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MILLS & BOON
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Chapter One
Renata forced the cutting edge of her blade against the war criminal’s cheek, just below his eye. The man didn’t tremble with fear the way she wished he would—not the way she still trembled when she remembered the explosion. Neither did his cruel mouth quiver the way hers did when she remembered being engulfed in flames. No, the war criminal’s expression didn’t change.
Even though she held his fate in her hands, he wasn’t afraid of her. He was cold, stony and remote—even as she brought her hammer down and drove the sharp chisel into his face, for he was made of marble and knew this was as close as the sculptress would ever dare to come.
In the quiet of her studio, Renata slowly came back to herself. She realized that it was dark; she had been carving with nothing to guide her fingers but moonlight and her own depthless rage. And now her dust-covered hands were shaking. Her mind reeled with memories of the war that had killed her father and little brother. Her throat swelled with grief like it had when her mother was abducted by an enemy soldier. Tears burned beneath Renata’s lashes and she knew she had to stop working, if only for a moment. She wiped her eyes with the back of an aching forearm, smearing her cheeks with grit and reminding herself that the war was long over.
It was one of those notoriously hot summer nights in New York City, and Renata’s unruly tresses were already coiled with perspiration, wet against her neck. Her cotton tank top clung damply to the small of her slender back, perspiration tickling the scars along her spine. It was sweltering.
Renata considered turning on the air conditioner, but she hoped the heat might bring her pet snake from its hiding place. The snake could be anywhere amidst the boxes, stone chips and art magazines that littered Renata’s studio, and she sighed knowing that her foster family would scold her for letting Scylla escape her cage and slither off. Then again, they had never liked her pet snake. True, Scylla wasn’t cuddly like a cat or a dog, but Renata knew that just because a snake—or a person—didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve didn’t mean she didn’t have one.
It was already midnight though; Renata had no time to search for runaway serpents. She had to put her obsessive final touches on The War Criminal in time for the art exhibit tomorrow.
Steeling her courage, Renata took a deep breath and lifted her tools to work again, but as she did so, she heard rustling in the draperies over her window. “Is that where you’ve been hiding, Scylla?” she asked, and before she could turn around, she felt a cool breeze lift the downy hairs at the nape of her neck.
Was she imagining she heard someone lifting the sash? Had the emotion that always gripped her while working on this sculpture finally driven her mad? Even over the thumping of her heart, she heard a small tearing sound, like fabric being snagged on a latch. Someone was breaking in!
Renata’s mind reeled with disbelief and fear. She was alone; she had deliberately rented a studio off the beaten path. It had seemed like a good idea because she prized her solitude, but now she wondered if anyone would even hear her if she called for help.
In the stillness of her studio, Renata gripped her wooden mallet in one hand and the chisel in the other, her knuckles going white. Her instinct was to not make any sudden movements, so she turned slowly, and she glimpsed a dark figure shadowed under the sweep of the drapes. A large lumbering man was silhouetted against the moonlight. Renata forgot to breathe. She saw a gun in his hand. Her heart forgot to beat. She was too afraid even to scream.
The last time someone had pointed a gun at her, she was just a little girl in war-ravaged Bosnia, but the man aiming the cruel barrel of his weapon at her now didn’t look like a soldier. “I won’t hurt you if you come with me,” he said, his voice thick with some accent that Renata didn’t immediately recognize.
At his words, Renata went weak all over, terror rushing through her veins like a hot, withering poison. Who was he? What could this hulking stranger possibly want with her? And why should she believe that he wouldn’t hurt her when he was pointing a gun at her?
Since she was a little girl, she had been a victim, as her sculptures attested. But Renata wasn’t a little girl anymore, and this wasn’t Bosnia. Something inside Renata snapped—like the angry strike of a whip—and she decided then and there that unlike her mother, she wouldn’t be taken. “I’m not going anywhere with you!”
With nothing but anger to direct her hand, Renata launched her hammer through the air towards her assailant. In slow motion, she watched the tool hurtle towards the intruder, cartwheeling end over end.
The hammer struck him square in the forehead.
It was only a wooden hammer—not one of the metal ones she sometimes used—but it made an audible and satisfying crack against the intruder’s skull. Shocked, the man staggered back, his arms tangling with the curtains. Only then did Renata cry out, but it was the intruder who screamed the loudest.
A gyrating tangle of scales and fangs had slipped from the draperies and coiled around the man’s shoulders.
Scylla had been hiding there after all, and—as hostile to intruders as its owner—Renata’s pet python constricted around the assailant’s neck. Perhaps scenting the man’s fear, the python pulled into strike position. “Get it off!” the intruder shrieked, fumbling with his gun.
Renata could see that the man was genuinely terrified, but her survival instinct was stronger than her compassion so, seizing the opportunity, she turned for the door and ran.
Only after the detective showed her his NYPD badge for the third time did Renata accompany him inside her studio. Even then, she crossed her arms over herself and tucked her fingers under so that he wouldn’t see her tremble.
There was no sign of the intruder or the snake.
Dark, swarthy, and clad in a black leather jacket, the detective took a brief look around the studio. “This is the scene of the crime?”
