A Profiler's Case for Seduction

by Carla Cassidy

  Mark intended to ask her assistants some hard questions, to learn what he could from them, and then he would interview Melinda to fill in her background information, to find some definitive answers.

  He knew the trick would be to see if he could connect with each, Ben and Amanda, by themselves. Dora had mentioned that the two assistants were competitive with each other. He could probably use that to his advantage, playing one against the other.

  He settled on the bench outside the building where Melinda taught her classes, the same bench that had brought Dora into his life.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, invoking a picture of Dora in his mind. The past week with her had only confirmed to him that he wanted her forever and always in his life, although he hadn’t told her that yet.

  They hadn’t made love again, although they had shared several long, soulful kisses. It was so difficult when he was with her not to touch her, not to want to kiss her, and he knew she battled the same demons of desire. But he was playing by her rules until he got up the nerve to tell her how he felt about her, how much she meant to him.

  He’d come to her each evening feeling like a failure, disappointed in the investigation and filled with the residual darkness of the nightmares. He left her place several hours later, restored by her laughter and strengthened by her nearness.

  In three nights he and Dora planned on attending the bonfire and festivities of homecoming together. He’d thought the team would be back in Dallas by now, but with Troy Young off the suspect list, Mark had no idea when they would leave Vengeance.

  He’d called Sarah the day before to set up an ice-cream date with Grace for Sunday. He’d already spoken to Richard about taking off for a couple of hours for family time on that day.

  He couldn’t wait for this case to end to start being the man he wanted to be for his daughter. He had no idea how long this case would continue. Dallas was less than an hour’s drive away. He’d drive there, pick up Grace and eat those two scoops of ice cream he’d promised while reveling in the wonder of the child he’d helped to create.

  As he saw Ben Craig rushing out of the building doors, he stood and raised a hand to motion to the younger man. “Agent Flynn,” Ben said with an easy smile.

  “Hello, Ben. I was wondering if you had time for a few questions.”

  “Actually, I don’t right now. Professor Grayson is in the middle of her lecture and she sent me on an important errand. Can it wait until later today or maybe sometime this evening?”

  Mark saw no tell on Ben’s face, no subconscious nervous gestures, nothing to indicate that a chat with Mark might be stressful to him. “Later this evening would work. What would be a good place and time for you?” Sometimes it paid to be accommodating.

  “You can come to my place. I rent a little house off campus.” He rattled off an address that Mark easily stored in his memory bank. “Why don’t we say around seven?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Mark replied.

  With a hurried goodbye, Ben continued on his way. Mark watched him go, aware of the fact that like Andrew Peterson, Ben had the same medium build, medium height, as the person on the kidnapping videos.

  Knowing that with Ben gone it was doubtful Melinda would send her other minion away, Mark pulled out his cell phone and punched in Joseph’s number. Joseph was the one who had done the background checks on Ben and Amanda.

  “Yo, brother, where are you?” Joseph said when he answered his phone.

  “On campus...what about you?”

  “At the sheriff’s office with Nick Jeffries checking and cross-checking facts. What’s up?”

  “Do you have Amanda Burns’s address?” Mark asked. He figured the best place to catch the assistant alone would be there. Sooner or later she would have to go home.

  “Hang on.” There was a rustle of papers and then Joseph gave him the information he needed.

  After thanking Joseph, he disconnected and headed off campus toward the apartment building where Amanda lived alone in apartment 114.

  As he walked he picked through the information the morning meeting had yielded. Pulling the tail off Andrew Peterson didn’t mean the man was innocent. The fact that Peterson had been a good boy all week, coming and going to work and back home, didn’t clear his name. He was still definitely a potential player on Mark’s radar.

  Mark knew Melinda’s class schedule was light on Wednesdays, but he also knew there was no telling what the taskmaster might have in store for Amanda throughout the day. The lecture they were currently in would only last an hour and he was hoping Amanda would return to her apartment after that.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the apartment building, and once there, Mark found a shady place to sit near the door of Amanda’s and watch for her arrival.

  It didn’t take him long to get lost in thoughts of both the murders that had occurred and his relationship with Dora. It was a strange mental combination that brought him both frustration and pleasure.

  He had no idea how long he’d been seated when he saw Amanda approaching. She looked worse than the last time he’d seen her in the coffee shop, more exhausted, more stressed.

  When she caught sight of him, she stumbled and righted herself. Her gaze shot all around and then back to him. “Agent...Mark,” she said. “Wha...what are you doing here?”

  “I was wondering if I could have a chat with you?”

  Once again Amanda looked around the area, as if afraid she might be seen with the FBI agent. She hurriedly unlocked the door to her unit and motioned him inside.

  “A chat about what?” she asked once he was inside the small living room and the door was closed behind him. She laid her laptop and purse on a chair but offered no invitation for him to have a seat.

