by Lisa Childs
Because she lifted a dark blond brow in question, Trent answered, “Phillip Graves.”
A breath hissed out between Vonner’s clenched teeth at the mention of the director’s name. He turned his back on Trent and spoke softly to her. “We gotta stop this, Alaina. We can’t have a suspect getting access to the crime scene and the evidence. We have to talk to the director.”
“You need to talk to Agent Bilski first,” she corrected her coworker as she slipped past him to stand on the opposite side of the metal table from Trent. “Don’t go over his head.”
“Okay, Bilski first,” Vonner agreed. “But you have to come with me to talk to him.”
She shook her head in denial.
Trent’s lips twitched into an amused grin. She didn’t like being told what to do. He could identify; he’d never liked taking orders.
“I can’t leave you alone with him,” Vonner said.
She lifted her gaze from the victim to Trent. “Where’s Dr. Rosenthal?”
“He stepped out to get something for me,” Trent admitted.
“What the hell? Are you ordering him around like you do that ape you have on your payroll?” Vonner asked.
“Oh, I’m glad you’re still here,” Dr. Rosenthal said as he rushed back into the room. “Thank you for waiting for me.”
The gray-haired coroner’s admiration and awe physically washed over Trent, drawing a smile from him even as Vonner’s disgust and distrust pummeled him from the other side of the room. But he experienced none of Alaina’s emotions. He could only feel her, like a touch on his skin, a kiss on his lips….
Dr. Rosenthal held out a book and a pen to Trent. “Do you mind signing my copy for me?”
Trent steadied his hand as he reached for the book, the same edition that had been spattered with blood at the crime scene. Even though this cover was clean, he could see the blood again on his hand.
How was he involved in all of this? It was more than mere coincidence. He knew this. And so did she.
Vonner snorted and turned on his heel, leaving the room. Trent noted his exit, but Alaina didn’t so much as glance at her partner. Instead, she stared at him, as if trying to figure out who he was or where she’d seen him before.
An image chased through Trent’s mind. The curve of a woman’s throat as she arched her neck. Her hands, with slender, red-tipped fingers, cupping and caressing her own breasts as she moved her hips, rocking back and forth on his pulsing erection. Then her cry of pleasure as she came. The woman had red hair and green eyes; she looked nothing like Alaina. But to him, she felt the same.
“Mr. Baines,” the coroner said, glancing from him to Agent Paulsen. Confusion wrinkled his brow. “Do you mind autographing …?”
“Not at all,” Trent assured him, flipping through until he came to the title page. Then he scrawled the doctor’s name, some platitude and his own, although sometimes he didn’t feel as if his name was really his. Even though he hadn’t taken a pen name, Trent Baines felt like an alias; he felt as if he was really someone else.
“So, Dr. Rosenthal,” Alaina said, drawing the coroner’s attention away from him, “when will you have the autopsy report ready?”
“I need more time,” Dr. Rosenthal said, his face flushing with color.
“How long?” Alaina asked sharply, her impatience with the doctor’s lack of professionalism obvious.
“I can’t tell you how long it will take me,” the doctor said. “It’s getting late….”
“How long has she been dead?” she clarified.
“I did a liver temp. Twenty-four hours.”
She glanced at Trent. No doubt he was back on her suspect list. Then she turned to the doctor again and advised, “Let me know as soon as you finish the autopsy. And don’t call me again if you don’t have any information for me.”
Dr. Rosenthal sputtered, “B-but I didn’t—”
“I called you,” Trent admitted, irritation gripping him that the male agent had answered her phone.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I can tell you what happened to her.”
She said nothing, only turned that unfathomable stare on him again.
He continued, anyway. “She was raped, then strangled until she nearly blacked out.”
Dr. Rosenthal gestured toward the victim’s throat. “There is bruising around her neck that supports that.”
“And then she was stabbed,” he said with a twinge in his chest as he relived the woman’s pain. He drew in a ragged breath before finishing his assessment, “And her heart removed from her chest.”
The doctor did not need to point out the gaping hole and missing organ in the mutilated corpse. Dr. Rosenthal only added, “His M.O. is just like that of the protagonist in your books, just like the Thief of Hearts.”
“Exactly like the Thief of Hearts,” Alaina agreed, her eyes unblinking as she studied Trent.
Did she expect a confession?
Chapter 4
“I want to talk to you,” Alaina said from the shadows of the dimly lit corridor. She’d waited for Trent outside the morgue, unwilling to watch the coroner continue to fawn over the author. And she’d been unable to stand beside the body of the red-haired woman who’d died such a violent death—the same death Alaina was certain she had experienced.
Trent grinned as if not a bit surprised to find her in the hall, waiting for him. Then he reminded her, “I warned you that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from me.”
Heat flushed her skin as she remembered what he’d told her when she’d left him that morning. Then another memory flashed through her mind: a thumb stroking across her bottom lip, back and forth. A hungry mouth sliding down her throat, nibbling along her collarbone before skimming over the slope of her breast to the nipple that peaked, begging for attention. His attention.
