Tie Me Down: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance by Tracy Wolff Read Free Book Online Page B

Four
    His name was Cole Adams. Genevieve shook her head in disbelief as she stared at the report in front of her.
The
Cole Adams—American documentary maker and Academy Award winner extraordinaire. How had she failed to recognize him?
    Maybe because she rarely paid attention to that stuff—even on her good days. Not to mention that his reclusiveness was the stuff Hollywood legends were made of. Of course, the fact that he’d spent most of the night with his face buried between her legs might also have contributed to her lack of recognition.
    Feeling her cheeks heat at the memory, Genevieve did her best to convince herself that Cole’s profession accounted for the file she’d found at his apartment that morning. Her gut had told her all along that he was innocent, but her brain still wasn’t ready to lay it to rest.
    If it was something as easily explained as research for a new documentary, why was he hiding it in a bedroom drawer? And why hadn’t he said something to her about it right away?
    Genevieve read the brief report one more time—seven years before, he’d been arrested for misdemeanor assault, but the charges had been dropped, as the other guy had instigated the fight. Other than that, his record was clean—nothing there to show any signs of sexual or homicidal deviance. With a sigh, she put it aside. She didn’t have any more time to waste on this, even though she didn’t believe for one moment that he’d sat beside her at that bar last night and not known who she was.
    No, that was entirely too coincidental for a woman who didn’t believe in coincidence.
    Going back to the file she’d started on her latest case, she reviewed everything she’d managed to accomplish that day.
    Missing persons had popped on the victim’s identity that morning, so she’d started her day by breaking the news to the girl’s devastated parents. Her name was Jessica Robbins, and she’d been a freshman at Tulane. Her roommate had reported hermissing three days before, when she hadn’t come back to the dorm after her evening jog through the Garden District.
    Jessica’s parents had flown in as soon as she’d disappeared, had hired a private detective to look for her even as they staked out both the Tulane and the Uptown police stations in a desperate attempt to find out what had happened to their daughter.
    Once she had a name, Genevieve had called the Tulane Police Department and gotten the parents’ information. She’d called them in, told them as gently as possible that their only child was dead.
    Not that there was a gentle way to deliver that kind of news—it was the part of her job she hated the most. And the part that haunted her when she lay in bed at night, the lights off and the city finally silent around her. How the people left behind looked when she shattered their world.
    In an effort to spare them, she hadn’t told Jessica’s parents everything she’d discovered. She hadn’t told them how the bastard had kept her around for a while. How he had toyed with Jessica almost endlessly in an effort to maximize the pain.
    Still, they hadn’t taken the news of their daughter’s rape and murder stoically. The mother wept uncontrollably while the father simply stared blankly ahead, as if the facts were just too much for him to comprehend. He’d been the one to identify his daughter’s body, and he’d been the one to escort his wife from the station when her sobs had died down to occasional whimpers.
    And he was the one who had looked straight at Genevieve and demanded to know who had killed his child. She had told him the truth—that she didn’t know, but that she would find out.
    And she would.
    She had promised them justice and she would deliver. Jessica Robbins would be avenged. Her parents’ anger and grief would find a focus. Genevieve would make damn sure of it.
    But she’d interviewed all the students at the dorm who claimed to know Jessica and none of them had said anything about an irate