Strong, Sleek and Sinful - By Lorie O'Clare Page 0,167

over her flesh under her clothes, adding to her discomfort.

“I . . . I’m not sure,” she said, admitting to herself it was the truth. In spite of her two months off, did she really want to stay where she wasn’t wanted? There wasn’t any point in going to the interview. She couldn’t stay here, or work here. This was Perry’s town. If she wasn’t welcome, she wasn’t welcome.

“Where are you headed?”

That much was a simple answer. “I have reservations at the Holiday Inn.”

“I’ll follow you there.”

Kylie turned to look up at him, confused why he would suggest doing so. But he’d turned already, returning to his car.

Way too aware of his headlights beaming in her rearview mirror, Kylie was so sick to her stomach when she pulled into the hotel parking lot she couldn’t think what to do. Her luggage was in the trunk. But should she haul all of it in?

Perry parked at the edge of the parking lot, not getting out of his car, and possibly doing paperwork. He watched her when she walked into the lobby and checked in, and Kylie felt his eyes boring into her backside when she moved her car in front of her motel room door. Did he want to see how much luggage she’d brought? That would clue him in on how long she planned on staying here.

He didn’t approach her, didn’t offer to help with her luggage, and didn’t pull out of the parking lot when she finally decided on her overnight bag and laptop, then disappeared into her room and closed her door. Like she would be able to sleep with him sitting out there.

After pacing the room for fifteen minutes, sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed when her leg started throbbing and peeking out the closed curtain half a dozen times to see him still sitting there, she finally opted for a hot bath. When she got out, still nervous and feeling more out of sorts than she had when she climbed into the hot water, Perry’s patrol car was gone.

A part of her left with him. Kylie climbed into the too-large bed, cuddling into a fetal position, and let the tears fall.

On Wednesday, Kylie had been in Mission Hills for two days. Her laptop was online, available for instant messages, but none came. Her cell was fully charged, and she got several phone calls. None of them were from Perry. She’d forced herself to go to the mall, trepidation over running into one of his nieces bringing on another of her annoying panic attacks. But when she saw no one she knew, even when she drove to the grocery store and purchased a few things to eat in her motel room to give herself a break from restaurant food, the overwhelming emptiness threatened to consume her.

Perry couldn’t make his message clearer if he yelled it in her face. He was no longer interested. No matter the intimate words they had shared on the phone a couple months ago before she lost service and spent two months in the jungle, enough time had apparently passed that he no longer felt that way.

“So what to do now?” she asked her reflection, standing with her hair in a towel and her bathrobe hanging over her naked body. She’d lost a lot of weight. “That appointment is this afternoon. You go or cancel.”

Her reflection stared back at her dumbly, not answering. She shifted her attention to the phone in the room and the phone book she’d put underneath it when she’d ordered delivery the other day. Maybe she was just more bullheaded than most, but this wasn’t enough closure. It could be that she was more of a masochist than she cared to admit. She needed to be yelled at in the face to get the truth to sink in. And there was only one way to make that happen.

Sitting on the edge of the bed with the phone book, she flipped through it, surprised but pleased that Megan Vetter, Perry’s sister, was listed in the book. Using her cell phone, while a small part of her insisted that seven thirty in the morning wasn’t the best time to call a household with children when they were probably all scurrying to get ready for school, Kylie dialed the number before she lost her nerve.

She had no idea where the powerful special agent, with nerves of steel, had disappeared. But she wasn’t anywhere near while the phone rang once, twice,