Feeling her relax as she drew in deep breaths, Rowan lowered her to the sidewalk. He kept a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Better?”
She nodded slowly. Keeping her eyes closed, she brought herself back under control, one deep inhalation after another. Finally she whispered, “Was that an anxiety attack?”
“I suspect so.”
“Me too.” She rubbed her face with her hands, and then dropped them and finally looked up at him. “I’ve never had one before.”
“I think you were entitled.”
“I felt like I was being suffocated and having a heart attack.”
“It happens even to people who haven’t just escaped from a thug.”
She winced. He kicked himself for bringing that guy up again. “Keep on breathing deeply,” he reminded her, squeezing her shoulder. “You’re doing fine.”
“Getting there, anyway.”
They fell silent for another minute, and he watched as she drew her focus inward, making herself come to grips with what had happened. Rowan wondered if she had any idea it would take a long time before she’d really be able to do that. What had just happened was the first step, but it wouldn’t be the last one. He’d dealt with enough trauma in his own life to know that. And not just on the job.
Not moving far, he did edge back a little when he realized she was getting steadier on her feet. Right now, all her cylinders were sparking in every direction. As calmness came back in, though, she might realize she didn’t want a strange man standing so close to her. He’d seen that reaction before in victims. So while he kept a light grip on her shoulder to keep her from falling, he also gradually inched away. Once she appeared completely still and straight, he dropped his hand and gave her even more room.
She remained where she was, still concentrating, and he watched her. Not for the first time, he found himself acknowledging just how attractive the woman was. He’d of course noted the just-below-the-shoulder-length hair the color of creamy coffee—dark blond with streaks of gold, amber, and brown. And of course those blue eyes. Now he studied the tear-stained oval face. Though it was cast in shadow, he’d already noticed the high cheekbones, the arched brows, the slim nose, and the pretty mouth.
He also noticed rough scratches and red marks that would become bruises tomorrow. Splotchy circles where ruthless fingers had dug in stood out on the soft skin of her jaw and throat.
Fuck. He wished he’d crammed that guy’s head into a sewer drain. And then thrown the rest of him in after it.
With a low, deep sigh, she shrugged her shoulders and tilted her neck from side to side, stretching to release her tension and the last of her fear.
“There you are, Evie Fleming,” he said, knowing she was past the anxiety attack and had regained her calmness.
“Here I am.” She looked around, up the block and down it. Nobody was around, any onlookers interested in the police lights having gone about their business. “I owe you another thank-you for getting me out of there. I guess I wasn’t really ready for enclosed spaces yet.”
“No problem. I should have realized it sooner, after what happened.”
“I don’t think I was the only casualty tonight,” she said, looking up at him. Lifting a hand, she scraped the tip of her finger on his cheek, rubbing something away. “You’re dirty, and that creep apparently got in one good punch.”
“My cat punches me harder than that when I don’t feed him on time.”
She smiled a little. Not much, but it was something.
“So. Coffee?” he asked.
She nibbled a corner of her lip. “You know, I think I just want to go home, take a hot shower, and get into bed.”
The images of a hot, wet woman and a bed quickly filled his mind, but he called himself an asshole and forced them away. Sexy as she might be, she had been through hell. Only a total prick would let the thought of soaping every inch of this woman’s sweet body interfere with his need to help her.
“If you don’t mind waiting with me, I’ll call for a ride.”
“No way,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”
“You really don’t have to do that, Detective.”
“I know I don’t. But I’m doing it anyway.”
He knew she wanted to argue—the flare of those midnight blue eyes revealed that. Again, though, her common sense outweighed any embarrassment. “I’d really appreciate that.”
“It’s not a problem. Protect and serve and all that.”
“Well, you definitely protected and served tonight. I’m the one who will buy you a coffee…but not now.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” And he would. Although his protective instincts demanded that he remain just a caretaker for now, he’d definitely like to see her again under better circumstances.
“I’ll hold you to holding me to it,” she said with the faintest of smiles.
He nodded, wanting to fist-pump the air with the knowledge of what that meant. She was interested. She was scared, tired, messed up, but she was also as interested in him as he was in her.
“You ready to go?” he asked, knowing that, attracted or not, the primary issue was getting her somewhere where she felt safe, warm, and comfortable.
“More than ready.”
“I’m parked right down there.”
Not taking her arm—initiating no more contact that might set her off again—he led her across the street. But before they’d gotten close to his car, which he’d parked so quickly it was almost on the sidewalk, another vehicle swung around the corner. It was coming fast, and he instinctively pushed her behind him.
“Where are they going in such a hurry?” he snapped when he realized the vehicle was a van from one of the local news stations.
Things became stranger when the van stopped, the side door slid open, and a woman holding a microphone hopped down. “Do you have any comment on tonight’s attack? Was anyone injured?”
“Are you kidding me?” Evie groaned.
