by Linda Turner
She forgot who she was, where she was, that there was a crowd of strangers below who were probably watching everything she did. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Joe and the way he made her feel. He was all she wanted, all she could think of, and even though she knew this could only lead to heartache, for tonight, she couldn’t deny herself these moments stolen out of time. Her body aching for his touch, she melted against him, sighing his name. “Joe…”
The Ferris wheel jolted back into motion at that moment, bringing them both back to earth with a jerk. Startled, they broke apart with a laugh just as they made a dizzy descent toward the ground. Then, just as they ascended toward the stars again, Angel’s cell phone rang.
Surprised, she frowned. “That must be Laura. I hope Emma’s not sick from all the cotton candy she ate.” Pulling the phone from her purse, she quickly flipped it open. “Laura? What’s wrong?”
“You bitch!”
Stunned, Angel blanched. She didn’t have to ask who her caller was. She knew. She’d have recognized her stalker’s voice in the bowels of hell. “How did you get this number?”
“Two-timing whore! Harlot!” Spewing vile curses at her, he didn’t hear her, let alone bother to answer her. “How dare you kiss that dirtbag in front of the whole town! You’re mine. Do you hear me? Mine!”
“No!”
“Oh, yes, you are. And you’re going to pay for this. You just wait!”
He screeched at her like a madman, telling her all the ways he was going to punish her, but Angel hardly heard his crazy promises. She’d just gotten a new cell phone the day before she left L.A. And he already had the new number. How? she wondered wildly. How had he managed to discover what the number was when she’d been so careful to make sure that only she, Laura and Will Douglas, her producer, had it?
Shaken, she would have dropped the phone then if Joe’s reflexes hadn’t been lightning quick. “What the hell!” he growled, snatching up the phone before it could slip through her fingers. “Dammit, Angel, what’s wrong?”
“It’s him,” she said faintly. “My stalker. He’s got my number.”
Snarling an oath, Joe jerked the flip phone up to his ear, only to find the line dead. The bastard had hung up. “What did he say to you?” he demanded.
Chilled to the bone in spite of the warmth of the night, she wrapped her arms around herself. “He called me a bitch for kissing you in front of the whole town.”
“He’s here?!”
Angel looked at him blankly, his words not yet registering. Then it hit her. She’d been so shocked that he had her number that she hadn’t stopped to think that in order for him to know she was kissing Joe, he had to be there, somewhere in the crowd down below.
“Oh, God!”
What little color there was left in her cheeks drained away as her eyes flew to the crowd below as the Ferris wheel began its rapid descent toward the ground. A blurred sea of faces stared back at her. Which one was he? she wondered wildly. The tall man with the black cowboy hat who couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her? Or maybe the heavyset man standing in the shadows with a sour look on his face? Then again what about the nasty-looking punk with the earring in his nose and tattoos all over his arms and chest? What kind of violence was a man like that capable of?
“He said I would have to be punished,” she whispered hoarsely. Her eyes wide with horror, she clutched at his arm. “Emma! Dear God, what if he meant he was going to hurt Emma? If he knows where we’re staying, he could be on his way there right now.”
Already dialing the ranch, Joe waited impatiently for Laura to answer the phone. The second she did, he didn’t give her time to say anything but hello before he started throwing orders at her. “Laura, this is Joe. Contact the guards and let them know Angel’s stalker is in town and has been making threats on her cell phone. Then double-check the alarm to make sure it’s set and check the locks on all the windows and doors, even upstairs. And don’t let Emma out of your sight.”
“No, sir, I won’t,” she promised quickly. “I’ll notify the guards right now.”
Joe hung up just as their gondola swept by the attendant at the controls. “Hey!” he yelled. “Stop! We need to get off this damn thing!”
The old man never even looked at them and let the big wheel continue to turn. Swept up to the top again, there was nothing Joe could do but swear.
