Read Obsession Falls for Free Online

her away and protect her until the monster who had killed—or tried to kill—that child was taken into custody.
    Anticipation hummed like fine wine through her veins.
    Seating herself on the upholstered Queen Anne armchair, she waited for the computer to load. The browser came up. The home page was set to USA Today. The headline flashed on the screen. She was connected. WHO WAS TAYLOR SUMMERS ?
    She shook her head. That was the headline? What the hell did that mean?
    She leaned forward. Read it again.
    WHO WAS TAYLOR SUMMERS ?
    Her name. Why was her name in a national newspaper? In the headlines?
    And why … why were they talking about her in the past tense?
    She scrolled down.
    Her picture was inserted into the text … and a photo of her rental vehicle, charred and broken.
    She read the words.
    She read them again.
    The article dissected everything about her: her appearance, her parents’ divorce, her education, her career as a successful interior decorator. In cold, cool prose, everything about her life was laid out for the world to see. And the story continually asked— why would a woman with so much going for her kidnap the nephew of the wealthy and powerful Kennedy McManus? And do so with no more motivation than to kill the child and bring misery to those who loved him?
    “I didn’t do that. I didn’t do that!” She was talking to USA Today.
    The article continued, When the child escaped and she had failed, how could she have been so naive as to die in an explosion set by her killer lover?
    She shouted at the monitor, “My killer lover? Who was my killer lover?”
    The picture showed the skinny guy who had dragged the boy out of the trunk, Ramon Hernandez, a guy with a criminal record stretching back to grade school. But he was dead, too, killed by the strike force that had saved the boy.
    Taylor sat back and tried to absorb what she had learned.
    The boy was still alive. At least her actions had helped him.
    But how had the truth become so twisted? The article said the boy was unhurt. He had to know she had nothing to do with holding him.
    Didn’t he tell the authorities what really happened?
    Or rather— why didn’t he tell the authorities what really happened? He had been whisked away by his uncle and not seen since. Was he hurt? Had he had a mental breakdown? Was he in a coma or something?
    Taylor read the article again. Yes. There it was. Kennedy McManus stated his nephew had fallen while escaping, had brain damage, and although he was recovering from the ordeal, he was not expected to regain his memory.
    There was no one to bear witness to her innocence.
    Worse, the article contained no mention of Dash. None.
    How could they have missed Dash?
    The article claimed she had been identified by papers with her name on them. Yes, that was what Taylor had been afraid of. But those papers—“They were drawings. Not sinister plotting. How could you print stuff that’s not true?”
    How could the reporter have researched Taylor’s obscure background and nailed the facts so precisely, but not have gotten one damned thing right about the crime? How could the cops be so stupid?
    Taylor followed another link and found shocked quotes from her coworkers, friends and her first fiancé … and tearful quotes from her mother wondering why Taylor had returned to her childhood home to commit her crime, and if Pete Summers’s suicide had warped her daughter’s youthful psyche.
    “How can you say that?” Taylor asked the computer screen. “He did not commit suicide!” Just like her mother to transfer all the blame for Taylor’s messed-up childhood away from herself and onto Pete Summers, with no care about maligning a good man’s memory … Taylor wiped a tear off her cheek.
    It wasn’t simply that the whole story was wrong, reporting her as one of the kidnappers, saying she was in the car when it exploded and her body had been unrecoverable—it completely missed the fact that someone else was behind the