The Marriage Profile Read online

  After getting herself a fresh soda from the kitchen, she returned to her workroom. And as she sipped the caffeine-laden drink, she viewed the sketches she’d made. The cave with the coins and cross, the cup and statues. None of it made any more sense to her now than it had when she’d first seen the images in her head. She set down the can of soda and began flipping through the rest of the pages in her sketch pad. She stopped at the pictures of the horses she’d drawn in a circle. Then she stared at the wooden fence she’d drawn. On still another sheet was the house—only she wasn’t sure if it was a house. She shaded in the road she’d seen surrounding the structure. Then she went back to the sketch of the horses in the circle.

  “A track?” she murmured. A track where horses were trained? Suddenly her heart began to race. Maybe this was where Lena was being kept, she thought. At some house or a place with a track for training horses. Excited that at last she was on to something, she hurried over and picked up the phone to call Justin. She began to punch in the number to the Wainwright Ranch, then stopped and hung up the phone. It was well past eleven o’clock. She couldn’t call him this late, she told herself.

  But as she glanced over at the little stuffed lamb on her worktable and remembered how frightened Lena had been, she picked up the phone again and dialed his number.

  “Wainwright,” Justin answered on the second ring.

  “Justin, it’s Angela.” She waited a second, and when he didn’t say anything, she repeated, “Justin?”

  “Yeah?”

  The gruff response did little to ease her nerves. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said, and wondered if she could possibly sound any more inane. She wet her lips, and quickly, before she lost her nerve, she blurted out, “I have something I need for you to see. It’s a…picture of where I think Lena is being held. I realize it’s late, and this could probably wait until morning, but I’m hoping you might recognize the place. Anyway, I was wondering if you could come over. Or I could come over to your place and—”

  “I’ll come there. Give me thirty minutes.”

  And before she could thank him, the dial tone was buzzing in her ear.

  Twenty minutes and several broken speed limits later, Justin pulled his truck up in front of Angela’s condo. Except for the lights blazing in her place and the one on at the newlyweds’, the rest of the block was in darkness. Judging from what he’d witnessed a few nights ago, the newlyweds were probably not asleep.

  If he had any sense at all, Justin chastised himself, he wouldn’t be thinking about what they were doing. Irritated by the direction of his thoughts, he shut off his lights and engine and exited the truck. He didn’t even make it to the front door before Angela was pulling it open for him.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly,” she said, and ushered him inside.

  Justin nodded, trying not to notice the fact that she was barefoot and wearing a pair of worn jeans that hugged her bottom and made her legs look a mile long. But with the light at her back, it was impossible to ignore the view of the curves beneath her shirt.

  “I appreciate you coming all the way out here this late at night. I mean, I probably should have waited until the morning.”

  Justin jerked his gaze to her face and realized now what he hadn’t when she’d first opened the door. She was wired. Probably running on fumes, if he had to guess.

  “But then I thought—”

  “Angela, slow down,” he said firmly. “I’m here now. So why don’t we go inside and you take your time and tell me about this picture.”

  “Right. Right,” she repeated, and hurriedly shut the door. “I guess I’m a little excited.”

  She was more than a little excited, Justin realized as he noted the shadows beneath those overbright blue eyes and what he suspected were tear stains on her cheeks. She’d probably been at it for hours and was on the verge of collapse. Not that she would admit to it. She wouldn’t. Angela’s ability to lose herself in a case had been one of the things he’d both admired and resented about her during their marriage. While he’d appreciated her dedication, he’d also hated the way she would shut herself off from him and everything except the case.

  “Well, at first I wasn’t sure it meant anything,” she began, growing excited all over again as she explained. “But then when I started going back over the pictures—”

  She was like a kid, racing ten miles a minute, he thought. “Whoa! You’re going too fast. Take a deep breath, Angel,” he said, the endearment tripping off his tongue as it had so often in the past. Without thinking, he caught her by the shoulders and ran his hands down her arms.

  And just like that, heat exploded in his veins. He released her at once and took a step back. But not before those big blue eyes of hers locked with his. Not before he heard that catch in her breath that told him she’d felt those sparks, too. “You said you had a picture you wanted me to see,” he pointed out, annoyed with himself because in less than a minute the past two days of reining in his desire for her was in danger of going up in smoke.

  “Yes. It’s in here.”

  Determined to see the picture she wanted to show him and get out of Dodge before he did something stupid, he followed her into the den he’d seen for the first time a few nights ago.

  “I suppose it would have made more sense to set up an office in the extra bedroom,” she explained, evidently noting his surprise at the changes. “But I liked it better in here.”

  It wasn’t difficult for him to figure out why she’d turned one corner of the room into her work area. The openness of the big room and the picture window on the far wall would have appealed to her. The fireplace, rug and pillows would have given it a cozy feel and made it feel less like an office. Accustomed to sizing up a scene quickly due to his law enforcement training, Justin noted the bulletin board with a map and arrows linking locations that she’d anchored to the wall in front of her workstation. A photo of Lena was pinned at the top of the board, a reminder he was sure, that the baby was depending on her. In front of the bulletin board sat an art table piled high with books, folders and reports. The baby blanket and stuffed lamb that Angela had gotten from the Carsons during their visit two days earlier was beside a stack of files. An open notebook filled with what he recognized as Angela’s handwriting sat next to it. At the center of the table lay several art pencils and a sketch pad. “Looks like you’ve been busy.”

