Killer's Prey

by Rachel Lee

She damn well would, even as her legs began to feel like overcooked spaghetti. Reaction, she told herself. It was just reaction setting in. Down the short, bumpy sidewalk to the curb. Jake dropped her suitcases and opened the door for her, helping her into the cruiser.

  Her hands had begun to shake so badly that she couldn’t even manage the seat belt. He leaned in, snapped it into place then loaded her suitcases into the back.

  She let her head fall back against the headrest, and for the very first time thought that at least one police car didn’t smell that bad.

  Moments later they were pulling away from the curb. She scarcely paid attention as Jake radioed to say that he needed to head back to his place. The voice of the dispatcher told him someone would cover him. Then he pulled out a cell phone and she heard it dial automatically.

  “Rosa, I’m bringing Nora back with me. The guest room is ready?”

  She couldn’t hear the answer.

  “Okay. Spray some of that air freshener around it. Nora likes it.”

  That got to her, that he remembered that silly comment. She crumbled then, quietly, a few silent tears running down her cheeks. No one, not ever, had given that much of a damn about her.

  Chapter 5

  Maybe it was Rosa’s TLC, or all the excellent food and fresh air, but a week later Jake hardly recognized Nora as the woman he had picked up at the airport. She was striding around the ranch with a firmness to her step. She rode Daisy without a lead and was planning to join him on a short trail ride that weekend, probably the last weekend before the weather turned completely into winter. She went to the library every weekday afternoon, and her afternoons were growing longer.

  The only problem he had was her desire to rent her own place. With Langdon still on the loose, he didn’t like the idea at all, and so far he’d been able to scotch every rental possibility by pointing out all the problems, until finally she had looked at him with wry amusement and asked, “Do you really think I’m going to find something perfect?”

  Of course he didn’t, but he didn’t want her that far away. He didn’t want her to be by herself. Especially not with Langdon out there somewhere.

  He was also troubled by Loftis’s threat as they had left that night, about that man coming after her. Did Loftis know something? Probably not. The cops were keeping mum. None should have revealed that they were watching for the man. The owner of the truck stop? Not likely. Hasty could be garrulous, but he also knew when silence was golden.

  So maybe it had been an empty threat in an attempt to intimidate Nora. He wished he believed it. He and Gage had talked about it, but Gage had no ideas, either.

  But he should have known secrets didn’t remain secrets forever. Not in this town, not anywhere. And he should have guessed that sooner or later Nora would call one of her friends back in Minneapolis and get the news.

  He was out in the barn in the early morning, forking some fresh hay into the stalls with Al’s assistance. At this time of year the nights grew cold enough that he preferred to keep the horses inside. They probably could have huddled together in the paddock and kept themselves warm enough, but he didn’t see the point in putting them through that when he could get them out of the wind and into a warm space. Their shaggy winter coats were thickening nicely, though. They’d probably make it through a blizzard outdoors.

  But he was thinking about more than horses. He was thinking about Nora, too. A thought had been dancing around the edges of his brain, and he wondered if he was tinkering with memory. As a cop he knew how unreliable memory could be.

  But as Nora strengthened, he felt the pull of an undeniable sexual attraction to her. Feeling that, and remembering how she had looked in high school, despite her hideous clothes, he began to wonder if the whole reason he had erupted at her as he had that shameful night was because he was promised to Beth and he really wanted Nora.

  She had offered herself to him, and that made him mad for her sake, certainly, but maybe it had made him uncomfortably aware how much he’d wanted to take her up on that offer. Maybe his cruelty to her had been defensive denial. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d just been a stupid twenty-year-old who for some unknown reason had blurted a whole bunch of cruel stuff.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time in his life he’d acted on an idiotic impulse he couldn’t explain. Probably not the last, either.

  But regardless of what had been going on in his head twelve years ago, he knew what was going on in there now. And in his body. As Nora’s health returned, he wanted her more and more. Not because she was prettier, but because she was stronger. He didn’t feel quite so guilty about the yearnings now that she didn’t look fragile enough to break.

  Not that he should act on them. Not after what she had been through.

  But he was growing increasingly uneasy. He couldn’t imagine how Cranston Langdon had managed to evade both the Minneapolis police and the Minnesota state police. A lot of people slipped their bracelets every day, but most of them wound up back in custody within seventy-two hours. Mainly because they were stupid and didn’t leave the area. This guy either had a great place to go to ground, or he hadn’t stopped moving and wasn’t using his own vehicle.

  It was the latter idea that increasingly worried him. Initially he’d been certain that Langdon would be under wraps in a few days. It had been over a week now and he seemed to have dropped off the radar.

  He was just emerging from the barn, covered in hay dust, when he saw Nora marching across the yard his way. His heart lifted a little at the firm determination of her step. She was coming back fast. She came to a halt about six feet away, putting her hands on her hips. Her blue eyes were shooting fire. Another time he might have liked seeing this burst of spirit.

