What was it that niggled at her brain? Maybe she shouldn’t feel uneasy that Hunter had planted her at her computer. If there really was something, maybe her subconscious mind would spit it out through her fingertips as she revised Andee’s story to synchronize with all that had happened that day. And see if it stuck.
She turned on her computer.
“Are you going to try it?” Hunter stood so close behind her that she could feel the heat from his body warming her. She wanted to lean back, take comfort from his nearness, but it would be a false reassurance.
He hadn’t been kidding at Margo’s about wanting something from her. But that didn’t mean he’d like the result.
“I’ll get a glass of ice water first.” She turned in the stiff wooden chair in Hunter’s guest bedroom.
“Stay here. Limber up your fingers or whatever you do to get ready. I’ll get your drink.” He squeezed her shoulders gently, and then he was gone. Not for long, she reminded herself. Still, the room felt empty without him.
She used her laptop’s touch pad to open her word-processing program, then scrolled through the menu to the story. Ironically, it was still labeled as it was when she’d first sat down to write “Duke’s Story.” It didn’t, of course, contain what she had started to write, but instead was Andee’s story. Other files on her computer also had titles she had started out with when she had sat down to write children’s tales. She never changed the names. Why bother? She knew what was in each.
She opened “Duke’s Story.” It started with the segment in Andee’s point of view that had so touched Shauna that she’d begun crying when she first opened her eyes and read it:
Andee was scared. So scared. “Daddy,” she cried.
But Daddy didn’t come. Instead, the bad man came back into the room.
“Help me, Daddy!”
Bracing herself mentally, Shauna scrolled down to where, chronologically, today’s events would fit. In her story, the news media had gotten hold of the kidnapping and run with it, but not for another couple of days. What had changed in real life? Could she save the changes she would make on the computer?
Would it make any difference?
How could Hunter bear it? She didn’t even know his child, and she ached each time she read this story. Maybe it was better for him, for he still hung on to his hope.
Hunter returned. “Here’s your ice water.”
“Thanks.” She sipped the cold liquid. She would need every bit of ice in her veins that she could import there. She put the glass down and saw, from the corner of her eye, when Hunter strode from the room again. Was he leaving? Good. She would rather do this in private, and so far he’d hung around each time he had wanted her to change the story.
He came back carrying a folding chair, which he set up beside her. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “Go ahead.”
How could she help but mind him? His presence dominated the room, and not just because he was such a large man, both in height and muscular breadth. His presence dominated her thoughts, too. He wanted a lot from her.
She wished—oh, how she wished—that she would be able to give him what he wanted. Then she could simply slip away, go back to her life, let him go back to his.
Who was she trying to fool? Even if things turned out perfectly, all the blockades she had built up in her brain after losing him before had now been decimated.
Damn. She had work to do. She turned to him, the smile on her face as false as acrylic fingernails. “Okay, let’s see what happens.”
She put her fingers back on her keyboard and began to write.
Hunter had seen Shauna write before—over the last few days, at her home before they’d dashed to L.A., and last night, when she’d been able to save the changes to her story.
He wouldn’t admit it to her—didn’t want to admit it to himself—but she looked damned sexy sitting there, her sensual body poised and slender on the uncomfortable-looking straight chair, her long legs crossed at the ankles, her soft brown eyes scrunched in concentration as she studied what she wrote. Her light, wavy hair swept below her shoulders, moving ever so slightly as she nodded gently to herself.
Her fingers pressed the keyboard in a syncopated rhythm as words he couldn’t read from where he sat appeared on the screen.
Her full lips puckered in a pout of concentration. He wanted to concentrate on them. On that pucker. On what she could do—did do—with those lips…
He moved in his chair and looked away, trying to regain control. He hardly noted the bareness of his guest bedroom, except for the bed in its center.
Shauna. Bed. His bed—
He clenched his fists so hard his hands ached. How ridiculous could he be? Like a hormone-crazed adolescent, when what he needed was to concentrate as much as Shauna on her story.
The clues pouring in to the authorities might help. They might not. But what Shauna was doing was damned important, for it revolved around Andee. And, now that he’d been faced with Shauna’s stories again, he knew he had to give them credence.
Had always given them credence.
Today’s press conference wasn’t in her story before. Once she inputted it, would she be able to save—?
At the change in tempo to Shauna’s typing, he pivoted back to look at her. And felt his jaw drop. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was open, but only a little. All color had fled from her lovely face, leaving her complexion pale, fragile looking.
And still she typed.
He’d seen her close her eyes briefly while writing before, go into some kind of daze or whatever, but this was different. Way deeper. As if whatever she was doing had taken control of her body, her mind…
And still her fingers flew over the keyboard.
Was this how her writing changed from tales about kiddies’ dogs into the horror stories that came true? If so, where did they come from?
She’d always claimed to consume other peoples’ emotions and spit them out, somehow, onto her computer. Whose emotions did she read now?
If he rose and drew closer, would he disturb her?