She swallowed hard, choking down the desire that overwhelmed her. “I only want to talk to you.”
His naughty, sexy grin widened as he stepped closer to her, trapping her against the wall. “Why waste our time talking?” he asked, his voice a seductive purr. “I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear.”
“What’s that?” She leaned her head back, away from the temptation of his lips. “What do I want to hear?”
“That I’m the killer.”
“If only it were that easy …” She sighed, bone-deep weary from a day that had started with her and Vonner on the road at dawn, driving up to Trent Baines’s remote castle in the Upper Peninsula. Now, night had fallen and she was back where she’d started in Detroit … only with Trent Baines. Just as he’d said, she couldn’t stay away from him.
The image flashed through her mind again—lips tugging at her nipple, a tongue flicking across the tip, hands caressing her back, then along her sides to the curve of her hips. She arched and parted her legs, silently begging for him to take her….
But he pulled back.
Trent stepped away from her and asked, “Killers don’t spontaneously confess like on television?” His green eyes sparkled with feigned innocence.
“No one who’d actually committed a crime ever spontaneously confessed to me.” She crossed her arms across her chest. It was cold in the hall, but her skin was hot, flushed with desire for the man in her mind.
And maybe the one in the hall …
“Innocent people confess?” he asked.
“Innocent? I don’t know how innocent they are when they interfere with an investigation just to get attention. Screwed up, yeah.” But then, so was she, to be attracted to a man who might be a killer.
He lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug. “Well, I’m not going to confess either my guilt or innocence. You’re wasting your time talking to me.”
“And you’re wasting your time going to the crime scene, visiting the morgue.” Tension pounded at her temples and knotted the muscles in her neck and shoulders. “What are you doing here in the middle of my investigation?”
“I got clearance.”
“That’s what the director thinks,” he admitted with a wink. “But I’m really not one to do much research.”
“Then I’ll ask you again. What are you doing here?” Trying to cover up evidence that might have implicated him? Sure, the crime scene had already been processed, the evidence collected, before he’d arrived. But still his presence there, and at the morgue, unsettled her, raising her suspicions about him even more.
He stepped forward again and touched her, just the pad of his thumb sliding along the line of her jaw. “I’m here for you.”
She shivered at the intensity of his gaze and the heat of his touch. Both felt eerily familiar. “Why? You won’t answer my questions.”
“I want to help you, Alaina,” he said, his deep voice full of seductive promise. “I want you to figure out what you need to know.”
“I need to know who this killer is,” she said. “I need to catch him.” She’d wanted that for so long, even before he’d killed again. Now she had to find him, to stop him….
“That’s not all you need to know.” He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching hers. “You need to know about us.”
She pushed her hands against his chest and shoved him back. Ignoring the tingling in her palms from the heat of his body and the hardness of his muscles, she shook her head. “There is no us. And there will never be.”
But had there been? In another life? Was he the lover she dreamed of, even wide-awake? Was he the man who had loved her so passionately in her past life that no other man in this life had ever measured up?
“You feel it, Alaina,” he insisted, his voice a rough whisper. “I know you feel it, too.”
Staring into his eyes, she could almost glimpse the images in their depths, the images that had been taunting her, of two naked bodies intimately connected, physically and emotionally. Alaina dragged in a ragged breath of air and shook her head again, trying to clear it. “All I feel for you is suspicion. You know more than you’re telling me about those old murders and this one.”
His grin flashed again. “You feel more than that. You feel what I feel….”
It didn’t matter what she felt. “I don’t trust you,” she stated unequivocally, reminding herself. “All I want is the truth.”
“Since you don’t trust me, you won’t believe that anything I tell you is the truth,” he pointed out. “So I guess we have nothing to talk about.”
Images, like slides in a projector, flicked through her mind—a sculpted chest pressed against her breasts, heavily muscled arms holding her close, perspiration glistening on slick skin….
She opened, then closed, her mouth, knowing it was useless to ask Trent Baines any more questions. Like he’d said, she wouldn’t trust the veracity of his answers.
But since she didn’t trust anyone with her secrets, she couldn’t expect him to share his willingly. She’d have to find out what she wanted to know another way.
“Come with me,” he urged her, his green eyes glittering with desire and erotic promises. “Come with me and we won’t have to talk at all.”
Temptation pulled at her to see if he could deliver on those promises. To see if he could make her feel what she only imagined….
“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, as if afraid someone might overhear her and catch them. “It’s so wrong….”
“That’s what makes it so exciting,” he pointed out as he reached for her.
She pressed her palms against his chest, as if about to push him away again. Her eyes wide with confusion, she stared up at him. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
“I told you,” he reminded her, “that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from me … any more than I can stay away from you. You belong with me.”
She shook her head, trying to deny him, trying to deny her feelings.
