A California Christmas (Silver Springs #7) - Brenda Novak Page 0,98
go on about their business. If she was lucky, she’d be able to blend in at some point.
No one else appeared to be out of place or expecting someone. But it was early yet. She had half an hour to wait. She’d just gotten tired of hanging out in her car, hadn’t been able to concentrate on her book with so many other things on her mind and had wanted to be the first to arrive, so that she could get into position and, hopefully, be able to figure out what was going on.
As the time passed, she turned away a few offers to dance and watched as several groups of people played darts or pool and still more danced or hung out, talking and laughing at the bar. But even at midnight she didn’t see anyone who might be alone and hoping to meet her.
It was almost twelve-thirty when she began to wonder if that email had been a prank. Maybe Ethan had downloaded that picture from a porn site and sent it himself as a way to intimidate her—and to remind her that he could still hurt her and it would be hard to stop him.
That made sense. How would some random guy who’d received her personal information on the internet—meaning he could live anywhere in the world—reach Silver Springs the same day they’d exchanged emails? And how would he be familiar with the Blue Suede Shoe?
On the other hand, maybe that wasn’t such a stretch. After all, there was nothing to guarantee he’d only received her information today. That exchange could’ve happened a week ago. Or... LA was only an hour and forty minutes from Silver Springs. Any online forum large enough could easily have members in such a huge metropolis, especially if Ethan had used some kind of filter to reach only those who were close enough to scare or harm her.
As for being familiar enough with the area to know of the Blue Suede Shoe? That would only take a Google search.
She spotted someone who looked like Cain and almost walked out. He was the last person she wanted to see—except for Ethan, of course. But before she could take one step toward the door, the person turned. It wasn’t Cain.
Thank God. Still, it was time to go. She’d done all she could here. Whoever it was hadn’t shown up. Perhaps he was having a good laugh from across the country over the fact that he’d probably sent her on a wild-goose chase.
She’d just stepped away from the wall when a tall, blond man in tight jeans, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat approached.
“Howdy,” he said, tipping his hat.
It always surprised her when she found a true cowboy in California. That didn’t happen very often in LA, but other parts of the state were quite rural. Cal Buchanon, the man Aiyana was about to marry, was a case in point. There were a lot of farms and cattle ranches up and down the Highway 5 corridor, especially between LA and Sacramento. “Hello.”
This couldn’t be her man. Any identifying details on that picture had been fuzzy and dark—the face intentionally hidden—but he didn’t resemble the body type. Besides, he was only about twenty-three and came across as too young and too polite. She assumed he’d walked over to ask her to dance and was already formulating her refusal when he said, “A man over there said he’d buy me this beer if I let you know he’d meet you around the building in back.”
Emery’s heart skipped a beat as she began scanning the people in the area indicated. “What man?”
He turned to look. “Hmm. I don’t see him. Must’ve gone outside already.”
“What’d he look like?”
“I don’t know,” he replied with a shrug.
“You didn’t see him when he bought you that beer?”
He seemed at a loss. “I saw him, but... Let me think. He was about this tall—” he lifted his hand to signify a height a few inches shorter than his own “—and had dark hair and dark eyes, I think,” he added uncertainly. “The lighting in here isn’t the best, and I don’t come for the guys, so I don’t make it a habit of looking at them too closely.”
He chuckled, but she was too focused on what he’d told her to even smile. Dark hair, dark eyes, average height. That could describe Ethan. But it could also describe millions of other men. “What nationality was he?”