O'Halloran's Lady. Fiona Brand

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СКАЧАТЬ noted the name on a badge pinned to the pocket of the security officer’s shirt and dredged up a thin smile for Mathews. “I’m fine, thank you. Just a few bruises.”

      And a whole lot of mangled shopping.

      While Mathews asked her questions about the near miss and made some notes, Jenna tested out her knee. It hurt and was already stiffening, but at least she could put weight on it. Although, it would be black and blue by morning.

      Limping, she began gathering up her things, starting with the contents of her handbag. The rice was history, grains were scattered all over the concrete, but she found the broken plastic bag and stuffed it into another carrier bag, along with other grocery items that had rolled loose.

      Mathews collected the bags containing her dress and shoes and insisted on carrying everything to her car and stowing them for her.

      As he closed the passenger side door he cast a steely look at the kids, who had drifted farther down the mall and were now grouped outside a café.

      “Are you sure you’re okay? If you need medical attention we’ve got a first-aid station in the mall.”

      Ignoring the burning pain from the scrapes on her palms, Jenna checked in her handbag, found a business card and handed it to him. “I’m okay. The only thing I’d like is the registration of the vehicle, if you can get it.”

      He tucked her card in his shirt pocket. “No problem. I’ll check out the security footage, but with the lights at this end of the lot knocked out by vandals and the mist, I can’t guarantee anything.”

      Feeling increasingly stiff and sore, Jenna climbed into the leather-scented interior of the Porsche although, for once, she couldn’t take pleasure in the car. With a convulsive movement, she locked the doors, fastened her seat belt then sat staring at her shaking hands and grazed palms.

      No, she definitely wasn’t okay.

      The driver of the black Audi had to have seen her. She had been standing in the middle of the lane, caught in the glare of his headlights, and yet he hadn’t so much as slowed down. If she hadn’t gotten out of his way she would have been hit. At the speed he had been travelling, she would have been, at the very least, seriously injured.

      Maybe she was going crazy, or she’d written one too many suspense stories, but she was almost certain that what had happened hadn’t been either a joke or an accident.

      Someone had just tried to kill her.

      Lamplight pooled around Jenna as, too wired to sleep after the near miss in the mall parking lot, she set a mug of hot chocolate down on her desk and booted up her computer. Sliding her glasses onto the bridge of her nose, she vetoed any idea that she could work on her manuscript. Since she couldn’t settle to sleep, it stood to reason that she was way too jittery to write.

      Clicking on the mail icon, she decided to stick with the less brain-intensive task of answering emails until she got tired enough to actually sleep. Her laptop beeped as a small flood of emails filled her inbox.

      Minutes later, she opened an email and froze. Fighting a cold sense of disorientation, she pushed her glasses a little higher on her nose and forced herself to reread the message that had just appeared in her fan mail account.

      I hate your latest book in which you have portrayed ME as the villin. Besides the romance and the hero being unreel (no one looks that good) the villin is not as bad as you’re making out, he deserves a medal for not trying to do away with Sara in the first chapter. Take “Deadly Valentine” off the market NOW. If you don’t you will regret it.

      Jenna drew a long, impeded breath. As chilling as the content was, and the veiled threat, the writer of the email, ekf235, had no particular literary aspirations. He had misspelt villain and unreal and had committed the cardinal sin of joining two independent clauses with a comma instead of a semicolon. If her editor, Rachel, saw it, she would have a fit.

      Jenna sat back in her office chair, her normal determination to see the positive side of every fan letter she received, even if it was scathingly critical, absent. The misspellings and dreadful grammar, the sideswipe about her characterisation, didn’t take away from the fact that whoever had written the letter was nutty enough to think she had patterned the villain on him.

      Since Jenna had never heard of ekf235, let alone corresponded with him, that claim was highly unlikely.

      For long seconds, Jenna stared at the screen of her laptop, and tried to catalogue all of the men she had known through her life, but her mind seemed to have frozen. It was mild shock, she realized.

      For the second time in one night.

      Hooking her glasses off the bridge of her nose, she sat back in her chair, and rubbed at the sharp little throb that had developed at her temples.

      She was tired and sore, despite taking a couple of painkillers and rubbing arnica and liniment into her bruised knee. She shouldn’t have started on emails this late. Buying in to the ramblings of an emotionally disturbed person, who didn’t have the courage to reveal their real identity, was always a mistake.

      Taking another deep breath, she let it out slowly and tapped the button that generated her auto-reply, thanking the fan. A small whooshing sound indicated that the reply had gone.

      She glanced at her collage board, which was littered with all of the various materials she had used as inspiration for the highly successful series of novels that had shot her to the top of bestseller lists.

      The only photos she had were those of various male and female models, which she’d cut out of magazines over the years to provide inspiration for her heroes and heroines.

      Massaging the throb in her temple with fingers that still shook annoyingly, she wondered what O’Halloran would think about the cowardly, threatening email then pulled herself up short. After the episode with her new book cover, then the moment in the mall parking lot, she had decided that for her own emotional well-being, the sooner she managed to cut O’Halloran out of her life, past and present, the better.

      Blinking away tiredness, she examined the rest of the board, which was littered with snapshots and pictures of houses, landscape settings and assorted weaponry.

      She had not amassed anything much about a villain. As a rule of thumb, she had found that the less that was said about a villain the better. Mystery was far scarier than knowledge and, besides, fans of her stories responded to the hero, not the bad guy.

      Picking up her hot chocolate, she sipped and let her mind go loose, a technique she used to help with memory, especially for allowing seemingly insignificant details to surface. She frowned when her mind remained a stubborn blank.

      The person who had emailed had claimed that she had used him as the villain, which meant she must have met him at some stage. There was always the danger that, subliminally, she could have remembered and applied characteristics from someone she had known in her past. In Deadly Valentine, she had been influenced by a couple of incidents from the past, but she was also aware that those incidents—the delivery of a single rose and a secret online “lover”—were neither new nor unusual elements.

      One thing was sure, no one she had ever met, or knew, came even close to the devious fictional criminal who had hunted Sara down in Deadly Valentine.

      The only character СКАЧАТЬ