Scent of Roses & Season of Strangers Read online

  Uncover dark secrets in this pair of classic romantic suspense stories from New York Times bestselling author Kat Martin.

  Scent of Roses

  Elizabeth doesn’t believe in ghosts. But this time she has no choice.

  Family counselor Elizabeth Connor isn’t sure what to think when Maria Santiago comes to her pregnant, terrified, and claiming to be visited each night by the ghost of a little girl, warning her to flee. Sympathetic to the young woman, Elizabeth agrees to help by contacting Carson and Zack Harcourt, the owners of the cottage where Maria lives. While Carson only takes interest in Elizabeth, Zack grudgingly agrees to help her look into the history of the cottage. But as unexpected desire draws Zack and Elizabeth together, the two sense a darkness in the house, something that has roots in murder…

  Originally published in 2006

  Season of Strangers

  In one fleeting moment, anything—and anyone—can change…

  Patrick Donovan would be a real catch if not for his notorious playboy lifestyle and matching attitude. But when a cocaine-fueled heart attack nearly kills him, Patrick makes an astonishingly fast—and peculiar—recovery. Julie Ferris barely recognizes the newly sober Patrick as the same man she once struggled to resist. Maybe it’s an unexplainable time warp fueling her paranoia, but she can’t help sensing something just isn’t… right.

  Originally published in 2008

  Scent of Roses & Season of Strangers

  Kat Martin

  Table of Contents

  Scent of Roses

  By Kat Martin

  Season of Strangers

  By Kat Martin

  Read this thrilling classic romantic suspense from New York Times bestselling author Kat Martin.

  Elizabeth doesn’t believe in ghosts. But this time she has no choice.

  Family counselor Elizabeth Conner isn’t sure what to think when Maria Santiago comes to her for help. Pregnant and terrified, Maria claims to be visited each night by the ghost of a little girl, warning her to flee. Her husband, Miguel, a migrant worker at Harcourt Farms in the San Joaquin Valley, dismisses her fears as hormonal changes. Sympathetic to the young woman, Elizabeth agrees to help by contacting Miguel’s employers, who own the cottage where the young couple lives.

  Elizabeth immediately picks up on the deep enmity between the two Harcourt brothers: Carson, the handsome scion running the estate for his incapacitated father, and Zack, the rebellious black sheep. While Carson is more interested in Elizabeth than in her concerns, Zack grudgingly agrees to help her look into the history of the house.

  But even as unexpected desire draws them together, Elizabeth and Zack feel something dark and disturbing at the house. And when the cloying scent and lingering chill of pure evil surround her, Elizabeth knows something terrible has happened here before, something that has its roots in murder…

  Originally published in 2006

  Scent of Roses

  Kat Martin

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  She awakened with a start, her eyes coming sharply into focus, ears straining toward the odd sound that had pulled her from a deep but restless sleep.

  There. There it was again, a strange, distant sort of creaking, like one of the floorboards under the carpet in the living room. She shifted on the pillow, trying to hear, but the sound had changed, become a peculiar moaning that sounded like the wind but could not be. Outside the house, the air was hot and still, the summer night densely black and quiet. She listened for the familiar chirp of crickets in the nearby field but they were oddly silent.

  The sounds came again, an ominous creak, then a groan unlike anything she had heard in the house before. She sat up in bed, her heart pounding, easing herself slowly back against the headboard, her gaze locked on the door as she tried to decide whether to wake her husband. But Miguel had to go to work early and his days were long and exhausting. Whatever she had heard was surely her imagination.

  Her ears strained into the silence, listening, listening. But the sound did not come again. She reminded herself to breathe, took a calming breath, and noticed an eerie thickening of the atmosphere in the bedroom. Maria found herself inhaling more deeply, working to suck air into her lungs as if a heavy weight pressed down on her chest. Her heartbeat quickened even more, thudding heavily now, each beat swelling beneath her breastbone.

  Madre de Dios, what is wrong?

  She dragged in another labored breath, drawing the thick air into her lungs and slowly forcing it out. She told herself to stay calm. It is nothing…only a trick of the mind. Nothing but the hot, moonless night and the silence. She inhaled again. Out and then in, deep labored breaths that should have steadied her but did nothing to ease her growing fear.

