Targeted

by Lori L. Harris

  She smiled. “In my experience hard produces better results.”

  The image that came into his mind had nothing to do with foot massages.

  He pulled her other foot next to the first. Starting with the instep, he worked down to where her nails were painted a pale pinky color. He spent some time working at the ball of her foot, before using the pad of his thumb on the sensitive area between her toes.

  When he glanced up, she’d closed her eyes.

  “Where did you learn how to do that?” she asked.

  He wondered if she’d somehow known his attention had shifted from her feet to her face. “The academy.”

  With her eyes still shut, she smiled.

  His gaze dipped to where her T-shirt draped across her breasts. No bra this time, and her nipples stood erect beneath the soft covering. As if on autopilot, his fingers continued to soothe away foot strain, but he was now envisioning them moving upward over her body, reaching the soft mounds beneath the T-shirt, massaging them gently in his palms, taking their hard peaks into his mouth…

  The loose-fitting jogging shorts were pushed high on her firmly muscled thighs.

  A sharp jolt of desire shot through him. Only twenty minutes ago, he’d assured himself that he could handle any attraction, and yet here he was, his pulse kicking harshly, his body ready for an act that he couldn’t allow to take place.

  And all because he’d opened his mouth and offered a quickie massage.

  “An interrogation technique?” she asked, breaking into his line of thought.

  “One of the more successful ones.”

  He ran his palm upward along her silky shin to her knee, then around to grasp the thicker muscle of her calf. He flexed her foot up, stretching out the tightness he felt. Eyes closed, she groaned softly and lifted her hips as his fingers worked.

  Talk about the king of bad ideas. All he could think about was the smooth, satiny flesh of her thighs, the loose-fitting shorts…

  She opened her eyes as he finished the second leg. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said as he retreated to his desk.

  Katie swung her legs over the edge of the couch and sat up. She flexed her toes, almost as if someone had given her a new set of feet to try out and she was testing them.

  “You can’t even begin to imagine how much better that feels.” She looked up at him. “The least I can do is return the favor.”

  What was she suggesting? That she would massage his feet? Imagining her kneeling in front of him, her hands working…

  Alec picked up the pen that rested in the middle of the blotter and propped it back in the rosewood holder. “My feet are great.”

  She stood and moved toward him. “Of course they are. But you’ve been rubbing your neck and moving your shoulders as if the muscles are all knotted up.”

  “You’re tired,” he said.

  The last thing he wanted was to have her hands on him. Turnabout wasn’t fair play, it was dangerous play.

  “And you won’t be able to get to sleep all knotted up like that.” She set her empty wineglass on the desk. “I’ve never been very good at being a taker. Being in someone else’s debt makes me uncomfortable.”

  “But I’m fine.”

  She folded her arms. “My mistake, then.” Her mouth tightened momentarily and then relaxed into resignation as she turned to pick up the wineglass again.

  What was wrong with him? It was just a simple neck massage.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I do feel a bit tight.”

  Leaving the wineglass on the desk, she stepped behind him. Her fingers dug into his trapezius, her movements surprisingly strong and aggressive.

  He refrained from closing his eyes, afraid of the images that would once again turn his body rock hard. As it was, it would take a long icy shower to cool him down. And even that might not be enough.

  “I sometimes spend too much time at the easel, and this always helps me. There’s a beauty shop just around the corner from my house that has a massage therapist. I just run over and let her work out all the kinks.”

  Obviously, they were dealing with different kinks.

  He allowed his chin to drop toward his chest, giving her free reign. Maybe by making it easier for her, she’d get done sooner.

  As she bore down, he could feel the slightest brush of her breasts against his back, and with each touch, the tightness in his groin increased.

  He was relieved when she finally lifted her hands.

  “Much better,” he commented.

  He started to stand, but she stalled him with a touch on his shoulder. “We’re only halfway there.”

  Maybe she was.

  She rotated the chair so that he now faced her. Quickly releasing the top few buttons of his shirt as if she was accustomed to undressing him, she pushed it aside. “You’re very tight here,” she said.

  Using her thumbs, she massaged his deltoid.

  He watched her face as she worked. Her delicate jaw tightened at the same moment her fingers did, and then briefly loosened when she shifted their position on his body. She’d taken a shower after dinner, and the scent of shampoo drifted around him. She was petite. Most people would simply overlook the supple strength of her body, the determined light in her eyes.

  His lungs tightened and he closed his eyes, afraid she’d see just how turned-on he was right now.

  Her breath fanned his face just before her lips settled over his.

  With the first touch, he opened his eyes and met hers.

  Her pupils were dilated. Her breathing was as fast and as irregular as his. But it was her mouth that he couldn’t seem to ignore. Soft lips gently parted.

  “This isn’t a good idea,” he managed, his voice roughened with restrained desire.

  “No, it isn’t.” The tip of her tongue moistened her bottom lip. Eyes wide-open, she lowered her mouth once more until it covered his. All the while, she watched him with eyes that were honest. Trusting. Inviting.

