by Jaycee Clark
His head shook. “No. I’m just trying to point out—”
A shadow fell over the doors. Aiden, the eldest Kinncaid brother, stood glaring in. In seconds, the mirrors slid back.
“Why didn’t you hold the elevator? I know you heard me.” He glared from one to the other, but his cobalt gaze, darker than Brayden’s, zeroed in on her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She started to shove by him, but he blocked her way and turned the stare on Quinlan.
“What did you do to her?”
Quinlan’s hands rose, palms up. “I’m just trying to talk some sense into her.”
“Will you both just stop!” This time, when she shoved Aiden, he moved. “I have things to do.”
“You’re not wearing shoes,” he muttered. And she heard his whispered, “She had a hickey on her neck!”
Rolling her eyes, she didn’t look back, but hurried across the foyer of the grand hotel and out into the warming sun. Already into September, the mornings were cool here and the cement chilled her feet.
The valet brought her Volkswagen Bug around. She climbed into the gray vehicle, cursing all males in general and left, merging with the early Sunday morning traffic.
There were things she needed to think about, things to decide.
Maybe Brayden, even in his stupidity, had been right. Maybe they did spend too much time together. They lived together, had built a life together, hell, they worked together. The Kinncaids had been Heaven sent to her, in her opinion, and perhaps it was time to move on. Grow up and move away.
Well, not grow up. She’d grown up one wintry night years and years ago.
But moving on, moving away was realistic. The problem was she didn’t know if she was ready. Was she ready?
The small town of Seneca, the old family Kinncaid home, the hotel, the entire family, offered and blanketed her in a security she did not take for granted. She’d known a family like theirs once, long ago, but time, events, and people changed all that.
No, she wasn’t going there, not now, not this morning.
Back to the matter at hand.
Should she get her own place? And if she tried, what excuse would she give?
What about Tori? That would be hard. No, more than hard. She was used to seeing the little girl every day. Morning routines before school, picking her up from school, listening through music lessons if it was her turn, bed times, sick times . . . She hadn’t lied when she said she thought of the little girl as her own.
But—and God knows she didn’t want to think about it, yet the doubt crept in anyway—what if Brayden didn’t feel the same way about her as she did about him? What if he didn’t really love her? What if he’d just said it in the heat of the moment? Then one day he would find someone and that someone would be Tori’s mom. That woman would get the breakfast routines with them both and the school work and the piano practices and the fights about vegetables before cookies.
That hurt, hurt so bad her skin prickled and her breath caught.
Christian shook her head, blinked the sudden stupid tears away and gripped the steering wheel. No matter what, she had to know what he really felt about her.
Perhaps by putting some distance between them, she, he, they could figure it all out.
So distance it would be. A place of her own.
On her own. She hadn’t been on her own since she’d come to Washington, D.C., and Seneca, Maryland—since she’d met the Kinncaids.
The past slithered through her memories, but she shoved it aside. All that was behind her, and ghosts couldn’t hurt her. Besides, he was still in Oregon, completely across the country and he had no idea where she was.
Yes, she could live alone. She was a grown woman and it was time to stop living in fear.
Chapter 2
Two months later
Oh, God, he’d found her.
Christian took a deep drag of albuterol. It had been months since she’d had to use her rescue inhaler. Fall netted over the air, a golden, amber web chilling and promising the winter to come. The heater blew at full blast in her car, and even with her long woolen coat, nothing stopped the shivers sliding through her bones.
This was not happening. Not again. Why? Why now? After all this time?
She glanced over at the passenger seat as the tightness in her chest loosened a bit from the albuterol and she could breathe. Photos today. Large glossy eight-by-tens in black and white. She’d found the brown envelope under her wipers when she came out of Dr. Trevor’s office. Her name was printed in bold black letters across the front.
But inside . . .
Inside she was caught on individual freeze-frames. Frozen moments of her life stilled in photos. There were pictures of her doing everything from swimming to laundry, coming and going to the shop, the store, her apartment. He knew everything about her. Everything she did. Where she worked. Where she lived. How she spent her time and who she spent it with. Like shopping with Tori.
Oh, God, Tori! That picture pierced her heart.
She leaned back against the leather headrest, tension throbbing behind her eyes.
A chill had wrapped its cold arms around her and held her fast for the last month. These were not the first photographs she’d received, but she hoped they’d be the last. First had been the postcards. Two words scrawled in that hand she knew all too well. My Angel.
There was one in the envelope now.
My Angel.
Her high school photograph, years and years old.
My Angel.
Then every few days a packet with photos recording her activities arrived. Last night was a phone call. All she could hear was that damn opera in the background.
The breath hitched again in her lungs. Fighting the panic back, she left the envelope in the car and got out, locking the doors. Her gaze slid over the growing and lengthening shadows.
Was he out there now?
A bell from the door jingled, pulling her attention to the shop’s entrance. Kinncaid Antiquities was written in black letters across the door and picture window.
