Torn - Cynthia Eden Page 0,13
winded as he closed in. He put his hands on his hips and his gaze swept over her. “I was hoping I might see you today.”
Uh, okay.
“I was worried,” he added. “I went back to that alley about ten minutes later and you were gone.”
Were her cheeks turning red? She thought they might be. “Wade took me back home.”
His blue eyes narrowed. “The work . . . partner.”
She’d been clear with Flynn. No strings. And they’d had sex once. Just once . . . “Right. My work partner.”
His gaze slid to her bag. “Another mysterious trip?”
“Just business as usual.” He was a pharmacy rep, so she knew Flynn took plenty of trips out of town himself.
“Maybe we can get together when you come back.” His ear buds dangled loosely around his neck.
She hesitated. Wade and I have a deal. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
His eyelids flickered. “Because of the partner?”
A cab pulled up at the corner. Her cab.
“Because of the partner,” Victoria agreed. Then she shook her head. “No, no, it’s because of me. I’m sorry, Flynn. I—”
His smile was sad. “You never led me on, Vik. I knew where I stood with you.” He nodded. “I’d hoped that you knew where you stood with me, too.”
The cab driver had exited the vehicle.
“Stay safe,” Flynn murmured. Then he was gone, running off at a steady pace.
I never felt the same with him.
The cabbie took her bag. Victoria murmured her thanks and climbed into the vehicle.
I never felt the same attraction with Flynn. Not like I do with Wade. When Wade touches me . . . it’s not fear that makes me tense.
It was need. Desire.
Deal or no deal, she wouldn’t have been meeting Flynn when she got back to town.
Because now she knew what it was like to want someone so badly that nothing else mattered. And that kind of desire . . . it was dangerous.
CHAPTER THREE
THIS IS WHERE she disappeared,” Lucas Branson said as he put his hands on his hips and paused in the middle of the running trail—Jupiter Trail. The sunlight glinted off his sunglasses. “Or at least, this is where the cops found her ear buds. She always ran with those things in, said it helped her to get in the zone . . .” He trailed away, then shook his dark head.
Victoria glanced around the area. They were in a park on the outskirts of Savannah, and the mid-afternoon sunlight flickered down through the trees. The dirt path snaked through the trees—a lot of trees. Enough trees to provide the perfect cover for someone who might be waiting to attack. Birds chirped happily from the shelter of those trees.
“We have Kennedy’s case files,” Wade said as he paced toward a tall oak tree. “There have been no ransom demands, no phone calls . . . no contact at all from Kennedy or her abductor in five years.”
Did Lucas understand just how bad that was? A ransom demand at least meant the victim might be alive. You could get a proof of life with a ransom demand. You could work with the abductor. But when a perp took a victim, and the family or friends never heard so much as a whisper . . .
That means the perp never intended to let his victim go.
“There was nothing,” Lucas said, and sadness flashed across his face. “I even offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward, hoping someone would come forward and tell me what had happened to her, but no one seemed to remember anything.” His hands lifted, then fell. “She was here one moment and gone the next. If it hadn’t been for those ear buds, hell, I don’t even know that the cops would have believed she was ever out on this trail.” He pulled off his sunglasses and shoved them into his shirt pocket.
“Her hair was found on the ear buds,” Victoria said. She’d read that bit of info in Kennedy’s files. And the hair had been compared by forensics to the hair at Kennedy’s home—in her brush. The cops had proved that Kennedy was in the park, but then she’d disappeared.
“Yeah, that was when they finally started to believe me.” Lucas sounded angry now, anger reflected in the hardness of his blue gaze. “But that was over forty-eight hours after she disappeared. And I know, now, that the first forty-eight hours are the most important. That’s when you have the best chance of finding the missing, right?”
Victoria met Wade’s gaze.
“That’s what they