Disturb her? Hell, she looked as if she’d turned into a sheaf of wheat in a windstorm, ready to blow over any second.
Should he hold her up? Catch her if she fell?
Wake her by shouting her name, the way he wanted to?
Damn, this couldn’t be good for her. It wouldn’t help Andee. He had to stop it. Now.
But he didn’t. As if he was the one who’d suddenly gone into a stupor, he watched for a moment longer. And then another moment. A minute…and then Shauna moaned, a small, mournful sound that made the hairs at the nape of Hunter’s neck prickle.
Enough! He stood and rushed toward her as she swayed and nearly toppled. She caught herself before he reached her. He inhaled the soft, sweet-spicy scent that was Shauna’s. Grabbed her by the shoulders. She turned her head and looked up at him, a vacant, bewildered expression in those eyes that always drove him nuts with their strength and eloquence.
“Hunter?” Her voice was frail, husky, and he knelt and held her tightly. Pressed his head against her side for strength—his? Hers?
“Are you all right?” he demanded.
“What…?”
“You looked like you were asleep. Really catching some heavy z’s—in some kind of trance, but you kept writing. Were you aware of it?”
“Trance? Now? No…” Her voice drew out for a moment, and then she slowly turned her head away from him.
She cringed as she faced the computer, looking at the screen as if creeping up on its contents might make it easier. Every muscle in her body appeared to tense, causing her to shiver.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“I—” She blinked, then faced the screen head-on. Her eyes moved as she began to read. “Oh, no,” she whispered.
“What?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Still kneeling, he took a few steps on his knees until he was again at Shauna’s side. He began reading, too.
“Damn,” he swore futi
lely. “Damn it all.”
What the hell was he going to do now?
Big T hadn’t counted on this.
Maybe he should have. Everything else had gone wrong since the second he’d snatched the kid.
He’d demanded no police. Police had been brought in.
The person he’d trusted most had betrayed him.
What should have been simple, a game to be won, had turned into a nightmare.
Well, he needed the damned money even more now. He’d set things up, get paid and get the hell out of there.
“Where’s my daddy?”
The kid was awake again. She kept interrupting him when he needed to think.
“Shut up.”
“That’s not nice. Where’s my daddy?”
“He’d better be doing what I tell him to.” Good thing he’d been able to keep the kid from watching the TV, or she would know where her daddy was, all right. Her mommy, too. And the cops, and the damned reporters, and—
Hey. He knew how to fix things. Where to schedule the pickup for the money, get rid of the kid and set himself free. He’d think it through, though, before calling again.
If he had to get rid of the kid the hard way to save himself—
Well, even though it hadn’t been the plan before, plans change.
Shauna held her breath as she finished reading. Her body was coiled into a tight, trembling mass as it so often was when she finished writing one of her stories. Only this time, it wasn’t a new story. It was part of an existing one.
She’d never before lost herself in adding to her writing, only while creating a story in the first place. But, then, she’d never before had Hunter urging her to change things.
“Oh, no,” she murmured yet again. She turned in her chair, away from the computer.
Toward where Hunter knelt beside her. He was so tall that despite the height of her chair, his head was even with hers. The muscles at the side of his strong jaw throbbed as if he clenched his teeth hard enough to shatter them.
He was still reading. Saying nothing. He didn’t have to.
And then he rose. Dwarfing her. Staring down at her with green eyes filled with the most terrible pain imaginable.
“Scroll to the end,” he demanded.
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it and did as he said. The ending hadn’t changed.
“Fix it.”
She looked up, but he wouldn’t want her to tell him the obvious: even if she changed it, the edits wouldn’t be saved.
Instead, she did as he asked. Gave it a happy ending.
“Now, if the other stuff you added saves, that should too.”
“We’ll see,” she said softly. She put the cursor on the Save icon and pressed it. She closed the document. Opened it again.
The horrible words she had added in her trance—an addition born of the obvious harsh emotions of the kidnapper who thought of himself as Big T—remained. So did the original ending.
Shauna looked up at Hunter helplessly, hating the cold expression he leveled on her as much as the agony she saw in the churning depths of his eyes.
Without another word, he rose and left the room.
Shauna stayed there, shuddering, her head bowed.
Of course he blamed her for what she had written. For what she could—and couldn’t—do.
Don’t kill the messenger. The trite expression slammed into her mind, but she didn’t voice it aloud.
He wasn’t killing her. Physically, he wasn’t doing anything at all to her. Emotionally…
Emotionally she was regressing by years. To the anguish of the time she couldn’t save her father.
To earlier, when she had lost Hunter. The first time.
The only time. She certainly did not have him now.
“If only—” she whispered in the silence.
She didn’t finish. There were too many “if onlys.”
Instead, Shauna raised her head and looked at her computer once more.
She opened a new file and again began to type.
For a long time, Hunter sat in Andee’s room on her small bed, on the frilly gold-and-white comforter his mother had sent for her granddaughter.
