Stolen: A Novel of Romantic Suspense (7 page)

It would be good to talk about it, she supposed. If anybody would understand, it would be Darcy. That was what friends were for, right?

After adding cream and sugar, she headed back to her office. She might as well tackle email while she talked to Darcy. They needed to discuss how to handle things until the impersonator problem was cleared up but until they had that worked out, Shay would much rather be the one declining any and all invitations.

A few minutes later, she finished summing things up and sat there, staring at her computer and waiting for a response.

Silence greeted her.

“Darcy?”

“I’m here,” Darcy said quietly. “This … well, this is weird. You’re serious about all of this?”

“Yes.” Shay pinched the bridge of her nose and said, “Somebody is pretending to be
me
.”

“What do you mean, somebody is pretending to have written your books?”

Sighing, Shay skimmed another email—
hello, we would like to link our blog to yours … delete
. “Darcy, I mean just what I said. Somebody went into the bookstore in Earth’s End and signed the damn books. Pretended to be me. Acted like they had a fucking
right
to sign
my
books.” Damn it, the more she thought about it, the angrier she got—and she still needed to get into town and talk to Elliot.

She shot a look at the clock; it was ticking close to noon.

But here she was, on the phone with Darcy. Fighting with email, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter.

Clicking on another email, she barely made it through two lines before her head wanted to explode.

It wasn’t the
Mr
. that set her off, either. Portland. Bookstore. Come in for a signing.
Shit
. Another one. People actually wanted her to come in for actual signings.

That so couldn’t happen. Shay would freak out before she even made it out the damn door.

She groaned and dropped down to thump her head on the desk. Hard. Several times.

“Shay? What’s that noise?”

“I’m hitting my head on the desk.”

“Ah … you just got out of the hospital after you hit your head in a car crash. Should you be banging your head?” Darcy asked worriedly. “I mean, you were in a coma.”

“I came out of the coma, too, thanks.” A headache
started to bloom, but she was pretty sure it was stress related.

“Well, still, that’s not a good thing to do. You know, you’re worrying about this too much,” Darcy said. “I mean, you deal with weird shit all the time. Just get to work on the book and this will work out. I’ll handle the email and everything, and maybe I can figure out what’s going on for you. You’d feel better if you weren’t messing with it anyway.”

“No.” Shay scowled. “I’d feel better if none of this was happening.”

But
that
wasn’t possible, so the next best alternative was to find answers—do something.

So far, all she’d done was send out complaints, and she hadn’t gotten one
damn
answer. That was stopping.
Today
.

There was one person who had some sort of answer. Elliot Winter.

He would have met the Shane imposter.

He was a nut for those books. It had always given Shay a dull rush of pride, even as it made her nervous and uncomfortable. He liked her books.
Elliot
liked
her
books, damn it.

He’d know something about the person who’d signed them—so why in the hell was she sitting here
chatting
instead of getting on the road?

“I need to go, Darcy.”

“Hey, wait!”

“I can’t.” Shutting down her desktop, Shay eased back from the computer and turned around. “I need to go to Earth’s End. So far, I’m not having any luck shutting things down on this end and I’m going to go crazy if I don’t find some sort of answers. Anna must be out of town or something and
she
isn’t answering me—nobody will be at the publisher’s until Monday. I’ve got to talk to somebody. So Elliot is it.”

“Elliot?” Darcy asked warily.

Grimly, Shay smiled. “Yeah. That guy I used to date. This faker signed books at his store. He’ll know something, or have remembered something about the imposter. That’s just Elliot for you. He remembers things. I’m going into town to pick his brain.”

“You’re driving down there?”

“Too cold to walk,” Shay pointed out, glancing outside. The sun was up. It would be up until around three or so and then it would set—the days were short and cold, very cold. She didn’t have to go outside to know that. It was January, for crying out loud. “Plus, it’s thirty minutes away.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you walk, silly,” Darcy said, laughing. “But you shouldn’t go
now
. You need to be resting and taking it easy.”

“I’ve done enough of that.” If she stayed here, she was just going to brood, and steam, and brood some more. At least if she went to Elliot’s, she’d feel like she was
doing
something. “I’ll talk to you later, Darcy.”

“But—”

Dropping the phone into the cradle, Shay stared outside at her truck.

She hadn’t driven since the accident.

She’d been in her car—a beautiful Dodge Charger. Or it had been beautiful. It now resembled a tin can. Swallowing, she rubbed a hand over her chest, vaguely recalling the way it had felt right before she’d passed out. Pain. Lots of it.

For a minute, the fear almost kept her trapped.

But then she threw it off. “What are you going to do … never drive again?” she muttered.

Like
that
was an option.

Some days the nightmares were so bad, she had to leave the house just to escape them. She couldn’t run
fast enough to get away from herself. She could barely drive fast enough.

Besides, if the nightmares from what had been done to her all of those years ago weren’t enough to paralyze her in terror, then she sure as hell wasn’t going to let a fucking
car wreck
do it.

FOUR

“W
HAT IN THE
HELL
DO YOU THINK YOU
’
RE DOING
?”

At the sound of his sister’s irate voice, Elliot closed his eyes and just remained where he was, sprawled on the floor, straightening out the mess the Danver kids had left when their parents had finally vacated the store.

Considering how pissed off she sounded, he knew he wasn’t in any mood to tangle with her.

