by Lisa Childs
Today another of her dark suits hid the curves of her shapely body and the holster holding her gun. Unlike last night, when her hair had flowed around her shoulders, she’d clipped it up off her neck again. She wore another high-necked sweater, and now he understood why. To hide her scar.
Without so much as an apologetic or even reproachful glance at Dietrich, she stepped inside the den. Under her arm, she carried the box Trent had had his employee deliver to her.
He nodded at Dietrich, dismissing him, before he closed the doors. Now she was locked inside with him. To keep his distance from her, because he didn’t trust himself not to shove her up against the wall and take her passionately, violently, he walked around his desk and dropped into the chair behind it.
“You told me to finish reading it,” she said, her voice sharp with anger as she dropped the box next to his laptop, “but you didn’t give me the rest of it. The ending’s missing.”
“It’s not written yet,” he admitted.
“Then why did you give the beginning to me?” she asked, her brow furrowed in confusion.
“You got yourself assigned to those cold cases,” he said, remembering his dinner conversation with the director last night. “You’ve pored through all those files, looking for answers.”
“Looking for a killer,” she insisted.
“You weren’t looking just for the killer,” he said. “You were looking for yourself.”
“You do believe me?” she asked, her voice soft with wonderment.
A twinge of sympathy struck him. Her own father hadn’t believed her. After her dad’s rejection, Trent doubted that she had trusted anyone else with her secret. “Yes, Alaina, I believe you.” He pushed his hand through his hair and sighed. “But I don’t want to believe you.”
“But you know,” she said. “You know it’s the only explanation that makes sense.” She planted her hands on his desk and leaned across it, her eyes narrowed as she studied him.
This was probably her interrogation face, the one that made suspects squirm with fear until they confessed all. A grin tugged at Trent’s mouth that she’d used it on him. Because it only turned him on …
Hell, she didn’t have to do anything to turn him on. The minute she got close, his body hardened, his heart pounded and his skin flushed with heat—all with desire for her. An image flashed through his mind—not of the past but of the future, of him throwing the computer and the box onto the floor and taking her atop his desk. His aching body driving into hers as they both sought release, fulfillment.
Her breath caught, her eyes widening as if she’d read his mind, and she jerked away from him.
“You know,” he tossed her words back at her. “You know what I want … and you want it, too.”
She shook her head and claimed, “I only want answers.”
He grinned again, tempted to prove her a liar. All it had taken was one kiss last night. One kiss and passion had overcome whatever doubts or fears she might have had about him. But passion couldn’t overcome his doubts and fears.
He sighed and commiserated. “You’ve been searching for answers your whole life.”
Her eyes glistening with a hint of tears, she nodded. “Most kids grow up trying to figure out who they are. I spent my adolescence and now my adulthood trying to figure out who I was.”
“Alaina …”
Her fingers trembled as she touched the pages of the galley. “This is who I was, isn’t it? Her?”
“I think so.” He knew it. To the depths of his old soul, he knew it.
If only he could be as certain about who he had been in their former life. Then maybe he wouldn’t have spent this life afraid of that per son.
“But those files,” she said, her voice cracking with frustration, “I went over and over those files, and there was no mention of her. Anywhere.”
“That was why you never figured it out,” he said. “That was why you never connected with any of those other victims. You weren’t one of those twelve women.”
Her breath shuddered out in a ragged sigh. “I was her….”
He couldn’t feel what she felt, but he could see it all on her beautiful face: the disappointment, the disgust, the guilt.
“It was all my fault.”
Trent shook his head. “No, it was his. He was the killer.”
“But I—” She grimaced, her disgust evident again. “But the woman I was had an affair with him. She cheated on her husband with his friend, with a killer….” She pushed her fingers into her hair, tugging several pale blond locks loose of the clip at her nape.
“He started killing before she slept with him,” he reminded her. She had claimed that she’d read all his books; like those files in her office, there had been no mention of her until this one—the last one.
“But she was his motivation,” she said. “His inspiration. He killed women who looked like her, with red hair and green eyes.”
“She was his obsession.” And having met Alaina, having experienced the power and passion of this connection in the present, Trent almost understood. “It wasn’t her fault that he was a killer.”
“Still, she shouldn’t have.” Her throat rippled as she swallowed hard. “She shouldn’t have cheated on her husband.”
“She was lonely,” he said, reminding her of what he’d written, and what she had lived. “He gave her the attention her husband wasn’t giving her.”
“Her husband was the detective assigned to those murders,” Alaina said. “She should have understood that he had to stop the killer.”
“And he should have understood that she needed him.” More than his attention, she had needed his protection.
“Why do you keep defending her?” she asked, her brow furrowed with confusion, her voice sharp with frustration.
He sighed and admitted, “Because I loved her.”
Her breath caught as her eyes widened. “Of course, you were the detective, Elijah Kooiyer. You had to be. That explains the accuracy of the procedural part of your books.”
