A Profiler's Case for Seduction(12)

She’d been through so much with the kidnapping. They’d beaten her and broken her arm, and yet before she was fully healed from the awful ordeal she was back teaching, unwilling to let her students down.

And that creep Ben had gone behind Amanda’s back to make himself look good and make Amanda look like a slug. Amanda could positively wring his neck.

On impulse she jumped up from the sofa and went to the tiny closet in the small bedroom. She opened the door and looked up on the top shelf. Nestled next to a large shoebox containing a pair of red cowboy boots that had been an impulse buy was a tin lockbox, half-covered by a nubby light blue blanket. The locked box was positive proof of Melinda’s complete trust in her.

Amanda closed the closet and returned to the sofa, where she once again sank down and pulled a pink flowered throw pillow against her chest.

Ben could knock himself out sneaking around to complete projects and presenting them to Melinda to garner favor, but that box on Amanda’s closet shelf spoke of who among the two grad students Melinda trusted the most.

She still remembered the night Melinda had shown up here clutching the tin box tight against her chest. It had been the evening after the day of her release from her captors and there hadn’t been a hint of the confident, strong woman.

Melinda had looked small and frightened, her green eyes huge as she’d handed Amanda the box and explained that it had all of her important papers inside.

“The key is in my desk drawer at the college,” she’d said, and then had jumped when a car squealed around the corner outside. She’d wrapped her thin arms around her body, as if to stanch an inward tremble, as if to protect herself from further harm.

“If anything happens to me, then you’ll have everything safe here,” she’d said.

Amanda’s heart had fluttered with fear for her mentor. “Do you expect something else bad to happen to you?”

Melinda had given her a rueful smile and raised the arm with the cast. “I didn’t expect this to happen to me,” she’d replied. “Would you keep this safe for me here?”

Amanda had assured her she would. What Melinda didn’t seem to understand was that Amanda adored Melinda so much she would do anything for her...anything at all.





Chapter 3



The coffee shop was almost empty when Mark and Dora walked in just after eight. It would be closing its doors in half an hour and there were only a few students seated at a couple of the tables.

Mark motioned her to where they’d sat the day before. “Black, right?” he asked as she sat down.

She nodded, ridiculously pleased that he’d remembered the way she drank her coffee. She remembered that he had used a packet of sugar in his, no cream.

Within moments he returned to the table and sat across from her, a smile lighting his handsome features. “I have to admit, I’ve been looking forward to this all day. I only have other colleagues here in town, and our conversations tend to be all about the crimes.”

“Everyone needs a little downtime,” she replied, wrapping her hands around the foam cup he’d delivered.

“Exactly.”

“So, tell me about this little girl of yours, your Grace,” she said, wanting to know more about him, about his personal life when he wasn’t chasing monsters and murderers.

She’d expected his features to soften with fatherly love, with pride, but instead tension straightened his shoulders a notch and no responding smile danced across his lips.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t see her much. My work keeps me so busy.”

“You should make time for her,” Dora couldn’t help but chide him. She’d always wondered how her life might have been different if she’d been raised by a loving, caring father rather than her abusive, alcoholic father.

“I know, that’s what my ex-wife keeps telling me.” He paused to take a sip of his coffee and then carefully placed the cup back in the exact position it had been in before he’d picked it up. “But Grace is so...perfect.” A hint of a smile toyed at the edges of his lips.

An ache swelled up inside Dora as she saw that whisper of a smile touch his lips. It was filled with such awe, with such love, a love she’d never felt from any man before in her entire life.

“She’s bright and funny and so innocent it scares me,” he continued. “And somehow I always feel as if the darkness of my work clings to me and might taint her, might ruin her.”