Page 9 of Luke, The Profiler

Oy, this man. “Don’t get me wrong, okay? It’s a struggle to live a life of being perpetually low-profile, always tempering my actions with thoughts of,will this cause a scene? Will I make waves for my father? Will I be an embarrassment?But with this kind of trouble it’s virtually impossible to stay out of the public eye, because this is a situation that should be handled by the police. That’s why I came to you instead of them. I’m Truman Steadfast’s daughter. I love him and I don’t want to make waves for him, so even if I have to put myself in debt for the next twenty years to pay off PSI’s bill, I’ll gladly make that sacrifice for my dad. He’s worth it.” There. Calling him “dad” should put a tug-on-the-heartstrings, downhome spin to it all.

His eyes narrowed as he searched my face. “I have no idea if what you’re saying is true, and that totally fucking shits me.”

I could hold a master class when it came to profanity. But considering I was wearing my “country-club best”—a designer purple shirtwaist dress with a popped collar and princess-bow wide belt cinched at the waist, a single strand of pearls at my throat and my hair smoothed back in a Grace Kelly chignon—I pulled off an eye-widening gasp. “I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t get how weird this is for me,” he went on, ignoring my response. Apparently he’d been serious about not being polite. “Just about everyone on the planet has tells—unconscious physical giveaways that express what they’re thinking, feeling or doing. But not you. Even your micro-expressions are contradictory—angry and worried, but calm and calculating. Controlled, yet raging. Sometimes I even see glimpses of what might be violence in you, yet you showed nothing but truthfulness when you said you couldn’t shoot at another living being with a real gun. So that leads me back to my very first question when I sat down across from you. Who the fuck are you, Eden Steadfast?”

“I’m innocent, at least when it comes to all the chaos that’s been unleashed in my life,” I said after a moment, returning his searching look with one of my own. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“Yet you’re making me feel like I’m guilty of something.”

“Are you?”

“Did you not just hear me say I’m innocent?”

“Of the chaos unleashed in your life,” he semi-quoted back. “That’s some qualifier you tacked on there. What do you think you are guilty of?”

“A great many things, just like every other person on the planet.”

“Such as?”

“Such as having a suspicious mind.” Slowly I began to walk around him, giving him plenty of time to spot all those so-called “tells” so he could put me in some lame-ass context he could live with. Maybe then he’d stop questioning my every move. “I have questions about you, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like, why do you even care about who I am? Why did you insist on being part of my security detail? Because it’s clear that you did, since a valuable analyst like yourself would never be used out in the field as hired muscle. Tell me, are you going to become as obsessed with me as my stalker obviously is? Let me know, because I’ll want to reload my BB gun for the occasion.”

“It’s cute how you think a BB gun would slow me down, much less stop me.” He turned his head to watch me complete my orbit around him, the late afternoon sun striking off the bronze highlights in his thick hair. “Or any man, for that matter. If I had it in my mind to get my hands on you, Ralphie’s Red Rider wouldn’t even slow me down.”

I worked at stifling a shiver as my girlie parts tingled all the more. I couldn’t tell if he was threatening me or promising me heaven. “Trust me, a well-aimed BB would drop you like a rock, and possibly prevent you from fathering any children.” Or any more children. For all I knew he had half a dozen bronze-haired geniuses at home, along with a loving wife breathlessly waiting for her man’s return.

A snort escaped him. “Your aim would have to be sniper-quality to actually do any harm, and even then I’d have to be standing still. Something I’d never do, and neither will your stalker. You know that, right?”

Just the mention of my stalker cooled my blood and made my stomach clench. “I’ll still shoot his balls off if he ever approaches me.”

“I didn’t see how accessible his balls were in all the dick pics he sent you, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to need more than a pea shooter to achieve that lofty goal.”

“What?” The word snapped out of me before I could get a handle on it.

“His dick pics,” he repeated, watching me closely. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know about them. You had to scroll through them to get to the photo of you at the salon.”

“I didn’t scroll through them. I just handed my phone over to Kels.” Who hadn’t said anything, but no surprise there. Like me, Kels had been raised to believe discretion in front of outsiders was the only way to go.

“What is your relationship with your father’s lawyer, exactly?” Luke asked while I dug for my phone. “There’s too much familiarity between the two of you for it to be just a business acquaintance.”

“You need to know this why?”

“Because for two hours you were grilled on all your intimate relationships, going all the way back to your first time when you were seventeen in a supply closet in your father’s church—”

“Meeting house, not church.”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to my father. Ever since he founded HEG he’s been very clear that the personal search for enlightened greatness is not an organized religion.” My father had been careful to not get bogged down in that quagmire. He did just enough charity with at-risk teens to be a nonprofit, and that was all he needed for a tax dodge.

“Whatever pie-in-the-sky bullshit your dear old dad’s peddling to the masses isn’t the question. The question is what’s your relationship with Kelsey Crosby? You didn’t name him as one of your former lovers.”

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