Fatal Exposure - By Gail Barrett Page 0,38

could only pray that Jamie hadn’t suffered, that the end had been mercifully swift.

“It’s my fault,” she admitted, feeling sick.

“Why do you say that?”

Brynn shifted her gaze to him. She took in his dark, knitted brows, the stark, steely planes of his thoroughly masculine face. He looked dependable, invincible, strong.

Leap of faith, she reminded herself. She had to trust him. She could no longer do this alone. She took a gulp of vodka for courage and shivered hard. “I didn’t tell you, but the night you found me, the night you came to my house, my agent, Joan Kellogg, had been attacked.”

“The one in Alexandria?”

“You know her?”

He shook his head. “Just her name.”

Of course he would know all that. He was a detective—a darned good one since he’d managed to track her down.

“That’s where I went after you left my house,” she continued. “I wanted to warn her that you’d shown up and that the media could be next. But when I got there, she’d been attacked. She said the guy was after me. He was Caucasian, with black hair and a snake tattoo.”

“The Ridgewood gang. That’s their symbol.”

Brynn nodded, then choked more vodka down. “That’s not all. I thought someone was following me when we met at the coffee shop the next day. But I figured I’d imagined it. Or that maybe I’d lost him. I must have been wrong. He must have followed me to Jamie. Although I don’t know how....”

“Why would the gang be after you?”

Good question. Knowing the time had come to answer, she swallowed hard. “I’m not exactly sure. It’s a different gang. But I think it’s connected to a gang execution I witnessed fifteen years ago.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “That was the day your brother died.”

Parker went stone-still. His gaze didn’t veer from hers. A clock ticked in the kitchen, in time to her thumping heart. “I told you I met Tommy on the streets,” she continued. “We were friends. Just friends,” she added in case he was wondering. “I was really young. And I...I was a real mess back then.”

She’d been so incredibly damaged, so utterly alone. So terrified and furious at the world. Betrayed by everyone who should have helped her. She’d gone berserk whenever a man came near.

But Tommy had been different. He’d never looked at her in that sick, sadistic way she’d come to associate with men. He’d wormed through her defenses, renewing her hope that good people still existed, even if a monster had preyed on her.

“I had two other friends, two girls I hung around with,” she continued. “They’d run away, too. Haley got pregnant, and her family disowned her. Nadine was a little older, seventeen, I think. Her family was Middle Eastern. They were trying to force her into an arranged marriage. They threatened to kill her if she didn’t obey.” A threat they intended to carry out, even now, if they ever caught up to her.

“We stayed together for protection at first. It’s not easy to survive on the streets without a pimp.” And Brynn would have killed herself before she’d let a man touch her again.

“None of us knew how hard it would be. The hunger, the violence... We weren’t prepared for that. So we stuck together to survive.”

She slid Parker a glance. He sat immobile, tension rippling from his steel-hard frame. “Tommy watched out for us, too. He kept the men away, made sure they knew we weren’t alone. He was kind to us.” She paused. “You have no idea how rare that is on the streets.”

Parker looked away, his Adam’s apple working in his whiskered throat. Her heart rolled, knowing how painful this had to be for him to hear.

“We tried to help him, too,” she said, her own chest tight. “We made sure he had blankets and food. We took him to the needle exchange. He...he wasn’t alone, Parker. We’d formed a family of sorts.”

Parker set his glass on the coffee table, then pressed his fingertips to his eyes. The slump of his broad shoulders, the anguish seeping from his powerful body made her yearn to console him, to wrap her arms around him and hold him close. But she had to tell him the rest before she lost her nerve.

Even if he despised her when she did.

“I had a camera, an old thirty-five-millimeter Yashica. It belonged to my father—my real father. He was an amateur photographer. He mostly took nature shots. We used to go on long

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