“I think he must be hard of hearing,” Angel said, glancing over the side of their gondola to peer worriedly down at the elderly man. Stooped and wrinkled, he had to be eighty if he was a day. “Look—someone else is trying to get his attention, and he’s just ignoring them.”
“I’d be deaf, too, if I had to listen to this damn music all the time,” Joe muttered in disgust. The calliope music that had been romantic and fun before was now irritatingly loud. “C’mon, you’re going to have to yell with me if we’re ever going to get this guy to stop this thing. Ready? Now!”
They yelled and waved their arms and did everything but throw something as they swept by the attendant, but they still had to go by twice more before they were able to make the man understand they wanted off. Finally cranking the machine to a stop, he stepped forward to release the safety bar and scowled at them irritably. “You didn’t have to yell at me. I ain’t deaf, you know.”
In no mood to try to make the man understand, Joe mumbled an apology, tucked Angel’s hand in his, and pulled her after him down the ride’s exit ramp. “Keep your eyes open and stick close,” he said in a low voice that didn’t carry past her ears. “If anyone even looks like they’re going to give you trouble, scream your head off. Understand?”
Her heart in her throat, she nodded and inched closer to him. “Do you think he’s still here?”
“I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But I’m getting you out of here.”
He stepped into the crowd like a wild mustang scenting the air for danger, his eyes sharp and narrowed, searching the faces of the crowd. Here and there, he spotted a neighbor or friend, but most of the people who pressed in on them were strangers, either there for the festival or drawn to Liberty Hill in the hopes of catching sight of a movie star. And any one of the men could have been Angel’s stalker.
Fury raged in him at the thought. How dare the bastard think he could come into town and start terrorizing her again! He might be able to get away with it in L.A., where he could disappear into the city’s rat-infested sewers and alleys with the rest of his kind, but this wasn’t L.A. There was no place for him to hide in Liberty Hill, and if he didn’t know that yet, he soon would.
“Hey, there’s Angel Wiley!”
The cry went up from somewhere off to their right, and the news went through the crowd like wildfire. Suddenly, people were pressing close, shoving and pushing to get a better look at Angel, until she and Joe were surrounded.
Joe felt Angel stiffen in panic and tightened his hand around hers. “It’s all right,” he assured her.
But it wasn’t. Crying out for autographs and pictures, the mob clutched at Angel, trying to touch her, to get a piece of her. Snarling an oath, Joe shouldered a path for them, pushing people out of the way when he had to, knocking away the hands of anyone who dared to try to touch her.
“Get back!” he growled. “Let us through!”
Her heart slamming against her ribs, Angel ducked her head and blindly followed behind him, cringing as strangers grabbed at her like she was some kind of prize for the taking. But it was the hands stroking her hair, her arms, tugging at her sundress that made her skin crawl. Shivering in revulsion at the thought of a stranger touching her, she pushed closer to Joe’s back and didn’t see the rock half-buried in the ground underfoot. With a startled cry, she tripped.
Joe whirled at her first cry, but hands were already there to catch her from behind before she could fall and to help her regain her footing. In the next instant, Joe swept his arm protectively around her shoulders and pulled her snug against his side, fury etched in every line of his face as to
gether, they fought their way through the crowd and finally broke free.
He took one look at her pale face and started swearing. “Dammit to hell, this is all my fault. Are you all right? God, you’re shaking! And your dress is torn!” He cursed again, a short, pithy curse aimed solely at himself. “I never should have brought you here. I should have known it could get out of hand.”
“Until you’ve experienced it first-hand, it’s hard to imagine people acting like such idiots,” she sniffed, tugging at the torn strap of her sundress.
He looked at her in horror. “You mean this has happened to you before? God almighty! This is nuts!”
“Every job has its drawbacks. And it only happened once before.”
“Then tonight makes twice,” he retorted, “and that’s two times too many.”
