A Profiler's Case for Seduction(27)

Amanda opened her laptop, ready to do whatever she was told by her mentor.





Chapter 6



It had been a quiet Sunday for Dora, who had spent most of the day off cleaning her house and telling herself she didn’t care that she hadn’t seen or heard from Mark since Friday night.

She was grateful for the arrival of Monday and her regular routine of classes and work. All she wanted to do was focus on what was important in her life and not keep thinking about that darned kiss she’d shared with Mark.

The kiss...so sweet, so evocative, had shaken the very core of her new world. As she sat in the theater and tried to focus on the lecture Melinda was giving, for the first time in three years Dora had difficulty maintaining her concentration and focus.

A vision of Mark’s sexy smile kept coming into her head. The sound of his deep laughter filled her ears, and the memory of that kiss made her lips burn and ache for more.

As she watched her sister pace back and forth on the stage, owning the room with her subtle command for attention, admiration swelled up inside Dora.

She’d never been close to Melinda, who had left their hometown immediately after high school graduation when Dora was fifteen. Neither Dora nor their parents had heard anything from Melinda for many years, not until the time that Melinda and Micah had shown up in the small town of Horn’s Gulf, Wyoming, to pick Dora out of the gutter and get her some much-needed help.

Although Dora admired her sister and would forever be grateful to her for helping her get on a healthy path for future success, the truth was she didn’t know Melinda very well.

It had been Micah whom Dora often turned to when she was feeling overwhelmed. Although Micah was undercover in the small town of Perfect, Wyoming, to clean up some of the mess their brother, Samuel, had made there, Micah always had the time and patience to talk Dora through any problem.

Dora respected and admired her sister, but she loved the brother who she hadn’t known existed when she was growing up. Micah had chosen the right side of the law while his twin brother, Samuel, had chosen the wrong side.

Dora had only met Samuel once and that had been enough. Something in his eyes had made her skin crawl. She was glad he was now behind bars, where he deserved to be for the crimes he’d committed.

She refocused on her note taking. Melinda was a tough teacher. Her tests were the hardest of all the tests Dora had taken and Dora knew her sister had too much integrity to fudge if Dora blew a test. In any case, Dora didn’t want that kind of special treatment. She was doing this alone for herself, to become the woman she was meant to be.

By the time the lecture was finished she left the building, a vague sense of disappointment winging through her as Mark wasn’t sitting on the bench or standing tall beneath a nearby tree waiting for her.

“And this is the way it should be,” she muttered aloud as she headed toward the bookstore. Mondays were always busy. She had two classes in the mornings before Melinda’s weekly lectures and then bookstore duty from two until close.

Traffic in the bookstore was hit-and-miss, leaving her time both to study and to think about the past week. She consciously kept her thoughts away from Mark Flynn. Instead, she focused on the idea that she was being stalked.

Even Saturday, as she’d made her way home from the campus, she’d felt the presence of somebody nearby, somebody watching her, somebody who didn’t want her to know that she was being watched.

She didn’t know if she was just imagining things because of what had happened to her sister or if there was a real threat to her. She didn’t know whether to tell somebody that she felt the whisper of danger breathing softly on the back of her neck. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself or be seen as some sort of hysterical woman jumping at shadows.

The only thing she knew for sure was that at the end of the night she dreaded the three-block walk back to her house. At exactly eight-thirty she locked up the store and stepped out into the encroaching darkness of the night.

She clutched her laptop to her chest, her purse slung across her shoulder, her heart already beating a fraction too fast. The campus appeared deserted, but in the distance she could hear the sound of male laughter drifting from the area where the fraternity housing was located.

With homecoming less than two weeks away, there was already an energy thrumming in the air, an energy that heightened with each day that passed. Banners and flags in the school red-and-gold colors were appearing from windows, across walkways. Brilliant artwork depicting red-and-gold-clad gladiators crunching blue-clad birds underfoot were nailed to trees and adorned classroom windows.