounds you’d make when I put my hands on you. I knew where you like to be touched, and how. When I was inside you, when we were . . . locked, taking each other, the room began to bleed, and burn.” The interest sharpened; the amusement died. “It rolled over us, that fire, that blood. Then you spoke. Right as it took us, right as you came, you said bestia .”
    “Sex and death. It sounds more like an erotic or stress dream than foresight.”
    “Probably. But I thought I should pass it on.” He tapped a