A Hero in Her Eyes

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Well, this obviously was. And you were right. Those people must have kidnapped Bonnie to replace their own daughter.”

  He was thinking positively. Maybe she had done a good job, after all. It was time she stopped feeling sorry for herself for whatever reason and concentrated on bringing this case to a proper conclusion.

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it? Now all we have to do is hope that we find them at this address.” She took the piece of paper out of her purse and looked at it. “Ben and Chad at the agency are both ex-policemen. Between the two of them, they have connections with the Laughlin police department. Ben promised he’d give the Laughlin P.D. a call, put them on the alert about a possible kidnapper in the area. If Wallace Allen and his wife are there and holding Bonnie, we can have the police moving in in a matter of minutes.”

  He nodded grimly. “Sounds good to me.”

  She didn’t like the way his hands unconsciously tightened on the wheel, but she said nothing.

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  Lowering his hand, Walker stopped pounding on the door marked #2D and turned to see a woman in a housecoat coming toward them. Her flip-flops slapped noisily across the concrete floor with each step she took. About to go down the stairs, she was carrying a bag of garbage.

  “Are they out?” Walker asked.

  “You could put it that way. They’re more than out, they’re gone. Skipped out owing me two weeks’ back rent. ’Case you haven’t figured it out, I’m the landlady. I felt sorry for them because of the little girl. A little beauty, that one, but always so sad.” She shook her head, vaguely incredulous. “Can’t see how something so perfect had a couple of parents like them. One worse than the other, if you ask me. Maybe the kid was adopted.”

  Walker thought his heart had stopped beating. “The little girl, what did she look like?” He pulled his wallet out of his pocket before she could answer, flipping to Bonnie’s photograph.

  The woman squinted, leaning in close. “Yeah, that’s her,” she declared, straightening. She looked from Walker to Eliza. “You friends of theirs?”

  He was about to say no. Anticipating him, Eliza interjected. “Yes, we are. We’re from San Francisco and trying to hook up with Wallace and Janie. Do you know where they went?”

  The woman glared at Eliza. “If you owed me money, would you tell me where you were going?”

  This was beginning to wear on him. For every high, there were two lows. He wasn’t sure how much more he could stand. “Do you know where he worked?” Walker pressed.

  “Not off the top of my head, but he wrote it on the rental agreement. Wouldn’t have rented them the unit if he didn’t. Let me get rid of this, and I’ll take you to the office and look it up for you.”

  Eliza was already taking the sagging garbage bag from her. “Why don’t I do that for you, and you take him to your office?” she suggested.

  “Fine by me. Dumpster’s around back.”

  Eliza flashed Walker an encouraging look before hurrying down the stairs.

  Thanks to the rental agreement, they discovered that Wallace Allen worked, or had worked, at a combination gas station and convenience store located just off one of the freeway exits. They lost no time in driving there.

  The man who owned the place had nothing good to say about him. Allen had been quickly fired after the owner had found him making an unauthorized withdrawal from the cash register. He told Walker and Eliza that he had no idea where Allen was, and cared less.

  “Don’t need to keep track,” he told them. “See enough of his kind every day.”

  Eliza thanked him and turned to leave.

  At the end of his rope, Walker went out first without saying a word. He didn’t realize that Eliza wasn’t with him until he turned around to say something to her. Looking around, he saw that she’d stopped to talk to one of the men working in the small garage pit next to the convenience store.

  Instead of calling to her, he doubled back, arriving in time to hear the mechanic in the navy-blue uniform say, “Yeah, I know where Wally went. Said he had some friend dealing at a casino in Reno. Was going to try to hook up with him and see about getting a job dealing. Not that he had the hands for it.” The mechanic scoffed contemptuously. “Couldn’t even hold a hand of cards right.”

  “Did he happen to mention which casino his friend worked in?” Eliza asked.

  The man shook his head. He stopped shaking it when Walker produced a twenty and held it in front of him. Suddenly, his memory made a miraculous recovery. “Oh, yeah, I think he said Mount Olympus.”

  “Did he tell you what his friend’s name was?” Eliza pressed.

  The mechanic looked at Walker. When Walker took out another twenty, a name suddenly merged from the man’s mouth. “Jack Stewart. Said they used to be friends back home in Yuma. That’s where he was from, he said. Yuma. Hell, they fry eggs on the sidewalk there in the summer. Couldn’t get me there except in a pine box.” The mechanic put his hand out, looking at Walker expectantly. “That Yuma thing wasn’t a freebie, you know.”

  Curbing his disdain at a man who doled out information about a reprehensible person for money, Walker handed him another ten, then took hold of Eliza’s arm and ushered her out.

  “We make a pretty good team,” she said, getting back into the car.

  Her comment, said with genuine feeling, took the edge off his anger. He looked at her for a moment before starting the car. That was what he had begun to think of them as, he realized. A team.

  That was a dangerous way for his thoughts to go. He couldn’t afford to get distracted.

  And yet…

  “I guess we do at that,” he agreed quietly. He turned the key in the ignition. The car hummed to life.

