Haunted Heart by Susan Laine Read Free Book Online

Winterbottom for the second time. If there had indeed been reporters asking questions about Ruben before, then his story was out there somewhere. All Duncan needed to do was find it.
    And in fact, he was relatively sure he had. Back at the office, he had searched what he could online. No results came up from five years ago relating to Ruben. Duncan had a sneaky suspicion his grandmother, the influential Rose, had had something to do with that.
    But a minor reference to the house where Rose had lived and where Ruben lived now had yielded a slightly better result. And now Duncan was in the Seattle Public Library’s newspaper archives, going over magazines and newspapers from five years ago.
    And there it was. The story Rose had buried. An obscure piece of writing in the Seattle Times from five years back, a small article about the house, how it had been robbed during a night when Rose had been at a fancy soirée—and how the seventeen-year-old boy sleeping there had been raped and beaten to within an inch of his life.
    Duncan’s heart broke.

Chapter 8
     
    A FTER A whole week, Duncan still wasn’t any closer to figuring out how to address the issue of what he knew. About the brutal assault on Ruben five years ago. The child who had been broken, brought into a violent world, and who now carried the weight of that so heavily he couldn’t even leave his house and home.
    Why Ruben had even stayed at that house was beyond Duncan.
    His head hurt with all the emotions inside. They were like feverish shards, stabbing him hotly, trying to get him off his ass to do something—when he was at a loss as to what to do.
    Could he call or e-mail Ruben brazenly and tell the boy he knew and understood? No. Then Ruben would think Duncan was snooping into his private business, or worse, stalking him or something. Could Duncan steadfastly go up to the house and coax the boy to speak with him, about anything and everything? No. Back to the stalker problem.
    “Dammit!” He accentuated his loud curse by banging his desk with his fists, followed immediately by his head. “Shit. Fuck. Damn.”
    “We may be selling words here at EP, but perhaps less of those words,” Maggie needled from the doorway as she strode in like she owned the place. As his assistant, she sometimes did. “What’s wrong, hon?”
    “Maggie!” Duncan mumbled, chiding her with a tone far angrier than his actual mood.
    “Well, ‘fuck’ actually does sell books, considering we are into erotic romances.” She was totally baiting him now.
    “Did you want something, or did you just come in here to torture me?” Duncan refused to raise his head from the desk, and an annoying, throbbing pain waved through his body from his banged-up forehead.
    “Can’t both be true?” Maggie was using her most irritating, cheerful, singsong voice that grated on Duncan’s nerves like nails on chalkboard.
    “You’re fired!” He actually partially meant it too.
    Maggie snorted amusedly. “Yes, of course I am. Now, I have updated the list of urgent book covers….”
    Duncan sighed tiredly. “Who’s behind on his or her schedule?” He meant the artists and the authors both. Delays could happen for a lot of reasons. Sometimes the vision of the artist didn’t mesh with that of the author or vice versa. Other times what an author wanted was impossible or what an artist had created sent the wrong message for an erotic story. Or, worst of all, there were legal issues at play, like accusations of plagiarism and whatnot. Thankfully, EP had never been the target of one of those. The most common problem was time, or lack thereof. The art department had several dozen covers on their to-do list at all times, and deadlines were deadlines.
    Maggie hesitated, and that sure wasn’t a good sign. “It’s Ruben.”
    Startled, Duncan’s head came up so fast he felt lightheaded for a second. “Ruben? But he’s always on time. He’s never missed a deadline yet.”
    “His first proof was due