by Natalie Ann
She dropped her shoulders. “I’m so not good at this.”
“Don’t pout,” he said, quietly. “See, she’s almost out. The key is to keep this up until you know she is sleeping completely, then lay her down. What’s the matter, there’s something out there you can’t excel at?”
“I repeat, not funny.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “You’re just annoyed right now. You’re annoyed that if I wasn’t here to save you, you would have sweated off two pounds then gained them back with that chocolate mousse in the fridge the minute Max and Quinn returned.”
She wanted to growl at him, but unfortunately he was right. Before she could control herself, before she knew what she was about to do, she slipped and said, “Not everyone can ace ‘take your baby to school day’ like you.”
He turned fast. Jocelyn stirred, but he got her relaxed again. “Kennedy,” he said, baring his teeth.
“Yep. And now I know. Of course, I always knew you’d make a great father someday.” She wanted to slap her hands in front of her mouth when that slipped out. That was taking things a little further than she intended.
They weren’t anywhere near making comments like that right now.
***
“Yeah, I will,” he said softly.
He’d found the past hour highly amusing, watching Riley try to care for her niece. She’d been all confident in her ability and for her sake he’d hoped it would work out well. She should have listened to him, but she thought she knew best.
“I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Why?”
“Why, what?” she asked. “Why did I say it, or why didn’t I mean to?”
“Both.”
She walked into the kitchen off the family room they were in, grabbed some paper towels and started to wipe her face and arms. “Just watching you right now. Not many men have that touch. Many want it, and try, but it’s just there with you. I guess it touched a chord with me. A good one.”
“And why did you wish you didn’t just say that?” he asked. He could see it on her face. He glanced down at Jocelyn, saw she was out cold, and laid her back in the playpen, then went to the couch and patted the cushion.
Riley walked over and sat next to him. He grabbed her legs and put them over his lap, always enjoying that.
“I don’t want you to think I’m getting all these ideas of babies and weddings. That’s kind of pushing things in a direction neither of us might be ready for. I had lunch with your sister and I know that made you uncomfortable, and now here I am saying all the typical things a woman does when she’s trying to land a husband.”
“You’re not a typical woman, though,” he said, running his hands up her calf. She was always so soft and smooth. He could never get enough. Riley Hamilton was turning into his addiction.
“I’d like to think I’m not.”
“We both know you aren’t. So tell me more about what you’re feeling.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to scare you.”
“You won’t,” he said, pulling her close.
“I look at you and I see everything. I see what so many women want and I wonder how I was lucky enough to find it with you.”
“I’m just a simple man,” Trevor said.
“There is nothing simple about you. Nothing at all.”
His mother always told him that everything he ever needed was in his soul. In his heart. Not to reach for what everyone else had in life, but to understand himself first and then he’d find love. His mother happened to be right.
“Probably not,” he said. He pulled her close and kissed her forehead. “Where do you see things going?”
“With us?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Far. I see things going really, really far.”
The One
A few weeks later, Riley ran into her office between patients to get a bottle of water out of her mini fridge. The air conditioning was working, but it wasn’t taking the humidity out of the air. After bending over her patient for the past hour with tools running, she needed a break and to stretch her back.
The minute she opened her door, she saw the flowers on her desk. She walked over to them frowning, wondering who sent them.
Trevor knew she didn’t like flowers, unless he forgot. No, he didn’t seem to forget anything. He was more likely to send her chocolate, or hand deliver it, but not flowers.
Maybe her father or Max sent them. Hopefully they did, though she couldn’t for the life of her wonder why.
It wasn’t her birthday. It wasn’t any special occasion.
She picked the card up and noticed a little plastic sign that said “you’re special” on it. The faint roaring was sounding in her ears.
Opening the card, she saw the typed words “I miss you” and her heart sank.
She pulled her chair out and sat, took a couple of deep breaths, then picked up the phone and called Trevor.
***
“I told you not to rush over after work,” Riley said to him.
But he had to. He could tell something was wrong when she’d called him earlier. Something was off in her voice. If she was trying to cover it up, she wasn’t succeeding well.
“I was done for the day. Not a big deal. What’s going on?”
“Do you want something to eat? I can make us dinner. I just pulled in a few minutes ago myself.”
He looked down at her shorts and shirt, her hair pulled back, and her face pale.
“No. I want you to talk to me. Something has you upset.”
“You really are good. Come on into the living room.”
He followed her in, noticed some flowers on the counter, but pushed it aside. “Talk to me.”
“I’m not sure where to start, so I’m just going to pick a spot and go.”
“That works. I’ll piece things together.”
“I told you a lot of the reasons Jason and I split. All good reasons, and all reasons that if we’d stayed together, we wouldn’t have lasted anyway.”
“Okay. I can understand that. Obviously there is more, though.”