“Then I was a fool.” But he’d prefer to have been a fool to a killer.
“I don’t understand….”
“He neglected her. That made him a fool,” he said. “That and having been friends with a killer. Why did he never figure it out? Why did he never get that those other women, all those victims, looked like his wife, that she was the object of the killer’s obsession?”
Her eyes widened with surprise and awe. “I don’t understand how you remember so much,” she said, “and I only have these flashes.”
Trent shrugged, but he couldn’t shake off the guilt, which was probably the reason those memories clung to him so vividly. “I don’t know. Like you, they came in flashes, too. For years, just little flashes, little things that set off that sense of …”
“Déjà vu?”
“Yeah.” He chuckled. “My parents thought I was crazy. Moody. Weird. I spent all my time alone.”
But he’d had another reason for that—survival. Even now, as an adult, he couldn’t deal with everyone else’s emotions. As a kid, he had reeled under the pressure. And had nearly cracked. “But then, my freshmen year of college I took a creative writing course. And as I wrote, the memories became more vivid. It just flowed out of me. I didn’t know, for sure, that any of it was real … until you came to me. And then I looked through those files last night …”
It had only taken him a glance at each to recognize the scene from a book. “My first book was published ten years ago,” he said. “What took you so long to find me?”
“I had no idea what exactly had caused the scar. Those flashes of memory weren’t clear enough for me to understand what had happened … besides my death,” she explained. “It wasn’t until after I joined the Bureau and started working cold cases that the memory became clearer.”
He rubbed his eyes, wishing it could all go away, wishing he remembered none of it. But her.
“In all those files,” she said, “there was no mentio
n of the detective’s wife, no report of her murder.”
“I guess her body was never discovered. Like you said, there was nothing in those files—not even a mention of why the detective stopped working the case.” And he’d looked through those folders carefully, trying to find anything to ease his dread.
She lifted a hand, then dropped it back to her side. “Why wouldn’t there have been something …?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe those memories aren’t really memories at all. Maybe they’re not real.” He’d hoped for so many years that they weren’t.
“We both know that’s not true.” She touched her knuckles to her chest where, beneath her sweater, the scar marred the perfection of her silky skin. “The only thing we don’t know is how and why the killing ended thirty years ago.”
“Her body may not have been found, but she was killed. And once his obsession was gone.” He’d had no reason to kill anymore.
“Then why did the killing start again?” she asked.
He pushed his chair back from the desk, stood and turned toward the window. Fog had rolled in around the hilltop, adding to the seclusion of his fortress.
“Or do you know?” she asked.
He shook his head even though he had a feeling that it had started up for the same reason it had last time. Because of her.
“But you know so much,” she said. “And if you really never saw those files until yesterday …”
“I didn’t.” And he wished he hadn’t ever looked at them, that he hadn’t confirmed that his nightmares had been someone else’s living hell.
“Then your memories are very vivid.” She came around the desk to stand beside him. Her arm bumped against his as she stepped closer.
But he couldn’t look at her; he didn’t want her to see what he was afraid he saw when he looked in the mirror. The soul of a killer.
“Your memories are real,” she said, “not just flashes like mine. Hell, you even knew his motive. You knew the reason he took their hearts. He wanted their love. Her love.”
And there was only one way he could know that. Only one way that memory could be his.
His stomach clenched with dread. And fear.
“You must know who he is and why he stopped,” she insisted. She reached back to his desk, and her fingernails tapped his laptop. “You have to write the ending.”
“I can’t.” He pushed his hand through his hair, grasping at the strands. “I’ve already missed my deadline. That’s probably why my editor told you how to find me. He’s pissed that the book is late.”
“He wasn’t happy when I talked to him,” she agreed. “But he didn’t want me to bother you. I had to threaten him before he gave up your location.”
“You threatened him?” he asked, amused at her persistence. “Why?”
“I had to find you,” she admitted. “Your books were the first lead I’d found on the case until …”
“Another woman was murdered.” His amusement faded. She hadn’t sought him out as a fan, or because of what they might have once meant to each other.
“We have to stop him before anyone else gets hurt,” she said, her voice breathy with urgency. “You have to write the ending.”
“I can’t,” he said again, surprised that she referred to the killer as someone else, as someone other than him. He wished he could be as convinced as she that he’d been the cop instead of the killer.
“What are you saying?” she asked. “That you can’t remember, that you can’t write? Are you blocked?”
“No,” he said. He only wished he was. “I can remember. I just don’t want to.”
A soft sigh of realization slipped through her parted lips. “You’re afraid of what you might find out.”
“I’m afraid that I am—that I was,” he amended his confession, “the Thief of Hearts.”
Chapter 8
“Oh, my God.” Her breath backed up in her lungs. “I—I hadn’t …”
“Yes, yes, you had.” He turned to her, finally, his green eyes full of torment as he met her gaze. “That’s what brought you here. You read those books, and you suspected that I was the killer.”