  He took the initiative, sitting on the sofa and then pointing for her to sit down, as well. She seemed to slink across the room and sat on the farthest end of the sofa from him. She didn’t relax against the cushions but rather remained on the edge, as if poised to run at any moment.

  She stared over his head at some indefinable point and waited, her silence like a scream of tension in the room.

  “Amanda.” He said her name firmly, hoping to force her gaze to his. It worked. Her eyes met his and she reached a hand up to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. “You seem nervous.”

  In truth she appeared to be a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t help but notice the ragged fingernails, bitten below the quick. Her eyes held the look of startled panic as a short burst of laughter escaped her.

  “I am nervous,” she replied. “I’m not used to being questioned by the FBI. Have I done something wrong?”

  Mark shrugged. “You tell me.”

  She laughed again. “No, I can’t be in trouble because I haven’t done anything.”

  “Actually, I’m here to talk to you about Professor Grayson,” Mark said, and instantly felt the tension in the air heighten.

  “What about her?” Amanda’s face had paled slightly and once again her gaze shot over Mark’s head. No doubt, she was afraid of what Mark might see in the depths of her eyes.

  “I heard she’s a tough taskmaster.”

  “She is, but she’s also brilliant.”

  “What do you know about her personal life?”

  Amanda shrugged. “Not a lot. I heard rumors that she was having an affair with somebody, but that was before she got kidnapped. I’ve never seen her with anyone. I really don’t know what she does when she isn’t with us.”

  “Us...meaning you and Ben.”

  Amanda’s features darkened even though she nodded affirmatively. “We spend a lot of time with Melinda.” She sighed and once again met Mark’s gaze. “Lately Ben spends more time with her than I do.”

  “And that upsets you?”

  She hesitated. �
�It used to, not so much anymore,” she admitted. She closed her mouth, lips tight as if afraid she’d said too much.

  “Are you and Melinda having problems?”

  “No, nothing like that,” she said hurriedly. “Things are fine between us, great really. She’s a wonderful mentor.”

  It was too much of a protest, instantly letting Mark know that there was an issue, at least for Amanda. He wanted to know what it was, but he was also afraid of pushing her too hard, too fast.

  She appeared as fragile as a leaf barely hanging on to a tree in the center of a storm. He had a feeling if he pushed her too hard she would slam to the ground in a crumpled heap.

  “Are you going to the bonfire on Friday night?”

  She nodded. “And the game on Saturday. It will be my first real time off in a while.” She offered him a small smile. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “Sounds like it’s going to be fun,” he replied, and then leaned toward her. “Amanda, did you put a note on my car last week?”

  Her cheeks flamed with color and she got up from the sofa. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a note.”

  It had been a fishing expedition on his part, but he knew she was lying. She’d put the note on his car to warn him that he might be in danger.

  “What do you know about Melinda’s past? Does she talk about her time before she came here to Darby?” he asked, thinking that would be a safe enough question to hopefully put her at ease.

  Amanda stared at him for a long moment. “I thought you and Dora Martin had something personal going on between you.”

  He frowned at her. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Why don’t you ask her about Melinda’s past?”

  Mark felt like he’d suddenly been cast out into an ocean with a lifeboat that had a hole in it. “Why would I ask Dora about Melinda’s past?”

  She looked at him in startled surprise. “You don’t know?”

  “Don’t know what?” Mark’s heart began a thunder he couldn’t control.

  “That they’re sisters. Melinda is Dora’s older sister.”

  Sisters? Dora and Melinda? Mark got to his feet, the world tilting beneath him as he mentally tried to make sense of what Amanda had just told him.

  He reeled to her apartment door, his heart pounding so loud in his head he could hear nothing else. It wasn’t until he hit the sidewalk outside that he realized it was anger that drove him away from Amanda’s apartment.

  Why hadn’t Dora told him? She knew he was investigating the kidnapping. Why in the hell hadn’t she ever mentioned that she was Melinda’s sister?

  Why hadn’t the background check into Melinda brought this information to light? Had it been sloppy work on the part of his team?

  As he raced toward the campus his anger built as he wondered what other secrets Dora had kept from him. What role did she play in this whole thing?

  Chapter 13

  Dora was feeling good about her life, about herself. The past week she’d felt stronger than she ever had in her entire life. She was focused, driven to succeed, and had the additional pleasure of Mark’s company in the evenings.

  She’d tried not to look forward to or worry about where things were going between herself and Mark. She knew their case against the drinking rancher had fallen apart and she had no idea how much longer Mark and the other FBI agents would be in town. She was simply enjoying taking things one day at a time.

  She refused to allow herself to love him, even though there were quiet moments in the middle of the night when the emotion fluttered inside her heart. She knew better than to embrace it.

  As she walked on the sidewalk from one class to her next, she passed the bonfire site and smiled to herself. She thought of sharing the night of craziness and school spirit with Mark.

  What had been on her mind throughout the morning had been the idea of making love with Mark again. They’d managed to get through the week with just enough physical contact between them to set her on a simmer that begged for release.

