A Profiler's Case for Seduction - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,31

away from how right she felt in his arms and instead focusing on why she was crying, what she had just said to him.

Stalked?

Why would somebody be stalking Dora? As she finished her crying she stumbled back from him, her cheeks damp and flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said as she swiped her cheeks. She gestured him back to his chair at the table, but he ignored her.

Instead he grabbed her by the hand and led her back into the living room and pulled her down next to him on the comfortable sofa. “Tell me,” he said as he twisted his body to face her and took both her hands in his. “Why do you think you’re being stalked?”

She squeezed his hands and gave a small self-conscious laugh. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just being paranoid because of what happened to Melin...Professor Grayson.” She pulled her hands from his and leaned back against the cushions. “The last week or so when I’ve walked home after work, I’ve been sure somebody was following me. I’ve heard their footsteps behind me, but when I turn around nobody is there. When I’m walking between classes I get that prickly feeling of uneasiness and my chest tightens up with fear. The other night I was certain that there was a person hiding behind the tree in the neighbor’s yard, watching me.” She shivered and once again released a small laugh as if to dismiss her fears.

But Mark wasn’t about to dismiss anything. The prickly feeling she talked about, the tensing of muscles and racing of the heart, were all survival instincts, the call to fight or flight.

“I don’t want you walking home alone anymore after dark,” Mark said, hoping that the strength in his voice would let her know this was a command not a request. “I’ll arrange to be at the bookstore each evening when you get off work and I’ll walk you back here.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she protested, her cheeks once again turning pink. “Mark, you’re here to catch a killer. You aren’t here to play babysitter to an overaged student with an overactive imagination.”

“Do you normally have an overactive imagination?” he asked, although he already knew the answer to the question. In the brief conversations he’d shared with Dora he’d found her to be practical and levelheaded, certainly not prone to dramatic imaginings or suffering from a hysterical personality.

“Well, no, but maybe in this case I’m just hypersensitive or something.”

“The bottom line is that you’re afraid to walk home alone after dark. I can easily fix that by walking you home each night.” He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt her. The murdered subjects had all been men and Dora certainly didn’t have the public adoration, the powerful aura that Melinda Grayson had, so he couldn’t fit Dora into any kind of a kidnapping scheme.

But he had a killer he couldn’t access, a kidnapping that didn’t make sense and not enough information to try to guess what might happen next or if the crime spree in Vengeance was really over. He only knew that he’d never forgive himself if Dora was murdered or kidnapped and he’d been warned in advance.

“Mark, you have important things to do here in town.” She made one last protest, but it didn’t have any teeth. Instead, he could hear the relief that had crept into her voice.

He smiled at her. “It’s a done deal. I’m going to escort you home on bookstore nights.”

“I’d like that,” she agreed, as the last of the fear finally left her eyes. “And now let’s get back to the kitchen and have our coffee before it gets cold.”

He followed her back into the next room, unable to stop his gaze from lingering on the soft sway of her hips beneath the black slacks she wore.

“Now tell me about this new suspect,” she said when they were once again seated at the table. “You said his name was Troy Young. How does he tie into things?”

“At the moment the only thing we know about him for sure is that he’s a rancher, recently divorced and struggling financially.” Mark placed his gun and holster at his feet. “He frequents Johnnie’s Tavern often, and he and Sheriff Peter Burris had some ugly run-ins when Burris was alive. According to the records we obtained, Troy was arrested or ticketed by Burris over ten times in the last year—arrested three times for public intoxication and once for disorderly conduct, and tickets for