Entranced Read Online Free PDF Page B

Why?”
    “What do you know about Sutherland Investigations?”
    “Sutherland?” Her brow creased in thought. “It’s familiar. What is it, a detective agency?”
    “Apparently.”
    “I think I … Mindy, didn’t your boyfriend have some business with Sutherland Investigations?”
    Mindy barely glanced up from ringing a sale. “Which boyfriend?”
    “The intellectual-looking one, with the hair. Insurance.”
    “Oh, you mean Gary.” Mindy beamed at her customer. “I hope you enjoy it. Please come back. Gary’s an
ex
-boyfriend,” she added. “Much too possessive. Sutherland does a lot of stuff for the insurance company he works for. Gary says she’s as good as they get.”
    “She?” Morgana glanced back at Sebastian with a cool smile. “Ah.”
    “There’s no ‘ah.’” He tweaked her nose. “I’ve agreed to help someone, and Sutherland is involved.”
    “Hmm. Is she pretty?”
    “No,” he said with perfect sincerity.
    “Ugly, then.”
    “No. She’s … unusual.”
    “The very best kind. What are you helping her with?”
    “A kidnapping.” The teasing light went out of his eyes. “A baby.”
    “Oh.” Automatically she covered her own with her hands. “I’m sorry. The baby … Is the baby … Do you know?”
    “He’s alive. And well.”
    “Thank God.” Even as she closed her eyes in relief, she remembered. “The baby? Is it the one who was taken from his playpen, from his own backyard, just a couple of months ago?”
    “That’s right.”
    She took his hands. “You’ll find him, Sebastian. You’ll find him soon.”
    He nodded. “I’m counting on it.”
    *  *  *
    It just so happened that Mel was at that very moment in the process of typing up a bill for Underwriter’s Insurance. They had her on a monthly retainer—which kept the wolf from the door—but in the previous few months she had had some additional billable expenses. She also had a fading bruise on her left shoulder where a man supposedly suffering from whiplash and slipped discs had popped her a good one when he’d discovered hertaking pictures of him changing a flat tire.
    A tire she had herself discreetly deflated.
    Bruises aside, it had been a good week’s work.
    If only everything were so simple.
    David. She simply couldn’t get David out of her head. She knew better—had been trained better. Personal involvements meant you messed up. Thus far, she’d only proven that rule.
    She’d canvassed Rose’s neighborhood, questioning people who had already been interviewed by the police. And, like the police, she’d come up with three different descriptions of a car that had been parked half a block from Rose’s apartment. She also had four markedly different descriptions of a “suspicious character.”
    The term made her smile a little. It was so detective-novel. She’d certainly learned that life was much blander than fiction. In reality, investigative work consisted of mountains of paperwork, hours of sitting in a parked car fighting boredom while you waited for something to happen, making phone call after phone call, talking to people who didn’t want to talk. Or—often worse—people who talked too much and had nothing to say.
    And, occasionally, there was the extra added excitement of being pushed around by a two-hundred-pound gorilla in a neck brace.
    Mel wouldn’t have traded it for a mountain of gold dust.
    But what good was it, she wondered, what good was making a living doing what you loved, and having the talent to do a good job of it, if you couldn’t help a friend? There hadn’t been so many friends in her life that she could take Rose and Stan for granted. They had given her something just by being there, by sharing David with her. The connection to family that she’d always done without.
    She would have walked through fire to bring David back to them.
    After tossing the billing aside, she picked up a file that hadn’t been off her desk in two months. It was neatly labeled David Merrick,