Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [27]
Hell, it was lucky he hadn’t blown himself to kingdom come long ago. Or unlucky. If Nate hadn’t come here he’d probably still be alive. And she wouldn’t be trapped in a living nightmare, remembering things she thought she’d dealt with long ago.
The air was even colder when she stepped outside this time, and the earlier sunshine had vanished, leaving the sky gray and threatening as the snowflakes filtered down. She walked down the alleyway between Dillon’s warehouse and the next, but there was no sign of life. No cars except for the abandoned ones, no voices in the muffled silence.
The main road wasn’t any better. Now that she could get a good look at her surroundings she was even more depressed. Everything around Dillon’s warehouse was deserted. If this had once been part of a thriving city, that city had abandoned this area, spreading out in more congenial directions. Maybe times would change and gentrification would hit Cooperstown, Wisconsin. Someone would snap up the deserted warehouses and turn them into loft apartments, someone would buy the empty storefronts and turn them into pricey boutiques.
There were footprints in the snow. Considering how abandoned that area of the city seemed to be, there were a surprising number of different tracks. The small ones were probably Mouser’s. She could see the scratching marks left by the rat’s brothers and sisters, and she shivered lightly. And there was another set of footprints, probably male. Narrow feet, not too big, almost graceful. The tracks couldn’t belong to Dillon. He had big feet. When she’d been an impressionable teenager she’d noticed them, and she and her girlfriends had speculated about what else might be oversize about Dillon Gaynor, giggling at the salacious thought.
She wasn’t giggling now, and she didn’t want to think about it. Those feet were more like Nate’s. Narrow, aristocratic feet, while she had always bemoaned her own wide peasant ones.
There was no traffic, no taxi she could hail, even if she had the money to pay for it. No one she could even hitch a ride with. She stood still in the deserted street and closed her eyes for a moment.
And then opened them again. Someone was watching her. She turned, slowly, but there was no one. She looked up at Dillon’s ramshackle garage, up to the windows on the second and third floor, and for a moment she thought she saw movement behind the frosted glass. She blinked, but then there was no one, and she shook her head. There was no one in that garage but Dillon and her, more’s the pity. Unless the rats had made their home on the third floor and had taken to spying on the human inhabitants of the place.
But she hadn’t heard the scrabbling sounds of rodent feet last night. Granted, she’d been exhausted, but she’d been edgy enough to be freaked by any unlikely noise. If the building was infested with rats then they all kept regular hours.
She must have imagined the movement at the window. The narrow footprints disappeared into the scuffed snow, and she told herself she was letting her imagination run wild with her. Not enough sleep, not enough food, and the shocking effect of seeing Dillon Gaynor again had managed to make her even more neurotic than usual. She never would have thought seeing him would have such an effect on her. After all, it was ancient history, she’d moved on, and one bad night shouldn’t have the ability to color her entire life. It hadn’t. Until she looked up into Dillon Gaynor’s cool blue eyes, and suddenly she was sixteen again.
But she wasn’t. She was twenty-eight, with a master’s degree, a good job, a loving mother and a sense of satisfaction in her life. While she wasn’t in a relationship at the moment, that didn’t mean she couldn’t be if she wanted one. She’d had offers. She just wasn’t ready. Besides, she was secure enough that she didn’t need a man to make her feel complete.
There was no sign of Dillon when she walked back into the warm kitchen. Her borrowed sweater was covered with snow, and she shook it out all over the cracked linoleum floor before hanging it back up on the peg.