Moving on With Brock: A Passionate Second Chance Romance (4 page)

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EVIE Snow picked up the newspaper at her office door before she unlocked it. Glancing at the headlines, she saw that another girl had gone missing. 

Shaking her head as she felt the surge of anger in her chest, she unlocked the door and walked inside of the store front space that housed her private investigation business. More than anything else in the world, crimes committed towards helpless children could really set her on edge. She’d always loved children, and thinking that other people could and would deliberately try to harm them made her really angry inside.

Besides, she has an axe to grind. She became a detective because of the kidnapping of a child. She might not have been able to help that child, but she had begun helping others from then on. 

Quickly, she punched in the code to the alarm, and went into the small kitchenette that was part of her office to start brewing coffee. Turning up the thermostat got the heat started so that her office would be nice and toasty within a very few minutes. 

She walked back into the room that held her desk and checked for phone messages. There were a few asking for pricing information and a couple of people she would need to call back regarding an appointment to see her. 

I really should hire a receptionist or something, she thought. Even if it’s just some part time help. Then I could be out of the office without worrying so much about missing an important message. I could also have more time to focus on getting answers for my clients. 

Pouring a cup of steaming coffee, Evie went back into her office and sat down at her desk. She spread out the newspaper flat on the desk and started to read the article about the latest missing girl. 

It was her hope that she might get something on this girl as she read the details. As much as she used to hate her “gift” for making her so different from other people she knew, she had come to accept a long time ago that it could be pretty useful, especially in her line of work. In fact, she had chosen the field of PI work because of what she could do—your purpose in life and your place in the universe and all that crap that sounded loony but somehow very true. It had become easier to do things this way than to try to deal with the police. Most of them never believed her so they didn’t take her seriously when she came to them with valid information, anyway. Idiots. 

One case in particular had been very painful and frustrating and totally changed her outlook about people in power and those supposed to protect and all that other crap that wasn’t loony at all, but could totally be pathetic once you’ve lost you’re faith in them. Evie had given the police information about where to find an abducted child. She told them what she knew plenty of time in advance to save the child. The problem was that the person she saw taking the child was someone quite important in town so the police had ignored her. And she wasn’t this cynical then. If she had been the person she was now then, she would have pursued the case on her own and to hell with the consequences. But she thought the authority would come through for her and for that child. She placed her faith in the wrong hands.

Once they found the child, it was too late to save her. The man who kidnapped and killed her was caught red-handed, but when it came to saving that child, it did not matter. Yes, he would not be able to hurt other children. But his victims before he was incarcerated were all dead and nothing could bring them back. 

And it did not matter that she had not known the child, too, or that she never had any contact with her before the kidnapping. She reached out to her. She tried to ask for help. And she, Evie, could have helped her. And she tried, but she was not able to save her.

So forget that they were strangers to each other. She had felt that child’s terror, and it was something bitter and painful and wretched. She had been that child’s older sister, mother, grandmother, and bestfriend for that short time she felt her terror before she was murdered. So they weren’t, in all sense of the word, strangers.

Evie knew she couldn’t go through another one of that experience after that. She gave up on simply helping and took matters into her own hands. 

She took classes and passed exams and finally was qualified to open up her own private detective agency. Her success rate in solving cases and helping her clients immediately became a bit higher than that of other agencies. That was no surprise to her, with her secret weapon on board. 

She continued reading the newspaper. She felt gratified because the more she read the article on the latest missing girl, the more confident she felt that she was still alive. 

She has a lot of chance to be found. That was the most important of all. So Evie closed her eyes and started doing her job. 

JUST as Evie was starting to enter a voluntary trance to divine more information, she heard the door to her office open. It startled her a little because rarely did clients come here this early in the morning. 

“Hello, I’m back here!” she called still looking down at the newspaper. She heard the thread of footsteps on the floor going to the direction of her office, and those footsteps stopping just right outside her door.

“Well, if it isn’t Evie Snow,” a sexy deep voice, almost like a purring growl, said to her. 

Evie’s head jerked up, and she stared up into the face of a man that she had never believed she would see again. 

At first she was speechless, but she soon found her voice. 

“Hunter Vale,” she said with some derision. “What on earth are you doing here?” 

“It says on your door out there that you run a private detective agency. I would like to hire you.” 

“Seriously?” Evie snorted. “What kind of game are you playing with me? I only take clients that are serious about my services.”

“What makes you think that I’m not serious about what you do; and also the need to hire you?” Hunter countered. 

Her eye sight thinned as she continued to stare at him, and his length began adjusting to the tiny slit that remained between the lids. She liked that making her eyes squint like that gave the illusion of him getting smaller. In fact, Hunter Vale was a tall, slim, rather elegant-looking man. It wasn’t that he was really elegant, but his face looked handsomely polished even during those times he’s sporting a five o’clock shadow. The man was simply a walking dynamite of male machismo. And for her, that was just one of his many… many faults.

“Let’s just say that even though it’s been a long time, it hasn’t been long enough,” she said in a mildly sarcastic, icy voice. 

