The Outlaw Prince's Captive - Holly Rayner Page 0,35

She had gotten so caught up in the fact that he was opening up to her that she had forgotten her responsibilities. She had essentially handed him all the evidence they had against him.

Which means that now he’ll have plenty of time to come up with rebuttals and explanations. He could say that he had loaned his car to a friend.

She suspected that, down in his own bedroom, Viggo was also regretting his own candor with her. But that thought didn’t make her feel any better. If he was thinking twice about how openly he had discussed things with her, that only meant that he would be more careful going forward.

She was unlikely to find him so willing to talk again.

I gave up all the information I had. I told him everything about our case. And for what? He doesn’t even know whether he was there when the crime was committed. He doesn’t know if he’s guilty or not.

But the truth was, Francesca did find that fact helpful. It meant that he wasn’t as cold as he had seemed. He did care that someone had died. And, she thought, he wanted to know whether he had been the one responsible for it.

It was possible that he would be her most valuable ally in this investigation.

Together, they could look at the case from angles that neither one of them would be capable of seeing alone. Francesca could allow him to look through the evidence. Maybe he would be able to see something that she had missed. Maybe he would pick up on some clue that hadn’t meant anything to her. And if he watched the video, he would probably be able to determine whether the man in the car was actually him.

And if she could persuade him to talk about the case more, Francesca knew the odds were good that she would be able to use her training and experience to piece together things that might not have stood out to him. She had the emotional distance to look at the facts analytically, something he wouldn’t be able to do.

But that was if he was willing to work with her. If he was willing to continue the information sharing that they had begun.

If he kept leaving to make cupcakes every time they got too close to an uncomfortable subject, they wouldn’t be able to sort anything out at all.

I’ll just have to convince him, Francesca thought.

Of course, there was no reason Viggo would want to share information with the officer who had come here to arrest him. But things were more complicated than that now. Arresting Viggo and bringing him to justice wasn’t Francesca’s primary goal anymore. It was strange to realize that, but it was the truth.

She wanted to help him.

She wanted to discover what had happened the night of the hit-and-run, not just to impress Voles and make a name for herself at work, but because she wanted to put Viggo’s mind at ease.

It was just that he had been so kind to her. Ever since he had found her here, he had gone out of his way to make sure that she was safe and comfortable. He had been under no obligation to do anything of the kind. She had broken into his house without a legal warrant, and he would have been within his rights to throw her out into the cold.

That made her wonder if he had been badly misjudged. A man who didn’t care for the lives of other people wouldn’t have allowed her to stay. He would have seen her for what she was—a threat to him, and an armed threat at that—and he would have forced her to go.

If he had been party to the hit-and-run, she realized now, he would be positively horrified by it.

She wanted to help him discover his own innocence.

Just then, the phone rang. Laird.

She looked at the time, puzzled. It was still only 11:50. She picked it up and accepted the call.

“I’m not late,” she said.

“Yeah, well,” Laird said, “I just got off the phone with Voles.”

The hair on the back of her neck stood up. “And?”

“And he got it out of me.”

“Matt!”

“He knows about the storm, Frannie,” Laird said wearily. “He knows the island is locked down. He demanded to speak with you, and I had to tell him you weren’t here. So then he wanted to know where you were. I mean, it’s a fair question under the circumstances.”

“And you told him?”

“I couldn’t lie about it,”