Guardian by Kaitlyn O'Connor (ebook e reader txt) 📗

slid down herdoor and covered her face with her hands.

“Oh my god! Omg! Omg! Ican’t believe I did that!”

She dwelt for a while onthe humiliation of making a total, clumsy fool out of herself rightin front of the sexiest man she’d ever seen so close in her entirelife—probably the sexiest she was ever going to see.

When the embarrassment began to wane,guilt and horror rose up to take its place.

She’d just tried to run down the guyshe’d just been to the police about!

Did he know she’d just come from thepolice station? Had he seen her come out, saw she was distractedand somehow managed to circle around and ‘accidently’ bump intoher?

As scary as that thought was, she justcouldn’t accept that there was any possibility of that beingreality.

Even if hehad seen her, shereasoned, why would he think it hadanything to do with him?

And thecontrived ‘accident’?

That was just plain silly.

The cops were right, she thoughtmiserably.

She’d let her imagination runwild.

Because shedid live alone andshe was boredbecause nothing ever happened. There was no excitement of any kindin her life. And she waslonely because she wasn’t even allowed to talk toanybody when she was at work except the exchange of information—notactual conversation.

She had spotted the guy one day,moving along the sidewalk outside in a way that made her bellyshimmy. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what there was aboutit that seemed so sexy to her, but there was no lying to herselfthat she wasn’t next door to orgasm by the time he moved beyond herview.

Naturally enough, it was way too faraway for her to get a real look at his face, but she had liked theway he moved and she had been turned on by his build.

She had no idea why she’d raced to herdoor to stare out of the peephole when she had no reason to thinkhe would even enter the building where she lived, let alone passher door.

She’d certainly never seen him beforeto recognize him as a resident.

Maybe it was just plainhopefulness?

Maybe it was a sixth sense she had noidea she had.

But she’d stood with her eye to thepeep hole while the excitement pumping through her slowly cooled.Then, just as she had given up hope of another glimpse, he’d stroderight past her door and she’d almost fainted.

She’d still had the presence of mindto press her ear to the door panel and listen intently, and she’dheard the jingle of keys and the subtle working of metal againstmetal, as of hinges moving, as the door opened and then closedagain.

He not only lived in herbuilding!

He lived just a couple of doors downon her very own floor!

She was downright giddy for hoursafter that ‘encounter’, making up all sorts of fanciful storiesabout who he was and where he’d come from—imagining one chanceencounter after another that led to an introduction and thenmore.

It was absolutelythe best nightshe’d had in her life!

She’d come down by morning, but therewas still a low buzz of excitement inside of her that refused to besubdued.

But reality had reared its head withthe rising sun and the jarring buzz of her alarm clock and she’dbegun to pick the incident apart.

Which was when it finally dawned onher that the guy that passed her door was ‘different’ somehow fromthe one she’d spotted on the street.

She’d began to pick the whole thingapart then, everything she’d seen, everything she’d felt, everyrandom thought that had flickered through her mind.

And she’d come to the conclusion thathad led her to do the most idiotic thing she’d ever done in herlife.

She’d done her best to ignore himafter that, because she had concluded that he was dangerous—notjust in the sense that she could fall for him from afar and make acomplete ass out of herself, but because he actually was up tosomething nefarious and was dangerous in that sense. But it seemedshe was constantly running in to him thereafter, when she had neverseen him before, and she began to think he was going out of his wayto make sure they kept passing one another.

Instead of feeling flattered, whichshe might have before if that had occurred to her, she felt …stalked. She felt a budding of uneasiness since that seemed toreinforce her suspicion that he was up to something verybad.

She would have loved to have believedthat he had been just as addled from their encounter and she’dbeen, but she just wasn’t that good at self deception.

* * * *

Dillard was pleased but almost amazedat how easy it had been to track the woman down with nothing morethan her name to go on and a hint that she worked at a library.With just a handful of phone calls, he’d traced her to an apartmentbuilding just blocks away from the precinct in a matter of minutes.Roughly fifteen minutes after the interview, he passed her walkingalong the street and pulled his car into a parking space a littlemore than a block further down the street and settled to studyingthe apartment building where she lived and the foot traffic in anout of it.

Spotting the ‘character’, as it turnedout, wasn’t hard either.

He wasn’t just ‘tall’ and dark. Helooked tall enough to be a basketball player and there weren’t alot of people around that were that tall, especially whitepeople.

Beyond that, he had to admit the guyfit the ‘drop dead gorgeous’ too—not that he was in to men, but hethought he could judge what drop dead gorgeous was to the female ofthe species.

Pretty much the opposite of what hewas.

Which meant he disliked the bastard onsight and it didn’t take him five minutes to decide the little ladywas right. Something was just ‘wrong’.

The very first clue was that he wasloitering like he was waiting for somebody.

When he put that together with thefact that he had passed miss library on the way over he was prettysure the guy was stalking her.

Unless the two of them were intosomething together?

Not a farfetched conclusion. Probablyhalf the tips they got were from exs—or current squeezes who had abeef with their ‘loved one’.

Sure enough, here comes miss libraryand suddenly the kook is as alert as a blood hound, comes toattention, and just