Ladies' Man by Suzanne Brockmann

place. I’m the one who thinks I’ve just temporarily captured the attention of some weirdo who will quickly lose interest in me just as soon as Paris Hilton comes back to town.”
    “But, Bob—”
    He kissed her on the cheek. “I have to go to work.” He turned to Sam. “If you have any questions, call me at the studio. Oh, and also feel free to talk to Tran Minh Hyunh, my security chief. She’s going to be here at home all day, running a test on the security system. Maybe between the two of you, you can convince the worrywart here that there’s nothing to be afraid of.” He stepped around Ellen and breezed out of the room. “See you later, kids.”
    Ellen stood clutching the file folder, staring after her uncle. As his footsteps faded into the distance she turned and smiled weakly at Sam. “Well. This is awkward.”
    “It’s nice to see you again, Ellen,” Sam said quietly.
    In some ways it was nice to see him again too. He looked delicious. He was dressed almost exactly the same as he had been the night they’d met. Jeans, sneakers, sport jacket, white shirt, tie. Only this time he was carrying a gun. She’d caught a glimpse of it beneath his jacket as he’d leaned forward to shake her hand.
    He smelled good too. The faint scent of his cologne brought back sudden vivid memories that she desperately tried to banish from her mind. His mouth and hands, touching, kissing. The smooth, hard muscles of his back beneath her palms. His body filling her…
    “This is
very
awkward,” she said again as she tossed the file folder down on a coffee table and sat on the plush golden-colored sofa. “For the record, it was T.S.’s idea to call you. There wasn’t much I could do to stop him, short of asking if he wouldn’t mind calling a different detective. I mean, there must be at least a thousand New York City police detectives that I
haven’t
slept with.”
    Sam laughed at her blunt honesty as he sat down some distance from her on the couch. “‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine,’” he quoted from
Casablanca
. “It’s not really coincidental, though. Or even fate. As far as I know, I’m the only cop T.S. knows. You and I were destined to meet again.” He paused. “God knows I’ve been running into you often enough on my television set.”
    Ellen couldn’t help feeling a flash of pleasure. “You’ve seen the commercial?”
    He smiled into her eyes. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. About four hundred times. It’s great. Every time it comes on, I’m mesmerized. You’re incredibly photogenic.”
    His eyes were much too warm and she had to look away. “Thank you.” She opened the file folder on the coffee table. “You’re here on business—we should probably get to it.”
    “I’ve got time,” he told her.
    She glanced at him, remembering what had happened the last time he’d told her that. She pushed the file with the letters in his direction, choosing to ignore his softly spoken words. “This is the latest file of what Bob calls ‘questionable’ mail.”
    Sam gazed at her as he pulled the opened file closer, but it was clear she wasn’t going to look back at him again. So he looked at the file.
    The letters—if you could call them letters—were drawn in crayon on white lined loose-leaf notebook paper, but other than that, there was nothing childish about them. Sam flipped through the pages quickly. From what he could see, there were three different letters, each separately paper-clipped, each several pages long. They all had a similar last page—a rather expertly drawn picture of eyes and words printed in block letters in black crayon: “I am watching you.”
    It was decidedly creepy.
    “The first one is on the bottom,” Ellen told him. “It arrived just about a week ago, on June twenty-eighth. I remember because Lydia had a callback that day.”
    Sam nodded, looking at that one first. He took a small notebook from his jacket pocket and scribbled a