Peril from the Past by Dana Mentink

Author:Dana Mentink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-10-04T20:03:56+00:00

TWO

Martin Roker was alive.

He had been outside the bakery.

He had fired a shot through the window.

Sasha hadn’t gone crazy.

She wasn’t imagining things.

Her sleepless nights and long hours of work weren’t making her hallucinate.

She frowned.

She had seen Martin three times in a week. Each time, she’d been convinced he was an unaged version of the man who had murdered her mother. Forty years old. Tall and angular. No wrinkles visible on his thin face.

“Impossible,” she whispered as she watched several police officers collect evidence outside the bakery. When they’d arrived, she had been asked to have a seat and wait. Forty minutes later, and she was still waiting. The sky had turned navy with twilight, the city lights flickering on. Cars inched by the police barrier that had been erected at the curb, blue and white lights flashing on windows and pavement.

The man who had been stalking her had caused all this.

Martin Roker?

It couldn’t be. Not an unaged, unchanged man in a world where everything aged and everything changed. Eighteen years was a long time. If Roker had lived, he would be close to sixty, with some gray hair and at least a few wrinkles. He’d have changed the way everyone did. Life left no one unscathed.

“He’s dead,” she muttered, reminding herself of the most important fact.

Martin Roker had been killed in a shoot-out with the police. Recently, she had looked through the files and the evidence that had been collected after her mother’s murder. She had seen photos of Roker’s body, lying where it had fallen, the area cordoned off by yellow police tape. She had felt for the wife and little girl he had left behind, and she had considered contacting them for her story.

She hadn’t wanted to dredge up a past that she knew had been as painful for them as it had been for her. They were not responsible for Roker’s actions, and their suffering in the aftermath only made his affair with Sasha’s mother, the murder and his suicide-by-police all the more heartbreaking.

She had left them alone.

Despite her journalistic need for all the facts and all sides of the story, she had shut herself off from that part of the past.

But now she wondered if she had been wrong to do so.

Roker couldn’t be stalking her through the streets of Sheepshead Bay. He couldn’t have fired a gun at her.

But someone was. Someone had.

Who?

She needed to know. The only way she was going to find out was to dig into Roker’s side of the story. Look into the life he had lived before he had murdered her mother.

Somewhere in the past was a clue about the present. She just had to find it.

“Are you okay?” the bakery attendant asked, plopping a bottle of water on the table in front of her before she could respond. “You look pale.”

“It comes with the blond hair,” she responded, offering a shaky smile.

“More likely comes from being shot at.”

“That, too,” she murmured, opening the bottle and taking a sip. Her hands were shaking and water sloshed onto her coat and the table.

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