the past few days, they’d seemed a little harder to shake.
Maybe a portent of the shake-up to come.
Man, was he shaken.
“What do you want?” he asked before that admission had time to unsettle him even more.
She opened her mouth, closed it and wrapped her fingers tightly around her coffee. Her nails were polished pale pink with tiny flecks of hot-pink glitter. She’d always been such a girly-girl, no matter what she wore. Even in one of his dress shirts and nothing else, she’d looked like a princess ready for the ball. Now, when he felt like a drained rat, she was beautiful.
After a minute, she eased her grip on the cup and raised her gaze to him. “I’m sorry about the way things went.”
For a moment, he thought that was just a start, that she would go on with some crappy explanation, but when she didn’t, he stared at her. “That’s it? That’s what you came all this way to say?”
“No. I came to tell you...”
He knew how to conduct interviews, how to get a reluctant person to talk, how to sort through everything a talkative person said to get to the important details, how to get his instincts at work on determining truth versus lies versus obfuscation. He knew the best action was to be silent and still; soon enough, she would talk just to fill the void.
He knew all that and ignored it. Instead he stood up, reached into his pocket and slapped a business card down on the table. “There’s my office number and my email address. If you ever decide to actually say what you came to say, you can leave a message. Once that’s taken care of, I assume you’ll be getting the hell out because that’s what you do, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t managed a single step when she spoke. “I think you might be in danger, Daniel.”
Saying the words out loud was hard. Hadn’t she already provided enough upheaval in his life? But she couldn’t have not said them, not if she wanted to live with herself. She felt so bad about what had happened to Kyle, and she’d had no advance warning. Finding out that one of the others had been injured or even killed when she’d made no effort to stop it would have been too much to bear.
The incredulous look he was giving her wasn’t easy to bear, either. It made her face hot, made her want to squirm on the ridiculous stool where she loomed like a giant over a doll’s table. Slowly, he sank back onto his own stool, his hands gripping the table in front of him, his fingers pressing tightly like he was imagining them around her throat. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then pinched the bridge of his nose. Those were his first outward symptoms of frustration, a habit she’d rarely seen directed her way but was still familiar with. Did he know he’d picked it up from Jeffrey? Except Jeffrey didn’t pinch. He just pressed two knuckles to that spot between his eyes.
When Daniel spoke, his voice would seem calm to most people, but she heard the stress, the tight control. “Would you say that again?”
She thought about repeating it verbatim, just to tweak his frustration a little tighter, because she knew he didn’t want a repeat. He wanted an explanation.
Deserved an explanation.
After drawing a deep breath, she exhaled, hoping to blow out some of her own stress, but it didn’t work. “I have a stalker,” she said flatly. “I got him about a year ago, right around Halloween.” That was Stacia’s birthday. Her sister had even joked about how bad her luck was: her birthday, and Natasha got a secret admirer. “Last weekend, he sent me a message that he had enjoyed his visit with Kyle on Saturday. You remember—”
Daniel growled. Of course he remembered her first fiancé.
“I still run into Kyle occasionally, so I called to see what he could tell me about this guy, and... I talked to his mother. He had a bad accident that day. He fell down the stairs at his house. He’s in a coma, and they don’t know whether he’ll survive.” She closed her eyes briefly, and an image of her first fiancé came to mind: boyish, auburn-haired, bearing a strong resemblance to Britain’s Prince Harry. The idea that he might die broke her heart.
“RememberMe said—”
“What?” Daniel interrupted, still looking flummoxed.
“RememberMe. It’s his email address. It’s the only name I have for him.”
“You don’t know who he is?”
“If I knew, I would call him by name.” She mimicked his dry, stating-the-obvious tone almost perfectly. “I have no idea. Stacia and I considered every guy I ever met and came up with nothing.” It was hard, looking critically at people she’d been friends with, had dated, kissed or more, and wondering if they could be dangerous. Could one of them be the one so determined to terrorize her? Was anyone she knew actually capable of that?
Dear God, she hoped not.
“What do you know?”
The memory of her first contact with the man was clearer now than the day it happened. At the time, it had been no big deal, just one more email from a stranger in an inbox that got plenty of those every day. His was friendly, lighthearted. It had made her smile, and she’d needed the smile, and she truly hadn’t found anything intrusive about it. She’d always had the option of deleting the email and, in that case, would likely never hear from him again.
Instead, she’d chosen to answer. What would have happened if she hadn’t?
“He sent me an email, just a short note. It had been a gray and dreary day, and he said it reminded him of the day we’d met. He said, of course, I probably didn’t remember because I had been surrounded by admirers. He said—” She broke off, pulled out her cell and scrolled through her email. She hadn’t known in the beginning why she kept his messages. It certainly wasn’t foreboding, and she hadn’t had any idea that they might be important someday. Maybe she’d just liked the picture attached to the first one, or the cartoon embedded in the second, or the link to a funny video in the third one. But she had kept them. Every one.
She offered the phone to Daniel, and he took it. It was big enough that there was no chance of an accidental touch. His touch had always been simple. No-nonsense. Comforting. It had made her feel safe and protected and loved and aroused and so very lucky. And afraid. She’d wanted to love him and adore him and never, ever hurt him, and she’d done it all—the loving, the adoring and the hurting.
He wouldn’t let her hurt him again. She knew that. He wouldn’t let anything the least bit sweet enter into his thoughts or his actions, because he had to protect himself from her, and that hurt her.
Daniel read the note, then gave the photo a cursory glance, unimpressed by it. It had taken her breath away the first time: sunset that very day over the ocean, the sun’s rays bursting out of dark clouds to form a halo of gold and deep pink and dark blue and luscious purples. She’d thought about having it enlarged, printed and framed to hang on her wall, and Daniel gave it just a look. Huh. A sunset.
He went on to read the second mail, the third, on down the list. After four minutes, according to the bank sign across the street, he looked up. “These aren’t exactly what comes to mind when I think ‘stalker.’”
“I didn’t think of him that way, either. I honestly thought it was someone I knew who was being coy. Seeing how long it would take me to figure out
