The next day Kristy strode into the offices of Get Out!, anticipation buzzing through her. Her gaze went right to the skydiving picture, though, with the classical music playing, she imagined Adrian playing a cello. She couldn’t help the smile that broke out on her face. She aimed that smile at Kyle, the receptionist with long, curly hair.
“Kristy Morgan, here to see Adrian.”
“I’ll ring him.”
Kristy was a jumble of nerves. Excited about the job prospect. More excited about the prospect of Adrian being someone in her life. Scared about Kiss and Kill Cupid.
It figured…find the man of her dreams and become the target of a killer at the same time.
She hung up her coat on the rack. Kyle’s thoughts ran to the mundane, as most people’s did. Where to go to lunch, her upcoming date with someone named Jack.
Someone else’s thought, though, jarred her.
Mm, I can see her tied spread-eagled to the bedposts while I torture her.
She spun around, catching Owen walking into the lobby. The blood fled her face. He was the only man in the vicinity. It had to be his thought. More disturbingly, his expression remained passive, giving away not a hint of his dark musing.
She pushed away her fear. She had to engage him, see what other thoughts came out. “Owen, good to see you again.” She forced herself to reach her hand out to him.
He reluctantly took her hand, and she cringed at the dampness of his palm. He wasn’t meeting her gaze now, though, shifting his light gray eyes away to Kyle. “I’ve got to run out for a few minutes.” He glanced her way. “Uh, see you later.”
He sprinted out the door.
“That’s odd,” Kyle said with a shrug. “I’ve never seen him move so fast.”
He was acting odd.
Couldn’t meet her gaze.
Nervous.
Check, check, check! She had definitely found the Kiss and Kill Cupid—and he was Adrian’s best friend and business partner.
“Hello, there.” Adrian’s voice, even low and soothing as it was, couldn’t calm her jangled nerves.
Kristy managed a smile anyway. Just the feel of his hand enveloping hers injected a sense of protection, like a warm, pulsing energy flowing through her.
His dark blue knit shirt set off his eyes, and the warmth of his smile, which reached those eyes, tempered the cold inside her. He gestured down the hall. “Come on back to my office.” To Kyle, he said, “Hold my calls.”
Your friend…your business partner… the words wanted to burst out. Stay calm. You can’t throw something like that out there. You have to ease into it.
He allowed her to precede him into the first office on the left, then closed the door behind him. He leaned against the front edge of his desk, and that angle put them more face-to-face. She realized he was doing it for that reason.
“The staff loved your writing.”
And he didn’t even make her ask or wait through small talk. Lord, she could love this man. She wanted to hug him, but that seemed inappropriate here and now.
She clasped her hands together. “That’s great. Awesome. Amazing.”
“I’m going to have my secretary book you a flight to Texas first thing tomorrow. You’ll come back on Monday, the fifteenth.”
Her smile faded. “You’re trying to send me away over Valentine’s Day.”
“You bet. He can’t try to kill you if you’re not in town.”
She rubbed her hand down her arms. “He’ll find someone else, then.”
His determined expression faltered. “I didn’t think about that. All I was thinking was getting you out of harm’s way.”
“I couldn’t live with myself if I came back and saw the woman who was supposed to be me, her face in the paper, those memorials people do…she’ll be this wonderful, nice, sweet woman who volunteered at the children’s hospital.” She pushed forward, stopping only a few inches from him. And a few inches below him, of course. “We have a chance to actually catch this guy. We know I’m his target. We can stop him.”
She saw a mix of disbelief and awe on his expression. “You’re serious?”
“You bet,” she said, using his earlier words.
“And you have a plan, I suppose?”
“Well…no. Not yet. It’s not something you can just look up on the Internet. We’ll come up with something.”
“I know one thing: I’m not leaving your side on Valentine’s Day.”
She shook her head. “As appealing as that idea is, that’ll scare the guy away. He’ll find some other gal who’s not lucky enough to have a big, bad dude watching over her.”
“I’ll stay out of sight, but not far away. Not for a second.”
“That could work.” His protectiveness warmed her down to her toes. “I’ve been reading up on Kiss and Kill Cupid. Typically he’s broken into a single woman’s apartment while she slept or sometime that evening. Last year he deviated from his M.O. and broke into a couple’s apartment.”
“And strangled her right next to her boyfriend whom he chloroformed.” His expression was sour. “I’ve been reading, too.”
“He’s getting more daring. Which means we have to be more careful.”
He touched her chin, tilting her face up to his. “I don’t like this.”
“I agree. But I can’t live with hiding out and letting this monster get someone else. And I don’t think you could, either. We just have to play this smart.”
“When you heard his thoughts at the coffee shop, did you get a good look around?” His eyes widened. “That’s why you looked so distracted.”
“I’m only a klutz when I’ve heard someone plotting my demise. I did check for men who were looking at me in menacing ways but didn’t see anyone obvious. But there were people I couldn’t see on the other side of the line. I’m not sure I’d recognize anyone there if I saw him again.” She decided to broach the subject. “Except for you and Owen, and I know it’s not you.”
“If this guy’s been watching you, and he probably has, then he knows that you and I have had lunch. He doesn’t have to know it’s business. We’re in the beginning phase of dating. So we go out on Valentine’s Day. But we kiss good-bye at the door—a really good kiss—and I leave. Or so it appears.”
