Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2018 Box Set by Lara Lacombe

Author:Lara Lacombe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781488094361
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

January 1.

Halloween had come and gone, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I saw TV sometimes. I knew what those days were like for most people, but I had never had a Halloween costume or anything to feel thankful for. My parents hadn’t killed me yet. That should have been something, shouldn’t it? The idea of Christmas, of people all over the world celebrating someone’s birth… My mother said my being born was the worst thing that ever happened to her. She hated me. He hated me, too.

I didn’t hate them. I just wished they were dead.

He took me to the Rose Parade today. I had never seen so many people in one place, tens of thousands of them. We walked down the crowded sidewalks, him grasping my hand so tightly it hurt, his narrow dark eyes sliding from one woman to the next. Did they have any idea, even just a slight disturbance in their souls, that they were in the presence of evil? I knew it. I smelled it, that mix of excitement and lust and sick, sick pleasure. For him, half the fun was the choosing. He never drank before a hunt. The anticipation was his high, his need, his reward.

We walked. He looked. I let my mind wander someplace safer. Sometimes I just stopped being. I was nothing and nowhere. A blink, and I no longer existed. Sometimes I became someone else, a normal girl whose father loved her so much that he’d fought traffic and huge crowds just so she could see the parade. He held my hand so tightly because his heart would be broken if we got separated. Fear, ignited by pure, sweet love.

I didn’t pretend very often. It was too nice, and when he poked me to point out his target—our target—the fantasy crashed so hard I was afraid it would squash the hope out of me.

Today I looked at those crowds, those hundreds of thousands of people, and wondered what would happen if I ran right into the middle of them. He was stronger, but I was fast and wiry, and I was more afraid. If I twisted my hand from his, quick and hard, and darted into the street between floats, I could reach the other side. I could run to that group of college kids over there and cry, “This man is not my daddy! Please don’t let him take me!”

Better yet, I could disappear. Sometimes when I was allowed to play outside, my mother said I’d never met an obstacle I couldn’t go over, around, under or through. I could run and run until my lungs burst, and he wouldn’t keep up. Everyone around was taller than me. He would have only a vague idea of where I’d gone, and I would get so far away from him that he would never find me.

Suddenly he jerked me to a stop and bent low to look into my face. His fingers squeezed so viciously around mine that the tips turned red, and after a spike of pain, mine went numb.

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