  She was vulnerable. He shouldn’t take advantage. She saw him as her white knight. He wasn’t. Far from it. If he’d still been with the Bureau, he would lose his job. But he wasn’t. And the only job he had now was keeping her safe.

  A physical relationship was still out of the question. He needed to stay focused, something he was already having problems with whenever he was around her. A physical re lationship between the two of them would only cloud issues more.

  And then she moaned, and he realized he was no longer listening to reason.

  Instead of staying chair bound, he came to his feet, Katie straightening with him. This time, when he touched the seam of her lips with his tongue, she opened for him and he plunged. His body shuddered with raw physical need, and twisting his fingers into the cool silkiness of her hair, he deepened the kiss.

  She tasted so damn good. He slid his left hand along her rib cage, his thumb just brushing the outside swell of her breast before settling at her waist. Male instinct ordered him to pull her tight against his arousal. Instead, he shoved aside the papers on his desk, magazines and several bills sliding to the floor. He lifted her so she sat on the cleared surface.

  As he stepped in closer, she was forced to spread her knees. She rested her hands on his chest. He could feel his heart slamming against the curled fingers of her hand. She lifted her gaze to his and he fell in.

  His fingers skimmed across her flushed cheeks. When they got to her mouth, she opened for him and his thumb slipped inside. Immediately her lips closed around him.

  Damn. She was sexy. All he wanted to do was bury himself inside her, to feel her body moving beneath his.

  Breathing hard now, as if he’d just finished a five-mile sprint, he eased her down onto the desk, his body hard and ready.

  Katie reached for him, and it was only then that he saw the clear plastic wrapper, the kind the U.S. Postal Service used to enclose mail damaged by their machinery, on the edge of the desk, the only thing that hadn’t fallen to the fl
oor.

  Even before he turned it over, he knew the card would contain only a single word.

  Remember.

  And the timing couldn’t be any more perfect. It had shown up on the very day that he’d almost managed to forget.

  Chapter Ten

  The morning air held the unseasonably crisp promise of fall. Alec, in a hurry to find his brother, pushed through the crowd surrounding Deep Water Spring’s century-old wooden bandstand, where senate hopeful Paul Darby was to appear in less than thirty minutes.

  Red, white and blue banners snapped in the sharp breeze. Most of the audience seemed to have dressed for the weather, and those who hadn’t were congregated in areas where either the sunshine poured through a break in the oak canopy, or where one of the news vans—the only kind that had been allowed into the immediate area—afforded them a buffer from wind gusts.

  Alec was supposed to have met Jack at the café to turn over the postcard, but there had been some last-minute security issues for the rally that had required Jack’s immediate attention. From the look of it, Jack must have pulled in every available officer to cover the event.

  It was beginning to appear as if the only cop left back in town was the one who had been eating breakfast when Alec had dropped Katie at the restaurant. Even though he’d promised to stick around until Alec returned, the damned truth was that Alec didn’t trust anyone with Katie’s safety.

  Though he was determined not to think about what had happened last night—not just the kiss, but also the way he’d lost control—he couldn’t seem to stop himself. Another three seconds, and he would have had both of them naked.

  He shoved his fingers into his hair. Lunacy. That’s all it was.

  The crowd suddenly opened up, and he found himself face-to-face with Jolie Kennedy, WKMG’s top investigative reporter. She was dressed in her on-air clothes, a red suit and heels, so he assumed her mike to be live.

  “Alec Blade, is it true that the recent attack on a local woman may have been committed by the same man who murdered your wife nearly a year ago?”

  “No comment.” He’d said those words so many times in his career that they were like breathing. Fresh air in, stale air out. Reporter asks a question on a subject that you haven’t had a chance to analyze fully, canned response. Anything else was dangerous. To the victim, to the investigation and to the likelihood of your continued employment.

  He tried stepping around the brunette reporter, but the several dozen people who had been within earshot when she’d posed the question now created a wall of resistance, not only with their bodies, but also with their hard stares.

  When he allowed his gaze to connect to Jolie’s, she smiled, and he could see the predatory excitement there. She knew she had him cornered.

  “Don’t you think the people have a right to know that your presence in this town has placed them in danger? And that Deep Water’s police chief—your brother—has conspired to keep this very real threat from the public?”

  He kept his expression bland. “All we have right now is an assault victim.” We? He realized too late that he’d spoken as if he were involved in the investigation on a professional basis. Certainly not the impression he wanted to give. “The public is not in any danger, and I can assure you that if they were, Chief Blade would take all necessary steps to rectify the situation.”

  He briefly scanned the crowd, looking for Jack, but then quickly returned his attention to the reporter. “Maybe you should check the statistics. Deep Water has less crime today than when my brother took over the position.”

  The wind tugged at Jolie’s open jacket and forced the thin, white silk blouse to hug her breasts and narrow rib cage. She was one of those women who were better-looking on screen than off.

  She stared up at him, a smug expression overtaking her features. “Well, maybe you can at least comment on this. How does it feel to know that one woman has already died because of her association with you, and that another one may face the same fate?”