Brayden stood there with his hands on his trim hips, dressed in a dark button-down and black slacks. “You’re late.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Deep breath. Shoving her hands in her coat pockets, she ducked her head and passed him. Hopefully she looked all right. Sometimes he could be so perceptive.
She’d left here at noon to meet with clients in Virginia, then rushed back to D.C. for an appointment with her shrink, but Brayden didn’t need to know the last part. It was the first counseling session she’d needed in over five years.
“I—I got held up in Virginia then stopped at a few country shops to see if I could find any decent deals.”
The antique industry was Brayden’s contribution to the family business. He owned this shop and supplied the Kinncaid line of hotels with either the best original antique and vintage pieces or reproductions. Christian understood antiques, she’d grown up with them. After she moved here and Brayden realized she knew what was what with the old pieces of furniture, glassware and sculptures, she’d started working here at the shop. She’d then gone to Georgetown U and earned her business degree with a minor in art history. Both helped her with her job here in the family shop.
Christian walked around behind the counter. Antiques stood still, waiting for someone to come in and claim them like lost orphans hoping for another home. The shop smelled of musky old wood, beeswax and lemon oil, a soft familiar smell that mixed with the sandalwood-spiced cologne Brayden favored.
For the first time since seeing that brown envelope on her windshield, she sighed, something calming her. Or rather someone. Brayden.
“What took so long today?” His voice had always been deep and soothing to her, like unfathomed depths of a lake. “I was starting to worry. It’s not like you to meander back to work, or browse country stores,” he said, shutting and locking the door.
She was late; it was almost six and the shop closed at five, but afte
r seeing the envelope she’d panicked. She’d just driven and this was where she’d ended up, even though she knew the shop was closed. Some part of her had hoped he’d still be here. Not that she could tell him anything.
Brayden walked toward her, but stayed a distance away. The same routine since that morning a couple of months ago; he got close enough to inquire, yet far enough away to run.
“So I decided to stop at a few shops. It’s not a big deal,” she lied, looking over some notes and receipts in the basket by the old-fashioned register. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it back earlier.”
“I don’t care about that,” Brayden’s voice barely registered.
She darted a glance at the window. Was she being captured in freeze-frame now? There had been a photo of her here at the shop, the coffeehouse, her car. He knew everything! Everything. How had he found her? How? Already she was losing sleep and her appetite. The windows only showed her the busy street beyond. A man waiting on the light looked over to the shop.
Absently, she rubbed her neck. Could he be the photographer? She had no idea what her stalker looked like. The man following her, taking the pictures, documenting her life, was not the man she needed to fear. No.
The terror came from the one who hired him.
My Angel.
A shiver danced down her spine and she wiped her damp palms on her dark, pin-striped pants.
“Hey, you okay?” Brayden’s roughened voice inquired.
Not meeting his eyes, she shrugged. “Sure.”
“Christian.”
The fear, the terror, the past all rolled together. She turned the storming emotions into anger, biting out at him. “What do you care? You no longer have a say in anything I do.”
The corners of his mouth thinned and his eyes hardened, darkened in their blue as they studied her. “I have a say, simply because I do care.”
“Hmmm.”
He stared at her in that intense gaze he’d inherited from his father, Jock Kinncaid. Finally, she looked away, but her neck tingled where she knew his eyes bore into her.
“Christian,” he repeated in a steeled tone.
Her eyes slid closed. She could not tell him. He’d ask questions. Questions she couldn’t answer, wouldn’t answer, because the threat was too great.
The truth had gotten her nowhere before. And asking for help had led to unbearable consequences. Not again, never again. She’d deal with it on her own.
Maybe she should just move away—leave as soon as possible.
My Angel.
Her chest vised and she gasped for breath. Again, she jerked out her inhaler and tried to fight off an asthma attack.
“Look at me.”
Slowly she drew a breath, fought her demons and turned to face the man she loved with all her heart. For the first time since she’d left his penthouse suite two months earlier, she was almost glad he’d turned away from her. Almost.
His gaze ran over her face, down her body, and she remembered what it was like to be held in his arms. To feel safe.
Safe? That was an illusion.
There was no safety for her. There never would be.
“You’ll always be mine, Josephine. Always,” the voice from the past whispered through her memories.
“What’s with the inhaler? You haven’t had an asthma attack since the mess with the kids months ago. And before that? I can’t remember you using one in years.”
Brayden wondered at the vulnerability he saw in her, the worry in her eyes.
Christian was one of the strongest women he knew. She gave what she got, usually in spades. For the last two months or so they’d bantered and bit at each other. But lately she’d seemed distracted. Too quiet and withdrawn. He noted the darkened circles under her eyes, worry creasing her brows. Her pallor contrasted starkly against her short dark hair, her charcoal pantsuit. Had she lost weight? Her collarbone, more prominent than he remembered, peeked out of her white button-down. Bones protruded from her delicate wrists as her French cuffs shifted. Had he brought her to this?
