Night Prey (1992)

Carol Davis Luce's suspense novel, published as a Zebra paperback in 1992, follows Roberta "Robbi" Paxton, assistant director of a local organization that aids abused women, whose father, the psychiatrist Cameron Paxton, retired from his practice in Reno and moved the family to a mountain wilderness. A large man stalks the woods around a pond there, and the cover line promises that he wanted two women: one to love, the other to kill. (Open Library)

Watches

Bulova (unidentified model): After a fall from her horse Madonna in a storm, when she is found unconscious in the woods, Robbi comes round in hospital in heavy darkness. She smells aloe and hears the ticking of her mother's old Bulova wristwatch as Lois Paxton sits beside the bed and tells her that the horse had to be put down. The watch is known only by its sound. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Through the heavy blackness Robbi smelled the subtle aloe, and she heard the ticking of her mother's old Bulova wristwatch as she sat by the side of the bed talking. (Carol Davis Luce, Night Prey, scan cataloged as Zebra Books, 1992, p. 49, where her mother is named Lois Paxton in the next paragraph; Internet Archive scan OCR)