Read Online Born to Darkness by Suzanne Brockmann - Free Book Online Page A

“It means I have an idea as to who took her—and why she was taken. But I don’t know precisely where she’s being held. Not yet. Miss Taylor, it’s urgent that—”
    “Who took her?” Anna demanded as she crossed the street. Her building was in sight, and she could now see a tall, slender man in a long, dark overcoat, with his phone to his ear, standing on the sidewalk out in front. She slowed her pace. He was unaccompanied—or at least he appeared to be. Still …
    She was suddenly very aware that she was alone on a dark, deserted street. And that at least one of the neighbors she’d met in her apartment building this evening had been some kind of drug addict. Meth, probably. The woman’s teeth had been terrible.
    “It’s … complicated,” Dr. Bach told her, turning to look directly at her, even though she was moving quietly and he couldn’t possibly have heard her approach.
    “I’m pretty smart,” she said, closing her phone as she stoppeda safe-feeling ten yards from him. If she had to, she could run, and she was fast. “Why don’t you try me?”
    He wasn’t elderly. Not even close. His shoulder-length hair was dark and his eyes were brown, and the phrase
black Irish
came to mind, although, really, that meant his eyes should have been blue. Despite the brown eyes, his complexion was properly United-Kingdom-pale, his face lean, his features strong yet aristocratically perfect.
    Cruel lips.
    Anna had read that description once, in a romance novel. The hero had had
elegantly cruel lips
. She’d always thought that was a load of hyperbolic bull. Or at least she had before tonight.
    Nika would’ve thought that Dr. Joseph Bach, with his elegantly cruel lips and pale complexion, looked like a vampire. The hot kind, with a soul—like Angel or Spike from
Buffy
.
    And had Anna been just a few years younger, and had her fear and worry for her little sister not been consuming her, she might’ve agreed. This man
was
unnaturally handsome. But since there were no such things as vampires, either with or without souls, and since she was solidly grounded here in this current dreadful-enough-without-demons-and-monsters reality, he looked like
exactly
what he was—a slightly tired, very good-looking young man who no doubt knew all about the incredible stress that came with a missing child, and who purposely spoke and dressed the part of the gallant prince in a fairy tale, come to the rescue.
    A gallant prince who spent a lot of time indoors, and didn’t even remotely share her own racially-mixed, melting-pot heritage—which was all part of being a prince. The whole purebred-to-the-point-of-inbred thing came with the territory.
    He was looking her over as carefully as she was inspecting him, and she knew that she didn’t look like most people’s idea of a Cinderella princess, with her wild mass of dark curls, her coffee-colored skin, and her hint-of-Mayan-ancestor’s nose.
    Of course, he wasn’t much of a real prince himself if he made his living kidnapping girls and “finding” them for their distraught families.
    He still hadn’t tried to explain his
it’s complicated
, so she asked him point-blank, “How much?”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “How much is it going to cost me to get Nika back?”
    He didn’t answer her. Instead, he said, “Let’s go someplace a little warmer—and safer—to talk.”
    Anna laughed and crossed her arms. “Yeah, sorry,
Dr
. Bach, I’m not inviting you inside.”
    “I’m not asking that,” he countered. “In fact, that’s the last thing I want. I have no doubt that your apartment’s been bugged.”
    “If the kidnappers bugged our apartment, then they know I have no money to pay any kind of ransom.” And they also knew that, at twenty-five years old, she slept in the bottom rack of a bunk bed in a tiny room that she shared with her thirteen-year-old sister. If they’d been inside the place, they’d probably also guessed that she and Nika felt profoundly lucky to