  She knew he was eager to get to Reno, but it wasn’t a short little hop and it was getting late. “You know, it’s almost dark. Why don’t we get a couple of rooms at a hotel and see about getting an early start in the morning?”

  “I’m not tired,” he snapped, then instantly regretted it. He owed her everything. “I’ll drive, you get some sleep.”

  That was the last thing she was prepared to do. “If I let you drive, I might be in for the big sleep, and I’m not ready to cash in just yet.”

  Lack of sleep interfered with his thinking. “I could just go on alone from here.”

  Stubborn to the end, she thought. “You need me,” she pointed out.

  She was right, he thought, and he knew it. Just like she’d been right all along. He surrendered. “All right, any particular hotel?”

  “Just the kind with beds.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Walker commented. Perhaps too good, he realized.

  Walker forced his mind on to other things, trying to forget the way Eliza had looked in her kitchen this morning after her bathrobe sash had come undone, the sunlight filtered through what there was of her nightgown. Highlighting her body.

  He didn’t have much luck.

  Chapter 13

  She couldn’t sleep.

  The hotel they had booked for the night was a little off the beaten path, so there was no noise outside her window to bother her. The room was cozy, tasteful in its decor, the bed comfortable.

  None of it mattered.

  She couldn’t sleep. Her thoughts were restless. And there was a vague disquiet roaming over her, making her unable to find a place for herself, whether in the bed or in the room.

  She’d given up trying to fall asleep half an hour ago. With her robe loosely wrapped around her, she had begun to prowl around her room.

  The restlessness only grew.

  It was as if she were waiting for something to happen, but she had no idea what.

  Catching her reflection in the mirror over the bureau, she shook her head at the anticipation she saw in her face.

  She knew something was coming. But she didn’t know whether it was going to be good or not.

  Maybe she would just get dressed and go out, she thought. Anything was better than ju
st sitting here, feeling as if she were going to explode and not even knowing why.

  Making up her mind, Eliza began to rummage through her purse for her pad. If she was going out, she needed to leave Walker a message on the off chance that he felt the need to talk to her in the middle of the night.

  Right, like they were both crazy, she mocked herself. Setting the pad aside, she took off her robe, then her nightgown. She just needed to get out for a while.

  Crossing to the closet where she’d hung her street clothes, she stopped dead. Eliza felt the door vibrating a half beat before knuckles had actually met wood. Grabbing her robe, she hastily put it on, knotting the sash at her waist.

  Instead of calling out to ask who it was, she went to the door and opened it.

  Walker had already dropped his raised hand to his side and was turning away, thinking better of the sudden, overwhelming impulse that had taken him from his room to her door.

  Her appearance cut short his retreat.

  “Ordinarily, I’d tell you you’re supposed to ask who it is before opening the door, but I figure you already knew,” he said wryly.

  She smiled. A sudden flash of intuition told her that this would never change between them. He was always going to be sparring with the fine points of what she could or couldn’t do within the parameters that defined her life and her abilities.

  “I had a hunch,” she told him simply. Stepping back to admit Walker, she closed the door behind him. “It’s much too early for the wake-up call, and I didn’t order room service.”

  He looked at her.

  Feeling like an idiot.

  Part of him wanted to bolt for the door again, like some kind of wet-behind-the-ears kid. But a wet-behind-the-ears kid had the advantage of some general idea what he was all about and where he wanted to get to.

  Walker, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue. All bets were off since he’d begun this odyssey.

  Bonnie should have been all that was on his mind. Bonnie and nothing else.

  And yet, he found his thoughts straying, drifting toward Eliza. His mind asking questions he couldn’t answer. Creating feelings he couldn’t acknowledge.

  God, but he was confused. Confused and yet needy for the sight of her.

  Knowing he should walk out with some mumbled excuse, he remained where he was. Remained and bared a little of his soul to her. “Then maybe your hunch can tell me what I’m doing here at twelve-thirty in the morning.”

  The vulnerability in his eyes touched her. Spoke to her. She had an overwhelming urge to put her arms around him and tell him it was going to be all right. She wanted him to do the same to her.

  “That’s easy. You can’t sleep.”

  He shook his head. “Not good enough. I haven’t been able to sleep before.” Just as restless as she had been a moment earlier, he began to roam the room. Always keeping her in his line of vision, because she was the source of all this unrest he was feeling. “Never needed anyone to hold my hand before.”

  And that bothered him, she thought. A great deal. But there was no reason for that. “Then you’re making progress.”

  When she smiled at him like that, he had trouble concentrating. All he could think about was tasting her mouth again.

  “Am I?”

  “I think so.” The distance between them decreased. She was drawn by a magnetism she was unable to resist. “It’s important for people to reach out to each other, at least once in a while. It’s what makes us human. Makes us able to cope.”

  Her voice was drifting over him like a siren’s song. “And who is it that you reach out to, once in a while?” he asked her quietly.

  The sound of his voice surrounded her like a warm blanket, making her feel safe. Giving her a sense of security that had been absent for so long from her life.

  Like a woman in a trance, she found herself inches away from him. Her body heating. “There was my great-aunt, but she’s gone now.”

  “So you have no one.” It wasn’t quite a question, not yet an assumption.

