the side of her thigh. Her pulse raced in reaction and she knew … this was the man. She stepped back, needing some distance between them, needing to not touch him.
“I’m not sure what exactly Dietrich assists me with,” he said, his brow furrowing in confusion, “but it’s not my writing. No one helps me with that.”
Her hand shaking slightly, she closed the hardcover book. “So you’ve done all your own research for this series?”
He nodded. “Do you want some investigative pointers?”
A smile threatened, but she bit her bottom lip. She should have been irritated instead of amused by his arrogance. “I am here because I want some information.”
“What do you want to know, Alaina?”
Her name on his lips lifted goose bumps along her skin and the fine hairs on the nape of her neck. “I want to know how you found out details that were never released to the public.”
He arched a dark blond brow. “Details of what?”
“Of the murders you sensationalized in your books.”
“Sensationalized?” He tapped a finger against the spine of the book she held. “It’s fiction.”
Her stomach muscles tightened in dread. “No, it’s not. Every one of those murders actually happened.”
And one of those murders had been hers.
Chapter 2
“No, no, they haven’t.” Trent denied the veracity of her claim even though he knew she spoke the truth. For some time he had suspected that the images in his head weren’t products of an overactive imagination but memories. Someone else’s memories. “It’s fiction,” he insisted. “Just fiction.” “I have case files—” “I want to see them,” he demanded. He hadn’t wanted to know before, so he had never looked up old news stories or pulled police records. But now he needed proof; he needed to prove that the murders in his books didn’t match the ones about which Agent Paulsen had come to question him.
She shook her head with enough force that one silky tendril of blond hair slipped free of the knot at the back of her head. “That isn’t possible.”
“Why not?” he challenged her. “Are you afraid I’d write about them? According to you, I already have.”
“Yes, it’s like those poor women have been brutally murdered twice,” she said. “Once in reality and then again in your novels.”
Trent squeezed his eyes shut on a wave of self-disgust. “I didn’t know.”
Because he hadn’t let himself believe …
“You had to know. You used too many details,” she said, releasing a shaky sigh. “You used every detail, some that had never been released, details of which very few people were aware.”
“That’s why you’re here,” he surmised.
“Of course. What other reason would I have?”
Because she’d been looking for him, as he’d been looking for her—for the woman with whom he knew he would share this special connection. Yet even as connected as he was with her, he couldn’t feel her emotions like he was able to experience the emotions of others. He had no idea if she was really feeling what he was. The fierce, breath-stealing attraction and heart-pounding desire.
“The police like to hassle me from time to time,” he admitted. “I’m used to it.”
“In your books the serial killer,” she said, her pretty mouth twisting in disgust, “is the hero.”
“I wouldn’t call him a hero.” Complex. Multidimensional. That was what the critics called the protagonist of Trent Baines’s Thief of Hearts horror series.
“But,” she said, “you’ve written him as being smarter than law enforcement.”
That was what tended to piss off the authorities.
Her smoky gray-blue eyes darkened with frustration, and she added, “He always gets away.”
“Didn’t your killer?”
“What?” The faint color drained from her porcelain skin. “How do you know?”
“This killer you’re after,” Trent said even as he wondered at her reaction, wishing again that he could feel her emotions. “You wouldn’t still be after him if he hadn’t gotten away.”
“How do you know I’m after him?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. We’ve already established that you’re not a fan.” And she wasn’t likely to become one now. Despite whatever they might have meant to each other in another time, he was the writer that law enforcement hated.
“I could just be following up on a case,” she pointed out. “Checking out why you know things that only the killer would.”
He swallowed hard, but the knot in his throat wouldn’t go down. “Only the killer?”
Color rushed back into her face. “Or his victims.”
“But none of his victims could have survived to share their stories,” Trent said. If those real murders were exactly like the ones in his books, in his mind, no one could have survived the brutal attacks, the ritualistic mutilation. But they could have come back, returning from the dead into a new life.
Was that what had happened to him? Had he lived before? Was that why he had these memories that were not his? Whose were they, then? The memories of the killer that Alaina Paulsen sought?
“No, none of his victims survived,” she con firmed.
“How long ago did the murders happen?”
“I didn’t come here to share information with you,” she reminded him.
“You came here to get information from me.” The irony had his lips twitching into a grin. How could a man who had no idea what was real and what was fiction aid in a federal investigation?
“So tell me, Mr. Baines,” she persisted, “how you know things no one else knows about these murders.”
He tapped a fingertip against his forehead. “Imagination, Alaina.” That was what he’d been telling himself the past ten years—that he was only imagining things.
But he wasn’t imagining the connection between him and this woman, this stranger. Needing to touch her, he reached out, but before his fingertips could skim her cheek, she caught his wrist.
“Don’t.” She dropped his arm and stepped back, increasing the distance between them.
But he could still feel her touch, his skin tingling where her fingers had held his wrist.
“You might be able to ignore it, but I can’t,” he said. “There’s
