Read Online In a Heartbeat by Elizabeth Adler - Free Book Online

“Listen to me, Harriet.
Believe me.
Ed Vincent is on that killer’s hit list. And if I don’t warn him, he will be the next one found dead in the library.”
    “Should I ‘mark your words’?” Harriet asked with a grin, because somehow now she
almost
believed her.
    “Darn right, honey.” Mel was already back in the car. “You’d better mark my words—and so had Ed Vincent.”
    “Where are we going now?” Harriet closed her eyes as they approached the battered bridge. This time Mel scarcely even slowed and they practically flew over it.
    “We’re going to telephone Ed Vincent in New York,” Mel announced triumphantly. “For sure, he’ll believe me.”

17
    “So? Did he?” Camelia asked.
    “Believe me, you mean?” Mel drummed her fingers impatiently on the table. She glanced around at her “prison,” a bare little room with a single blank window, a table, two chairs, and a layer of dust. She had been so caught up in her story, she had almost forgotten where she was. “Can a condemned prisoner get a Diet Coke around here? Please,” she added as an afterthought.
    “Sure.” Camelia got up. He straightened his silver-gray silk tie and smoothed back his hair, Al Pacino–style, Mel thought, as he walked across the room and asked the uniform standing outside the door to get her a Diet Coke.
    “Make that two,” Camelia added, closing the door again.
    Mel took a good look at him, taking him in as a man and not just a cop—and a cop who thought she had tried to murder her lover at that. This guy was quite the fashion plate. If he were not a cop, she might have tabbed him as a member of the mob.
    “You must be married,” she said, fingers still drumming on the table.
    “Why do you say that?”
    He leaned back in his more comfortable chair, one leg draped lazily over the other.
    “No cop living alone would look as smart as you—freshly ironed shirt, light starch only, pants pressed, shoes shined.”
    He grinned. “I shine my own shoes.”
    “Well, thank God for that.”
    He laughed then. Leaning across the table, he took hold of her hand. “Stop that drumming,” he said. “Anyone would think you were nervous.”
    “Who, me?” She stuck her chin defiantly in the air. “I’m not nervous, I’m just trying to find out the truth.”
    “Like me.”
    “Like you.” Their gazes locked, and then, because she just couldn’t help it, she cracked. Tears streamed down her face. Big fat tears that rolled down her cheeks, dripped from her chin, leaked into her ears. Gosh darn it, she was bawling like a kid and all because her heart was breaking.
Ed
was lying in that hospital bed, Ed was gravely
wounded, Ed was dying. . . .
    “I can’t bear it,” she wept, still sitting bolt upright in the chair. “I just can’t bear to lose him.”
    Camelia got up. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her.
    She looked at it and then up at him. A kind of giggle, or maybe it was a hiccup, interrupted her sobs. “That’s what I mean about the wife,” she said. “A clean handkerchief. Anybody else would have offered a box of Kleenex.”
    Officer Brotski knocked on the door, then entered, carrying two cans of Diet Coke. “With caffeine,” he mentioned to Camelia, who gave him a withering look.
    Brotski took in the sobbing blonde, the clean white handkerchief, the tension in the air, and with a muttered, “Sorry, excuse me, sir” quickly departed.
    “You really love him that much?” Camelia flipped open the can and handed it to her. “You haven’t known him that long.”
    “Long enough.” She hiccuped. “And then again,” she added in a whisper, “not long enough.”
    Camelia tilted his chair. He sat, one leg draped over the other, arms folded, silently watching her. There was something so vulnerable, so gallant about her at that moment, he was almost tempted to believe her. Then he reminded himself she was there because Ed Vincent had said she had tried to kill him. He took in the