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Rio, seated in the chair near the door, waiting for her to come out.
Dylan stopped short, startled to find him there.
"I knocked," he said, a strangely considerate thing, coming from her kidnapper. "You didn't answer, so I wanted to make sure you were all right."
"Seems like I should be asking you the same thing." She cautiously walked farther into the main area of the suite. Although there was no reason she should be concerned about the man who was holding her against her will, she was still rattled by what she'd heard in the other room a few hours ago. "What happened to you last night? You sounded like you were in pretty bad shape."
He didn't offer an explanation, just stared at her from across the dim room. Looking at him now, she had to wonder if she'd imagined the whole thing. Dressed in a dove gray tee-shirt and tailored charcoal pants, his dark hair perfectly swept back from his face, he looked well rested and relaxed. Still his broody man-of-few-words self, but less on edge somehow. In fact, he looked as though he'd slept like a baby for a full night straight, while Dylan herself felt like roadkill after lying awake speculating about him since the predawn hours.
"You might want to tell your friends that they need to fix the timer on the blinds in here," she said, gesturing to the tall window that should be bathing the room with daylight but was instead blocked by the remote-controlled window shades. "They opened on their own last night, then closed before sunrise. Functionality's a bit backward, don't you think? Nice view, by the way, even in the dark. What lake is that out back - the Wannsee? It's kind of big to be the Grunewaldsee or the Teufelssee, and based on all the old trees surrounding this place, I'm guessing we have to be somewhere near the Havel River. That's where we are, right?"
No reaction from the other side of the room, except for a slow exhale as Rio watched her with dark, unreadable eyes.
He'd brought her breakfast. Dylan strolled over to the squat table and dainty sofa in the center of the parlor area, where a bone china plate containing an omelette, sausage links, roasted potatoes, and a thick slab of toast waited. There was a glass of orange juice, coffee, and a starched white linen napkin tucked beneath a gleaming set of real silver flatware. She couldn't resist the coffee as she wandered over to have a look at everything he brought her. She dropped two sugar cubes into the cup, then poured in enough whole cream to turn the coffee a light shade of tan, sweet and milky, just the way she liked it.
"You know, apart from the incarceration portion of my stay, I have to admit that you folks certainly know how to treat your hostages."
"You're not a hostage, Dylan."
"No, a prisoner is more like it. Or does your kind , as you put it, prefer a less obvious term - detainee, maybe?"
"You are none of those things."
"Well, great!" she replied with mock excitement. "Then when can I go home?"
She didn't really expect him to answer. He leaned back in the chair and crossed his long legs, one ankle propped on the opposite knee. He was thoughtful today, like he wasn't quite sure what to do with her. And she didn't miss the fact that as she took a seat on the sofa and began nibbling at the buttered toast, his gaze lingered hotly on her body.
Not to mention her throat.
She flashed back to what he'd said to her several hours ago: I can smell you, Dylan, and I want to taste you. I want you...
She definitely had not imagined that. The words had been playing in her mind, practically over and over, since he'd growled them at her through the door. And as he watched her so closely now, with a broody interest that was all male, Dylan could hardly breathe.
She dropped her gaze to her plate, suddenly very self-conscious.
"You're staring at me," she murmured, the silent scrutiny driving her crazy.
"I'm merely wondering how it is that an intelligent woman like you would choose the line of work you're in. It doesn't seem to fit you."
"It fits well enough," Dylan said.
"No," he said. "It doesn't fit at all. I've read some of the articles on your computer - including a few of the older ones. Articles that weren't written for that rag that employs you."
She took a sip of her coffee, uncomfortable with his praise. "Those files are private. I really don't appreciate you excavating my hard drive like you own it."
"You wrote a lot about a murder case in upstate New York. The pieces I read on your computer were a few years old, but they were good, Dylan. You are a very smart, compelling writer. Better than you may think."
"Jesus," Dylan muttered under her breath. "I said those files are private."
"Yeah, you did. But now I'm curious. Why did that particular case matter so much to you?"
Dylan shook her head and leaned back from her breakfast. "It was my first assignment fresh out of college. A little boy went missing in a small town up north. The police had no suspects and no leads, but there was speculation that the father might have been involved. I was hungry to make a quick name for myself, so I started digging into the guy's history. He was a recovering alcoholic who never held a steady job, one of those class-act dead-beat dads."
"But was he a killer?" Rio asked soberly.
"I thought so, even though all the evidence was circumstantial. But in my gut, I was sure of his guilt. I didn't like him, and I knew if I looked hard enough I'd find something that pointed to his guilt. After a few false leads, I ran across a girl who'd babysat for the kids. When I questioned her for my story, she told me she'd seen bruises on the boy. She said the guy beat his kid, that she'd even witnessed it personally." Dylan sighed. "I ran with all of it. I was so eager to get the story out there that I didn't fully check my source."
"What happened?"
