Now, instead of chips and cakes for her snacks she had crackers and fruit, and sometimes the occasional bowl of homemade ice cream…when she had time to make it. She never stopped at the ice cream stands because they always reminded her of that day when her life changed forever. In a lot of ways she was still trying to survive the ordeal, and in other ways she already had.
If it weren’t for Greg back then she would have killed herself. She wanted to kill herself. He never said that he was worried about her taking her own life, but he did everything in his power to see that she talked to somebody, that she made it through the pain.
She saw the “shrink” a few times. She didn’t really like going, and even though the woman had wanted her to continue her sessions Clair had said no. Greg tried to talk her into going, but she didn’t want to. She made a deal with him. She would talk to him, if he would listen. She didn’t want somebody to tell her everything would be okay, because everything wouldn’t be okay. She just wanted somebody to hold her when she cried and listen when she talked. He became that someone.
Now he was back in her life again, saving her. She smiled. Ten years ago she had wanted this, him in her bed, making love to her, loving her. He had been her one wish. She wouldn’t have dreamed she would have ever got it, but she had. She had wished for him and despite the lapse in time, her wish was finally coming true.
She nudged him slightly. “Wake up.”
“I’m up,” he said in a tone that told her he was indeed wide awake.
“How long have you just been lying there awake?”
“I woke up when you woke up,” he said. “I felt you move a little, and your breathing changed. I figured I’d stay here until you were ready to get up.”
“Oh,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I don’t sleep that long. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I don’t sleep that hard,” he countered. “It doesn’t take much to wake me up.”
“Well,” she lifted her head. “I have to go get ready for work.”
“It’s…” he looked at the clock. “Two. You can wait here a little longer,” he stroked another line down her arm before sliding his hand over her behind and squeezing it gently. She moaned.
“If we do this now I’ll be too sore to teach my classes today.” He had been in and out of her all night until they both fell asleep. She was already sore.
“Later,” he patted her behind before releasing her. “I should go get myself together to,” he climbed out of bed as she had.
“You can get dibs on the shower if you want,” she offered, but he declined. He could let her go first.
“Or we can shower together,” he winked.
“No shadows in the shower,” she said and he pouted. “Seriously, there are some things I will not let people watch me do; showering and peeing are two of those things.” And right now she needed to do both.
“All right, but one of these days…”
“One of these days nothing, mister. Bathroom is off limits.” She swatted his naked behind. “Now where is my underwear?”
“Same place as mine,” he drawled.
A slow smile spread across her lips. “And where is yours?”
He bent down and picked up his clothes, picking up her panties in the process and handing them to her.
“Thanks. Bra?”
He shrugged.
“You took it off me.”
“I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the bra once I got a look at those sweet breasts of yours.”
She laughed. “I’ll find it later. It’s probably under the bed or something.”
“You should look,” he said so deviously that she had visions of exactly why he wanted her to look.
“We are not doing that this morning. I’ll look after I have my clothes on…when it’s safer.” She laughed as she walked into the bathroom. She waved him through and waited until he closed the door before she took care of her morning business.
Breakfast was more relaxed between them. She made her usual fruit and cheese platter, he handed her the knife to pare the fruit, then took it back from her, washed it and returned it to the knife block. She made the orange smoothie milkshakes, one for him and one for her. He made an egg sandwich for himself. They sat at the table, eating, but not talking. They just watched each other, letting their eyes silently talk to each other. She could almost tell what he was thinking, or maybe she was just seeing what she was thinking mirrored in his eyes. Either way, they seemed to be on the same wavelength.
“’Morning,” Janet grumbled. Obviously she wasn’t much of a morning person either.
“Good morning,” she replied. It was indeed a good morning, a good night too. She tried not to think about the night. She had work to do and she couldn’t do it if she spent the day thinking about sex. She would just have to ignore his incessant staring at work. Although since he had arrived he was getting increasingly difficult to ignore. The man watched her like prey and when he wasn’t watching her, he was watching the gym making sure Levins didn’t show up.
She had told him Levins wouldn’t be fool enough to approach her at work. Although before he had gone to prison he had kidnapped them during the day, in a park no less. Maybe he was brazen enough to try something at the gym, but she didn’t think so.
Greg turned in his chair to watch Janet as she pulled a carton of her yogurt from the refrigerator. “Clair tells me she called me, all those years ago.”
Janet tensed up, her shoulders going rigid and her mouth thinning into a hard line. Clair knew Greg had purposely surprised her with the conversation. He had a way of doing that, even ten years ago; it was his way of seeing if he would hear the truth or if he’d just have to pick it up from body language.
Obviously Janet’s body language was speaking volumes.
“Funny thing is I never got any messages, or the letter she sent.”
Janet relaxed only slightly. “I was trying to protect you. You had said you were going to give her some space and I didn’t want you to feel obligated to return her call.”
