Temptation pulled at her to see if he could deliver on those promises. To see if he could make her feel what she only imagined….
“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, as if afraid someone might overhear her and catch them. “It’s so wrong….”
“That’s what makes it so exciting,” he pointed out as he reached for her.
She pressed her palms against his chest, as if about to push him away again. Her eyes wide with confusion, she stared up at him. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
“I told you,” he reminded her, “that you wouldn’t be able to stay away from me … any more than I can stay away from you. You belong with me.”
She shook her head, trying to deny him, trying to deny her feelings.
He cupped her chin in his hand and tipped her face up. “Look at me. I’m the man you’re meant to be with. You can feel it, too.” He lowered his lips and just brushed them across hers. “When I kiss you …” He trailed his fingers across her cheek, along the length of her neck to the curve of her breast. “When I touch you …”
Her fingers clenched the fabric of his shirt, dragging him closer. “I want you.”
Want. It wasn’t love. And what he wanted—needed—was her love.
The soft click of a door opening drew Trent’s attention from his computer screen. He lifted his head as Dietrich stepped inside his room of the hotel suite they shared.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the big man said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your writing.”
“No, that’s fine.” He didn’t want to be writing, anyway; he wanted to be with Alaina. But she had refused his proposition and denied her feelings for him.
Hell, maybe he was wrong about her. Maybe he couldn’t feel what she felt because she felt nothing for him. Maybe this connection between them, this sense of destiny, was only in his mind.
Trent rubbed a hand across his forehead where tension pounded with the onslaught of the emotions of others. “Did you get this floor cleared?”
Dietrich nodded. “The concierge helped convince them to move to the new rooms you’re paying for.”
“And everyone moved?” Because he could still feel the anxiety of someone about to do something … Apply for a new job? Ask someone to marry him?
And the couple that fought …
Trent felt their anger and resentment, the hurt and pain that felt eerily familiar even though he’d never been in a relationship that had lasted beyond a week or two of physical pleasure.
At least, he hadn’t in this life.
Had he lived before? Or was it that through their emotions he lived everyone else’s life right now?
Dietrich nodded. “Everyone on this floor has moved. But there are people on the floor below and in the buildings surrounding this hotel. We should go home, where it’s quiet and peaceful,” he urged. “The city is too much for you.”
Trent closed his eyes as a red haze of emotion rushed over him. Then oblivion, black and comforting, tempted him to slip into unconsciousness. He’d done it before. Blacked out when he was too overwhelmed to deal with the pain of others.
At the crime scene and the morgue, he’d nearly lost consciousness. The terror and pain had been so intense.
But he was stronger now than the kid he’d once been … the kid who’d escaped into his own little world so he wouldn’t have to deal with others. He opened his eyes to the screen of his laptop. The words he’d just written all blurred together unintelligibly.
And he realized it hadn’t been his own little world.
Other people had lived in it with him … Before he had killed them?
Dietrich cleared his throat, drawing Trent’s attention back to where he hovered, like a mother hen, in the doorway of the suite. He spoke hesitantly, dropping each word softly into the silence. “I don’t understand why we’re here.”
Trent leaned back in his chair at the desk. Too weary to speak, he just arched a brow.
“You have that book to finish.”
He’d already missed his deadline.
“Your editor called again today.” Dietrich relayed the message, as much secretary as bodyguard. “Twice.”
Evan was pissed, not just about the deadline but because Trent had told him this book would be the last in the lucrative Thief of Hearts series. It was time to end it. But he’d been struggling before Alaina Paulsen had shattered his peace and quiet and confirmed that his fiction was actually fact.
Fact that Trent didn’t know if he was strong enough yet to face….
“I’ll get the book done,” he promised Dietrich and himself.
“But it’s easier for you to write back at the estate,” his assistant insisted. “You have fewer distractions.”
It wasn’t just his empathy that distracted him now; it was her. And Dietrich must have noticed.
Hell, Trent had left shortly after she had that morning. But it hadn’t been just that he was drawn to her, connected in some way he couldn’t explain. It had been because of the murder. He’d called the Bureau to find out why she’d been called away so abruptly and he’d learned of it. The ritualistic killing that so closely matched the M.O. of the protagonist of his Thief of Hearts novels. He’d had to see for himself if the nightmares he’d hoped were only products of his imagination matched the horrifying reality.
“I was there,” he murmured, the dead woman’s terror gripping him again. “It was just like.” The violent images once again took center stage in his mind.
“It’s not your fault,” Dietrich said, “if someone copied your book. You can’t be held responsible for someone else’s actions.”
But what if they’d once been his?
He closed his eyes, and passionate images replaced the violent ones. A woman’s nails raking his back, clutching at his butt as he thrust inside her again and again. Alaina Paulsen was more than just an agent investigating murders; she was part of it, too.
She had once been his … and he couldn’t leave until she was again.
Excitement coursed through him, but he fought it down, fought to control his emotions.
But it was all so perfect.
He wanted to scream, wanted to thump his fist in the air in celebration. But he had rejoiced another way, a far more satisfying way….
He lifted the cover from the box. He’d found it, like he had so many other things, when he’d opened that door and allowed the past to come rushing back into his mind.
A chuckle rumbled in his chest. Trent Baines had unlocked that door with his books. And until today the man had had no idea that he’d let the monster loose.
He gazed inside that box at the heart he’d stolen. In his mind, it beat yet. For him.
But it wasn’t the heart he really wanted. That heart beat now inside Alaina Paulsen’s chest. But he knew to whom it had once belonged. The woman she had once been and the man she had once loved.
Now he knew who they all were and who they all had once been … before he’d killed them.
He closed the lid on the box, which would soon fill with more hearts. Because now he knew what he had to do, who he had to kill. Again.
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