Obsession Falls by Christina Dodd Read Free Book Online

was the logical choice.
    She went looking for a way to contact him.
    She found no direct way. Not surprising—she had worked with many wealthy, powerful people and they weren’t readily accessible.
    She’d worked on Maryland senator Bert Hansen’s home. But she was under no illusions; he was a politician first, and if he had the chance to bring a notorious criminal to justice, he would do so with all the fanfare of a magician revealing his greatest sleight of hand. While in Eastern Europe, she had run into a CIA agent. Yes, she knew the CIA only worked outside of the States, but surely any kind of official government contact was better than none. On the other hand, she and Elsa Medcalf had not hit it off. In retrospect, Taylor should have sucked up to Elsa.
    Taylor could get in touch with her mother, who was married to an executive of a company contracted for government work. But the thought of going to her mother for help, after her mother’s betrayal of her and her father … Taylor could not. She could not .
    She put her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. This wasn’t as easy as it should be. She should be able to go to the police. She should believe they were honest and trustworthy. She did not.
    Which brought her back to Kennedy McManus. She needed to research him, see if she could figure out any way to …
    She lifted her head from her hands. Outside, she heard the spit of gravel beneath wheels. She turned her head and listened harder.
    A car. A car had just driven up to the front door.
    Her heart started pounding, strong, rapid.
    She turned off the computer. She glanced at the French doors that led onto the porch. Should she run out? But what if someone came around that direction? What if … what if this was Dash? She would be caught. She would be killed.
    The front door opened.
    She crawled under the desk.
    Men’s voices in the living room. Not angry, not threatening—not Dash—just chatting back and forth.
    Not Dash, but still dangerous to her. Did they live here?
    The voices got farther away, then closer.
    She huddled against the wall, then forced herself behind the desk drawers. She was not invisible, but unless these men bent down and looked, they wouldn’t see her. She hoped.
    They came into the master bedroom. One guy said, “No sign of an intruder in here, either.”
    “Something tripped the sensor.”
    The sensors. Of course. There were motion sensors in this house. She should have known.
    “The branch broke the window. The debris set off the sensors.”
    The other guy was stubborn. “Last night the branch broke the window! The monitors recorded the break then and the motion then . That shouldn’t have tripped the sensors today .”
    These were the guys from the local home-security office. And it had taken them over twelve hours to arrive from town to check out the problem? The Renners should be informed. Not that Taylor was going to do it.
    “There’s nothing out of place here,” the first guy said.
    Thank God she had wiped up after herself.
    He continued, “If we don’t find anything, we’ll send a technician. I’ll tell you what he’ll find—he’ll find a mouse chewed on wiring and we’ve got a short.”
    Legs walked past the desk.
    Heart pounding, Taylor pressed herself into a compact ball. When Dash had chased her, she had given everything to her physical reactions. She had gasped, feared, run, sought refuge. She had been an animal in flight.
    Now she was an animal in hiding, frozen in place, trembling, afraid to make a sound, to allow a single panicked breath to escape her. She wanted to stand, to shout she was innocent, to tell them she had entered the house only in the most dire of circumstances, to ask what they would have done in her place.
    But she knew, without having ever faced this situation before, that she did not want to deal with smug, homegrown guys who couldn’t wait to bring in their first trespasser.
    The second guy said, “I’m going