Well, she was the one who decided to move out of the family home. Not him, and he damn sure hadn’t chased her away like his brothers seemed to think. Everyone blamed him for her move to the city: his daughter, his parents, his brothers and their wives.
Himself.
No, it was not his fault she’d up and decided to leave. He’d told her he would move to the hotel. After all, he was in town most of the time anyway.
She wanted her own place, her own space. So out she moved while his mother tried to understand, his father barked and snarled, his daughter cried, and his brothers glared at him.
Now he felt like glaring at himself.
Ironically, it felt like a marriage separation, or what he figured one would feel like. He’d taken her for granted, he supposed. The housewife who helped with his business as much as the child would allow. They’d been so much a part of the other’s life for so long and now . . . Now she wasn’t there.
He missed her. Missed breakfast with her, listening to her clear laughter mix with Tori’s, hearing her voice, seeing her around the house when he was there, missed their talks about the important, the silly, the nothing-at-alls. He just missed her.
Loneliness was a strange thing at thirty-four, creeping upon the wary. Her perfume, Calvin Klein’s Obsession, drifted on the air between them, the sweet smell reminding him of a dark, sultry, tangled night.
She looked as lonely as he felt. Brayden hadn’t seen that haunted look in her eyes for a long, long time, those darted hurried looks. Other than that nightmare months before—when Tori and her cousin, Ryan, had been kidnapped—he honestly couldn’t remember the last time Christian had needed to inhale albuterol. Fear shifted along her features as she glanced again out the window, the pulse furious in her long slim neck.
“Christian?”
She rubbed her arms.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She shook her head, one long-fingered hand running absently through her short, slightly curled hair. He caught the tremor as she dropped it down to her side.
He sighed. There were walls between them, there always had been, but most had crumbled the longer she’d lived with his family. Some had gone up after their night together. Recently, it was as if she were carefully fortifying some inner sanctuary.
Different tactic. Nonchalantly, he leaned against the counter and crossed his ankles and arms. “Mom called yesterday. She’s worried about you. She said she and Dad hadn’t heard from you much lately and when she did hear from you, there was something in your voice.”
Her eyes wouldn’t meet his and she busily ruffled through a stack of papers he’d been looking over as he’d waited on her.
“I’ll—I’ll have to call and talk with her. Everything’s fine. Fine. I’ve just been really busy and had a lot on my mind.” Her voice seemed sincere, but there was something—tension—just under the surface.
“Such as?”
She took another deep breath. “Just—just things, Brayden.” Finally, she looked at him and leaned back against the counter, but she was hardly calm. Her boot heel tapped on the floor. “I’ve been doing some thinking lately. Well, longer than lately. It started last summer when you and I talked about opening a shop in the London hotel.”
She cleared her throat. He noticed her fingers fidgeted within the confines of her pockets. And why did she still have her coat on?
“Anyway, I’ve been thinking about my career and life in general,” she finished on a huff.
“What do you mean?”
Her head tilted to the side and very quietly, she asked, “Did you know I was going to go to Juilliard? I don’t think I ever told you. I had a scholarship and everything. I used to want—never mind. Anyway, life moves on, not always the way we planned, and I’ve been thinking. That’s all.”
Juilliard? No, she’d never told him. For as long as Brayden had known her, a runaway who had shown up on his parents’ doorstep years ago, he suspected
the reason behind her flight had been a bad home life. Not that any of them knew for certain. Christian could be open about many things, but others—it was like trying to see a clear picture in a black murky pond. She’d never told them about her life before, and they’d eventually quit asking. She was twenty-eight years old and she did what she wanted to.
So she was musically talented, he did know that much, if not the Juilliard bit. Why she was suddenly telling him this, he couldn’t figure out. He took a deep breath; he’d just stay quiet and see what else she decided to tell him. Maybe she’d eventually get around to what was bothering her.
Frustration laced her sigh and a sad smile played on her face. “I wanted Broadway. I guess maybe that’s why I still take a theater and music class every semester. Who knows.”
He still had no idea what she was leading up to.
Turning her back to him she said quietly, “I used to be really good at that sort of thing. I grew up like Tori, for the most part. Voice lessons, ballet, art classes.”
Brayden still didn’t understand what was troubling her. And troubled she clearly was.
She turned to him. “I’d always thought music heals.”
Heals? He tucked that bit away for now.
“Okay,” he drew out. “What does all this have to do with the London shop?” A suspicion grew, but he tossed it aside. She wouldn’t.
“Music doesn’t heal everything,” she whispered.
“What do you want it to heal?” he asked just as quietly.
For a long moment she stared at nothing, and the pain in her eyes, the sheen of tears, made his breath catch.
She opened her mouth, then snapped it shut.
“Christian?” He reached out to her, but she jerked back.
Finally, she smiled. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter. Sorry, I haven’t been in the best of moods lately.” She waved a hand. “I don’t know why I’m going over all that. I just wanted to talk about the idea of opening the shop in England.”
Her smile was too bright and he didn’t miss the fact she kept looking out the window.