  “I suppose so,” she said, as though only now seeing the worktable and the array of material.

  On the edge of the table atop a napkin sat a can of soda that Justin suspected was lukewarm, an open bag of chips and a jar of salsa. Remembering her tendency to fuel up on caffeine and junk food, he chalked up her hyper state to tonight’s diet. Walking over to the desk, he gestured to the snacks. “I take it this was your dinner?”

  Angela blinked, then looked at the chips as though she hadn’t a clue how they’d gotten there. “Actually, it was lunch and dinner,” she confessed.

  He started to lecture her about taking better care of herself, but reminded himself that Angela Mason and her eating habits were no longer his concern. Instead he opted to ask, “So what is it you’ve found that’s had you too busy to eat a decent meal?”

  “Not everyone considers steak and potatoes a decent meal,” she informed him, and Justin told himself it was just as well that he’d put her on the defensive. “But to answer your question, I spent most of my evening going over the reports and statements, and didn’t come up with much more than you or the FBI already have. Then I tried using Lena’s things, to see if I could get a sense of what might have happened to her.”

  Justin read the challenge in her eyes that he’d heard in her voice, but he remained silent and waited for her to explain.

  After a moment she continued, “Josie said the day Lena was kidnapped from her nursery, that she found her gone when she went in to check on her during her nap. I think whoever kidnapped her had
staked out the Carsons’ place and knew Josie’s routine. When Josie put the baby down for her nap, they snatched her.”

  “We’ve always suspected as much,” he conceded. “But if Del Brio is behind the kidnapping, we haven’t been able to link him to it. And believe me, I’ve tried. Since there’s been no ransom demand, we have to also consider the possibility that Lena’s mother—whoever she is—is the one who kidnapped her.”

  “It wasn’t her,” Angela replied.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because whoever took Lena used something—a doll or a toy of some kind—as a means to get close to her without scaring her and then they snatched her. Once they had her, they covered her up with something so that she couldn’t see. She was terrified,” Angela said, her voice little more than a whisper.

  The fear in her eyes as she replayed the scene for him had Justin’s gut tightening and anger fueling his blood. He clutched his hands into fists at his side and waited for her to continue.

  “When she started to cry. They…they drugged her to keep her quiet. It wasn’t her mother,” she told him. “No mother would put her child through that. Not for any reason.”

  She stared at him, obviously waiting for him to challenge what she’d said. He didn’t because he believed her. Every word of it. He didn’t doubt for a second that it had happened just as she had described. A part of him wanted to reason that it was Angela’s uncanny instincts and training as a cop as he’d done so often in the past. But he knew to do so now would be to lie to himself. “All right,” he said finally. “So where’s this picture you wanted me to see?”

  “It’s right here,” she said, and reached for the sketch pad. Her fingers shook as she fumbled through the pages.

  “May I?” Justin asked, and took the pad from her. He sat down at the table and began to view her sketches. The first one was of a horse poised on its hindquarters. He flipped to the next drawing of a black-and-white pinto strutting.

  “I saw the horses first,” she explained from behind him. “The drawings aren’t very good, but I think you get the general idea.”

  She was wrong. They were good. As a man who’d been incapable of drawing a straight line without a ruler, he’d always been in awe of Angela’s ability to sketch and paint. Judging from these sketches, he could see her skill had only improved with time. He turned to the next picture. In this one she’d drawn the same horses again but had put them in a circle with a fence surrounding them. He studied the picture a moment longer, then moved on to the next one. “What’s this?” he asked at the sight of what appeared to be some type of coin.

  “I’m not sure, and I don’t know that it has anything to do with the kidnapping. I—I just had these quick flashes and jotted them down.”

  She leaned over his shoulder, her hand brushing against his as she reached for the sketch pad, and the innocent contact had his entire body on instant alert. Doing his best to ignore her scent, he allowed her to skip through the rest of the drawings until she found what she was looking for.

  “This is what I wanted you to see,” she told him, her words a warm breath against his neck.

  When he turned his head, looked up at her, she seemed to sense the same sparks he did because she moved over to the side of the table and waited for him to look at the picture. Justin stared at the drawing of a house. It was small, with a winding road and a wooden fence that looked almost primitive. There was another house or small building in the rear that could have been a shed, a barn or a garage.

  “I realize the drawing is poor, but does it look at all familiar? Do you ever remember seeing a place like that?”

  He could hear the hope in her voice and hated to dash that hope. But he had no choice. “First off, there’s nothing wrong with the drawing. You’re a very talented artist, Angela.”

  “Thank you, but—”

  “And yes, the place does look familiar,” he began. Before she got excited, he stood. He caught her hands, held them in his own as he met her gaze. “But there are probably at least a hundred places that look like that one or are pretty close to it in Lone Star County alone.”

