Page 27 of K-9 Prime Target

He grinned, a wolfish grin. “Perfect,” he breathed.

“If…if I’m going to be naked, you should be naked, too,” she said, doing her best to sound coy.

“No. I don’t have to be naked.” He traced the knife across the top of one breast, a razor slice, leaving behind a line of blood.

“Stop it!” she cried, and tried to move away, though he had her backed against the wall.

“Hold still,” he ordered, and squeezed her arm.

But she wouldn’t hold still. She wouldn’t stand here and let him cut her to pieces. She shoved him away, even as the knife sliced again, deeper this time. Warm blood dripped down her icy skin.

She launched herself at the door and fumbled with the lock.

The knife drove into her back just below the right shoulder as she wrenched open the door. Pain flooded her, but she ran, ankles repeatedly giving way in the high heels. She ignored the pain and kept running, screaming and pounding on the doors of neighboring rooms as she moved down the corridor. “Help! Help! Call the police!”

She still didn’t know who had saved her. People began emerging from their rooms. Someone wrapped her in a blanket. Someone else tore a fire extinguisher from the wall and hurled it at Nicholson, who had run after her, brandishing the knife. Other people tackled and held him until the police and an ambulance arrived.

Nina woke hours later in the hospital. A guard stood outside her door, and reporters filled the parking lot below her window. Her coach was there, along with a state police officer. She had stitches and ached all over. She had lost a lot of blood, but beyond that she had lost forever that sense of being safe and happy and lucky.

Chapter Eight

Liam listened to Nina’s story, physically ill as he pictured her, naked and bleeding. He heard the terror even in her cold, flat delivery of the tale and felt her tremble. When she was done, he gathered her close. She collapsed against him, and he tightened his arm around her, rage and sorrow a sickening stew in his stomach. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” he said.

“You didn’t know.” She sat up again and looked at him, tears sparkling on her lashes. “None of us knew. The notes sounded so innocent. We thought he was just another fan with no sense of boundaries. A socially awkward person who didn’t know how to express themself. It all sounded so…so harmless.” She shook her head. “I used to give people the benefit of the doubt before. Now I can’t.”

He remembered her mentioning the notes, which she had characterized as intrusive but harmless. “We shouldn’t have been so naive,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that horror.”

“I wanted to be stronger,” she said. “I wanted to go back to skiing, and to my life, as if nothing had happened. But I couldn’t. More than the pain and the scars from the cuts and the terror of being trapped with him in that hotel room, he destroyed my confidence. He took away my belief that I even deserved to be as happy as I was that day before he came along.”

“You deserve to be happy. We all do.”

“I would have made you miserable, if I had let you back into my life,” she said. “I was miserable. It took me months before I could go anywhere by myself. Months more before I skied again. Getting involved in ski patrol helped. I could be anonymous, at least most of the time. Then I got Sky.”

At the sound of her name, the dog looked up and thumped her tail, then flopped back down again. Liam patted her side.

“When I’m out on the slopes with Sky, I tell myself everyone is looking at her, not me,” Nina continued. “Gradually, I began to feel more like myself. I was doing important, useful work that still involved skiing. When Marlena approached me about being an ambassador for SkyCrest Resort I was flattered. I thought I could do that. Nicholson was locked away and I rarely received fan mail of any kind these days. I told myself I shouldn’t let one horrible night prevent me from celebrating the good things I had accomplished in my skiing career.”

“I wouldn’t have given up on you,” he said. “Not when you needed me most.”

“It’s sweet of you to think that,” she said. “But I was in a really bad place. It would have changed things between us.”

“And now—when I’m here, and Nicholson is here, too?” He took her hand. “Don’t push me away again.”

“I won’t push you away,” she said. “But I’m not ready to be close. Not while he’s out there, threatening.”

“I’m not asking you to give me anything,” he said, a surge of anger coloring his words. Not anger at her, but at the unfairness of a world that made a negotiation like this necessary. “I’m asking you to let me give you what I can—my presence. My time. My help.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’ll accept whatever you can give.” She closed her eyes, her shoulders sagging. “I just don’t know where to start.”

“We’ll start with the basics. Take a shower and change into something comfortable. I’ll fix something for us to eat. Then you can go to bed and I’ll stay here on the sofa.”

She frowned. “That’s not going to be very comfortable.”

He patted the plush cushions. “I’ve slept on worse, believe me—concrete floors, mud huts, in bombed-out buildings.”

“You have a comfortable hotel room to go to.”

“I’m not going to leave you here by yourself. Not when Nicholson has been here three times already.”