  That was when she smelled it. The faint scent of roses. The odor drifted toward her, wrapped itself around her, began to press in on her. It grew as dense as the air, turning thick and heavy, cloying, sickeningly sweet. The fields around the house bloomed with roses nearly half the year, but the scent was soft and light, a pleasing fragrance, nothing at all like the sticky smell that hung in the air: the scent of flowers, which had died and begun to decay.

  The bile rose in her throat and Maria whimpered. Her hand shook as she reached for her husband, sleeping peacefully beside her. She paused, knowing once he woke up he would have a hard time returning to sleep, knowing how badly he needed his rest. Still, silently, she willed him to awaken.

  Her gaze skipped frantically around the room, searching for the source of the noises and the smell, unsure what she might find, but there was nothing there. Nothing that could explain the terror that continued to well inside her, swelling with each frantic beat of her heart.

  She swallowed past the fear clogging her throat and reached for Miguel, but just then the rose scent began to fade. The pressure on her chest began to ease and little by little, the air in the room slowly thinned to normal. She took a deep, cleansing breath and released it, then another and another. Outside the window, the familiar chirp of crickets reached her ears and she sagged against the headboard.

  It was nothing, after all. Just the hot, dry night and her imagination. Miguel would have been angry. He would have accused her of behaving like a child.

  Unconsciously her hand came to rest on her stomach. She was no longer a child. She was nineteen years old and carrying a child
of her own.

  She looked over at her husband and wished she could sleep as deeply as he. But her eyes remained open, her ears alert. She told herself that she was no longer afraid.

  But she knew that for the rest of the night she would not sleep.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elizabeth Conners sat behind her desk at the Family Psychology Clinic. The office was comfortably furnished, with an oak desk and chair, a couple of four-drawer oak file cabinets, two oak side chairs and a sofa upholstered in dark green fabric sitting against one wall.

  Oak-framed pictures of the town in the early nineteen hundreds decorated the interior and a green-glass lamp sat on the edge of her desk, giving the place a casual, old-fashioned appearance. The office was neat and orderly. With the number of cases she handled, it was imperative she be well organized.

  Elizabeth glanced at the stack of manila files on her desk, each one a case she was currently working. For the past two years, she had been an employee of the small, privately owned clinic in San Pico, California. Elizabeth had been born in the town, mainly an agricultural community, situated near the southwest end of the San Joaquin Valley.

  She had graduated from San Pico High, then gotten a partial scholarship to help pay her way through college. She had majored in psychology at UCLA, earning a master’s in social work, making extra money with a part-time job as a waitress, as she had done in high school.

  Two years ago, she had returned to her hometown, a quiet place of refuge where her father and sister lived, though her dad had died last year and her sister had married and moved away. Elizabeth had come to recover from a messy divorce, and the quiet life away from the city had helped bring her out of the depression she had suffered after her marriage to Brian Logan had fallen apart.

  In contrast to the hustle of busy Santa Ana, where she had been working, San Pico was a city of around thirty thousand people, of which half the population was now Hispanic. Elizabeth’s family had been among the original founders back in 1907, farmers and dairymen back then. During her childhood, her father and mother had owned a small neighborhood market, Conners’ Grocery, but after her mother had died, her father had sold the business and retired, and Elizabeth had gone off to school.

  She reached for the file on top of the stack on her desk, preparing herself for her upcoming session that evening with the Mendoza family, conducted in their home. The file contained a history of drinking and family violence that included an incident of child abuse, but the violence seemed to have lessened in the months the family had been in counseling.

  Elizabeth fervently believed the sessions were helping family members learn to deal with each other in ways that did not include physical violence.

  Leaning over the file, she tucked an annoying strand of dark auburn hair behind an ear and continued to scan the file. Like all of the Conners, she was dark-haired, slenderly built and a little taller than average. But unlike her sister, she had been blessed with the clear blue eyes of her mother.

  Which meant that every time she looked in the mirror, she thought of Grace Conners and missed her.

  Her mother had died a painful death from cancer when Elizabeth was just fifteen. They had been extremely close and the difficult months of caring for, then losing her had taken its toll. Elizabeth’s blue eyes were her mother’s legacy, but the memories they stirred were so painful that sometimes, instead of a blessing, her best feature seemed more of a curse.

  Elizabeth sighed as she reached the end of the report, closed the file and leaned back in her chair. She had never expected to return to her hometown, which was flat and dusty and most of the year far too hot.

  But sometimes fate had different notions and here she was, in a rented apartment on Cherry Street, doing the kind of work she had been trained for, and though she didn’t particularly like living in the homely little town, at least she felt good about her job.

