Kansas City Countdown. Julie Miller

this guy?”

      She looked again. Even if she could remember the attack, there was little to identify in the picture. The man stood in the shadows behind a parked car, beneath a harsh circle of light from a street lamp creating shadows that rendered his face a black void that reminded her of the Grim Reaper.

      “No. I don’t know him.” Not even the clothes looked familiar. She tucked the loose hair behind her ears. “What if I never remember what happened to me? How good a detective are you? Can KCPD solve a crime like that? I may not remember clients and faces, but I remember my books and law school and what it takes to make a good case. I can’t imagine getting a conviction if the victim herself isn’t a reliable witness. Any decent defense attorney would fry me in court.”

      Keir’s eyes darkened to an unreadable midnight blue, and the grin disappeared. She’d struck a nerve there. Something to do with shredding his case again, she imagined. A fist squeezed around Kenna’s heart. She didn’t want whatever had happened between them in the past to ruin this...what? Friendship? Attraction? Maybe she was the only one imagining a connection between them. What if he was just a good cop following through on an investigation and she could have been any citizen he’d taken an oath to protect? Maybe she was more addled in the head than she knew and she couldn’t tell the difference between being kind and caring.

      Kenna dropped her feet to the floor and stood, reaching for Keir when he turned away. “What did I just say? I reminded you of something. What did I do to you?”

      His cell phone vibrated, creating an audible buzz in the silence of the room while she waited for him to answer.

      “Keir?”

      But an explanation wasn’t coming. Keir read the summons on the screen as it buzzed again. “The doc said I couldn’t use my phone in here, but I need to take this.”

      An instinctive response to ask a different question—to get him to open up about something else before she steered the conversation back to what she really wanted to know—kicked in. “Who’s calling you before dawn?”

      “My partner. I asked him to do a wider search grid around the alley where I found you, see if he could find a primary crime scene or at least where you parked your car. He’s searching to find the guy I showed you, too.”

      “He’s a person of interest, isn’t he?”

      “I spotted him in the general vicinity where I found you. Don’t know if he was sizing up a mark, if he was watching the alley to see if anyone noticed you or if he just had nothing better to do on a Friday night. I’d sure like to talk to him.” The phone buzzed impatiently, and Keir backed toward the door. “I’ll be out in the lobby.”

      Manipulating the conversation to get to the answer she needed was starting to feel like second nature to her. Had she possessed this stubborn streak before the attack? “Tell me why you called me the Terminator earlier. It didn’t sound like a compliment.”

      “I’ll ask up front about getting you some clothes, too, since the CSI took your suit and shoe to the lab.”

      This conversation wasn’t done. Kenna walked right up to him and fingered the lapel of his gray tweed jacket. She rubbed her thumb over the crimson smear staining the nubby material. “You’d better ask about a change of clothes for you, too. You’ve got blood on your jacket. My blood.”

      “I’m coming back.” The gap—both literal and figurative—widened between them as he pulled the material from her fingers. Then he put the phone to his ear and turned away. “Hey, buddy. What’s up?”

      Kenna hugged her arms around her weary body and watched the door close behind him. Keir had managed to be supportive and evasive at the same time. “Run, you clever boy.”

      Clever boy. Where had that phrase come from? While she’d seen glimpses of a boyish charm, there was certainly nothing immature about Keir Watson. Not in his stature, his tone or his demeanor.

      “Clever boy,” she muttered the words again, mentally chasing the blip of a memory that floated through her head. “It’s from a TV show.” She watched TV. She had a hobby. “Blue box. British accents.” One lightbulb, however dim, finally turned on inside her head. “Dr. Who.”

      She seemed to be in pretty good shape, so she wasn’t a full-blown couch potato. Who did she watch it with? Family? Friends? A significant other? Why hadn’t whoever she watched that show with come to see her at the hospital? Okay, sure, there was that whole thing with the missing phone and purse and relying on the police to track down where she lived and worked—but wasn’t someone missing her? Alarmed that it was five in the morning and she hadn’t come home?

      Or was someone at home the danger she needed to fear? The person who’d gotten so angry that he or she had tried to kill her? How should she handle this? What was her next step? How was she supposed to know who to trust?

      “Take a breath,” she warned herself before panic reclaimed her.

      Kenna hugged her arms around the thin cotton of her gown and glanced around the room, looking for answers. Looking for someone to talk to. Looking for a friend or sympathetic doctor or polite detective or anyone who could keep this helpless, lonely feeling from seeping in as surely as the air-conditioned chill that dotted her skin with goose bumps.

      She had a feeling she wasn’t used to relying on others to take care of her. Kenna eyed the soiled remains from treating her injuries that the nurse had wheeled into the corner. She wasn’t used to being weak like this, forced to put her trust in people she didn’t know. Had she put her trust in the wrong person, making herself a sitting duck who’d had no clue she was about to be attacked?

      Fear crawled across her skin as the knowledge she would have to trust someone to help her through this sank in. Where was home? How was she supposed to get there? What was she supposed to do with herself the next morning? And the day after that?

      Her gaze drifted over to the ER room’s metal door. She’d put her trust in Keir Watson tonight. Not that he’d left her much choice. He’d allowed her a token argument, then had swept her up into his arms, bundled her into his car and driven her here. But she could have asked him to leave the treatment room at any time, and she hadn’t. She wanted him with her.

      Crazy as it seemed, Kenna knew Keir better than anyone else in her life. Once she’d come to and realized her brain had turned into Swiss cheese, it felt as if her whole life had reset. There was the time before the assault where her memory was riddled with empty spaces and vague shadows, and there was the time after—when she’d stumbled into Keir Watson’s arms. He was the person she’d known the longest in the part of her life she was more certain of. And his abrupt departure to chat with his partner left her feeling about as vulnerable and confused and alone as she’d been when she first woke up with her cheek in a puddle of her own blood on the cold, gritty concrete.

       Chapter Three

      A sharp rap at the exam room door rescued Kenna from the maddening examination of her thoughts. She turned as quickly as the ball bearings inside her skull would allow and smiled, eager to apologize for showing Keir Watson anything but gratitude. “You came back.”

      “I haven’t been anywhere yet.”

      Not Keir. Not a familiar face. Her smile quickly flatlined and she backed her hip against the examination table as an older man with neatly trimmed hair that held more salt than pepper in it dropped what looked like a carry-on bag on the chair inside the door.

      “Kenna, dear. Look at you. How horrible. Does it hurt?” He swallowed her up in a hug and planted a chaste kiss on her numb lips, giving Kenna the chance to do little more than wedge her hands between them and gasp in protest. “Of course it hurts. When I heard you’d been attacked...”

      Kenna straight-armed him out of her personal space, pushing the older man back to get a better look at his face, hoping for a ping of recognition as he rattled