That was a good question, and Rowan wondered about it too. Muggings happened in LA all the time. How would a news team find out so quickly, and why on earth would they want to cover what was just another random act of interrupted violence in a city filled with them?
“No comment,” he said. “Don’t you have anything better to report on?”
The reporter wasn’t deterred. “Is the suspect in custody?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, but there’s nothing to see here. Excitement over.” Noting the shock on Evie’s face, he led her past the reporter, and a cameraman who’d followed her out of the van.
“Miss Fleming, do you have any idea why someone would target you?”
Rowan opened the passenger door of his unmarked sedan and ushered her inside, barely hearing the reporter.
“Do you think this has anything to do with the Joe Henry Angstrom case?”
Angstrom? What the fuck? “I told you, no comment,” he snapped as the reporter tried to knock on the window of his car. “Now get that van out of the way before I cite you for reckless driving and illegal parking.”
A veteran LA reporter probably would only have banged harder on the window. This one was young, fresh-faced, and not yet ready to take on a cop.
She stepped back as he walked around the car but didn’t give up entirely. “Officer, can you give us any details at all? Do you know if Miss Fleming was a random victim or if this was a targeted assault?”
“How many times can I say ‘no comment’ in one conversation?”
His curiosity growing along with his annoyance, Rowan waved the woman off, got in the car, and jammed the key into the ignition. He was careful maneuvering around the newspeople but hit the gas hard once he had a clear path down the street.
“What the hell was that all about?” he asked once the van was in his rearview. His passenger huddled in her seat, his coat wrapped tightly around her. Rowan jabbed at the heater to warm up the car. “Are you famous or something?”
“No. Not really.�
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Meaning what? He racked his brain, trying to figure out if he’d ever heard her name before. It was pretty distinct and sounded a little made up. Not that he’d ever judge anybody for that—hell, his name was as fake as the Gucci bags peddled in Santee Alley. When his late mother had dragged him and his brothers to Hollywood after she’d divorced his father, she’d had their names changed to suit their big, bright, movie-star future.
Rowan had realized at a young age that he didn’t want to be a superstar. His twin brother, Reece, and their sister, Rachel, had been the ones meant for the limelight. Rowan hadn’t been sorry to leave that world behind and had thought about changing his name back. Unfortunately, George Franklin Winchester just wasn’t a name he wanted to reembrace. So Rowan it remained. His brothers had done the same—Reece because he’d reentered the business. Younger brother Raine—whose given name was worst of all—just hadn’t cared either way. And, of course, Rachel had died.
“Thank you for getting me out of there,” she said softly, pulling him out of his thoughts. “I can’t imagine how they found out so quickly.”
“Well, you must have some element of fame. Somebody drawn by the police lights obviously recognized you and called it in.”
She shrugged and looked out the window. “I’m just a writer.”
“A famous one?”
Another shrug. So she was famous. Not being much of a reader, beyond the occasional police procedural, he supposed it was no wonder he hadn’t heard of her.
“Kid’s books?”
She jerked her head around and glared. “Why do men automatically assume a young female author writes children’s books? I happen to write nonfiction.”
Whoops. He had stepped in it there and realized he had definitely made a shitty assumption. “Sorry. My bad.” He frowned. “I haven’t heard of many nonfiction writers who are stalked by paparazzi.”
She reached over and jacked up the heat. It was warm in the car, but he supposed after her evening, she was fighting off a chill that wasn’t weather-related.
“They’re making a movie of one of my books,” she admitted. Clearing her throat, she added, “And talking about a TV show.”
He nodded. That made sense. In this town, anybody who got a sniff of a new project always wanted to hover around the makers and the influencers. A nonfiction writer might not have a whole lot of input on any project made from her work, but it was possible she had some voice in casting. So he’d bet the hungry actors’ agents who swam like sharks in Hollywood already had an eye on her. As, he would bet, did the movie-biz shows, tabloids, and websites.
Evie Fleming would be an especially attractive subject for them to cover. She was, after all, beautiful. Not just pretty, as he’d thought in that stairwell when she’d been shaking and looking ready to puke. But pretty damned stunning, in a brainy-sexy way. She would be entitled to attention for that alone. Add to it a movie and TV deal? The back-clawingly ambitious entertainment crowd was probably already trying to dig in their nails. Hence the media interest.
“What was that about Joe Henry Angstrom?” he asked, remembering what else the reporter had said. How Evie could be connected to an infamous serial killer who had terrorized the mid-Atlantic region a few years ago, he had no idea.
“I testified against him.”
He jerked his head to look at her. “Seriously?”
She nodded.
“Holy shit. That must have been tough.”
“It was.” Her voice fell to a whisper. “His last victim was my roommate.”
He sucked in a breath, remembering more details. Angstrom was one monstrous sonofabitch. He couldn’t imagine how she lived with the knowledge of what her friend had probably gone through. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too. We had just finished college and were living in an apartment in Richmond. Angstrom owned an auto repair shop close to our place.”
