obviously wasn’t taking his cards seriously.
She’d let Beth die. According to the reporter on the phone, she’d let her own sister die, too. Lester wasn’t going to let her endanger another girl.
Even if that meant he had to go to California to stop her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ON ANY OTHER SATURDAY, Nina would have slept in and risen leisurely to have a cup of coffee on her back patio. Instead, despite a restless night, she woke at the crack of dawn, feeling aroused and surly. She immediately knew the cause: her dreams of Simon Granger. They’d plagued her all week, no matter how hard she’d tried to purge him from her thoughts. And even when she was awake, she thought of him often, and those thoughts were always accompanied by a vague feeling of anticipation.
Damn it, the man was sexy and intriguing and infuriating and he was going to be trouble. Moreover, she had no illusions that he was going to take the assignment to work with her sitting down. He was going to push back; it was only a matter of when and how.
Instead of sitting around and stressing about it, however, Nina decided to take a drive. Maybe to the ocean, she thought, which never failed to clear her head of troubling thoughts. She dressed, packed a day bag and had just poured herself a cup of coffee when there was a knock at her door. She frowned and again thought of Simon Granger.
It would be easy for him to find out where she lived. She’d suspected he’d push back against Stevens’s machinations. Had his offensive begun already?
Deliberately, she took a minute to fix her coffee the way she liked it. Then, bringing her cup with her, she looked through the peephole but saw nothing. She opened the door. There was an innocuous-looking letter sticking half out from beneath her welcome mat.
She seriously doubted Simon Granger would leave her a note rather than tell her face-to-face exactly what he thought of her and her proposed plans for the city.
With a sigh, she knelt down, picked it up and walked back into the house.
Juggling her coffee cup, she pulled the piece of white parchment paper out of the envelope, a small smile on her lips as she imagined it to be a love note from Simon. The kind that kids passed around in school that proffered two boxes—check yes or no—to the question whether the recipient liked them. She and Simon didn’t like each other, that was obvious, but she was honest enough to admit they were attracted to one another.
When she glanced at the paper, she wasn’t expecting to see the note she’d imagined. But she wasn’t expecting to see what was actually there, either.
She died and so will you.
Her mug of coffee slipped from her fingers.
* * *
AS SIMON SAT IN HIS parked car across the street from Nina Whitaker’s home, he again thought of contradictions. Of puzzle pieces not quite fitting into place. Although he couldn’t see it, he’d bet her ugly car was parked at the end of her long driveway, muddying up the hoity-toity aesthetics of what was an honest-to-goodness mansion.
The woman worked as a shrink at a public hospital but apparently she was loaded. Either that, or she was boffing a really rich sugar daddy, but he just couldn’t make himself believe that about her. More and more, he was fascinated by what made her tick. And that very fascination should have him even more determined to get her the hell away from him by any means necessary. Instead, he was here, prepared to lay his proverbial cards on the table.
He recalled his plan to seduce her. To use their mutual attraction to get her to quit the absurd partnership they’d been forced into.
As soon as he’d had the thought, another had started to form and it had kept at him until he’d had to accept it: he couldn’t do it. He’d never crossed the line, but he had no problem intimidating suspects when he needed to. On the other hand, he’d never used sex to intimidate an innocent woman and he wasn’t about to start now. That wasn’t his style, and moreover, he didn’t really need to stoop that low to accomplish what he wanted with Nina.
The fact of the matter was he was attracted to her and she was attracted to him. Since both of them seemed equally determined to fight that attraction, things were going to naturally be uncomfortable between them. If she