  As if he’d been conjured straight out of her mind, she saw Mark approaching in the distance. Despite the fact that she couldn’t be in love with him, her heart lifted at the mere sight of him.

  She smiled and waved as he drew closer, close enough that she could see the fire in his eyes and the determined set of his jaw. Uh-oh, somebody was having a bad day.

  “Hey, you,” she said as he walked up to her. She smiled up at him, but no answering smile lit his stone-hard features. Instead, he took her by the upper arm.

  “We need to talk.” He started to tug her down the sidewalk.

  “Mark,” she protested, “what are you doing?”

  “We’re going to your place. I have some questions to ask you.”

  “I can’t go now,” she exclaimed. “I have a class to get to.”

  “Forget your class.” He released his hold on her. “I need to talk to you now. It won’t wait until after your class.”

  She stared at him, suddenly afraid as she saw no kindness in his eyes, only hard, cold orbs piercing through her. Whatever conversation he wanted to have with her, she knew she didn’t want to have it here in the center of the campus.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said.

  It was the longest walk of her life. Mark didn’t speak a word and she didn’t, either. He had found something out, something about her...about her past. With every step they took she realized that he knew she wasn’t the woman she’d portrayed herself to be to him. He knew what she had been and now he wanted to tell her what he thought of her.

  Her steps began to drag the closer they got to her house. She didn’t want to hear the disgust, and she didn’t want her last vision of him to be one where his eyes were full of revulsion.

  Tears stung her eyes and she quickly blinked them away. It didn’t really matter what he thought of her, she told herself. He was only temporary in her life anyway.

  She didn’t care what he said to her. She’d give him all the ugly he wanted. If he couldn’t accept who she had been, and who she was now, then to hell with him anyway.

  It took her two stabs to get her key into the lock of her front door. She opened the door and stalked into the living room and then turned to face him, her chin lifted in defiance.

  “So, exactly what do you want to talk about? The fact that I was a drunk or the fact that I was a whore?”

  He blinked twice and appeared speechless. “Dora, I don’t know—”

  “You’re right, you don’t know,” she said, interrupting whatever he was about to say. “You don’t know what it was like for me in that small town where my father was an evil, hateful man and my mother was an alcoholic who bedded every man in town in the back room of the little café she owned.”

  To her horror the tears she’d been determined not to shed stung her eyes once again. She swiped at them angrily and realized she had come to a place in her life where she would own what she had been, but she refused to allow anyone else to tell her what she’d been.

  “You don’t know what it was like, to be branded just like your whore mother before you’ve ever kissed a boy, to let a town label you as a bad girl when you’ve done nothing wrong. I was Horn’s Gulf’s dirty little joke, along with my mother. Despite everything I was a virgin on my wedding night to Billy Cook, who was supposed to be my knight in shining armor. Instead, he beat me and told me every day that I’d come from dirt, that I was nothing but dirt.”

  Mark remained standing frozen in place, his features reflecting nothing as the words tumbled out of her. “My life in Horn’s Gulf was not a safe place to be. When I finally married Jimmy I thought I’d found my safe place, a man who might respect and love me, but when he told me I was nothing more than my mother’s daughter and nothi
ng could make me respectable or clean, I lost my heart, my soul, my very mind. I crawled into the bottom of a bottle of gin and wanted to die.”

  For the first time since they’d stepped through her front door she stopped long enough to draw a deep breath. “So, I’ll ask you once again,” she said softly. “What do you want to talk about, the fact that I was a drunk or the fact that I was rumored to be the town whore?”

  Mark appeared shell-shocked. “I actually came to ask you about Melinda.”

  “Melinda?” Dora looked at him blankly. She backed up a couple of steps and when her legs hit the sofa she sank down. “What about Melinda?”

  The anger that had sparked in his eyes when he’d first approached her on campus, before her diatribe on her past, was back. “When were you going to tell me that you and Melinda Grayson were sisters?”

  “Probably never,” Dora replied truthfully. Everything was out of kilter. She felt like she’d just laid her heart, her very soul, bare for nothing, and his only response was to ask her about her sister. “It’s not something I broadcast. We aren’t close and I never wanted Melinda’s star to be tarnished by me.”

  “Her star? I’m trying to take her down for the murders of those three men,” Mark replied.

  Dora gasped in shock. “What are you talking about?”

  “I believe she staged her own kidnapping with a partner and then while she was supposedly kidnapped she and her cohort murdered those three men.”

  “You’re crazy.” Dora stared up at the man she thought she knew, the man she’d fought not to love. “Melinda would never be part of something like that. She’s the one who saved me. If not for her and my brother Micah I’d still be in a gutter somewhere in Horn’s Gulf drinking my life away.”

  “I’m telling you, Dora, she’s in these murders up to her neck. It would have been nice if you’d told me about your relationship with her. The fact that you didn’t makes me wonder what other secrets you have.”