Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 111860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
“I thought that might score me a few extra points.”
She nodded, a jerky movement. It did. It did do that. She couldn’t help picturing him with that look of concentration on his face he wore so often, this enigmatic man who fought off attackers and told stories so well, leaning over a cutting board full of watermelon slices and carefully pressing a star cutter into the fruit, or perhaps even doing it by hand because how would he have a star cutter in a hotel room? In any case, he’d done it for her. To make her smile. And truly, she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done something nicer for her. “Mint,” she said, and even she heard the emotion in her voice. “That’s a nice touch too.” Her throat felt full, and she swallowed, refusing to be brought to tears by some star-shaped melon and a few sprigs of mint. “It’s good. I’d invite you back to my potluck, Ambrose Mars.”
He squinted one eye, looking as if he was struggling with something humorous.
“Don’t do it,” she said. “I set you up for some form of a ‘that’s what she said’ joke, but I know you can resist. I have faith in you.”
He laughed, and she grinned, and God, she’d been beaten and terrorized and made to feel so low today, and here she was laughing over fruit salad in her kitchen with this strange, confusing man. It felt as though her mother had arrived with that elixir that would erase her memory. Rather, Ambrose had shown up and, with laughter and fruit, had done the very next best thing. Distracted her. From the smell of the attacker’s breath on her face. From the pain of his hands around her neck. From the terrifying feeling that she was going to die.
“I wasn’t sure how you felt about fruit dip, so I decided to avoid any potential pitfalls,” he said, his eyes dancing.
“That was wise.” She nodded slowly. “There are several.”
“I figured.” He tilted his head. “Cool Whip?”
She pretended to shudder. “Whipped marshmallow is the true villain of that story.”
He grinned, and she did too. And for several heavy moments, they simply stared at each other, and Lennon felt lifted even further from her body—a blessed relief, considering the circumstances. But she also felt that same flutter of fear she’d sensed since the get-go with this man, and she was pretty sure what it was about, but she was too exhausted and emotionally fragile to ponder it right that moment. Especially with him staring at her with those sleepy eyes that made her think of crawling beneath the sheets at all hours of the day.
“How are you, Lennon?”
She sighed and sank down into a chair at the table. “Sore, but otherwise all accounted for.”
“Emotionally?”
She shrugged and let out a short laugh. “Well, a case could be made for the fact that I wasn’t exactly of sound mind before today anyway, so . . .”
A ghost of a smile flitted across his full lips before he went serious. “The two officers who checked the men in the tent before you did feel awful. But as many drugs as the man who attacked you was on, he might have actually been pretty damn close to dead when they took vitals. Something sparked his attack, and then he promptly died again on the way to the hospital. This time for good. Paramedics couldn’t revive him.”
She felt an internal sinking, and though the man had terrorized her, she felt sorry for him. That wasn’t a nice way to die. “I should have waited for backup. I will next time I’m in a situation like that.”
He assessed her for a moment, his expression inscrutable. “The purple drug in the baggie wasn’t the same as at the previous scenes. It was something called purple heroin. Have you heard of it?”
She wrinkled her brow. “Maybe.”
“It’s mostly been found on the East Coast so far. This might be one of the first West Coast cases. It comes from China in pill form, but most dealers crush it up with heroin so they can sell smaller doses.”
She rubbed at her brow. “What’s in it besides heroin?”
“Brorphine, which is a synthetic opioid without a medicinal purpose, and carfentanil, which is an elephant tranquilizer a hundred times more potent than fentanyl.”
An elephant tranquilizer. Christ almighty.
“Why purple?” she asked.
“No one really knows so far. Maybe just a marketing feature.”
She blew out a breath. “My God. The things people will put in their bodies,” she murmured. It did make her consider what had happened to her a little differently, however. The man who’d attacked her had not only been mostly dead but very literally out of his mind. Who even knew what kind of human he was when his body wasn’t pumped full of opioids and large-animal tranquilizers. It wasn’t that she’d taken the attack personally . . . exactly. But, well, maybe in some small, irrational way she had, and knowing what she now knew clarified for her that he’d have attacked a fly with as much vigor if it had landed on his arm. It didn’t make it less traumatic, but it did put it in a clearer light. “He was possessed,” she murmured.