He stepped closer to her, but before he could touch her, she stepped back, out of his reach. Her action had been involuntary, though.
“See,” he pointed out, “even now, maybe even more than before, you suspect me.”
“But you’re not,” she said. He couldn’t be—not with how she felt about him. She hadn’t backed away out of fear. She had backed away because when he was too close, her skin tingled and her pulse quickened. And she wanted him. She wanted the passion she remembered from that other life. “You can’t be.”
“Because I was here when you got the call the other day?” he asked. “We were both there when the coroner told you the woman had been dead for twenty-four hours.” He gestured out the window, at the fog-enshrouded hillside. “You know I have a helicopter. It sits on a helipad right on the roof of this house. I can come and go quickly.”
“Do you want me to suspect you?” Alaina wondered, her pulse quickening now with the fear she’d had yet to feel for him.
“The director speaks highly of you,” he shared. “You’re a good agent. Smart. You should suspect me.” He pushed a hand through his hair, setting the dark golden strands on end. “I suspect me.”
She reached out, needing to comfort him as much as she needed him. Her fingertips slid across the back of his hand. But he pulled away, as if he couldn’t bear her touch. “Why do you suspect yourself?”
“The things I know.” Now the torment was in his voice, in the rough timbre of his already deep tones. “How else could I know them? How could I know his motive? His relationship with her?”
“If you were the detective, you could have learned all this in the course of your investigation.”
He snorted with derision. “That guy was an idiot. For years he worked this case. For years he found this guy’s victims—women who looked just like his wife. And he never realized the killer was his friend?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, wishing she could comfort him.
“This friend slept with his wife, killed his wife, and he had no idea.” His voice vibrated with anger and resentment as he added, “He was too stupid to figure it out.”
Now she understood the perspective from which he wrote his books, the reason for his disdain of law enforcement. From his perspective, the killer had been smarter than the cop.
It was her turn to defend the man she was certain she had loved despite how her past actions must have hurt him. “Maybe he was just too trusting to suspect the people he loved of betraying him.” Like his wife had betrayed him. Could she have really been that woman? “That doesn’t make him a bad investigator.”
“Just a fool …”
She had been the fool to betray a good man. But in the end she had paid for her mistake with her life. “What happened to the detective?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. I didn’t even know for sure that he was a real person and not just a figment of my imagination.”
“Until you saw the files,” she said. “He has notes on that last case. But that’s not really the last case. His wife’s murder has to be the final one—even though her body must have never been found.”
“I don’t know.” He expelled a ragged sigh of frustration. And guilt.
If he were really the man he feared he’d been, would he feel guilt? Would he feel anything?
Her perception of the serial killer had always been that he’d been a soulless monster. He wouldn’t have had a soul to go on to another life.
“Maybe there are more victims, more bodies that haven’t been found,” she mused aloud. Maybe he hadn’t stopped killing at all. “Women disappear all the time and are never seen again, their bodies never found.”
Maybe she needed to search through the missing-person records for more victims.
“He never hid any of the other bodies,” Trent reminded her. “It
was like he wanted them to be found, just like this last victim was found.”
“You need to write the ending to this book,” she urged him. “We need to know.”
He shook his head. “You want to know. We don’t need to. It won’t change what already happened.”
“No,” she agreed. She couldn’t go back to that life; she couldn’t undo what she’d done. She could only vow not to make the same mistakes again. “It won’t change what happened. But it might stop more women from getting killed. Penelope Otten didn’t deserve to die.”
“No,” he agreed, his handsome face twisting into a grimace as if he could feel the pain the woman had endured before she’d died. “She didn’t.”
“Did you know her?” she asked, finally asking the questions the investigator in her should have been asking him. But that other life called to her—and her connection with him was stronger than her instincts as an agent.
“No,” he said. “At least, not that I remember …”
And Vonner, despite his efforts to find a link between them, had found nothing but Trent’s book in her apartment. Alaina had checked it herself, but it hadn’t been signed. She wasn’t even convinced that Penelope Otten had been a fan of his writing. Her other books had been self-help and romance; there’d been no other horror or even suspense novels. Had the killer brought it with him, trying to implicate Trent in her murder?
“Maybe her death has nothing to do with our past lives.” Maybe it had more to do with the present, with someone finding an excuse for killing.
“It too closely matches those old murders,” he pointed out. “The murders I write about. If this isn’t him killing again, it’s someone copying my books.” He tipped his head back and groaned. “And either way, her death is my fault.”
His frustration and self-loathing rushed over her as if the emotions were her own. Her breath caught at the unexpected intensity of those feelings. It was unusual for her to experience any feelings, even her own.
She’d been so caught up in her past life that she hadn’t done much living of this one. She hadn’t fallen in love. She’d told herself it was because of the scar, because it had been too hard to explain to those few boyfriends she’d had.