They’d already tangled over the Danver kids. She’d wanted to tear into the mom and dad the second they’d stepped foot in the store. The last time the kids had been there, they’d left bubble gum inside books and one had thrown a board book down a toilet.

Elliot had decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

He’d been in the wrong—as evidenced by the thirty or forty dollars’ worth of destroyed merchandise surrounding him.

Bunch of hooligans. He honestly didn’t mind if parents wanted to bring their kids in to just
browse
—very often
browsing
led to
buying
. And a bookstore couldn’t exactly stay in business if people didn’t
buy
. But who in the hell was going to buy the books that those kids had trashed?

After he’d pointed that out to the parents, they’d gotten
rather insulted and informed him, “We’ll just take our business elsewhere.”

He’d then felt the need to mention, “You don’t exactly do any business here anyway, so that’s just fine.”

They hadn’t approved.

Lorna had barely managed to keep the
I told you so
quiet until they’d taken their five kids out of the store. Once the bell jangled shut behind them, though, she’d whirled around and laid into him as if the kids had destroyed bricks of solid gold.

Elliot was a wise man. He knew when to advance … and when to retreat.

He’d retreated into the aisles to clean up the mess; he was perfectly happy to stay right there until she cooled off.

Tuning out the low murmur of voices coming from the front, he picked up a scrap of paper and stared at it glumly. Hell, didn’t those idiots bother to teach their kids that books were for
reading? Not
for tearing up? He could have understood if any of the kids had been under five or so, but the youngest Danver kid was about seven or eight.

Hearing a soft footstep behind him, he said, “Give me a second to clear the mess up—sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Need punched through him a second before the recognition hit. His body, his heart … those parts of him remembered Shay just a little better than his mind did. He looked up in time to see her easing her way down to the floor, a wary look on her face.

The bruises were still there—those faint shadows of color lingering on her pale, soft skin. He’d seen them yesterday and it had been like a kick to the gut. She didn’t look much better today—tired, strained, and in pain.

Yet she still looked amazingly beautiful.

And she smelled so damn good. Like the first snow, springtime, and citrus, all wrapped up together. Sitting as close as she was, he had that scent flooding his head now, making it hard to think. For weeks after he’d broken up with her, he’d caught the faintest ghost of her scent on his jackets. Now he was surrounded by it again and it was torture.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, tearing his gaze away from her and forcing his attention back to the mangled remains of children’s books.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said softly. She reached out and touched one of the books, her fingers brushing against the cracked spine. “Man, somebody had fun back here.”

“The Danver family was in.”

“Ahhhh. That would explain it.” She gathered up the books around her.

“I can get them.” Hearing the terse sound of his own voice, he sighed and rubbed a hand down his face. “Sorry. I’m in a bitch of a mood. But I’ll take care of the mess. You should be back home, taking it easy, anyway.”

“Handing you three or four books isn’t going to slow my recovery any, I promise you, Elliot.” She smiled at him.

The dimple in her cheek winked and his heart stuttered in his chest. That dimple had always gotten to him. Damn it, how could she still get to him like this? Hadn’t he decided he was better off without the complication of Shay Morgan?

Shit
. Clearing his throat, he focused his attention back on the books in front of him, stacking the books that he wouldn’t have to trash in one pile and the rest in another. “So how is that recovery going? You going to need physical therapy or anything?”

“No. I was lucky. If it hadn’t been for the coma and
the head injuries, I probably would have been able to go home within a few days, but those complicated things. I ended up with pneumonia in ICU, but that’s not as bad as the other stuff.” From the corner of his eye, he saw her shrug. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“It sounds like it was bad enough.” He held up a hand and ticked the problems off on his fingers. “Coma. Head injuries. Pneumonia. Any of those could have been bad, just on their own. But all three? You should be taking it easy. So why aren’t you resting?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve rested. Two weeks, flat on my back.” Her fingers toyed with the folds of her long denim skirt, twisting them, smoothing them out. Twist, smooth, twist, smooth … over and over … He wanted to reach over and catch her hands in his, hold them and get her to tell him what was wrong.

That wasn’t going to happen. So he focused on the obvious.

She was nervous about something. Very nervous. She wasn’t looking at him and she was fidgeting.

Elliot had learned to read people pretty damn well. It had come in handy during his years in the army and in the years since he’d bought the bookstore.

Reading Shay wasn’t always easy because she was about as open as a closed book, but right now, she was nervous as hell.

Shifting around, he faced her and waited her out.

She shot a quick look at him, her eyes bouncing around to land somewhere in the vicinity of his chin before moving to linger on his right shoulder as she said, “Besides, I need to ask you a question.”

“I’m all ears.”

She paused in her endless twisting and folding of her skirt to reach for a book by her side. Seeing the copy of the book she held, his curiosity stirred. He’d almost forgotten about it. “I heard you’d picked one up. What
made you change your mind about trying these?” he asked, reaching for the copy of
Death Sigh
. It was one of the store’s copies. He recognized his store’s autographed copy sticker.

Her fingers uncurled from the book slowly as he tugged it out of her grasp, but it struck him that she was reluctant to let it go. From under his lashes, he watched her.

“I didn’t exactly change my mind,” she said quietly. Her tongue stroked across her lower lip.

For a moment, he was distracted. He wanted to lean in and trace the path her tongue had taken with his own.
Focus, Winter
. Flipping the book open, he looked at the flowing, flowery script on the title page, giving himself a minute before he looked back at Shay. “So what’s up?”