Marie Ferrarella - A Hero In Her Eyes

Maybe he was a little of both. “I’m a private person.”

“Closed,” she concluded with a nod, shutting the door behind her.

Rounding her desk, she sat down behind it. She would rather have sat beside him, unencumbered by the desk, but she knew that he preferred the traditional. Besides, she knew she still made him uneasy. Gentling techniques took time.

Folding her hands before her, she smiled at him. “I take it I passed muster.”

“Excuse me?”

Maybe the term was too old-fashioned for him. It’d been one her great-aunt liked to use. “You’re here. That means you had me and or the agency investigated. I’m just assuming that our passing grade was impressive enough to you to bring you here.”

Walker shifted in his chair. More body language for her to read, he upbraided himself. He didn’t like being so easy to read. Moving to the edge of his chair, he locked eyes with her. “Do you do that sort of thing all the time?”

“Do what?” she asked.

“Read a person’s thoughts?”

Even as he asked the question, Walker didn’t know if he actually bought into that on any level. It seemed like a bunch of garbage.

But there was just something about her eyes, about the way she looked at him, into him, that made him think Eliza Eldridge could actually see his thoughts if she was so inclined.

Maybe he was losing his mind, he thought. Given the stress he’d been under—and was still under, if he was honest with himself—it was small wonder. Not every man lost his child and then his wife within a few months of each other.

“I can’t read a person’s thoughts, Mr. Banacek. Like everyone else, I read expressions, and, at times, I sense thoughts or emotions. Perhaps a little better than most people.” The smile she offered him somehow made her statement almost intimate. “But I don’t read minds, cards or the bumps on your head if you have any. That’s strictly carnival stuff. The business the people in this agency and I are in is a very serious one, and I for one can’t think of anything more worthwhile than recovering children wrongfully separated from their families.”

He believed her. As long as he looked into her eyes. Striving to hold on to reason, he looked somewhere else. “Very altruistic.”

Because he was in more pain than he would admit or perhaps even realized, she gave him a great deal of leeway and took no offense at his tone. She knew it was the skeptic in him.

“I’ll settle for noble.” It was time to get down to business. “So, you didn’t come to verbally go ten rounds with me, Mr. Banacek. You came because you weren’t so sure you didn’t believe me anymore.”

The smile came from nowhere. He wasn’t even conscious of it until he saw his reflection in the window behind her. “I thought you said you didn’t read minds.”

“I don’t.” He had a nice smile, she thought, but it didn’t reach his eyes. And wouldn’t, until he found his daughter. “I was doing my impression of Sherlock Holmes for you. I was deducing.”

“But you did have that dream about Bonnie.”

“I did have that dream about Bonnie,” she assured him with quiet intensity.

If he were someone else, listening to himself talk, he would call himself a fool. And yet, here he was, grasping at straws. “And in your dream, she was alive.”

“Very much so.” Reaching, Eliza placed her hand on top of his. “She is alive, I’m sure of it.”

He couldn’t believe he was actually asking questions like this. But he was a man who had come face-to-face with his desperation all over again.

“How often are these dreams—?” He stopped, trying to find the right word that wouldn’t make him look like some talisman-clutching fool. He was angry at himself for being here, for hoping. But he continued to do both.

“Accurate?” she supplied. She took a breath, wondering how to phrase this to his satisfaction. He hadn’t come here wanting to be convinced, he’d come here daring her to convince him. “There’s no easy answer for that.”

Double-talk. He might have known. Disgust filled him. “I thought so.”

“No,” she countered, raising her voice ever so slightly as he rose from his seat, “you didn’t.” He sat down again, his body language telling her that he was ready to walk out in a heartbeat unless she said something to convince him to remain—and said it soon. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come here, when doing so flies in the face of everything you hold logical. And to get back to your question, it isn’t easy to give you a straight answer because my dreams aren’t predictions. They’re things that somehow, on some level, I sense. At times, they’re other people’s pasts—at others, their futures.”

Belatedly he realized he was holding his breath, and released it. This wasn’t true, none of it. Why was he even listening to her?

Because he wanted her to convince him. Somehow, some way, he wanted her to make him believe there was some connection between her and his daughter. A connection that would lead him to Bonnie.

“Which was this?”

“The past. The recent past,” Eliza clarified. “Perhaps even the present.”

He could feel his patience wearing thin. “Can’t you give me a straight answer?”

She didn’t see the anger, she saw the anguish. “This isn’t a science. And even if it were, not even science always gives you a straight answer. Just a hypothesis that might or might not be proven, under the right set of conditions.”

He’d listened long enough. This time, he rose to his feet and remained there. “Look, if this is all going to be just mumbo jumbo, then I’m wasting my time and you’re wasting yours.”

As he began to turn away, she called after him in a strong, steady voice that was far more forceful than the one she’d just used. “Fact, I had the dream. Fact, the girl in the dream was your daughter. Fact, I heard her calling out to you.”

He turned to her. There was a dangerous look in his eyes, like that of a man who’d been asked to endure too much.

“To me? What did she say?”

She could still hear the voice in her head. “‘Daddy, where are you? Come find me. Please!”’

Damn her, she was playing on his emotions, nothing more. He was wrong to have allowed himself to be led by his feelings. He had to get out of here before he lost his temper completely—and before she found a way to sucker him into this.

He was certain she had no difficulty doing that with her marks. She had the look of breeding about her: genteel, but uncommonly attractive. With eyes that could see into a man’s soul. But no matter how she dressed herself up, no matter how lovely her features, she was still nothing more than a con artist. She’d probably gotten her training very young, learning how to use her assets to separate people from their money, and play on their hopes and fears.

But he wasn’t a player. Not anymore.

“All well and good.” He crossed to the door. “And when you have another dream—” he took hold of the doorknob, twisting it “—maybe you can—”

“There’s something else.”

He didn’t bother hiding his contempt. “I rather thought that there would be, but I’m not—”

She sensed this was important to him and said the words very slowly. “She had a bedraggled pink toe shoe with her.”

Walker’s mind went numb. And then anger washed over him. White, hot anger. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

She tried not to take offense. “Nothing about kidnapping, or finding a kidnapped child, is a joke, Mr. Banacek.”

His anger had no direction; she was the only target available. “Stop calling me Mr. Banacek—you make me feel like this is a corporate meeting.”

“All right—Walker, then,” she allowed cautiously, watching his eyes.