He loved the professionally taken photo of the two of them that hung on the yellow wall, their cheeks pressed together, their smiles wide. He thought he could see a lot of himself in his sweet daughter—or at least he’d wanted to. Black hair, though Andee’s was as curly as his was straight. But their eyes were both the Strahm green.
Right now, he couldn’t bear to look at that picture.
Instead, he stared at the small, white dresser with all the stuffed animals on top. Andee particularly loved her stuffed kitty cats.
He’d promised, one day, that they could adopt a cat from a shelter, like she’d seen on some show on Animal Planet, her favorite TV station. He had never gotten around to it. Never quite figured out how one took care of a cat, which seemed a good reason not to get one. And now, maybe he would never be able to get his daughter her cat.
The sound that wrenched from deep inside him was too long for a sob, too guttural for a moan.
“Hunter?”
Startled at the interruption, ready to snap at Shauna for daring to catch him like that, he stood, his fists clenched at his sides. “Yeah?”
He didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see the damnable sympathy he was sure he’d find. Not now.
“Look. You have to see this.”
Curious, he did turn to her and saw that her cheeks were flushed pink, her eyes sparkling. She held her laptop.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure it’ll help, but I finally figured out what it was that was bothering me.”
“And it is—?”
His cell phone rang.
“Hunter, it’s Simon. I’m on Margo patrol. She just got another call from the kidnapper. You’ve got to get over here.”
Chapter 13
“Did Simon give any hint of what the kidnapper said to Margo?” Shauna asked. White-knuckled, she clutched the edges of the passenger seat of Hunter’s car for at least the illusion of stability. It was just past dusk, and he was driving way over any reasonable speed limit. He barely slowed for stop signs, made sharp right turns instead of waiting for red lights to change, even ran one when they got into a commercial area less than a mile from the freeway on-ramp.
“All he would say was that the call was important, and Margo was on the verge of hysterics again. Banger and he listened in on the eavesdropping devices they’d installed. The guy sounded stressed. Angry.”
Like in the revisions to her story. Shauna didn’t say it, but she couldn’t help thinking it.
Apparently Hunter thought it, too. “But of course you know that from the latest stuff in your story. You wrote about how things changed, how the guy knew how to fix things. Any idea what that meant—other than the part on getting rid of the kid?”
Shauna winced, even though Hunter’s tone remained level, conversational. Maybe he really wasn’t blaming her anymore. But that didn’t keep her from wishing—as always—that she could do something positive to fix what was in her stories.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t follow his thinking. But I have some theories I want to share with you.”
Theories? Heck, they were well-reasoned suppositions, based on her story—how it was written before, and how it had changed.
After Hunter left the room, she had begun to write a sort of flow chart, putting together the ideas that came to her. She’d intended to sort out the odd impressions that had teased her mind, made her think that, if she only could put her finger on it, she had more information than she realized. And now, she thought she’d figured it out.
Was she right? She didn’t know. But at least they were heading in the right direction to find out. To Margo’s.
“What theories?” Hunter roared his GTO onto the San Diego Freeway, headed north, pulled into the fast lane and pushed the car up to a speed that sug
gested a street race. He might be remaining civil to her, but his driving evidenced his disturbed mood.
“I’ll tell you if you slow down,” Shauna said through gritted teeth. “I’d like to arrive at Margo’s in one piece.”
She saw the glance he shot at her. Great. When she’d asked for more safety, he wasn’t even watching the road.
“Please, Hunter,” she said. “What I have to say may or may not be right, but at least it’ll give us a new angle to explore. It won’t do Andee any good if her daddy dies trying to save her.” The idea of Hunter harming himself arrowed a pang of sorrow through her. “Slow down, okay? Then I’ll run this by you.”
She held her breath, waiting for his response. And then he pulled out of the fast lane and slowed.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Okay. What’s your new inspiration?”
Shauna glanced at him, but neither his tone nor his expression suggested he was being sarcastic. Maybe he was, at last, understanding what she could and couldn’t do, and willing to accept her help. “Well,” she said, “it stems from my wondering if the four neighbors described in my story were actually only two.”
“We talked about that. If Chiles is the nosy neighbor, the irritated one and the one who saw something important without realizing it, all rolled into one, what did he see?”
“I’ve taken notes on my conversations with him. I entered it all onto the computer, and—”
“If you wrote another story that says Chiles is the kidnapper, it’s wrong. I already looked around his place. If he’s involved, he has to have an accomplice.”
“No, I didn’t write a story about Conrad.” Despite herself, Shauna was getting edgy. She glanced out the window at the barely illuminated hillsides flanking the freeway, then back at his strong, shadowed profile. “Let me tell this my way, okay? I’m having a hard time low-keying it, because I’m excited. I didn’t want to dump it on you too fast and with too much conviction, in case I’m wrong. If you don’t want to hear it, fine. I’ll tell Simon or Banger or even Tennyson. I’ll have to hedge it with the official guys, though, since they don’t know the truth about my involvement here. But—”
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