His eyes roamed over her, narrowing at the sight of the scrapes on her arms, her ashen face and tousled hair. She looked like she’d been in a catfight. Fury rising in him again at the thought of how easily she could have been trampled, he started to turn her around so he could check out her back, only to stop at the sight of something tangled in her hair. “What’s this?”
“What?”
His jaw granite hard, he gently drew a crushed yellow rose from her hair and held it out to her. “This,” he said flatly.
Angel took one look at it and stumbled back a step in horror. “Oh, God!”
Neither of them had to ask where it had come from—they knew. And just thinking about it made Joe’s blood cold. What an arrogant fool he was! He’d been so sure he could protect her, so sure that nothing was going to happen to her while he was there beside her and his hand was securely wrapped around hers. And all the time, her stalker had been right there, within touching distance, and he hadn’t even known it.
Sick at the thought, he took her hand again, this time glancing around to make sure no one was near. “C’mon. We’ve got to find Nick.”
With so many people in town and beer flowing freely for those old enough to buy it, Nick and his three deputies had their hands full keeping people in line. A man and his wife started yelling at each other at the dance, while over at the carnival, some of the festival-goers chased down a pickpocket who made the mistake of helping himself to the wrong pocket. Then there were the teenagers passing fake IDs in order to buy beer—just keeping track of them was a full-time job.
Every year he promised himself he was going to hire some part-time help for the festival. And every year the city council vetoed the idea with the excuse that they just didn’t have the funds. Yeah, right, he fumed. If they had the money to hire the mayor’s deadbeat brother to mow the city park every week, even when it didn’t need it in the winter, then they had the money to hire some extra deputies once a year. And he was damn sure going to tell them that at the next city council meeting.
The sound of muffled grunts and fists hitting flesh snapped him out of his musings as he walked around the bandstand to check out the dark end of the park and the local teenagers’ favorite necking spot. A fight, he thought with a groan. Great! Just what he needed. Cursing under his breath, he switched on his flashlight and shot the bright beam directly into the dark, concealing shadows under the trees on the edge of the park. And there, as expected, a ring of teenagers surrounded two boys who were trying to pound each other’s brains out.
Not surprisingly, the spectators took off the second he hit them with the beam of his flashlight. The two young pugilists, however, were too caught up in their fury to notice anything but each other. They were still swinging at each other when Nick waded in to break it up.
“All right, that’s enough!” he snapped, shaking them both by the scruff of the neck. “Keep this up and I’ll have to throw you in jail and call your parents. Is that what you want?”
Since one of them was the preacher’s son and the other the only offspring of a prominent city councilman, he felt sure that it wasn’t. Hanging their heads, they both mumbled, “No, sir.”
“Then I suggest you find another way to solve whatever your problem is,” he said tersely. “Now get the hell out of here before I forget my good intentions and run you both in.”
He didn’t have to tell them twice. Scowling at each other like two junkyard dogs, they sulked off in opposite directions. They would, Nick knew, meet somewhere else later and exchange blows again, but the odds were slim that it would be tonight. The crowd was already starting to thin, and within another hour, the carnival would start shutting down. And it wouldn’t be a minute too soon for him. It had been a long evening and he was ready to call it a night.
But when he turned back to the dance and saw Joe bearing down on him with Angel held protectively close, he only had to take one look at Joe’s set face and Angel’s torn dress to know that he had a hell of a bigger problem on his hands than a couple of kids fighting. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s here,” Joe said flatly.
Nick didn’t have to ask who he was. From what he’d seen of Angel Wiley, there was only one person who could put that stark look of fear in her blue eyes, and that was her stalker. “What do you mean he’s here?” he demanded, his dark brows snapping together in a scowl as he looked Angel up and down. “Are you saying he did this to you?”
“No. At least I don’t think it was him, but I can’t be sure. We were caught in a mob of fans—”
“What?!”
“It got a little out of hand,” she tried to explain.
