Task Force Bride. Julie Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ so proud of serving in the Marines. Hope’s gaze dropped to her right hand where it rested on the steering wheel. A familiar web of pale scar tissue peeked above the cuff of her tan trench coat. She touched her fingers to the collar of her silk blouse, knowing there was more scarring underneath. All along her arm, her foot, her thigh—there were scars there, too.

      She was lucky to be alive.

      Hope was grateful to be where she was now, considering where she’d started. She was pushing her luck to dream of something more—like holding hands or being the recipient of a look like the one Jeff Stelling had given his bride, Deanna, today.

      “Damn lucky,” she whispered out loud as the light changed. And she meant it. As long as other people kept falling in love, she’d have a job—and the security she’d been denied growing up. What would she do with a man, anyway? Embarrass herself? Shy, plump and partially disfigured—what man wouldn’t want to get all over that?

      With a healthy dose of mental sarcasm to sharpen her dreamy focus, Hope turned onto her street. The familiar brick facade and storefront windows she’d decorated herself welcomed her as she slowed to pull into the parking lot beside Fairy Tale Bridal.

      Hope parked her car in the reserved space next to the side entrance and climbed out, keys and pepper spray in hand. As stylish and reborn as this neighborhood might be, it, unfortunately, had become the hunting ground of a serial rapist that the press had dubbed the Rose Red Rapist. She had the unwanted distinction of being responsible for the horrid nickname because one of his first victims had been abducted right outside her shop. So much for fairy tales. Several more women, including a friend who’d worked just across the street at the Robin’s Nest Floral shop, had been blitz attacked, driven to another location, sexually assaulted and then dumped back here on this very block as if they were so much trash.

      A client of hers, Bailey Austin, had been that first victim. Hope still felt guilty about the night more than a year ago when Bailey—then an engaged woman having a tiff with her fiancé at the shop—had stormed out of Fairy Tale Bridal and been assaulted. Although the younger woman had assured Hope that she in no way held her responsible for the attack, Hope was still looking for a way to make restitution.

      Hope unlocked the vestibule and picked up the mail off the floor that had come through the slot. Then she unlocked the inner door to her shop and set the bills and letters along with her purse inside before returning to her car to unload the boxes from the wedding reception. She tilted her gaze to make sure the security lights and camera monitoring the entrance were working before opening her trunk and grabbing the first box of family mementos from her car.

      With each trip to and from the shop, she made a point of scanning her surroundings and locking her car. KCPD had formed a task force to track down and arrest the elusive rapist, and they had stepped up patrols in this particular neighborhood. The Rose Red Rapist had received plenty of press on television and in the local papers, although facts about the attacks often got less coverage than the reporters’ negative opinions on the police department’s handling of the case. But every woman in town knew the dangers lurking in the darkness. Every woman who lived here knew the details of the crimes—what to look for and what to avoid.

      She was one woman, alone in the city. And even though she was no slim, head-turning beauty, she wasn’t so naive to think she couldn’t become a victim, too. She fit the profile of the professional women the rapist targeted. She was successful and confident—when it came to her business, at any rate. Hope was smart enough to be on guard, especially at this time of night. But she couldn’t very well surrender to the terror she faced as a single woman in this neighborhood. Her entire life’s savings was tied up in this shop. Anything she could call her own was in that apartment upstairs.

      Besides, she was experienced enough in life to know that danger could find a person anywhere—in the heart of the city, or on a dusty back road in the middle of nowhere. This building was her home and her livelihood, and no man—no threat—was going to frighten her into giving up everything she’d worked so hard for. She just had to be aware. She had to pay attention to the alerts and details the police had shared with the public.

      Details.

      Driven to another location...

      Hope shifted the box of photos to one arm and closed the trunk as a shiver of awareness raised goose bumps across her skin. That was what she should have remembered about the white van that had cruised past her. She’d read a witness account in the paper with vague details about coming to inside a white van before being dumped in the alley across the street after her assault.

      White van? A driver hiding his face on a cool autumn night?

      There had to be hundreds of white vans in the city. Just because one had crept up on her bumper...twice...

      And the man in black and white behind the wheel? Surely he wasn’t... Hope’s stomach knotted with fear. Surely she hadn’t gotten a glimpse of the Rose Red Rapist himself.

      En route to another abduction.

      Returning from the scene of an assault.

      “No. Surely not.” No one had seen the serial rapist. One reason he’d never been arrested was that no victim had been able to identify him—no surviving victim. She hugged the box to her chest and tried to talk herself off the ledge of fearful possibility she was climbing on to. “He was just some jackass who was in a hurry.”

      A blur of white in Hope’s peripheral vision drew her attention out to the street.

      A white van moved with the late-night traffic past the entrance to the parking lot. The white van? Was the Rose Red Rapist on the prowl for his next victim?

      Hope’s breathing locked up the way it had at the church. She was squarely and completely trapped on that ledge. “That can’t be him.”

      Cruising through her neighborhood? Had the driver followed her home? Was he hunting her?

      Hope barely managed to save the box and its fragile contents from crashing to the asphalt. “You don’t even know if it’s him,” she warned herself on a whisper. “It’s just a white van. It’s just some guy in a van. It’s probably not even the same one.”

      Refusing to let her imagination turn her observation into a panic, she carefully set the box down on the trunk and took a couple of steps toward the street. Rusting wheel wells. Shiny silver bumper.

      She glanced up into the cab. Dark stocking cap and...not a scarf.

      A surgical mask.

      Shadowed eyes met hers.

      “Oh, my God.”

      Hope slipped her hand into her coat pocket to pull out her phone as the van suddenly picked up speed and headed toward the next intersection. She hurried out to the sidewalk to see which direction the vehicle would turn and punched in 911. The driver might not be the Rose Red Rapist, but it was definitely the same van that had nearly crowded her off the road tonight.

      “Nine-eleven Dispatch,” a succinct female voice answered. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

      “I don’t know if this is exactly an emergency, but I’m not sure who to report this to.” Hope turned up the collar of her trench coat and huddled against the suddenly brisk chill in the autumn air. “I just saw a white van that matches the description the police gave in the paper about the vehicle the Rose Red Rapist drives. The man inside had his face covered.”

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