Miranda looked absolutely furious as she spit, “I can’t excuse you at all.”
She needed to get this woman to calm down. “Miranda, I think you’d better—”
“I’d better what?” Miranda shouted viciously. “Not kill you for taking the only person I ever loved away from me? Is that what you want?”
Krys stared at the woman. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh don’t play dumb with me. I know what you did. You hounded that wonderful man with those awful, prejudiced newspaper articles of yours until he had nowhere to turn. You were actually going to have him facing a death penalty. But I saved him,” she boasted. “I managed to help him escape. And he promised to take me with him. Promised that we were going to start a whole new life together,” Miranda said happily. And then fury creased her brow. “But you wouldn’t give up, would you? You had the police looking for him, hounding him,” she shouted, her face turning ugly.
How could the woman even think that? “Miranda, he killed a lot of women for their money,” she said, trying to somehow reason with the woman.
“He had a right to live, too!” Miranda cried. “Until you took that away from him.” She was all but shrieking now. “Well, I can’t bring him back, but I can sure as hell make you pay for taking him away from me!”
The second she saw the woman reaching into her purse, Krys knew what was going to happen next.
Her heart slammed into her chest, beating madly. She knew if she tried to grab the woman’s hand there was a very good chance that she would wind up getting shot point-blank. But the odds seemed to be equally against her if she stood there and did nothing because then she would wind up getting shot, too.
“You don’t want to do that,” Krys told her, doing her very best not to let Miranda see just how very frightened she was.
“Oh, but I do. I really do,” Miranda answered. “You act like you’re so smart, but you don’t know anything. You didn’t even have a clue that I was the one who’s been trying to kill you.”
“That was you?” she cried, widening her eyes as if she was stunned. From the moment that Miranda had begun ranting, she had started to suspect as much. But right now, Krys was playing it for all it was worth, stalling and pretending to be impressed by the woman’s deviousness. “Really?”
“Yes, it was me,” Miranda bragged, throwing back her head, her hair flying over her shoulder. “And when I missed, I bet you thought that you had some kind of a charmed life, didn’t you? Well, you don’t!” she shouted into Krys’s face. “You were just lucky. You ducked to pick up something when I shot at you and then the next day, the guy pulled you out of the way just as I was about to hit you with the van. But your luck couldn’t last forever and it just ran out,” she declared gleefully. “I’ll be kinder to you than you were to Alan. I’ll let you make your peace with your maker.”
“You’ll let me pray?” Krys asked, scanning the immediate area and desperately trying to find something she could use as a weapon.
“Yeah, I’ll let you pray. But pray fast,” Miranda ordered, cocking her weapon.
“I’d rethink my next move if I were you,” Morgan warned the would-be killer as he stepped forward.
His weapon was drawn and aimed right at the woman.
Miranda shrieked a curse as she swung around and pointed her gun at Morgan.
Chapter 24
Krys didn’t even remember thinking, just reacting. It all happened at lightning speed. Realizing that, because of her, Morgan would be dead in less than a moment, she grabbed Miranda’s wrists and pushed them high overhead with all her strength as she struggled to gain possession of the weapon that Miranda was pointing right at Morgan, about to discharge it.
Krys was aware of being utterly terrified. She could literally see the scenario playing itself out in her head and she couldn’t let that happen.
She and Miranda were instantly locked in a deadly battle, shifting from one position to another.
Morgan tried to get off a clear shot. But he couldn’t, not without risking the possibility of hitting Krys.
Struggling, Krys succeeded in getting Miranda off balance by kicking the taller woman’s legs out from under her. Miranda’s weapon went flying just as Krys threw her full weight right on top of the furious woman. The latter was cursing a blue streak.
That was the moment Morgan finally managed to get a clear shot at the stalker. “This ends right here!” he ordered.
The sound of the detective’s weapon being cocked punctuated his warning. The gun in his hand was pointed at Miranda, who was still on the ground.
“You can get off her now, Krys,” he said. “And as for you,” he told the stalker, “you can stand up!”
Staggering to her feet, Miranda let loose with a wild, guttural screech as she lunged at Morgan. She looked as if she wanted to kill him with her bare hands.
The screech had warned Morgan and he met the head-on attack with a right cross, aimed at Miranda’s chin. She fell to the ground, knocked out cold. Morgan lost no time in whipping out his handcuffs and cuffing Krys’s crazed, unconscious assailant’s hands behind her back.
Shaken, hardly believing it was finally over, Krys blew out a breath. “Lord, I am so glad to see you,” she cried, throwing her arms around the man who had just saved her.
Krys’s words didn’t quite get the response she had expected.
With her stalker out cold and safely handcuffed, all the fear that Morgan had experienced in the last half hour came pouring out and he shouted at Krys.
“Why the hell would you come out here by yourself like this?” he demanded angrily. “Do you have some kind of a death wish?”
Krys stared at him, her mouth