  She didn’t even need to open her mouth for him to realize what was coming. He braced himself, suspecting this wasn’t going to be pretty. Worse, he suspected he may have utterly sacrificed any trust she had begun to feel for him. Probably deserved to, too.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that man was missing? You knew, didn’t you? Hell, that’s what my father meant when he said the guy was going to come after me. Everybody knew but me!”

  He hesitated, unsure of the best way to give the story to her. His mother used to tell him, when he was young, that it was all in the way you said something. He still wasn’t sure he’d mastered that arcane piece of advice. “I knew,” he finally said, with customary bluntness. “Usually they pick these runners up in a couple of days.”

  “Usually. Usually? At what point did you think I might need to know about this? When I was facing him in another ditch?”

  “Nora...”

  “Or did you think that because you’re chief of this Podunk police force that you’d be able to stop him at the county line?”

  “Everybody’s watching out for him. We posted a BOLO.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better? That you and a bunch of other cops are keeping an eye out? What about me? Don’t I need to keep an eye out?”

  She paled suddenly. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Because this way you can be sure I’m never alone. If it isn’t you, it’s Rosa, or Emma at the library.”

  “Now, wait...”

  But she wasn’t waiting. She turned to storm back toward the house, although he couldn’t imagine what she would do there except slam some doors, but then he noticed a slight stagger. The fury had drained her. Hell, maybe it had even set back her recovery.

  Didn’t he feel like something that ought to be on the compost heap?

  Reason argued he should let her be, but emotion was having none of it. It pained him in an unexpectedly deep way that she felt angry. Pained him that he had once again hurt her and it didn’t matter that he’d done so with the best of intentions. Hell, he’d thought he had the best of intentions last time when he’d turned down her offer, being promised to Beth and all. It wasn’t turning her down that had caused the pain. It was the way he had done it.

  That appeared to be the same problem n
ow. The way he had handled this was clearly wrong.

  “Nora!”

  She kept right on walking, although her step was a whole lot less firm then when she had come at him. That tore it. Giving no thought to what was the right thing to do, he ran after her, caught up and wrapped her in his arms.

  Then he felt a terrible stillness go through her, a shocking stillness as if she had turned to marble. Oh, God, he had just grabbed a woman who had been recently assaulted.

  He didn’t know what to do. He had no idea if she was locked in some cell of memory, if she might collapse if he let her go. But holding on to her seemed like a bad thing, too.

  “Nora?” He gentled his voice almost to a purr. “Nora, I’m going to let go and step back. Will you be okay?”

  After a few seconds he felt a jerky nod. Moving slowly, afraid of startling her or unwittingly frightening her, he loosened then dropped his arms. When he was certain she was steady, he stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you.”

  Maybe what killed him most was the way her gaze had gone from furious to almost hollow. She stared at him and he could almost feel the effort she was expending to pull herself back from wherever she had gone. As if she couldn’t quite focus on him.

  Little by little, she seemed to visibly reassemble herself. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “No, I shouldn’t.”

  Then she said something that tore at his heart. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be normal again.”

  “Eventually,” he promised her. “You’re already getting better day by day. It’ll come.” Mostly, he amended silently. He doubted all the scars would ever be gone.

  Then she ripped at him even more. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? For what? Nora, there’s not one damn thing you need to apologize for. I’m the one who should apologize for grabbing you like that. I’m not long on finesse, as you well know, and I was just so disturbed that I’d upset you and you were walking away, I did the stupidest thing possible. I physically stopped you. That was wrong, no two ways about it.”

  “You hugged me,” she said quietly.

  Well, he had, sure enough. But he still didn’t have the right to lay a finger on her without her permission, attack or no attack. His own ham-handedness appalled him.

  “Nobody,” she said, sounding choked, “has hugged me in forever.”

  Aw, man. That hurt to hear. His chest squeezed so hard he could barely breathe. No hugs? “Can I hug you? Now?”

  She gave a jerky nod.

  He approached her again, moving slowly, gentling every touch as he wrapped his arms around her, feeling as if he were dealing with a skittish mare. He felt the stiffness seep out of her until at last, ages later, her head came to rest in the hollow of his shoulder. Only then did he tighten his hold, making it a true hug.

  A tremulous sigh escaped her, followed by the most miraculous thing: he felt her arms lift and tentatively wind around his waist. Turning his head, he pressed his face to her hair and smelled baby shampoo. It was an aroma he had always liked.

  Eventually, though, reluctant as he was to disturb these minutes in which she seemed to have given him her complete trust, he murmured, “It’s chilly out here. Do you want to talk inside?”

  Some of the softness left her, an infinitesimal pulling away that he felt in the furthest corners of his being.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “We need to talk.”

  No question of that now. He stepped back gingerly, regretting every inch of space between them. Together they walked toward the house.

  Passing through the mudroom, they doffed their boots. Rosa was somewhere upstairs, cleaning a bathroom to judge by the sound of running water. Jake stopped to get two cups of coffee, then led the way to the living room. He considered closing the pocket doors to give them complete privacy, then wondered if that might make her uneasy, so he left them open. She took a gooseneck chair, saying as clearly as words that she wanted space, that she didn’t want him close.