“The last straw was him not believing me. Not standing behind me. Not when I needed it the most.”
“What didn’t he believe?”
“I think I’m being stalked,” she said quickly.
He turned his head to look at the flowers and went to stand, but she pulled him back. “Not yet. Let me explain it all and give me your honest opinion. If you tell me it’s nothing, I’ll believe it. I really will. I don’t know what’s going on and being stalked is the only way I can describe it, or that comes to mind.”
“My opinion means nothing, Riley. If you believe this in your gut, then that’s all that matters. That is what you need to go with and that is what you need to believe. What you need to make other people believe.”
She laughed, not a happy sound, tears coming to her eyes. Tears he hadn’t seen before. She always kept herself locked up tight. Unless she was eating chocolate, he never knew exactly what was going on with her.
“It’s no wonder I fell in love with you.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oops, didn’t mean to say that.”
“But you did. And you can’t take it back,” he said, searching her eyes. Did she say it because she was feeling vulnerable, or because she truly felt it? And how do you ask someone that?
“Would you want me to take it back?” she asked, holding his stare.
“Not at all.”
“Then maybe if I heard it back I wouldn’t feel like I need to grab those truffles that I brought home with me today.”
He framed her face with his hands, laid his lips to hers and kissed her as gently as he could. “You’re the one, Riley. The one I love. The one I’ve been waiting for. And I’ll be damned if something takes you away. I’ll be damned if you think I won’t stand behind you. And I’ll tell you right now—I’ll always believe you. I’ll always believe in you.”
“Wow, you really know how to make a woman’s heart lea
p and soar.”
“When it’s there, it’s there. When it’s right, nothing stands in its way. And when it’s time to be said, you feel the words more than you hear them.”
She started to cry. That wasn’t really what he was hoping for when he voiced those words. “I’m sorry,” he said, hedging, trying to figure out what just went wrong.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, sniffling. “You’re the first person I feel I can come to with this. A few weeks ago when it started again, I almost told you. I called you and just wanted to hear your voice, and it calmed me. I thought it was nothing. That I was going crazy. But I’m not. I know I’m not. And I know I can tell you.”
“A few weeks ago? Geez, Riley. Hang on. Let me get something to write on. I need to hear it all from the beginning.”
She got up and grabbed her laptop. “Here, just type it up, it might be easier.”
“No. I’m going to get a recorder. I want to talk to you. I want to see your face. I want to ask questions. I can’t do that if I’m typing or writing. Hang on.”
He went to his SUV and grabbed a recorder out of the bag in the back, then came in and put it on the coffee table.
“That’s a little ancient.”
“But it works,” he said. “So start from the beginning. When you first suspected something.”
“I don’t know when it really started. I can’t put my finger on it at all. It was just feelings. Like someone was watching me. Like I was being followed.”
“That’s your gut telling you to be on alert. That’s the fight or flee instinct we all have in each of us. What else?”
“Then I’d get phone calls and no one would be there when I answered, if I did. I assumed they were just wrong numbers. We’ve all done it. Dialed the wrong number and then hung up before the person could answer or hung up when we heard a voice we weren’t expecting.”
“How often did this happen?”
“Not often in the beginning. Once every few weeks. Then it was once a week, then every few days. Always from a different number. But it took months for it to get to the every-few-days frequency. Then it’d stop for a month and start up again.”
“Did you ever call any of those numbers back?” he asked.
“A few times, but the person wouldn’t answer. I just figured that my number was a common one, something that was one off of a business or something.”
“What else besides the phone calls? There has to be more.”
“Aside from feeling like someone was always watching me, I’d get empty envelopes mailed to me. First at work, then at home.”
“Empty how?”
“Just an envelope addressed to me. Always typed, never the same font. No return address either, but postmarked New York City. I’d open it and there would be nothing there. Or a blank sheet of paper. Just things to annoy me, but then put me on edge. Waiting for the next one. Waiting for them to escalate.”
“And you told Jason this?”
“I did. He said I was nuts. That it was probably nothing and there was no proof of anything other than my overactive imagination. We’d argued before about things. He was jealous of anyone I talked to, and he thought I was the same way. I wasn’t, but he’d build himself up that I was doing those things, saying those things, to get attention from him.”
Trevor felt his blood boil. Riley was one of the most rational people he knew, and if her gut was telling her something, then there had to be more going on.
“Anything else other than the envelopes and calls?”
“Nothing more than it getting more frequent. I didn’t think I could go to the police over a few annoying calls and envelopes. The person closest to me told me I was nuts. I didn’t feel like having law enforcement tell me the same thing.”
Unfortunately, he was pretty sure that in a city like New York, she’d be put down on the bottom of the list, if they didn’t dismiss it altogether. She was right, these were annoyances in their eyes. Probably would be his response if someone else came to him with it, too. But she wasn’t someone else.
