Blind Pursuit Read Free

to indulge himself like this, under these circumstances. Still, he could not turn away. She held him fascinated.
    Of the women he had taken, she was by far the most beautiful. By far.
    He admired her as a connoisseur of art would admire a fine painting, attentive to every detail. It was an undiluted pleasure to study her lovely face as minutely as he liked, with no risk that she would return his gaze or challenge his absolute control.
    She was thirty years old, balanced at that delicate equilibrium point between youthfulness and full maturity. Her skin was smooth, powdered with faint freckles; a light suntan endowed her with a pink, scrubbed look, wholesome somehow. Offsetting these girlish features were her strong cheekbones and blunt jaw, which gave her face a squarish shape, and her wide, serious mouth, not a child’s mouth at all.
    Her auburn hair, combed away from her forehead, shone even in the carport’s wan fluorescence. A stray lock lay along her temple like a spiral of sewing thread, reddish-gold.
    Peeling back her eyelids, he stared into gray eyes, smoky and mysterious.
    He parted the flaps of her robe. Removed one of his gloves so he could stroke her white pajama top, feel its softness. Satin.
    The clean lines of her neck, the bare skin stretched taut over her thin collarbones, the scatter of reddish freckles on the margin of her cleavage, cupped in the buttoned neckband ...
    He reached for the top button, wanting to see her breasts....
    No.
    He jerked his hand away as if slapped.
    His mouth twisted. A noise that was both grunt and gasp hiccupped out of him. Its echo hopped like a frog among the metal stanchions of the carports.
    Dirty. Unclean. Corrupt.
    Quickly he taped her mouth, then clawed a blindfold out of his pants pocket and snugged it over her eyes, knotting it in the back of her head.
    Helpless now. Deprived of mobility, speech, sight. She was a free agent no longer. She was his.
    Erin Reilly was his.
    The Ford’s trunk thumped shut like a coffin lid.

 
     
     

     
     
     

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    4
     
    Her keys gave him access to her apartment. Strange to be here, in another person’s living space, and in a home so different from his.
    No dull glaze of dust on the tables and fixtures. No soiled spots in the carpet, long ignored and now permanently set. No brittle carapaces of dead insects lining the baseboards, shiny in the lamplight.
    His own apartment was a ground-floor unit, cramped and airless, the windows staring blankly at the stucco wall of the building next door. Erin Reilly’s place conveyed a sense of openness and freedom, with its views of the city and mountains, its promise of light and air, its immaculate floors and whitewashed walls, its silent testimony to the serenity of a well-ordered life.
    He almost hated Erin for having all of this around her—and then he remembered that she would have it no longer.
    In the bedroom closet he found a set of three valises, small, medium, and large. He chose the medium-size suitcase. Opened it, then began pulling random clothes off hangers and stuffing them inside.
    No. Random was wrong. He forced himself to concentrate on selecting items that went together as outfits. It must look as if she had done the packing.
    What else? Footwear. He tossed in a pair of fringed western boots.
    Undergarments. They were neatly folded in a bureau drawer.
    Toilet articles. In the bathroom he collected them. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Shampoo. Deodorant. Comb. Hairbrush. Other things, including some feminine products he’d never seen before and couldn’t identify.
    Stationery. His gloved hands rifled the drawers of a mahogany desk in the den. He found a bundle of pale olive envelopes and matching sheets of writing paper that bore her letterhead.
    The suitcase was bulging when he zipped it shut.
    As he toted it to the front door, worry nagged him. He was certain he was forgetting something.
    Of course.
    Slung over a chair in the dining room was her purse.