by Jane Blythe
With that final statement, he shoved his bodyweight sideways, throwing her into the wall. Her broken wrist got caught between her body and the wall, and she hissed as pain sliced through the limb.
Cops filled the hallway, dragging Justin away from her and down toward a holding cell where he would be kept until he was taken off to jail, charged with assaulting a police officer, which would hopefully get them the warrants they needed to look closer into his life.
“You think you can get away with treating men like this?” Justin screamed at her. “Sooner or later you’ll get what you deserve. Someone will wipe that smug smirk off your face.”
“You okay?” Jake asked.
“Fine, I've had worse.”
“What was that all about?”
Florence jumped at the silky, smooth voice behind her. Just hearing it had her insides turning to melted butter, and her lips tingled just remembering the kiss they had shared last night.
That kiss had kept her up half the night as she obsessed about whether or not she should trust Eli enough to give him a chance.
“It was nothing,” she said, not wanting to get into a discussion on what had just happened. In her life it really was nothing.
“It didn't sound like nothing. It sounded like that man was threatening you.” Eli’s hands clamped—albeit gently—around her shoulders and turned her to face him. Protectiveness was oozing out of him, and she had to roll her eyes at him.
“You remind me of my brother.”
“Excuse me?” Eli looked aghast at the prospect. “That is not what a man who was kissing you just twenty-four hours ago wants to hear.”
“Relax, Romeo, that’s not what I meant. I didn't say that I wasn't attracted to you. It’s just the protectiveness, you're just like Fletcher. You know I am trained, I know what I'm doing, this isn’t the first time a suspect has threatened me.”
“You're attracted to me?” Eli was grinning at her like an idiot.
“I thought we already established that last night.”
“You mean when I kissed you?” His arm circled her waist, and he drew her up against him. As it always did when he touched her, her heart began to beat a frantic rhythm in her chest, and she became hyper-aware of every part of her body that Eli touched. He lowered his head, his lips hovered just above hers, she could feel his warm breath, and she tilted her head to bring him closer. Just when she thought he was going to kiss her, he spoke instead, “Can I drive you home?”
Surprised and disappointed, that he hadn't kissed her or even asked her out on another date, Florence quickly stamped down the feelings. She was the one who had consistently turned him down, she shouldn’t be surprised that he had finally decided to take her at her word.
Why should she expect him to fight for her when she hadn't been sure she was willing to fight for herself?
No one in her life had fought for her.
Even her brother had left to go to college, leaving her behind in that hellhole.
Eli wasn't any different.
No man was different.
* * * * *
6:37 P.M.
Vulnerability was obvious in Florence’s sky blue eyes, but somehow Eli knew she wouldn’t want to know that he could read her so easily.
“You leaving now?” he asked, releasing his hold on her but claiming her hand.
“I was going to do a little more work into researching our suspect before I called it quits for the day.” Florence tried to tug her hand free from his, but he only tightened his grip, and she finally gave up.
“We can do that in the morning,” Jake spoke up. “Callie asked me to be home by seven because her parents are coming over for dinner, if I leave now I can be there not much after.”
“Then I guess you’re leaving now,” he said with a grin.
“I guess,” Florence agreed but didn't look too happy about it. Whatever was running through her head right now was evidently something that was upsetting her.
“I’ll give you a ride home, do you need to get anything before we leave?” he asked Florence.
“My purse is upstairs on my desk.”
“I’ll wait down here while you go get it.”
She opened her mouth, her face troubled, but then snapped it closed, nodded, and disappeared off down the corridor.
“Did she tell you that she thought someone was watching her apartment this morning?” he asked Florence’s partner once they were alone.
Jake’s eyes grew wide. “No, she never said a thing.”
“I went to pick her up, and she pulled a gun on me, thought I was the one watching her.”
“Were you?” Jake arched a brow. “I know you’ve been sending her flowers, calling her, and hanging around ever since you saved her from getting hit by that car.”
Eli tried hard not to lose his temper at the insinuation. “I'm interested in her.”
“And she’s told you several times that I've heard, that she’s not interested.”
“She might say the words, but you know she doesn’t mean them.”
Jake studied him for a long moment. “Look, from what I know of her childhood, it was pretty messed up. She doesn’t trust easily. If you’re interested, you better be prepared to be patient. I have a feeling you're not a patient man.”
“I can be patient with her.”
“Thanks for telling me about someone watching her.”
“I told you so you can do something about it.”
“And I will.” Jake gave a nod then walked off.
While he waited for Florence, Eli debated the odds that he could convince her to come and stay with him until they found whoever had been outside her apartment. His hotel was safe, and the apartment he would be moving into had excellent security, even though he hadn't officially moved in yet, he owned the penthouse, and he kind of liked the idea of staying there with Florence.