He cupped her chin in his hand and tipped her face up. “Look at me. I’m the man you’re meant to be with. You can feel it, too.” He lowered his lips and just brushed them across hers. “When I kiss you …” He trailed his fingers across her cheek, along the length of her neck to the curve of her breast. “When I touch you …”
Her fingers clenched the fabric of his shirt, dragging him closer. “I want you.”
Want. It wasn’t love. And what he wanted—needed—was her love.
The soft click of a door opening drew Trent’s attention from his computer screen. He lifted his head as Dietrich stepped inside his room of the hotel suite they shared.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the big man said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your writing.”
“No, that’s fine.” He didn’t want to be writing, anyway; he wanted to be with Alaina. But she had refused his proposition and denied her feelings for him.
Hell, maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe he couldn’t feel what she felt because she felt nothing for him. Maybe this connection between them, this sense of destiny, was only in his mind.
Trent rubbed a hand across his forehead where tension pounded with the onslaught of the emotions of others. “Did you get this floor cleared?”
Dietrich nodded. “The concierge helped convince them to move to the new rooms you’re paying for.”
“And everyone moved?” Because he could still feel the anxiety of someone about to do something … Apply for a new job? Ask someone to marry him?
And the couple that fought …
Trent felt their anger and resentment, the hurt and pain that felt eerily familiar even though he’d never been in a relationship that had lasted beyond a week or two of physical pleasure.
At least, he hadn’t in this life.
Had he lived before? Or was it that through their emotions he lived everyone else’s life right now?
Dietrich nodded. “Everyone on this floor has moved. But there are people on the floor below and in the buildings surrounding this hotel. We should go home, where it’s quiet and peaceful,” he urged. “The city is too much for you.”
Trent closed his eyes as a red haze of emotion rushed over him. Then oblivion, black and comforting, tempted him to slip into unconsciousness. He’d done it before. Blacked out when he was too overwhelmed to deal with the pain of others.
At the crime scene and the morgue, he’d nearly lost consciousness. The terror and pain had been so intense.
But he was stronger now than the kid he’d once been … the kid who’d escaped into his own little world so he wouldn’t have to deal with others. He opened his eyes to the screen of his laptop. The words he’d just written all blurred together unintelligibly.
And he realized it hadn’t been his own little world.
Other people had lived in it with him … Before he had killed them?
Dietrich cleared his throat, drawing Trent’s attention back to where he hovered, like a mother hen, in the doorway of the suite. He spoke hesitantly, dropping each word softly into the silence. “I don’t understand why we’re here.”
Trent leaned back in his chair at the desk. Too weary to speak, he just arched a brow.
“You have that book to finish.”
He’d already missed his deadline.
“Your editor called again today.” Dietrich relayed the message, as much secretary as bodyguard. “Twice.”
Evan was pissed, not just about the deadline but because Trent had told him this book would be the last in the lucrative Thief of Hearts series. It was time to end it. But he’d been struggling before Alaina Paulsen had shattered his peace and quiet and confirmed that his fiction was actually fact.
Fact that Trent didn’t know if he was strong enough yet to face….
“I’ll get the book done,” he promised Dietrich and himself.
“But it’s easier for you to write back at the estate,” his assistant insisted. “You have fewer distractions.”
It wasn’t just
his empathy that distracted him now; it was her. And Dietrich must have noticed.
Hell, Trent had left shortly after she had that morning. But it hadn’t been just that he was drawn to her, connected in some way he couldn’t explain. It had been because of the murder. He’d called the Bureau to find out why she’d been called away so abruptly and he’d learned of it. The ritualistic killing that so closely matched the M.O. of the protagonist of his Thief of Hearts novels. He’d had to see for himself if the nightmares he’d hoped were only products of his imagination matched the horrifying reality.
“I was there,” he murmured, the dead woman’s terror gripping him again. “It was just like.” The violent images once again took center stage in his mind.
“It’s not your fault,” Dietrich said, “if someone copied your book. You can’t be held responsible for someone else’s actions.”
But what if they’d once been his?
He closed his eyes, and passionate images replaced the violent ones. A woman’s nails raking his back, clutching at his butt as he thrust inside her again and again. Alaina Paulsen was more than just an agent investigating murders; she was part of it, too.
She had once been his … and he couldn’t leave until she was again.
Excitement coursed through him, but he fought it down, fought to control his emotions.
But it was all so perfect.
He wanted to scream, wanted to thump his fist in the air in celebration. But he had rejoiced another way, a far more satisfying way….
He lifted the cover from the box. He’d found it, like he had so many other things, when he’d opened that door and allowed the past to come rushing back into his mind.
A chuckle rumbled in his chest. Trent Baines had unlocked that door with his books. And until today the man had had no idea that he’d let the monster loose.
He gazed inside that box at the heart he’d stolen. In his mind, it beat yet. For him.
But it wasn’t the heart he really wanted. That heart beat now inside Alaina Paulsen’s chest. But he knew to whom it had once belonged. The woman she had once been and the man she had once loved.
Now he knew who they all were and who they all had once been … before he’d killed them.