Brandi took a calming breath. Had she allowed her fears to shove her imagination into overload? When she wasn’t afraid of what he might do, he managed to instill a sense of confidence.
“Okay.” She took a calming breath, leaned back and closed her eyes. The scene began to replay through her mind.
“He must have been hiding in my garage, waiting for me. When I opened my car door he came up behind me and put his hand over my mouth. As I struggled to get free he put his other arm across my neck and told me I’d better shut up and behave if I didn’t want to get hurt.”
“His voice…what did it sound like?”
“I couldn’t tell. He whispered the words in my ear, sort of a raspy whisper. I don’t know if it was real or if he was attempting to disguise his voice. He shoved me toward the side door of the garage. He turned me loose so he could open the door. That’s when I got a glimpse of his face. He put a blindfold over my eyes and steered me out the door and across the backyard toward the alley. I tripped on something, stumbled and fell. My blindfold shifted position. When he reached down to pull me to my feet, I was able to see out from underneath it.”
She frowned as she pursed her lips. “That’s when I saw his badge…and something else. It was on his arm.”
She sat up straight. Her eyes opened wide as if she had just remembered something. “No—it wasn’t his arm. It was on his wrist.”
Reece’s voice grew anxious. “What did you see? A scar? A tattoo? What?”
“I’m not sure. He had something around his wrist. It wasn’t a watch. I think it was…” The fuzzy image suddenly popped into focus. She saw it clearly. The excitement filled her voice and surrounded her words. She made eye contact with him. “That’s it! It was a medical alert bracelet.”
“Were you able to make out what type of medical condition? If he was a policeman, then he would have been in good health so it wouldn’t have been something like a heart condition. Perhaps an allergy to some sort of medication?”
“I don’t know what it said, but I recognized the medical insignia on it.”
A flicker of disappointment rippled through him, dashing his hopes. He quickly shoved it aside and went on to his next question. “The badge…were you able to make out anything beyond the fact that it was a badge? A police department? A federal agency? Anything?”
A dejected Brandi slumped back against the sofa cushions. A definite air of disappointment accompanied her words. “No, just that it was a badge clipped to his belt.”
Reece shifted the direction of his questions in an attempt to jog her memory a little more. “Was there anything else on his belt? A holster, perhaps? If he was wearing his badge, then he was probably armed, too. Did you notice anything like that?”
“No, nothing.”
“Okay, let’s try something else. How was he dressed?”
She furrowed her brow in concentration as she tried to force an image. “He wasn’t wearing a suit, but he wasn’t dressed in jeans, either. He wore slacks, a shirt that buttoned down the front and tucked in rather than a pullover and some sort of lightweight jacket with a zipper.”
“You’re doing great, Brandi. Just a little more, now. What color were his clothes?”
“The slacks were a charcoal-gray and the jacket a lighter shade of gray. The shirt was blue.”
“That’s terrific—good job.” He squeezed her hand to show his appreciation.
She looked up at him. His expression showed how pleased he was with what she had been able to recall. A little moment of satisfaction nestled inside her. It was a lot more detail than she realized she had noticed at the time.
There was one more thing she became acutely aware of…Reece’s hand still covered hers. Rather than evoking fear, this time his touch filled her with a comfort that she found very reassuring. It was accompanied by a flicker of hope she had not felt since the nightmare began a month ago.
“Does that help at all? Did I remember enough for you to recognize who it was?”
“Well, it wasn’t enough for me to be sure about anything, but it will go a long way in identifying who it was if we come across him somewhere along the line.”
“We?” The excitement bubbled inside her. “Does this mean that you believe me? That you’re going to help me?” Maybe there was a way out of this mess after all. She tried to temper her enthusiasm with a more pragmatic approach. “I’ll pay for your investigative services, of course. A straightforward business deal.”
“We can talk about that later.” He withdrew his hand from hers. The moment of intimate contact had infused him with a warmth he had not felt in a long time. The moment he broke the physical contact a sudden feeling of loss flooded through him. That was not a good sign. He needed to double his determination to maintain his emotional distance from this very tempting woman and her obvious vulnerability, which continued to tug at him.
“Do you think you would recognize him if you saw a picture?”
She tilted her head to one side and scrunched up the side of her mouth. “I don’t know. I might. As I said, it was only a glimpse.” She sat up straight and stared at him. “Do you have pictures of the members of the Rocky Shores Police Department?” Then she slumped back again. “Of course, he might be a police officer somewhere else, one of the other cities around Seattle or maybe even in Seattle.”
A sigh of resignation escaped her throat. “Or maybe he was some sort of security guard and not a law enforcement officer at all.”
Reece grabbed another log and put it on the fire. “That’s very true. We can’t go jumping to conclusions.” As much as he wanted to tie together her problem with his, he didn’t have anything concrete—only his strong suspicions.
He went to the window, pulled the drape aside and stared out into the darkness. “The rain doesn’t seem to be letting up. It looks like it might end up raining all night.” And of even more concern to him was what to do about her being in his cabin. Eventually it would be time to go to bed. Should he offer to drive her home? Drive her to a motel?
Suggest that she spend the night in his cabin?
He was never going to keep temptation at arm’s length with her sleeping under the same roof with him. A cozy fire, the sound of the rain—a scene ripe for seduction. He sucked in a deep breath, held it for several seconds, then slowly exhaled. What had he gotten himself into? The very notion that her stalking and abduction would have any connection to him being set up and framed for a crime was totally preposterous. He was trying to make two pieces fit together that didn’t even belong to the same puzzle.
Reece had been offered parole after only a few months in prison, but had refused. He had no intention of giving them the opportunity of sending him back to prison with time added on to his sentence by claiming some trumped-up violation of his parole. He did the full term of his sentence and walked out the gates without further obligation to the legal system—no reporting to a parole officer, needing to provide them with his address or having to prove that he had a job.
It had been three months. He had been hiding in his cabin with nothing to do to occupy his time other than read, watch television, surf the Internet and dwell on the past and what had happened to him. Maybe it was time to put that part of his life to rest. To quit thinking about it. To stop fixating on the people who had been responsible.
But that was easier said than done.
He stared at Brandi. She seemed to be lost in thought. Perhaps fate had delivered her into his hands. Even though he no longer had his private investigator’s license, he could still put his expertise to use by helping her get to the bottom of the mystery. It would give him a place to focus