“Calls,” he corrected. “And a letter.”
She shrugged.
“You do know it’s a federal offense to tamper with somebody else’s mail,” he stated more than he asked.
“What are you going to do; arrest me?”
“No. You’d probably like that,” he snapped. “You didn’t have the right to make that decision for me. You should have told me she called.”
“Why; so you could run to her, coddle her?”
“It wasn’t your decision to make.”
She shrugged again. Clair could tell Greg was on the verge of losing his temper, maybe even cursing Janet out for her blatant lack of respect for his personal space.
“Well, now you know.” She turned and left the kitchen. He stood to follow, but Clair put her hand on his wrist and he stopped. He eased back into the chair.
“Let it go, Greg. We can’t change what happened. It’s too late for that.”
“She was wrong.”
There was no doubt Janet had been in the wrong. Even if she were worried about losing Greg she had no right to delete his messages, dispose of his mail, but being angry now wouldn’t change what happened.
“I agree,” Clair nodded. “But…fortunately,” she leaned in and kissed his lips. Hovering just centimeters away from his mouth she whispered, “we found each other again.” This time they hadn’t wasted much time declaring their love. That is he hadn’t, because she hadn’t yet said she loved him, not expressly anyway. She wasn’t sure she was ready to say it yet either. Knowing she loved him and saying it were two different things. Somehow not voicing it seemed as if it would shelter her if he decided to walk away again. She hadn’t found it easy to trust people.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him with her life, because she did. She just wasn’t sure she could trust him with her heart. Until she had that certainty there were certain things she didn’t want to say, didn’t want to share with him.
&nb
sp; He had told her last night that he would wait for her to connect with him the way they use to be connected. She wasn’t sure that connection was possible. She felt so much more, and after last night, things were definitely different, stronger than they were when she was eighteen.
He, of course, had been talking about trust, and that was different. He wanted that connection where she came to him, talked to him, didn’t hold anything back. It had been a long time since she had done that with anybody. She hid her past and herself from everybody. There were a few people in her life who had felt the need to look her up on line and found the story about the kidnapping. They had asked questions and she had refused to answer those questions.
Greg new all the answers. He knew things she hadn’t even told the cops. She had told them enough, but refrained from sharing the gory details of her ten hours with Levins. They knew he had raped both girls, knew how he had killed Amy. There wasn’t any guess work involved there with her organs all over the floor and body cut up the way it was. The amount of blood alone told them Amy was alive when it happened. She had even told them what Levins called her—chocolate éclair, But she had left some details out, details about what he had made her do to him while she was tied up. She had told Greg, not right away, but after the abortion, she told him everything.
Things were a little different now. She was more guarded, less freely giving of information to him. He had wanted to know about the last ten years. “Nothing special,” she had said. “No life changing promotions to talk about,” she had winked. He wanted more details about school, her life, all of it.
“Well,” she had said. “You know I did my remedial coursework in the college prep program at my school. I graduated a year early and I still managed to get my general requirements for college out the way.” But she hadn’t gone to school right away. She hadn’t wanted to go. She wouldn’t have even stuck with the college prep course had it not been for her need to escape her own guilt. When she was busy she couldn’t think about things, and she so desperately didn’t want to think about anything.
When the appeal trial came up and her dad kicked her out of the house, well she hadn’t thought much of school at all, but then after Greg left her alone she had a couple months to think. She decided to finish her Associates of Science degree at the community college and she decided she knew exactly what she wanted to do. Exercise and nutrition became her life after that. She didn’t make room for the usual college activities like pledging a sorority or going to the college parties. She just did her work, interned when she could and then found a full-time job at one of the chain gyms while she finished her certification testing.
Life had been life, uneventful and that’s how she liked it. She liked knowing what her day would bring, who she would see, what she would do; no surprises. She had had enough surprises to last her a lifetime.
Greg had told her he knew about her degree. He had even seen an article in the paper on Colorado’s fitness with her name mentioned; he read it. She knew the article. The reporter had wanted an interview with the trainers at the gym she was working for at the time. At least that’s what Clair had been told. She hated reporters, hated the scrutiny and the blatant lack of respect for privacy. She had been shielded some when the abduction happened. She was still considered a minor so the court had restricted some parts of the case, but it was a big case. Levins had kidnapped and killed several children before, and she was the first survivor; people were curious.
The interview had started normal, just a little background on her college experience, her decision to declare exercise physiology and nutrition as her major and minor programs, how she liked working for the gym. And then the reporter had brought up Levins. That’s when Clair ended the interview abruptly by walking out. She guessed it didn’t look too good for the reporter to report on her own underhanded way of prying into a closed case so she hadn’t listed the questioning in the article. Clair was thankful for that because she had started to move on with her life and she didn’t want people at the gym looking at her with mountains of sympathy and suspicion. Still, she had found out her boss had been paid good money to make sure she participated in the interview. In her book that meant he knew what was going to be asked. He had obviously looked up the information himself and offered her up as a sacrificial lamb to the big paper in exchange for a little publicity. She quit that gym just a few months later and moved on to another before landing at the one she worked at now. Given her history it was no wonder why she didn’t trust people. She couldn’t trust them, any of them because they were all out for their own benefit. Except for Greg, he had never been that person who became friends with a person only to get what he could. He had, however, walked away and that was the hard part to get past.