“There are two sides to everything, Evie,” he replied. She couldn’t read the expression on his face. “It hasn’t been long enough for me, too.”

Drat. She began coloring at the deliberate sexual implication. What the hell? There hasn’t been any. It got nipped in the bud.

Then he got serious. “Now, are you available for work or not?” 

She managed to throw him a belligerent look. Belligerent or dirty, whatever works. “It depends on what sort of job you may have for me to do. I might be interested—or not.” Her tone implied she sided on the latter. 

But he wasn’t paying attention to her. He was looking down at the newspaper she was reading. “Actually, it seems that you’ve already begun working on the job I’m here to hire you for.” 

“What are you talking about?” Evie asked in a puzzled tone. Hunter nodded at the newspaper spread over her desk. And she frowned. He couldn’t possibly be talking about this missing girl! Was he just messing with her? “You don’t mean this missing girl, do you?” 

He looked at her, and that’s when she saw the look of exhaustion marring his face. Then he sighed even as his jaw clenched tightly on his face. “Yes. That is exactly why I’m here. That’s my niece, Evie, and we want her back. My sister is a wreck as are my parents. Between my brother-in-law and myself, we’re trying to hold everyone together, but it’s still all starting to fall apart around us.” She was staring at him, surprised at finding a weak spot at last in his façade. His hands couldn’t seem to rest as they rested on his hips. There was a defeated look in the way his broad shoulders slumped. And yes, his clothes looked like it was slept in. He didn’t usually have any detail in him out of place. But now he looked like he was falling at the seams. He focused his eyes on her and she felt her spine stiffening as an impulsive reaction to the shot of sexual electricity that she was somehow the only one feeling, because his body language remained as impassive as ever. “Can you help?” 

She heard the plaintiveness in the voice, the helplessness, the desperation. Like he believed she was his last resort. And it made her immediately focus on the case. She almost jumped from her seat when things fell into place. 

“Oh my god! This is Suzanne’s daughter? I didn’t connect the names at all!” Suzanne was his only sibling, so there couldn’t be anyone else.

“Yeah, well, she goes by her married name now so there’s no reason that you should have recognized it. But now you can understand why we need your special kind of help.” 

This time, she was the one who sighed so she could calm herself. Suzanne’s brother might be an asshole, but Suzanne herself was a lovely, wonderful and kind friend. She could only imagine how she was feeling that her daughter was missing! 

“Sit down, Hunter,” she said in a gratefully more controlled voice as she settled down again to continue reading the article. 

HUNTER brought up a chair closer to the desk so that they could talk properly—Evie and him. He almost smiled at that. They could never talk properly, and it had been a long time he could almost swear he missed quarreling with her. But instead, he patiently waited for her to attend to him again. Even though he wanted to start wringing information out of her right away, he’s learned a long time ago that it wasn’t the way it worked. He would sit here quietly and wait until she was ready to speak, how ever long it takes.

As it turned out, he didn’t have that long to wait. 

“OK, Hunter,” Evie said. “What I’ve got is this—Crista is alive. She’s scared, but she’s alive and that’s a positive.” She did not tell him because it could set up crazy images in his head, but she was also grateful that whoever has taken Christa has not started doing what-she-was-taken-for things to her. “The place she’s being held is…” she closed her eyes, “is dark and feels damp. It’s probably a basement or cellar of some sort, but I can’t be sure. She knew the person who took her; that’s why it was so easy to get her. All of the other girls knew this person, too. They weren’t afraid of this person before because they were charmed. That’s why it was so easy. They all went voluntarily and happily. Yes, that’s right. There was a feeling of happiness around them when they went with this person.” 

“Can you see who took her?” Hunter asked, barely breathing. 

“No, not yet.” Evie opened her eyes and there was frustration on her face. “But I’m pretty sure I’ll get enough clues to figure that part out. It’s not the most important part, though. It’s more important that we figure out where she is so we can get her home in time for Christmas.”

“You don’t know how much that would mean to my family, Evie,” Hunter said, his voice breaking slightly. “These last 24 hours have been the worst kind of nightmare.” 

Evie looked across the desk at Hunter with light, golden brown eyes. She has eyes that looked exotic, and people had always found her eyes to be very unusual. Well, including him, he grudgingly admitted to himself. The unusual eye color made her look more uncommonly attractive. He also knew enough to know that this factor irritated the hell out of Evie because her attractiveness didn’t help her at all and even became a deterrent because pretty as she was, she wasn’t being taken seriously before she showed attitude, something he’s once said she certainly has plenty of. That obviously, did not make a happy Evelyn Snow.

HUNTER had changed little in the last ten years except he did have more of a maturity about him now. He was still tall and fit. He was still able to get to her, dammit! 

But of course she would help him! That was never in question. No matter what happened between them in the past, she would do her very best to help find little Crista. 

“Yeah, I do know, Hunter,” she said to him, for a moment not sure if she was cross with him for thinking she could possibly turn him down, or she was trying to reassure him that everything would be alright. Se decided it was a little bit of both. “Crista isn’t the first lost child I’ve found. My success rate is pretty high; you can keep that in mind.”