Right, mechanic. “I remember this—he used to copy house keys when people left their cars to be worked on.”
Handing your whole key ring to someone who also had access to your car registration—with your home address printed right on it—wasn’t wise. But it happened more than most people realized.
She sniffed. “Yes. That’s how he got into our place. She was home alone.”
He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if she hadn’t been. It was tragic about her roommate; Evie’s presence, however, almost certainly wouldn’t have stopped that murder from happening. It would just have meant two victims.
“It was my fault,” she added in a low whisper.
“Don’t.”
As if she hadn’t heard him, she went on. “I had a flat tire. I waited right there in the shop office while he fixed it. It just didn’t occur to me that he would make a copy of my apartment key while I was sitting ten feet away. She died because I was stupid and careless.”
“It was not your fault.”
It wasn’t, of course. It was the fault of a psychotic monster. And hell, even Rowan had probably left his whole key ring in the car when getting a super-quick tire change while he waited. Angstrom had been good at what he did, and obviously very fast at key molding.
More, though, her words made him realize something else.
Evie had probably been the intended target.
“If I hadn’t been dumb enough to…”
“Don’t,” he urged. “Do not do that to yourself. It is not your fault; it’s that sick bastard’s.”
“So said my shrink for a couple of years afterward.”
He wasn’t at all surprised she’d needed professional help. “And now?”
“Now…I suppose my rational side accepts that it wasn’t my fault. The emotional side isn’t so sure.”
“Let me be sure for you,” he insisted. “Perps count on victims blaming themselves a lot of the time, but it’s nobody’s fault but the killer’s.
“I still miss her,” she said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Angstrom in prison.”
“Must’ve been hard testifying against him with him sitting right there in the courtroom. Bet that caused a few nightmares.”
“And daymares. I had so hoped that phase of my life was over, but it keeps getting dragged back up.”
Considering heartbreaking death had touched his own life, and the reverberations of it seemed to go on for years, he understood that. Maybe it had been a suicide, but nobody really knew how his sister had plunged off that high-rise balcony so many years ago.
Then there was the unsolved murder of Harry Baker, his childhood movie agent. For years, Rowan and Reece had believed their baby brother Raine had killed the man because Baker had molested their sister. Finding out they’d been wrong had been a shock. Guilt about that, as well as their desperate need to know the truth, had driven all three of the brothers into the most private of investigations.
They intended to find out what had really happened that night six and a half years ago when somebody had shot Harry Baker dead in his living room. No matter what it took.
“So what is it you testified to, leaving your car there?”
“That was only part of it.” Clearing her throat, she explained, “I got a little obsessive about her murder and did some sleuthing on my own.”
“Wow. Ballsy.”
“Not really. I wasn’t out there Sherlock Holmes’ing the case. It was more about doing a lot of Internet research and realizing there had been similar murders in several states. Then I remembered the license plates hanging on the wall of Angstrom’s repair shop and everything sort of clicked.”
“License plates?”
“One from each state of a previous victim. His souvenirs. I know some people do decorate with those, but it seemed odd that there were only nine of them, too few for a real collector, but obviously important enough to be displayed. I noticed what states they were from and remembered one of the personalized tags.”
“That was pretty stupid of him.”
“Yes, it was. I did a lit
tle search when I got home. Imagine my surprise when the tag showed up in a police report about a South Carolina girl who’d been murdered two years prior.”
The implication sank in. “Are you telling me you were the first to realize there was a serial killer operating on the East Coast, and you identified him?”
She shrugged. Answer enough.
“Impressive. Did that lead you to a career in law enforcement?” He shook his head, remembering what she’d said before. “No, of course, you’re a writer.”
“I was a fledgling journalist at the time. Junior Girl-Friday type thing. I just wasn’t going to give up trying to find out what happened to my friend Blair and I had a knack for research.”
Rowan was fascinated, shocked a young journalist had put together a puzzle that multiple law enforcement agencies had not. Thinking about the Angstrom case and what he had done to his victims, Rowan could only think the world was a better place because of Evie Fleming’s research abilities.
“I guess I should give you my address,” she said, changing the subject.
He suspected she had to do that a lot. People were never pushier than when wanting details about a gruesome crime; he ran into those types every day. No way would he become one of them.
“Yeah, you probably should,” he said, realizing he’d been on autopilot and was heading for his brother’s place in the hills. He’d been staying there for a couple of weeks and just took the route for granted.
She gave him the address, and he frowned. She didn’t live in a bad place, but it was in an older, beachside neighborhood. There weren’t a lot of security fences or gates, as there were in most upscale communities. That area was trendy, with crowds of partiers even on weeknights. Probably not the best atmosphere for a woman who had been attacked, and then had a microphone shoved in her face by a reporter. He only hoped they hadn’t tracked down her address yet.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with that street?”
“No, it’s not like downtown. Don’t worry about that.”
Wanting You Page 3