  She opened the conversation. At least he hoped it would be a conversation. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  At least she didn’t sound truculent. That was a better start than he had hoped for. Of course, a lot of his conversations with Beth after their marriage had generally started with her mad about something. “Gage and I talked about it. We were pretty sure they’d pick the guy up in a day or two. We also wondered how likely it was that he would follow you here, or that he even knew where to look. We’ve been keeping in touch with the Minneapolis police, though.”

  “They haven’t found him. And he attacked his wife.”

  “Unfortunately true on both counts. But the fact is, we put his photo out there to all our officers, and at the truck stop. Anywhere else in town, strangers will be noticed. You know that.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any safer.” She pulled her knees up and tucked them under her chin, wrapping her arms around her legs. She seemed to have shrunk again.

  “You’ve been through hell,” he said bluntly. “It’s going to be a long time before you feel safe again. Even after they put the guy away.”

  “If they can find him.”

  “They will,” he said with a certainty he was far from feeling at this point. “How many people know you come from here? Apart from your immediate friends, who probably wouldn’t mention it to anyone.”

  “I don’t know.” Her chin quivered, then steadied. “It’s not like I made a big secret of it, but I didn’t exactly bandy it about, either. It was in my employment records. My college records, but I don’t even know if the police asked for it or looked it up. They wouldn’t talk anyway, would they?”

  “No.” But he didn’t mention that all the information would be available to Langdon’s lawyer. All of it. He could have sighed when it hit him how many possible ways someone could find out where she lived. Loftis wasn’t an uncommon name, but combined with her first name, that would narrow a search considerably. So far this guy had eluded police, which meant he wasn’t your typical dumb criminal.

  Of course, going after his wife wasn’t exactly genius. Now he was up for two major felonies. So the question was, would he still have it in for Nora, enough to hunt her, or was he making his way out of the country to escape prosecution?

  “Nobody ever figured out why this guy attacked you,” he said.

  “Not really. I never even knew who it was until they caught him, and then all I could tell them was that I’d never met him. That’s when they got the idea that I was obstructing, trying to conceal an affair with him. But I told you all this, didn’t I? Then when they arrested them, he claimed he’d blown his cork because I was having an affair with his wife. Maybe going after her was a way to bolster his story.” She spread her hands, her eyes huge and sad. “I just don’t know, Jake. I still can’t believe most of this, let alone understand it.”

  He nodded encouragingly. When life changed so completely and totally, you could feel as if you’d been transported to a different planet where almost no landscape was recognizable. Feeling safe would be a hard commodity to come by.

  For him, though, it was like looking through fractured glass, past and present leaving scattered pieces all over the place, and he wasn’t quite certain how to put them together. There was that long-ago time when he had hurt this woman so deeply he’d forever lived with an awareness that he, too, could be immeasurably cruel, an awareness that stained his conscience. And there was now, a woman who had suffered a terrible attack, false accusations, intolerable pain both emotionally and physically, and she, too, was like shattered glass that needed to be put back together.

  And her assailant was out there somewhere and nobody could guess if he might be a threat to her.

  He was accustomed to moving through life in a pretty straightforward way. As a youngster and young man, he’d known his course: take over the ranch, marry, have a family. Well, Beth hadn’t gone according to plan, but it was still straightforward: work the
ranch. Then he’d added working part-time as a deputy to make ends meet better, with a little slack for the unexpected.

  Basically a very ordinary life and path.

  But when he looked at Nora, he saw a path full of knots and nooses. Yes, nooses. All the years she had suffered under her father’s thumb, and from the taunts of her peers. All the years she must have felt like the ugly duckling watching swans through a window she couldn’t get through. Followed by her leap for freedom and a new life, an adventure that most of the people he’d grown up with hadn’t even attempted, whether they’d thought of it or not. She had guts. She’d reached out for the brass ring and built a new life. Then it had all been snatched from her in the most horrific way.

  While he’d been sailing through, she’d been struggling, and in desperate need of a life preserver that no one would throw her. The clarity of that image was enough to twist him into knots.

  And now she had reason to fear that the worst demon of any of her nightmares might be coming after her. He wished he could promise her that wouldn’t happen, but he couldn’t. Nor would she believe him if he did.

  “So,” she said after a little while, “that’s why you’ve objected to every place I thought of renting. You don’t want me to be alone.”

  He couldn’t deny it. “That’s part of it. The other part is that I’m enjoying having you here.”

  Did her cheeks pink slightly? He couldn’t be sure. Given their history, he decided it wasn’t likely. She had no real reason to trust him. Not after that long-ago night. Although he was cherishing a small hope that they were becoming friends of a sort. And she had let him hug her.

  But, God, how alone she must feel! She’d given up the home she had built, the friends she had made, to come running here to recover, only to find that the beast might be following her, that her father hadn’t softened one iota over the years, and now she was utterly rootless, staying with a man she had ample cause to loathe, one who, over the past twelve years, had become a stranger.

  Lovely.

  “He’ll find me,” she said suddenly.