  “But what about the horses?”

  “What about them?”

  “Maybe the house is on some kind of a ranch that has a place to train horses. Look,” she said, pulling her hands free to go back to the sketch pad. “See how they’re moving in some kind of a circle? Maybe it’s a track where they train horses to race.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded, not having the heart to dash her hopes completely. “But that still leaves a lot of territory to cover. This is Texas. Do you have any idea how many ranches there are with training facilities for horses?”

  “Probably a lot.”

  “A lot,” he repeated. “But at least with this,” he said, indicating her sketches, “we have a start.”

  She smiled at him then, a real smile that brightened her eyes and wrapped itself around his heart. “Thank you for believing me about the visions, and for not treating me like I’m some kind of nutcase.”

  Justin tipped up her chin so that he could see her eyes, and so that she could see his. “I’ve never thought of you as a nutcase,” he told her. “And while I’ll admit that I don’t understand any of this psychic stuff and I’d probably be more comfortable if you’d told me you just had a gut feeling about that place, none of that changes the fact that I believe you. I’ve always believed in you, Angel. How could you not know that? Did I do such a lousy job as your husband that you didn’t know how special I thought you were? How special I still think you are?”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t you,” she told him, tears in her eyes. “It was me. I didn’t believe in myself. So how could I expect you to believe in me?”

  “I guess it comes back to that issue of trust again, doesn’t it?”

  “It was myself I didn’t trust. Not you,” she whispered. “I always trusted you.”

  Her tears ripped at him. “Don’t cry,” he pleaded, unable to bear the sight of her hurting. “I hate seeing you cry.”

  She took the handkerchief he offered. After hopping atop the worktable, she swiped at her wet cheeks and then handed him back his handkerchief. “There,” she said, lifting her face up for inspection. “See? No more tears.”

  “Not quite,” he said, noting the lone tear that clung to one of her lashes. He moved closer and caught the tear with his thumb. He was so close he could see the damp spikes of her lashes, note the trail made by the tears on her cheeks, smell the scent of apricots in her hair.

  Her grin faded.

  So did his.

  Alarm bells went off in Justin’s head, telling him to get out of there, not to look into those liquid blue eyes, not to stroke his thumb along her cheek. Ignoring the warnings, he lowered his head to within a whisper of hers. “This is a mistake,” he said, more to himself than to her.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I should go.”

  “Yes,” she told him just before she fitted her mouth to his.

  One taste, Justin promised himself as he drank her in. One taste would take the edge off this craving for her. One taste, and he’d stop. But after one taste, he wanted more.

  Angela must have felt the same way because she slid her fingers into his hair and deepened the kiss. Desire became a fire in his belly, in his blood. Her hunger fed his. He raced his hands over her curves, ached with need as she raced her hands over him. With every touch, with every sigh, the flames burned hotter, faster, brighter. And when Angela opened her lips under his, the fire inside him exploded.

  Angling his head, Justin took the kiss deeper. Mouths fused. Tongues tempted, teased, mated. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed herself against him. And with each move, each stroke of her tongue, each nip of her teeth, new aches and new hungers flared to life inside him. Somewhere in the back of his mind the last shreds of reasoning whispered that this was madness. That this was Angela, his ex-wife. That they were working on a kidnapping case together, and the minute
it was over she’d be gone. Back to San Antonio. Back to her job. Back to the life she’d wanted without him.

  He was searching for the strength to stop when she tore her mouth free and attacked the buttons of his shirt. She yanked his shirttail from his jeans. “Angela,” he said, and sucked in his breath at the feel of her fingers on his skin.

  “Touch me,” she demanded, and flicked her tongue across his throat. “I want to feel your hands on me.”

  Groaning, he took her mouth. Pulling her shirt from her jeans, he made short work of the buttons, then flipped open the clasp at the front of her bra. He pushed the fabric aside and stroked her nipples with his thumbs. She gasped, and the sound sent a new wave of need ripping through him at lightning speed. The sight of her nipples pebbled and dusky brought him to a flash point. He wanted to drink her in, swallow her whole. And because he did, he forced himself to go slow.

  Lowering his head, he circled one nipple, then the other, with his tongue. He heard the hitch in her breath, felt her tremble at his touch, felt her nails bite into his shoulders. Sweat beaded his brow with the effort it took not to rush her. With a patience that cost him dearly, he continued to lave the tender flesh. And then he closed his teeth over the swollen nipple.

  “Justin,” she cried out.

  Yanking him by the hair, she forced his head up. He caught a glimpse of wild eyes the color of smoke. And then she was fastening her mouth to his, kissing him again.

  Her hands were everywhere—in his hair, racing down his back, sculpting a swift path over his chest, down his belly to fight with the buckle of his belt. She tore at the snap of his jeans, fumbled with the tab of his zipper.

  “Angel,” he called out, strangling back a groan as her fingers brushed his straining shaft.

  If she heard him, she gave no indication. She continued to pepper his face with kisses while she fought to get his zipper down.