  She was thinking about her upcoming session that night when a soft knock sounded at the door. She looked up to see one of the boys she counseled walk into the room. Raul Perez was seventeen years old, on work leave from juvenile detention, to which he’d been sentenced for the second time. Belligerent, surly and difficult, he was also smart and caring and loyal to his friends and the people he loved, and especially to his beloved sister, Maria.

  His concern for others was the reason Elizabeth had agreed to do his counseling sessions without a fee. Raul had potential. He could make something of himself if he was given the right motivation—if she could convince him that his life would never improve as long as he involved himself in alcohol and drugs.

  Burglary had been the result, of course, as it often was with kids like Raul. They needed money to buy the drugs and they would do whatever it took to get them.

  But Raul had been drug free for over a year and he had told her that he meant to stay that way. There was something in his intense black eyes that made Elizabeth believe it might be true.

  “Raul. Come in.” She smiled at him warmly. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You are looking very well,” he said, always extremely polite.

  “Thank you.” She thought that she did look good today, in crisp beige cotton slacks and a short-sleeved turquoise silk blouse, her shoulder-length auburn hair in loose waves around her face.

  Raul sat down in one of the oak side chairs and Elizabeth sat down behind her desk. To begin the session, she started with a question about his part-time job at Sam Goodie’s, janitorial and delivery work that would end when Ritchie Jenkins got back on his feet after crashing his motorcycle down at the end of Main Street. In another week, the job would be over and unless he found something else, he would be back in juvenile detention full-time.

  “So, how do you like working at the store so far?”

  He shrugged a pair of linebacker shoulders. “I like the music—except when they play country western.” Raul was only about five foot ten, but he was stocky and muscular, big for his age since he was a child. He had glossy, straight black hair and dark skin, marred only by the tattoo of a skull on the back of one hand and his initials in blue under the skin beneath his left ear. The initials were a homemade job probably done in grammar school. She thought the skull must have been done during his last stay in juvenile hall.

  Elizabeth looked at him and smiled. “I know you’ll be out of work by the end of the week, but I have some very exciting news for you.”

  He studied her warily from his place across the desk. “What is it?”

  “You’ve been accepted at Teen Vision.”

  “Teen Vision?”

  “I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, remember?”

  He nodded, his eyes fixed on her face.

  “Since the farm is a fairly new facility, they only have room for twenty-five kids so far, but a couple of openings have come up and your application was one of the ones they accepted.”

  “I didn’t put in an application,” he said darkly.

  She kept the smile fixed on her face. “I know you didn’t—I did. I mentioned the farm to you when you were here before. You seemed interested. I took it one step further and applied in your name.”

  He was frowning. That wasn’t good. The students who participated in the residential program at Teen Vision were there of their own free will. If he didn’t want to be involved, being there wouldn’t do him the least bit of good.

  “The term lasts one year. You have to be between the ages of fourteen and eighteen and you have to agree to stay
the entire twelve months or they won’t let you in.”

  “I’m out of detention for good in six more months.”

  “You need to change your life so that you can stay out.”

  Raul said nothing.

  “You would start next week. While you’re there, your room and board would be completely taken care of. They even pay a small stipend for the work you do on the farm.”

  Raul grunted. “I know how much farm workers make. That’s the way my family earned their living.”

  “This is different than being a migratory worker, Raul. You told me yourself you liked farming, being out in the fresh air working the soil. You could learn a vocation while you’re there and you could get your GED. When your year is up, you could find a full-time job in agriculture or whatever you decide you want to do, something that would eventually make you a decent living.”

  He seemed to mull that over. “I need to think about it.”

  “All right. But I don’t think you can make any sort of decision until you go out there, take a look at the facility and meet some of the instructors. Would you be willing to do that, Raul?”

  He sat back in his chair, his eyes still on her face. “I would like to see it.”

  “That’s great. Just remember, a place like that requires a commitment. It’s a place you go in order to change your life. You have to want to do that. You have to want to start over and make a new beginning.”

  Raul said nothing for several long moments and neither did Elizabeth, purposely giving him time to think.

  “When could we go?”

  She stood up from her chair. “Do you have to work this afternoon?”

  He shook his head. “Not until tomorrow morning.”

  “Good.” Elizabeth rounded the desk and moved past him toward the door. She smiled and pulled it open. “Then why don’t we go right now?”

  * * *