“Did you keep those envelopes?”
“No. I threw them all out when I moved. My relationship with Jason was getting more strained the longer it went on. The more nervous I was getting, the more I wanted to leave the area. He wanted no part of that. We were fighting a lot and I just ended it. He said some nasty things to me, and I walked away. We’d been split up for a few weeks when I got an envelope mailed to my house. Before that it was just work, but then they started coming to where I lived.”
“That’s when you decided to leave?”
“Yeah. I made plans. I’d visited Max months before, looked around the area, asked some questions, and heard Dr. Fielding was older and might be retiring. I took a chance and contacted him, asked if he’d like to sell his practice.”
That would explain the comments he’d heard from Riley’s staff that Dr. Fielding announced his retirement out of the blue. “What if he’d said no?” he asked.
“I would have found another practice. I was glad I didn’t have to. I was glad I ended up close to family.”
“No one in your family knows?” he asked, wondering why she didn’t tell them. They all seemed close.
“There was no need to worry them. I had nothing to go on, no proof. A few weeks before the move was final, I got flowers at the house, just like this. Before, it was flowers at the office. Always a different little plastic sign. A little message to throw me off.”
“What was on the last one?”
“‘My friend.’ It just said, ‘my friend.’” He felt her shudder on his lap. “I called the florist to see if they could tell me where it came from, but they said they couldn’t give that information out.”
“How long before it started happening here?”
“Not long. I covered my tracks when I left. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even my coworkers. I had movers come and take everything away in the middle of the night, I took a different route to work that day, threw my old cell phone in the dumpster at work, and left a note on my boss’s desk. I wanted no one to know that was close to me.”
“But your family knew?”
“They did. They thought I was leaving because of Jason, so they kept quiet about it because I asked them to. I think Max and my father assume Jason is harassing me, and that’s why I left.”
“They said that to you?” he asked, wondering why if they suspected that, she hadn’t been honest with them.
“No. It’s just all the ‘safe’ comments lately. A few weeks ago, Max and I were talking and he said he knew there was something going on and he’d be really ticked off if it was serious and I didn’t want to tell him. I lied and told him I had it covered.”
He hugged her close again. “I’m glad you’re telling me.”
“I have to. I have to know. I don’t know what else to do. I got an empty letter forwarded to me a few weeks ago. Whoever it is didn’t know I left and they mailed it to my old address. It was empty, but I kept it. Then another week or so went by and I got an envelope at my office. This time there was a piece of paper inside that said ‘I’m sorry.’ I recognized Jason’s handwriting and got pissed off. I thought he was playing with me. Either that, or he truly was sorry and wanted me back. Either way, I pushed it aside and figured it was him.”
“Did you try calling him to find out? Contacting him at all?”
“No. I just want him to forget about me.”
“Smart move. So tell me about the flowers. Are you sure it’s not him?”
“It’s not. I’ve never told anyone how there are different little plastic signs. All he knew about was the letters and calls. The flowers are always something different, but the signs are the same thing. Always red, too. No one knew that. Trust me, it’s the same person who sent them before.”
She got off his lap and opened the drawer in her kitchen, then dropped two envelopes on the coffee table. “I kept them this time. So tell me, am I nuts?”
Not Harmless
&nbs
p; Riley looked at Trevor as he looked at her. If he told her she was nuts, her heart wouldn’t only break, it would shatter into a million little pieces.
This was her last chance to get someone to believe her. Her last chance to move forward. To move on. She knew that deep down where it counted the most. She’d been mentally running for so long to finally find the place of her dreams, and to think it followed her here was heart wrenching.
“You’re not nuts,” he said, standing up and pulling her into his arms. “You’re stupid, though.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You’re stupid because you didn’t tell me sooner. Because you didn’t trust your family or me with this information. I believe you. They would have believed you too.”
“I don’t know what to do now,” she said.
“First thing is you’re not staying by yourself anymore.”
“Trevor, that’s nuts. Whoever he is, everything he has done is harmless.”
“Making you feel unsafe is a form of terrorizing someone. That’s not harmless.”
“He doesn’t know where I live, though,” she argued.
“So you think. He may not know your home address, but he knows you’re in Lake Placid. He found your practice easily enough.”
“There was no way I could hide that.”
“But he knows you’re in this area, and it’s a small enough area that he could ask around. He could find you if he wanted to.”
“Are you trying to scare me more?” she asked.
“I’m trying to make you aware. More aware. We can take turns staying at each other’s place. Alternating.”
“Are you telling me, or asking?”
“Right now I’m telling you. I need to know you’re safe, and to do that I need you with me and not alone at night.”
She wanted to be annoyed, but she was touched instead. “What if I get on your nerves? We aren’t used to being around each other that much.”
