“You keep harping on that.Surely, I’m not the first woman who has stripped in front of you.And I wasn’t completely naked.Neither were you.”
Laughter slipped from him.A deep, dark, oddly sexy laughter.“Oh, sweetness, I never harp.Cute, though.”
Finally, finally, his hand moved away.Hemoved away.
“We’ll be at Preston Hollow soon enough,” he murmured.
Ah, yes, his home in the ever-so-prestigious Preston Hollow.Billionaire row with lush, private properties.And top-of-the-line security.
“So let’s get our agreement down, shall we?First, my terms.Then yours.Sound fair?”
“Yes.”She pressed her hands against the top of her thighs.Her wrist ached.The bruising was getting worse.
“You don’t lie to me.I won’t lie to you.”
She’d never bared her soul completely with anyone.Not even her mother.Especiallynot her mother.“Before we start, I must insist on personally going to my rental property.I have the keys, after all.My property, then your place.”
“Desmond doesn’t need keys for your rental.”
She licked her lower lip.“That’s called breaking and entering.”
“That’s called getting inside.”
“Are you always this…”Difficult.“Challenging?”
“Yeah, I am.Think you can handle that?”
“In my sleep.”A challenging billionaire was nothing compared to the murderers she’d faced.“This is a nonnegotiable point for me.I have to stop by my rental house.I have confidential material there that I must obtain.”
Silence.
“Lily.”A sigh of her name.“Is this the part where you confess that you came to Dallas because you thought I wasalreadya murdering psycho, just like my father?”
She squared her shoulders.“Atlas.”Deliberately, she sighed his name, too.“Is this the part where youconfessto being a murderer?”
ChapterSix
He couldn’t help it.Booming laughter escaped from Atlas.As if he’d ever give up anything that easily.
“Right.”A sniff from Lily.A cute, little annoyed sniff.She was just being so delightful.So serious and intense as she accused him of being a serial killer.“Didn’t think you would fess up.Especially since I now believe you are his target, and not, in fact, the killer that Benedict and I had begun to hunt in the area.”
Nowthatstopped his laughter.“You were hunting with Benedict?”
“A predator has disemboweled two individuals in the Dallas area.Sure, most officials will say a perpetrator must have three or more vics before earning the moniker ofserial killer,but I say…if the signs are there, why wait when you know what’s happening?”Very deliberate.“I told Benedict after the first kill that I was concerned a serial was at work.”
Again, Atlas asked his question, “You were hunting with Benedict?”Because he needed to be clear on this point.
“I came to town after I learned of the first murder.The method was very unusual.Deliberately painful.The killer clearly had the end goal of making his victim suffer as much as possible.I was…already looking into the Dallas area because of you, but the murder of William Lloyd did speed along my process.”
William Lloyd.Billy Lloyd.Petty thief turned drug dealer.A guy tied to the fentanyl overdose of three Dallas teens.
“Victim number two turned up shortly after that,” she added.
Yes, he was aware.Conry Harding had been the second kill.A suspected domestic abuser.An accused rapist.The son of a very wealthy real estate mogul.Conry had never actually spent any time behind prison bars.
But he’d sure gotten one gory ending to his life.
“After the second victim, there was no denying what was happening.”Cool words.Except they frayed just a bit around the edges.“The killer only had three weeks in between the murders.That time frame alarmed me.”
