Page 90 of Beautiful Exile

Linc squeezed my hand and then released it. “See, told you she’d come around.”

Anson’s gaze followed the hand movement—the reassuring gesture, the release of it. I could imagine his genius brain putting all the pieces together, but I hated thinking about what he might find.

“Thank God for small miracles,” Trace said.

I stuck out my tongue at him. “Hey, I’m agreeable now, remember?”

He chuckled. “Fair enough. All right, from my corner of things, we’ve got a deputy here while you are. They will be your tail for the foreseeable future. The county lab is still running trace analysis, but we’re guessing the perp wore gloves in here. We haven’t found a single print other than yours, not even on the broken items.”

Damn. I was hoping whoever it was would be an idiot and leave a path straight to them. But that would be too easy.

“Anson?” Trace asked, tossing the baton.

I forced myself to look at the broody profiler but couldn’t help but fear that he was about to lay all my secrets bare with his mental sorcery.

Anson met my gaze, and I swore he was trying to reassure me somehow. “We’re looking at a progression in events, an escalation.”

Even though Linc was no longer touching me, he was close enough that I felt him stiffen. As if the air around his body vibrated at a higher frequency due to the tension in his muscles. “Meaning this will keep getting worse,” he surmised, his voice taking on a deadly air.

“It means that Arden isn’t giving whoever this is the reaction they want. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.”

I mulled that over, frowning. “That doesn’t make sense. If this is linked to my past, it means someone’s trying to silence me again.Why not just take me out while I’m crossing the street sniper-style, or blow up my car? Why are they playing with me?”

A muscle in Linc’s jaw fluttered wildly. “Could you please not talk about all the ways you could get dead?”

“Seconded,” Trace mumbled.

“Sorry, but it’s true.”

Anson nodded. “You have a point. And it sometimes helps to approach it logically, not personally.”

He was right. Because if I really let it sink in that someone wanted to hurt me—possibly kill me—after everything I’d fought through to get safe…I wasn’t sure I could keep going.

“A couple of things,” Anson went on. “We don’t know for sure this is about your past. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was if anyone has been paying closer attention to you lately. Anyone new in your life?”

“The deputies already asked me?—”

“Quentin Arison,” Linc spat, cutting me off.

Anson pulled out his phone. “Who is he?”

“A douchebag. But he doesn’t exactly strike me as the type to get his hands dirty.” I gestured around the space. “This took work. Quentin wears three-piece suits and thousand-dollar dress shoes.”

Anson met my gaze as though he needed to know I was hearing him. “This takes rage, Arden. It’s personal on some level, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily make logical sense to you or me. Someone whose mind has twisted on them can see something as slight as you not smiling at them as justification for this.”

“She refused to go on a date with him. Refused to sell art to him before the auction,” Linc cut in. “I had someone on my security team do a little digging. Family wealth, from Europe. Used to getting what he wants. His reputation is less than stellar.”

I turned slowly to Linc. “You had a background check done on him because he asked me out?”

Linc shrugged as if it was completely logical. “I didn’t like the way he looked at you.”

Trace choked on a laugh. “And I bet that had nothing to do with him asking her out.”

Oh, Jesus.I would never hear the end of this.

Linc ignored him and turned back to Anson. “You said you had a couple of things.”

Anson nodded. “I talked with my old partner at the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and the agent who has the case. They haven’t seen any movement.”

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