  She wanted to protest that she had friends, that the people she worked with were more than just people in an office to her. That they all genuinely cared about one another.

  But not in the way she sensed he meant. That deep down, intimate kind of sharing that came in the wee hours of the morning when shadows loomed larger and insecurities threatened to swallow you up whole.

  “No.” The single word slid from her lips like a raindrop on the petal of a rose.

  “I see.”

  There was an internal struggle going on, one that he was losing. This wasn’t right. Wasn’t right for either of them. He was taking advantage of her, giving in to the moment. Losing his mind.

  And yet, his mind had never been clearer. He wanted her. Wanted her the way he couldn’t remember ever wanting anyone else before.

  “Eliza…”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Her eyes shone brightly, not with a question, but with agreement. With some deep, untapped joy that was hurtling to the surface.

  “You do take away the need for conversation,” Walker told her, his mouth curving as he took her into his arms.

  But she wanted conversation; she wanted words to hold to her breast.

  “No, talk to me,” Eliza urged. “Say things to me. Things you want to say because you’re feeling them.” Things I need to hear. “I promise there will be no accounting in the morning, no promises to keep. Just for tonight, for now—”

  He laid a finger to her lips, stopping the flow of words. Lyrical though the sound of her voice was to him, he didn’t want to talk, not now. His needs, his desires, were more basic than that.

  Her eyes were huge, lustrous. Looking into them, he felt himself falling.

  Threading his fingers through her hair on both sides of her face, Walker turned her mouth up to his and kissed her. Kissed her the way he’d been longing to for the past three hours, ever since he’d left her door and had gone into his own room.

  The way he’d longed to ever since he’d last kissed her.

  One kiss was too much.

  A thousand wouldn’t be enough.

  A fierce need seized him, and he had to struggle to keep it reined in, before it got out of hand and frightened them both. As gently as possible, Walker kissed her mouth over and over again, each kiss growing longer than the one before.

  He could feel his heart hammering wildly as he drew her into his arms, his hands slipping away from her face and winding around her small, compact body. Holding her against him.

  Or was that her heart beating that way, pounding so hard it made him believe it was his own? He didn’t know, didn’t understand. Didn’t care to unravel the puzzle. All he cared about was making love to this woman. With this woman.

  If that made him reprehensible, to think of making love at a time like this, he’d deal with it all in the morning. Right now, Walker knew he was incapable of making sense of anything. His needs had consumed him to such a degree that everything else was just a heap of ashes to be sifted through.

  Later.

  This had been what was coming. The instant she’d seen Walker in her doorway, she’d known. This was why she’d been so restless, her body like a fine watch that was in danger of being over-wound. There were all these pent-up feelings, pent-up with no release in sight.

  Until she had seen him.

  Now she knew. This was what was meant to be. They were meant to be together. Perhaps not forever, perhaps not even in the morning, but for tonight, they were meant for one another.

  She felt his fingers gliding along the edge of her robe, felt him parting the silken material until the cool air and his hot gaze found her. Eliza bit back a moan as he cupped her breasts, the gesture forcing apart her robe even more.

  His hands began to roam along her body, not roughly but gently, as if he were afraid that she would shatter if he touched her the wrong way.

  As if she wouldn’t shatter if he didn’t.

  Eliza felt every part of her bo
dy quickening in moist anticipation. She dug her fingers into his biceps, glorying in his gentleness, in the feel of his skin moving along hers.

  Her pulse raced, accelerating with each pass. Impatience took hold of her, and she began tugging at the edge of the sweater he’d thrown on, tugging until she’d succeeded in pulling it up over his head.

  A fine mat of light hair covered pectorals that were finely sculpted. She splayed her fingers along them, her palms cupping him just as he had cupped her. Excitement grew.

  “You work out,” she murmured.

  “Occasionally.”

  He nipped at her ear, and was rewarded with the feel of her body melting against his. Her breathing grew louder, more rapid. Matching his. The excitement that poured through his veins was unimaginable and refused to be harnessed.

  Walker found he had little control over himself, over his destiny. Like a man caught up in a current of a river that was rushing out to sea. He gave up trying to fight it, to tame it, and just let himself enjoy the journey.

  Her skin was like cream beneath his hands. Walker slipped the robe down her shoulders and off her arms, his body quickening at the splendid form he discovered beneath.

  The thought that he should fall to his knees in worship occurred to him, as did the thought of making her his.

  As if he could, a small voice mocked him.

  For a little while, though, he could, he told himself. And that was all he asked for. A little while. Tomorrow was too far away to think of. He had only now, and he was going to make the most of it.

  Walker lay her down on the bed, his mouth never leaving hers. His hand found her body. And he lost himself in her.

  As she did in him.

  Eliza wasn’t an experienced lover. There had never been a parade of men in her life. For her, lovemaking had never been a casual thing, to be taken lightly. A commitment of the heart came before a commitment of the body. There had only been one other man in her life, and he had left her.

  As would this one.

  It wasn’t her gift telling her, it was a vague feeling that for her, there would be no everlasting happiness. Her great-aunt had told her that because of her gift, she belonged to everyone.