“I thought you had snuck out the back,” he teased when Florence finally returned.
That coaxed a smile out of her. “I thought about it.”
Instead of ordering her to give him a chance to prove to her that there could be something real between them, he took her hand again, pleased when she threaded their fingers together. “You hungry?” he asked as he led her outside to where his driver was waiting for them.
“Starving. Jake and I were so busy today we skipped lunch.”
Stamping down a flare of jealousy at the thought of her spending all day every day with a man who could be a model, he said, “How about we grab some takeout on the way to your apartment?”
“Yeah, okay, I guess we can do that.”
Pleasantly surprised by Florence’s acquiescence to what he considered to be a date—not that he was going to tell her that just yet, he didn't want to spook her—he opened the car door for her. “What do you want?”
“I'm easy, whatever you like is fine by me.”
“I'm in the mood of pizza.”
“Pizza is good, but I only like cheese on my pizza.”
“What?” He shot her a look like she was crazy, then pulled out his phone to order the pizzas from his favorite place. “No mushrooms? No ham? No olives? Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all,” she echoed.
“You’re crazy, but cheese pizzas it is. So tell me what other foods you like and don’t like,” he said as the car took off.
“My favorite vegetable is carrots, I love to snack on them raw, but for some reason, I don’t like them grated in salads and things.”
“Actually, I get that. I love chicken, especially fried chicken, but for some reason I can't stand chicken nuggets. When I was a kid my mom was always trying to convince me to try them, they were her favorite easy to cook dinner, but she could never get me to like them.” Eli smiled at the memory, right up until the very end of her life it had been a running joke between the two of them.
“Are you and your mom close?”
“We were. She died about eighteen months ago. She had cancer.”
“I'm sorry.” Florence reached out and took his hand, squeezing it.
Keeping hold of her hand, he brushed his thumb backward and forward across her knuckles. “It was hard losing her. We were close ever since I can remember. Even as a teenager I loved spending time with her. We traveled a lot, I lived in London, Paris, Rome, Sydney, and Geneva when I was growing up, my father worked a lot, and my brother was ten years older than me, so my mom and I would always go for lots of walks, taking in the atmosphere and the culture of each new city. Those times walking around, just the two of us, those are some of the best moments of my childhood.”
“It’s nice you have memories like that.” Florence gave a sad smile, and he wondered what her relationship with her parents was like. “What about your dad, were you close with him as well?”
“We had a different relationship than the one I had with my mom. He was the disciplinarian, and I could be a bit of a wild kid. He worked a lot, and my brother was the one who was supposed to take over his business, so he spent a lot of time grooming him, but he made time for me too. I played soccer, and he always came to my games to cheer me on, at the time, I didn't realize it, but looking back I appreciate that he made that time for me. A lot of my friends’ parents didn't.”
“You lost your dad too, right?”
“About a year after my mom. He loved her so much he didn't want to live without her.”
“And your brother died too? Is that why you ended up running the business?”
“He died when I was twenty and in college. Anaphylaxis, he was allergic to bees and got stung while he was at the park. He was dead before the ambulance arrived, they tried to revive him, but he was already gone.”
“You’ve lost so many people, I'm so sorry.” Florence wiggled sideways across the back seat so she was sitting right up against his side.
“Makes you realize how fragile life is.”
“Yeah, it does.”
Something in Florence’s voice said she also knew something about life’s fragility, only perhaps for very different reasons than he did. He wanted to ask about her childhood and her family but wasn't sure she’d tell him anything. She had mentioned a brother, and it hadn't seemed like he was a sensitive topic.
The car stopped, and he decided that he might as well go for it. “You only have one brother?”
“Fletcher, he’s two years older than me.”
When she didn't offer more he pushed. “And your parents, are you close with either of them?”
“My dad took off before I was a year old, I know his name but nothing else about him. My mother was a mother in name only, she never really cared about me and Fletcher, we raised ourselves.”
Eli hated that she’d been without a loving family her whole life, and it didn't take a genius to figure out why she was hesitant to give him a chance. She’d never had a family who was there for her, and she had no reason to believe that happy families existed. He would show her what a real family looked like, what it felt like to know that there were people who had your back, who were there to support you. He wanted her to know what it felt like not to be all alone in the world.
A knock on his door signaled the arrival of the pizzas, and he opened it and took them from his driver. The smell of pizza permeated the car, and he handed Florence a takeaway cup of coffee and set the box on his lap, opening it, the steam filled the back of the car.
“You're not by yourself anymore, Florence,” he told her. “Coffee, pizza, as far as I'm concerned this constitutes a date. The first of many dates to come. I'm not looking for no-strings hot sex, there are any number of women I could find if that’s all I wanted. I want what my parents had. I'm looking for someone to share my life with. I'm looking for you.”
