Wounded Angel (The Earth Angels) - By Stacy Gail Page 0,32
for granted that a stranger on the street wasn’t really a sick bastard waiting for me to pass him so he could grab me, knock me out and throw me into his van,” she went on, talking over him until he came to a curse-laden halt. “The point is, it’s not two years ago. It’s now, and I’m not the gullible person I once was. There’s no way in hell I’m going to blindly accept whatever you say as gospel and let you into my life so you can protect me from what might be figments of your—”
“This has happened to me before, Ella.”
That stopped her. She watched him wrestle with words that didn’t seem to want to come, but eventually the crushing weight of the room’s silence popped them free.
“Up until six months ago, I was a detective with the Atlanta Police Department. And if you don’t even believe that about me, I’m more than happy to give you my badge number and captain’s name so you can check me out. I have a clean service record, several commendations and I was one of the youngest in the department’s history to earn the rank of detective. I was born with a certain talent for finding things—it didn’t matter what it was, where it was, or whether it had been lost or stolen or hidden. Whatever it was, there was a good chance I’d be able to find it. I found you in the mountains,” he added, and it was his turn to try and pin her to the spot with an unblinking intensity that stole her breath. “Though technically speaking you’d already saved yourself, so you didn’t really need me. The same couldn’t be said for the man who came to the police with the claim that his estranged wife had kidnapped his two daughters. He needed me to find them.”
Ella watched him dig a fork into the cinnamon roll as if he had a personal grudge against it. “Sounds like he was desperate.”
“That’s one way of putting it. Tell me, Ella. Do you think there are some things in this world that should remain hidden?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
“You’re probably the one person on the planet who can answer that question better than anyone. Would it have been for the best if you—or I should say Gabriella Littlefield—had remained hidden forever?”
“Yes.” There was no hesitation. “I wasn’t kidding when I said Charles Rainier killed that naïve person who existed two years ago. Uncovering that part of my life now serves no purpose other than to bring agony to scars I’ve worked unbelievably hard to heal.”
Something crossed his face so quickly an average person might not have been able to identify it. But she was no stranger to pain. “Six months ago, I wasn’t nearly as careful as I was when I decided to take the case of finding you. I told you I went to great lengths to verify that the need to locate you was legitimate, and that’s absolutely true. I made sure you were the legal beneficiary of Claudine Pierpont-Rainier’s Will, and that no one else had a legal leg to stand on when it came to contesting her Will. The final deciding factor in my choosing to find you was that it would be a huge financial benefit for you. It would provide a better quality of life, the kind of life few ever have the luxury of knowing. I figured you deserved it. After going to such pains to make sure this was a legitimate case, I was certain the lesson I’d learned six months ago—the life-and-death lesson that some things should remain hidden—would never come into play.”
“Life and death?” The very sound of it made her teeth want to chatter, so she ground them together instead. “I suppose you’re talking about that man’s kidnapped children? Were you not able to find them?”
“Oh, I found them, all right.”
“That’s good, right?”
“That’s the last thing it was.”
She wondered that the bitterness in his tone didn’t burn his tongue right out of his mouth. “What happened?”
His expression was a masterpiece of self-loathing. “There was a hint of domestic violence in this guy’s background. Nothing huge, as no official charges had ever been brought against him. I thought at the time that whether or not there was any violence in the home, nothing justified the kidnapping of two innocent kids. There were legal ways to go about it, and in my mind the mother had proven just how