She was going to try to forget his leaving, though, because she had a second chance; they had a second chance, and she didn’t want to blow it.
Chapter Eight
Clair spent the morning and a little of the afternoon cleaning her house. Normally she would have started earlier, but Greg had kept her busy all night and decided to give her wakeup sex this morning so her cleaning schedule got derailed.
The one thing she hated about visitors, even though she didn’t usually have them, was that they never seemed as concerned about respecting her place as she did. Greg had cleaned up behind himself, made his own bed, did his own laundry, but Janet…the woman was a walking disaster zone. There were clothes all over the bedroom floor. Clair figured she’d try to live with that since it was just as easy to keep the door closed so she didn’t have to look at it, but the downstairs bathroom…she couldn’t ignore the ring around her beautiful Victorian tub, or the makeup stains from where Janet had washed her face and hadn’t wiped off the sink.
She could clean it now or spend a lot of time trying to clean it once they went back to their own homes. She opted for now. Waiting meant dirt would compound on dirt and she wasn’t in the mood to spend an entire day cleaning one room.
“Need some help?”
She turned to find Greg standing at the entry way. Yeah, she could use help, by way of a cleaning service. Keeping the house clean behind herself wasn’t the same as having to keep it clean behind somebody else. Even keeping the kitchen clean had taken more of her energy. She was use to washing dishes as she used them. What she couldn’t understand was how anybody could just use a dish, put it in the sink and never come back to wash it…never, not even by the next day. If Janet was this messy here she couldn’t imagine what she was like at her own home. Then again she probably spent less time at her own home than she was spending here.
She needed to get Janet out of the house, which probably meant she would have to get out of the house herself in order to do that. She didn’t want to disrupt her already slightly disrupted schedule any further, but if getting out the house for a day of nothingness would come close to saving her house she would do it.
“Sure,” she mumbled. “I need to disinfect the sink still and then I have to mop the floor.” She had already cleaned the toilet, and now she was scrubbing the tub. Her next task was the sink and then mopping the tile floor with bleach water.
Greg picked up some cleaning supplies and went to work on the sink, then he ushered her out the bathroom while he mopped the floor. Wow; she had some serious help cleaning; something she hadn’t needed in years, but then again she usually didn’t have this big of a mess in her place.
After the bathroom it was on to the kitchen, where she washed Janet’s breakfast dishes. She heard Greg when he entered the kitchen. She was almost done, and then maybe after she showered they could go do something, maybe even go out for dinner. She didn’t really like eating out, but she would if it meant she didn’t have to make a single dish tonight.
He wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled her neck with his lips. He felt so good pressed against her that she allowed herself to melt into him. Those crafty hands of his enticed her. Soon, the soft caress turned into succulent kisses on her neck as hi
s hand slid over her right breast and down her body, closer to the area where she was suddenly acutely aware of needing to be touched. She moaned. “We can’t,” her voice was barely audible.
“Yes we can,” he mumbled against her ear as he continued his slow exploration of her body. His erection nudged her, almost taking her over the edge of reason. She wanted him to pull down her pants and take her right there. She wanted his touch, his caress, his kiss and then the blissful feeling he gave her every time he started to slide the thick head of his penis into her. Each inch was arousing and she craved him, more of him, more of what she knew would soon come—heavy thrusting followed by the best climax ever. Each time was more explosive and she wanted it, needed it—that connection that took them deeper than they had ever been.
As much as she wanted to get lost in this moment her brain stepped up to the plate and reminded her why they couldn’t get naked and have sex in the kitchen. “We’re not alone here,” she managed to say.
He stopped, as if suddenly he was aware of not being alone. He gave her, maybe an inch, of space and she almost mourned the loss. “I need to feel you,” he said. Thanks to his deliberate attempt at arousal she now needed to feel him too, but she wasn’t going to do it some place where Janet could just walk in and see them. Public sex wasn’t her ideal series of events, and beyond that, it was clear to her that Janet still had feelings for Greg. While she didn’t like the woman she wasn’t in the business of trying to deliberately hurt people. She wanted, as long as both he and Janet were in her house, to keep things as low key as possible. Thankfully, Greg was in the upstairs bedroom meaning he had more than one way into her bedroom. He could enter quietly; Janet wouldn’t know and the already mounting tension in the house could at least plateau, if not subside all together, while she and Greg still had a chance to do a lot of bodily exploration.
Dangerous Obsessions Page 9