With that, he curled a hand around the back of her neck and pulled her in for a kiss every bit as steamy as the pizza.
FEBRUARY 13TH
5:19 A.M.
It was getting harder and harder to wait between kills.
It had only been four days since he dumped the last body in the trash, and already he had sought out his next victim.
He knew the risks. The more often he killed, the more evidence he gave the cops. As careful as he was to clean down each of his victims, there was always the chance that he would make a mistake and leave a piece of himself behind. If he kept the number of kills to a minimum, then he decreased his risks.
But he was finding he could no longer do that.
There was something inside him compelling him to keep going. Each kill, each time he forced someone to see him, instead of feeling soothed like a balm had been smoothed over his anger, all he felt was the burning desire to do it again.
And again.
And again.
He was pretty sure it would never be enough.
Not that he cared. He liked killing, he liked taking his anger out on others, and he certainly had enough anger to parcel out every day for the rest of his life without relieving himself of his burden.
Because killing had become a compulsion, he was already here, standing outside the door of what would be victim number sixteen. He was quite impressed with himself and how smoothly this had all gone. For eighteen months now, he had been breaking into women’s homes, tying them up, and keeping them alive for forty-eight hours while he unloaded a lifetime’s worth of woe onto them. Then he would strangle them, carve his message into their flesh, and dump them in dumpsters, and so far the cops didn't have a single thing to pin the crimes on him.
The more he killed, the more the pressure to keep killing with perfection.
How embarrassing would it be to wind up in prison for what he had done?
Already, he had narrowly avoided a jail cell more times than he could count. That happened when you had an anger problem, and you hated women.
Rapping on the door, he pasted on a bored expression and waited. He found that early in the morning was the best time to get to his victims, they were usually still half asleep, and being startled awake by a knock at the door had them thinking the worst. While they opened the door expecting to see a cop standing there waiting to deliver bad news, they saw him instead and immediately dropped their guard. That was when he swooped.
He knocked again, harder this time, and waited.
Moments later he heard footsteps inside.
When the door was thrown open a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties stood there, wrapped in a fluffy pink robe, her long hair a wild mess around her face. Her eyes were wide with fear, but when she saw him, she immediately relaxed.
“Morning, ma’am,” he said in his well-practiced disinterested tone. “Sorry to wake you so early, just letting you know that because of maintenance work in the building, we’re going to be turning off the electricity at six. We’re letting everyone know so they can be prepared and have time to cook breakfast and get ready for work and school before we cut it.”
“Thanks so much for letting me know, I’d never be able to do anything with this hair without my hairdryer and a lot of product,” she said with a giggle as she ran her fingers through her messy locks.
He gave her a small smile. “Would you please sign this to confirm that you’ve been notified,” he said as he held out the clipboard.
“Sure thing. You get a lot of people complaining and claiming they weren't informed?” she asked as she took the clipboard.
The second her attention was focused on scrawling her name on the sheet that looked like it had been signed by half the other residents in the building, he made his move.
His hand whipped out, his fingers curling around her throat because he knew that would immediately draw her attention to fear that her air supply would be cut off and stop her from screaming and drawing unwanted attention. As his hand squeezed tightly enough to make her panic, he pushed backward, shoving her into the apartment.
Spinning her around so her body was tight up against his, he moved his hand to cover her mouth while his other wrapped across her chest, pinning her arms to her side and effe
ctively preventing her from fighting. He kicked the door closed and let out a sigh of relief that everything had gone smoothly once again.
Just as he was patting himself on the back for a job well done, he felt something sharp slice into his leg.
His attention diverted, he must have loosened his grip just a little because the woman let herself go limp, and when he went to adjust his hold on her she managed to fling herself forward and out of his grip.
“What did you do?” he growled, looking down to find blood trickling down his leg.
“Protected myself,” the woman said, a smug smile on her face as she ran for the door.
No way was she getting away.
No way.
Lunging toward her, he managed to reach her just as she got her hand on the doorknob and threw it open.
She opened her mouth, and he could see she was dragging in a breath ready to scream at the top of her lungs. If she did, everyone within earshot would be calling the cops and come running to see if there was anything they could do to help.
That wasn't happening.
Grabbing a handful of hair, he yanked backward, and she screeched and stumbled.
“You don’t get to leave,” he hissed as he threw her onto the floor and closed the door.
The woman was a fighter, and she was already crawling toward a table where he could see a cell phone.
Stepping forward, he kicked her in the side as hard as he could.
She gasped in pain and fell flat on her stomach, clutching at her ribs.
He followed up with another kick because he was annoyed that everything had been messed up. He was bleeding, she’d gotten to the door and gotten it open so he couldn’t know for sure if anyone had seen or heard something that they shouldn’t, which meant this whole thing was ruined. He had to call it off, that was the only sensible thing to do.
