Daddy Next Door - The Complete Series Box Set (A Single Dad Navy SEAL Romance)

by Claire Adams

  Well, we could take a trip to my parents’ house, I suggested. I mean, yeah, they won’t let us sleep in the same room, but what’s to stop us from sneaking out to the hot tub after they’ve gone to bed? I’ve never had sex in a hot tub before.

  Back and forth the messages flew between us; they weren’t all crazy and sexy, but a lot of them were, and I joked to Johnny that with the plans we’d stacked up between us — different fantasies and ideas — we’d never manage to make it through finals, we’d be too busy getting each other off.

  We met for lunch every day and Johnny walked me to class every morning, catching me halfway from the dining hall to the building and taking advantage of the fact that I always left a little early to pull me off to the side where we could have some privacy and make out with me. I was in a nearly-constant state of bliss, spending more time with the man I loved without doubting him. Everyone had more or less accepted the fact that Johnny was into me wasn’t on the market anymore. I guessed that Georgia might have let slip the fact that he had said “I love you” to someone in the dorms. I still got envying glances from the girls, especially when Johnny and I walked around campus together holding hands, obviously a couple, but no one made any real, overt moves to flirt with him while I was around.

  Earlier in the morning, Johnny had walked me to class, giving me a last, lingering kiss when we got to the door that put me in the perfect state of mind to daydream. Fortunately, the class I was in would be more difficult to fail than it would be to pass. Introduction to Academic Life was the least challenging of all of my classes, of any class I had ever taken. The lesson of the day was about procrastination and good work habits, and while the professor droned on about calendars and using different apps to manage our college work load and make sure we didn’t have finals sneak up on us all at once, I started to think about Johnny.

  My favorite little fantasy about him was taking him to my parents’ house while they were out on vacation. We would lounge around in the hot tub, making out, touching each other everywhere, getting really hot and heavy, and maybe making love for a little while. Then we’d go back up to my room again. I imagined Johnny laying me in my bed, going down on me, teasing me the way he always did — bringing me to the edge of climaxing and then backing off, over and over again until I was sure I would die if he didn’t let me orgasm.

  I was just starting to get really turned on, able to feel how wet I was becoming, to feel the heat in my cheeks and chest as I imagined Johnny slithering up along my body to kiss me on the lips and finally give me what I wanted, when my phone started vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out carefully to keep from getting caught, but instead of a text from Johnny, it was my mom calling me. I frowned. I had been careful to tell her about when I had classes—but of course, she didn’t even pay attention. I rolled my eyes and pressed the button to stop the vibrating. It was probably just an invitation for Johnny and me to come to dinner.

  As I walked over to my second class of the day, my phone started vibrating again; once more, it was mom. I rolled my eyes and told myself that I would deal with it later. She always managed to forget anything about my life that wasn’t convenient to her. It vibrated two more times during class with calls from her and by the time I was out of class for a couple of hours, lunch and a little break before my afternoon classes, I saw that she had left a couple of messages. I walked out to the little seating area off to the side of the building outside and decided that whatever it was obvious she thought was urgent; I listened to the first message. “Hey, Becky. I really need you to give me a call back.” That was fairly standard, but Mom’s voice sounded tense. Maybe she’d had a fight with Dad. Or maybe there was some huge catering mishap and she needed to vent. “Becky-love,” the second one — tenser than the first — started out. “Please give me a call back as soon as you get this. We really need to talk. Really. We need to talk.”

  Oh good grief, I thought to myself, watching as my classmates drifted towards the dining hall. My stomach was rumbling, too. I’d listen to the last message and then text mom to let her know I would call her back soon, and then I’d eat something. Whatever was going on in her life could not possibly be that urgent. Oh God — what if Dad’s been in an accident? That would be a big deal. That would be a huge deal. No wonder Mom would have completely forgotten about my schedule — my schedule wouldn’t matter in the face of that. I opened up the most recent voicemail and held the phone to my ear. “Becky, I know you’re busy, but please, please give me a call back as soon as you can. Your father and I hired a private investigator to look into Johnny. Before you roll your eyes at me or doing that, you really need to listen. We knew you two were getting serious, so we had him checked out just as a matter of course. Becky! Becky — you have to stay away from him. He’s dangerous. Call me back just as soon as you can, sweetie.” I stared at my phone for a long moment as the shock rolled over me. I had no idea what to do.

  BREATHLESS #4

  Chapter One

  After a few moments, the sheer shock of my mom’s message on my phone began to abate; I decided that I had to get back to my dorm room — that was not the kind of call that I could make in the middle of campus where anyone could hear. I hurried across campus, my heart pounding in my chest. They hired a private investigator? I shook my head as I remembered that detail. I wasn’t sure whether to be angry with them for taking that precaution when they had no real reason to suspect that Johnny had ever done anything wrong or upset and panicked about whatever the investigator had uncovered about him. You never confronted him about that comment. You never talked to him. You never even asked him about it. In spite of the fact that I’d given up talking to him about what I had read, I had never quite fully lost the back-of-my-mind feeling of fear and suspicion about Johnny.