“And sneak around the back of the building, where I let you in. He’s outside…watching me.” She scrubbed her hands down her arms at the thought. “He thinks I’m alone. I’ve got a roommate, but I overheard her making Valentine’s Day plans with her boyfriend. I’ll make sure to walk in front of the windows a few times, so he knows I’m alone. Then I’ll close the curtains and tuck in for the night.”
“Is there a fire escape or any exterior way for him to get in?”
“I’m on the second floor. The stairs to the fire escape don’t look as though they would work. It can be climbed, I suppose, if someone was good at that kind of thing.” She gave him a mock-suspicious look. “Like you are.”
“As soon as he’s in, I flatten him.” He flexed a fist big enough to flatten about anybody.
She ran her fingers over his hand, looking up at him through her eyelashes. “My, sir, what a big fist you have.”
“All the better to save your pretty little ass, my dear.”
She giggled despite the circumstances. “Kiss me. Now that we have a plan, let’s see if your vision changes.”
He rolled his eyes. “The things I have to do for you.” He kissed her.
One of the songs on her iPod was “Electric Feel,” by MGMT, and they sang about being shocked by an electric eel. That was how she felt, an electric shock buzzing through her, from where their tongues danced right down to her toes.
No ugly-death vision yet. This was good. She slid her hands around his neck. Oh, yes, this was very good. His hair was silky soft, and she loved the way it felt sliding through her fingers. His hands were splayed across her back, holding her close against his hard body and one hard part in particular.
Just as she was revving up, the gruesome image of her dead body flashed into her brain, knocking her back.
“I guess she accepted the assignment,” a voice said from the door—the open door where Owen had been watching them for who knows how long. He didn’t look pleased, or embarrassed, or much of anything. The guy creeped her out, especially after what she’d heard him thinking about her. Which made her realize that the man Adrian would have to flatten might be his best friend.
Adrian gave him a smile without a hint of chagrin at being caught necking in his office. “It’s our lucky day.”
It’s his lucky day, Owen thought, walking in. “I did knock, but obviously you were too preoccupied to hear it.” He handed Adrian a blue folder. “Here is the advertising summary for the March issue.” He gave her a dark look before turning. “I’ll leave you two alone.” He pulled the door shut with a loud click.
She stared at the closed door for a second, her arms crossed over her chest. “He’s not happy about my coming on board.”
“It’s the mixing of business-pleasure thing.”
She turned to him and lowered her voice. “I hate to say this, I really do. There was one person who came off as a bit strange at the coffee shop: Owen.”
“No way.” He shook his head, not a doubt on his face.
“You’re a bit biased, don’t you think?”
“I’ve known him almost all my life.”
“Yeah, but do we really know the people in our lives? People who knew Ted Bundy never suspected his terrible hobby. Owen is odd, you have to admit that.”
“Absolutely. He’s always been that way. But I’ve never seen him so much as lift his hand in anger. Or muse about killing someone. To be honest, I’m not even sure he likes women. He doesn’t seem to date, or if he does, he doesn’t talk about it to me.”
“Another commonality of serial killers: social impairment with the opposite sex. And he does like women. When I came in today, he had a thought about…me: Mm, I can see her tied spread-eagled to the bedposts while I torture her. Torture!”
“He could have meant in a good way.” He looked her up and down. “I could imagine you tied up while I torture you, bringing you to the brink, backing off.” He cleared his throat. “For example. Not that I’m thrilled he’s having those kinds of thought about you.”
“I couldn’t hear anything else; he nearly tripped over himself to get away from me. You didn’t tell him I could hear people’s thoughts, did you?”
“No. He doesn’t even know about my visions. He’s a see-it-to-believe-it kind of guy. Doesn’t believe in ghosts or psychics or anything like that. So I never told him.” He walked over to the window, looking down at the sidewalk. “I won’t even go there. It’s not Owen.”
She couldn’t blame him, but she wasn’t going to accept his belief in Owen. “Okay, we won’t go there. But what if, and just humor my wild imagination here, it is Owen who climbs into my window? What would you do?”
“I suppose I would flatten him, as planned. But it’s not him.”
She walked up beside him. “Come over for dinner tonight. I’ll cook.”
That got a smile out of him. “I’d love to. Then we can go over the plan, where I’ll hide, all that.”
“And we can kiss. I kind of liked that.”
She gave him a quick kiss good-bye and walked out, hoping to get another chance at Owen’s thoughts. No such luck. She pulled on her coat, and with another glance at the picture of Adrian skydiving, left the office.
Adrian wasn’t going to help her pin down the idiosyncrasies that might indicate Owen’s murderous tendency. As defensive as he’d gotten, he would never look at Owen objectively.
She stepped into the elevator and dug in her purse for her lip balm. Her fingers bent a business card: Dale Soza’s card. He was as eager as she was to catch Kiss and Kill Cupid, though for other reasons. Still, as a reporter, he would be objective. Could she trust him?
She stepped out of the elevator and called him. “Dale, my name is Kristy. We met at the police station two days ago.”
“Long, blond hair?”
“Yep, that’s me.”
“You had information on Kiss and Kill Cupid.”
“Not information, per se. But I have someone I’d like you to check out, if I can trust you to be discreet and not to print his name or mine.”
“You can’t get to my level of success by not being trustworthy. Where are you? I can meet you right now.”
She gave him her location. “There’s a Starbucks on the corner.”
“I’ll catch a cab and be there in about fifteen, twenty minutes.”
“See you then.”
She walked inside, inhaling the rich scent of coffee. After ordering, she stuck in her earbuds and found an empty table. The only thought she could hear was her own: I sure hope I haven’t made a huge mistake.