“A little?” Joe echoed incredulously. “It was a feeding frenzy. Somebody recognized her, and the next thing I knew, people were pushing and shoving and grabbing at her, and we were surrounded.”
“When we were finally able to break free, Joe found this in my hair,” she told Nick and held out the crushed rose.
She didn’t have to remind Nick of the significance of the yellow flower. She saw from the sudden tightening of his angled jaw that he recognized it immediately for what it was—a sign from her stalker. Just thinking about how close the monster had been to her, how he’d actually reached out and slipped a rose in her hair, sickened her. Had he chosen, he could have just as easily slipped a knife between her ribs.
“He saw Joe kissing me on the Ferris wheel and called me on my cell phone,” she said huskily, the first hint of color coming back into her cheeks. “He was furious. He started screaming at me—”
“He threatened her,” Joe snarled, correcting her. “The slimeball said he was going to punish her. That’s why he put that damn rose in her hair. He wanted her to know he could get close enough to crush her if he wanted to.”
Nick swore. “We knew it was only a matter of time before the jackass showed up here, but I was hoping that it would be later rather than sooner.” Taking a clean handkerchief from his back pocket, he carefully wrapped the rose in it. “I doubt that the lab will be able to pick up any latent fingerprints off this, but it’s the only evidence we’ve got. I’ll send it off to Colorado Springs first thing in the morning.”
That taken care of, he turned his attention back to Angel. “Tell me about this mob again. Since I don’t believe in coincidence, and it wasn’t just dumb luck that someone chose to put a yellow rose in your hair, then we’re going to assume your stalker was in the crowd. Considering that and all the pushing and shoving going on, you had to be scared. But of what? The mob itself and the fact that it seemed to be out of control or one person in particular?”
With no effort whatsoever, she remembered the exact moment she’d felt revulsion threaten to choke her. “Someone stroked me,” she said thickly. “It was right before I started to fall. I felt someone’s hand on me, stroking my hair and arm and tugging at my dress, and I just wanted to gag.”
Horrified, Joe said, “My God, why didn’t you say something? I’d have taken him apart.”
“There wasn’t time,” she said simply. “It all happened so fast. The next thing I knew, I was falling and someone caught me and set me back on my feet.”
“Was it the same person
who’d been touching you?” Nick asked sharply. “Did you get a look at his face or even his hands?”
Regretfully, she shook her head. “No. He released me almost immediately, and then Joe pulled me up beside him and we were finally able to break free of the crowd. Do you think it was him?”
“Probably,” he said bluntly, not pulling any punches. “In his twisted mind, he was probably proving to himself and you that he had the right to put his hands on you—especially after he saw you kissing Joe.”
“It’s none of his damn business who she kisses,” Joe snarled.
For the first time in what seemed like hours, Nick had to fight the need to smile. Who would have thought it? Woman-hater Joe McBride kissing movie star Angel Wiley on the Ferris wheel. God, what he wouldn’t have given to have seen that!
“No, you’re right,” he said, sobering. “She can kiss anyone she pleases, but I’d be careful about doing it in public until this jerk’s caught. In fact, now that we know he’s here, I’d keep a low profile if I were you,” he told Angel. “He’s already gotten to you once. The more you’re out and about, the better chance he has of doing it again. And next time, he might do a hell of a lot more than run his hands over you and stick a flower in your hair.”
He knew that had to gall her—it would anyone. She was the victim here. She hadn’t asked for any of this to happen to her, yet she was the one being forced to give up her freedom. To her credit, however, she didn’t fuss. “I don’t have a problem with that. I feel safer at the ranch, anyway.”
Joe and Nick exchanged a look, and it hit her then. “But that’s not going to be very safe after this, is it? He’s bound to know already that I’m staying there. It’s just a matter of time before he comes after me.”
“The security at the house is rock-solid,” Joe assured her. “As soon as we get back to the ranch, I’ll let everyone know the bastard was in town tonight. He won’t get his hands on you again.”