Renata merely nodded; even under the best of circumstances, she was guarded with strangers, and these were not the best of circumstances.
Still, there was something familiar about the detective’s shadowed eyes. He’d introduced himself several times, but she found that she just couldn’t remember his name. Maybe it was because she was in shock, or perhaps it was because she couldn’t stop staring at his startlingly handsome face.
Renata had nearly been kidnapped, so now was not the time to notice a handsome man, but as a sculptress, she revered chiseled cheekbones and strong jawlines like his.
“Let’s go over this one more time,” the detective said.
“I’ve already told you everything,” Renata snapped, fixing her cool gray eyes on him. With practice, she had perfected that classic New York City bitchy-but-beautiful stare that drove most men to take a step back, but the detective didn’t seem cowed.
“With repetition, sometimes an extra detail or memory comes to mind,” the detective insisted. So they sat together on her old beat-up college futon with the denim cover, now as threadbare as her calm. He wrote Renata Rukavina at the top of a page and took careful notes as she told him all over again what happened.
When she finished telling her story, she noticed that the detective was sitting too close to her, and when he leaned forward she worried for a startled instant that he might try to kiss her. But instead, he exhaled a great breath, and fleetingly, she smelled the aroma of freshly baked bread. It was the middle of the night—no one was baking—but the scent somehow relaxed Renata enough to let the detective take her hand.
There was a strange tugging sensation as her skin came into contact with his. She wondered that she allowed it; with friends and lovers—even with her foster family—there was always a struggle between her need for intimacy and her fear of it. Yet she was letting this stranger hold her hand.
“You just had a scare, but you’re okay now,” he added.
And somehow, she was.
“You’re sure you don’t know the guy who tried to break in here?” The detective’s mop of dark hair softened the intensity of his gaze. “You’ve no idea why anyone would break into your studio this hour of night?”
Renata shook her head again. If she’d testified before the war tribunals, someone might have had cause to try to shut her up, but that’s why Renata hadn’t testified. Why she would never testify.
The detective finally went to the windowsill to dust for fingerprints. Meanwhile, Renata searched for her pet python. As she checked all of Scylla’s usual hiding spots, she realized the detective was examining her work. “These are some powerful pieces,” he said of the statuary adorning her studio.
“Thank you,” Renata said politely. “They’re not to everyone’s taste. One of my critics said they were nightmares brought to life.”
The detective circled a black marble sculpture of a man with a gun strapped over his shoulder, his clenched fist pulled back to brutalize an unseen victim. “Not a nice guy, I’m guessing.”
“He was charged with crimes against humanity,” Renata said, feeling a well of rage rising as she remembered his deeds. “He died before they could convict him, though.” What she did not tell the detective was that the soldier had died the very night Renata finished his sculpture, and thus joined her collection of ghosts.
When she was a fledgling artist, Renata carved the faces of children felled by sniper fire outside Sarajevo. Even now, after years of experience, the only living person in her art collection was The War Criminal, so she watched warily as the detective approached the almost-finished statue and ran his hand over the stone. “This is the guy on trial at The Hague right now isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Renata replied, impressed. It seemed unlikely that an ordinary police detective would know anything about it; in Renata’s experience, most people chose to forget the war that had destroyed her childhood. That this man seemed to care made Renata willing to talk. “The War Criminal was going to be the centerpiece of my exhibit at the gallery tomorrow to coincide with the expected verdict against him, but now I’m afraid I won’t finish in time.”
“But you must finish it,” he insisted, a ripple of anger passing across his shoulders beneath his leather jacket. His sudden vehemence startled Renata, and seeing this, he measured his tone. “I’m just saying that you can’t let anything stand in your way. An art exhibit is a huge deal, isn’t it? You’ve worked hard for it, haven’t you? You can’t let someone scare you from finishing important work like this.”
Renata was flattered that he thought her work was important, but she was terribly unsettled. She wished he would tell her that they had her would-be kidnapper in custody. She just wanted to feel safe—but then, hadn’t she always? Renata shrugged apologetically. “I can’t do the delicate finishing touches with shaking hands.”
“Look,” the detective said. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll keep my squad car parked right outside tonight and make sure nobody bothers you. Meanwhile, you should just take your fear from tonight, turn it to anger, and finish your sculpture.”
Renata tilted her head at the curious phrasing he used. “I don’t think you should be encouraging that. My therapist thinks I have anger issues.”
He gave a mirthless smile, a gleam of savagery in his eye. “No doubt. Sounds like you clocked the perp. Did you throw the hammer because you were scared or angry?”
“Both,” Renata admitted.
“Then it seems to me that your anger is what kept you from being kidnapped tonight and it’ll help with your art too.”
Renata couldn’t help thinking, yet again, that this was no ordinary police detective. Once again, he took her hands in his. She felt something tug at her emotions and she realized she was no longer shaking from fear.
Only rage.
Someone had broken into her apartment. Someone had pointed a gun at her and tried to take her. Someone had come into her world, uninvited, and tried to rip apart her life just like the invading soldiers had done all those years ago. And someone should have to pay for that.
Anger roiled and coiled inside her, twisting upon itself with venomous purpose. It was past midnight.
Renata picked up her tools and began to sculpt.
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