  It was a common interrogation technique. If a reporter asked a question often enough, from enough different angles, sometimes she got lucky. Not this time, though.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t read so much fiction,” Alec said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  He no sooner broke through the crowd than he saw Jack, who motioned for him to follow.

  “What’s going on?” Alec asked. “Why all the officers?”

  “Darby’s campaign manager called this morning. He received another threat last night. Placed from a stolen cell phone. Nothing specific. Just a you’ll-be-sorry.”

  Alec realized his brother was headed for the staging area just behind the platform. With the roped-off section keeping the crowd at bay, they were alone except for the odd officer cutting through, or one of the politician’s point men making a last-minute check before Darby’s arrival.

  Alec was already trying to analyze the fallout from what had just taken place. If the interview made the six o’clock news, more reporters would be looking into a possible connection between Jill’s death and Katie’s assault. Eventually there would be no dodging the truth, and any hope of luring the killer into making a move became that much more difficult.

  “How do you think she found out about the connection to Jill?” Jack asked, obviously having heard the reporter’s question. “It didn’t come from anywhere inside my force.”

  “She’s just fishing at this point. That doesn’t mean she won’t get enough to make a story. Even by tonight.”

  As he pulled the postcard from his pocket, still sealed in the plastic and now enclosed in a white envelope, he couldn’t help but think about the typed word on its back. Remember. After receiving eleven of them, he would have expected it to get easier, but it hadn’t. Remember. That single word held him in the past, kept him desperately searching death-row cases where he’d played a part, kept him reliving the night he’d come home to find his wife dead.

  And yet this crinkled card with two of its four corners ripped away might provide them with the break they needed.

  He passed it to his brother. “All the automatic sorter left for us to work with is the message and a Deep Water postmark. With any luck, maybe someone saw it being mailed.”

  “I’ll let you know what I find out.” Jack ran the long edge of the envelope through his index finger and thumb. “You said the postmark was the twentieth, right? Just like the others?”

  “Yes.” Alec noticed an attractive fiftysomething woman in the crowd staring in their direction and realized how the passing of the envelope might look to an outsider. “Perhaps you should put that away.”

  Jack’s gaze followed Alec’s. He smiled. “Afraid the mayor’s wife will think it’s a payoff?”

  After tossing a wave in the woman’s direction, Jack tucked the envelope in his shirt pocket. “The night of Katie’s assault, you seemed fairly certain that the reason you hadn’t received anything in the mail was because he saw Katie as his October postcard.”

  “Shoots that theory to hell, doesn’t it?” Alec commented.

  Jack touched the pocket containing the envelope. “Did you want me to have this run through the lab for fingerprints?”

  “No. Just get it back to me and I’ll send it up to Philly. I don’t hold out much hope, anyway.”

  They’d run all the previous postcards through the lab, not only looking for fingerprints but also hoping to find a match—any link—between the cards. To date they’d been unable to do either.

  The crowd had nearly doubled in size, and now took up most of the clearing.

  Jack plucked the radio off his belt, started to raise it to his mouth, and then lowered it. “Any chance you can give us a hand here for the next hour or so? Play backup to Darby’s security team?”

  Alec would have preferred to head back into town. Not to the café, of course, since they had to make it appear as if Katie had been left unprotected. But to the library down the street where he could find a quiet corner and turn o
n his laptop. Several keystrokes later, he would be watching everything that went on inside the restaurant and breathing a whole lot easier.

  But as much as he wanted to say no, it was the first time Jack had asked a professional favor of him. “Sure.”

  “MISS?” The man who had picked up the broken dishes yesterday morning motioned for a coffee refill by raising his mug.

  Katie was on her way to pick up an order, but stopped with the nearly empty carafe in her hand. “They just put on another pot.” She poured the mug only half-full. “I’ll bring you some fresh in a minute.”

  “This is fine. I’m already late as it is.” He glanced out the front window as another gust of wind buffeted the plate glass. “That wind picks up much more and we’ll have some trees and power lines down.”

  Usually, by this time of morning, foot traffic filled the sidewalk and women eager to get out of the house with their young children crowded the park benches across the bricked street.

  But not today. Laishley Park was deserted except for what was probably a couple of college kids attempting to launch a kite. It had been nearly two weeks since she had ventured over there. She missed sketching the children at play, seeing the face of a mother light up when she offered her the sketch.

  “The winds are supposed to die by tonight,” she commented, having listened to the news on the way in.

  The last time she’d seen this man, he’d been dressed in nice slacks and a dress shirt, but today he wore a work shirt, blue jeans and well-used cowboy boots. Which surprised her because he didn’t really look like the outdoor type.

  “You work around here?” She glanced at the wall clock behind the register. Nine o’clock. Where was Alec? He was to have dropped off the postcard, and then come back for breakfast.

  When she looked back down, the customer was watching her over the rim of his mug.

  He set the coffee down slowly. “Yes. Just started out at the Barnetts’ place.”

  It took her half a beat to realize that he was answering the question she’d asked before her thoughts had become distracted. Barnett place? Was that a ranch?