  I didn’t even wait for the elevator. I half-ran through the hall of the first floor of dorm rooms and punched at the safety bar of the door to the stairwell. My heart was pounding so fast I barely noticed the stairs themselves as I went up flight after flight, heading up to my room — the one place I could safely call my mom and talk about whatever she had found out through her private investigator.

  I should have known my parents would hire someone; I should have known that they wouldn’t have taken the cue that I’d chosen my own college, that I was an adult. I should have guessed that they were going to be just as paranoid as ever about any guy I chose for myself. It wasn’t fair, but I should have expected it. I paused as I came to one of the landings between floors, almost out of breath from how quickly I had been taking the stairs. It couldn’t be anything, could it? I thought about it. Johnny had only ever had the one situation in his life, hadn’t he? Or maybe — the thought chilled me — there was something that the girl in the dining hall didn’t know about. Maybe there was a history there.

  I couldn’t believe it. There was no way Johnny could possibly be some hardened criminal or some abusive, cruel person. He was sweet and kind and thoughtful constantly when it came to me. I hadn’t known him very long, but if someone had the kind of past that a private investigator could uncover, they wouldn’t be able to hide their true colors, would they?

  I made my way up the last couple of flights of stairs more slowly; I couldn’t reconcile the Johnny I had met, the Johnny I had made love with and who had taken me into the woods on the sweetest, nicest date I had ever been on, with someone who could be the kind of man who would alarm my mother. Of course, I thought bitterly, it could just be that she thought he was dangerous because one of his uncles once shoplifted from a store. In my mom’s eyes, a poor background would be dangerous. But nonetheless, I had to lend her a certain amount of attention. I knew that in spite of how little I respected her views on wealth and things like that — her pretentiousness — she loved me and cared about me and wanted me to be happy. She wouldn’t have called so many times if it was something like Johnny being poor.

  That opened up the question once more in my mind of just what it was that Johnny had done. I
f he had done something other than be involved with a girl who committed suicide, I should know about it, shouldn’t I? I came to my floor and pushed the heavy stairwell door open with difficulty. My heart was pounding inside my chest as if it wanted to explode, and I had to walk slowly, already exhausted, towards my dorm room. I had to hope that Georgia wasn’t around; I needed the most privacy humanly possible for the conversation that I was about to have with my mom. What had her stupid private investigator discovered? I couldn’t imagine. It had to be more than what had happened with Claire, didn’t it? I had taken Johnny at face value when he had told me about his involvement with the girl who had committed suicide. But there had been that comment. On the one hand, I had Johnny’s assertion that he had only been her boyfriend and that people were still bitter at him, still blamed him, for not being able to save a troubled girl from killing herself. On the other hand, there were the spiteful words of the girl who obviously wanted Johnny for herself and the comment from Claire White’s memorial page where someone had said that Johnny should be in prison, too, and that what he had done to Claire was not love.

  And I had Johnny’s behavior. He had always been sweet and kind with me, funny and confident. I had seen him be aggressive on the ice, but that was how hockey players were, wasn’t it? I had never seen him treat a single woman with anything more than slight disgust and that was when the jealous girl from the dining hall had flashed him and pressed her boobs against the Plexiglas at a game. My mind was spinning as I closed the door to my bedroom in the dorm and caught my breath. I looked at my phone. Mom obviously urgently wanted to tell me something — I couldn’t just let it wait. I would have to call her and find out what she knew or thought she knew about the situation.

  But as I pulled up her contact information and started to hit the button to dial out, it occurred to me that once more I wasn’t giving Johnny the benefit of trust. Anything that Mom had to say to me was something I wouldn’t be hearing about from the man it concerned himself. I was once more going to listen to what amounted to rumor instead of confronting the man who had told me he loved me.

  I had been with him so many times; I had had so many opportunities to ask him more. Even when we had been alone in the woods and I had asked him about Claire White, I had just let it go when he asked me to. At the time, it had seemed like the best idea. It had seemed cruel to try and drag it out of him when he was clearly upset about having to talk about the girlfriend he had lost his virginity to. But had it just been stupid of me to let him distract me from asking about it again? Every time I had been on the edge of confronting him, asking him to his face if there was more to the situation than what he had told me before, I had stopped short. It would be better just to face whatever Mom had heard from her ridiculous private investigator and figure out how to deal with it. Figure out how to confront Johnny and what this meant for me.

  I pressed the call icon on my screen and took a deep breath. Mom would probably still be freaking out; one of us had to remain calm. I closed my eyes as the phone rang. Damnit, Mom, I thought as it rang once and then twice. You wanted me to call back. Answer the damn phone already.

  “Sweetie! Oh thank God,” Mom said the moment the call connected. “I’ve been so worried all this time.”

  “Mom,” I said, as she started to rattle on, sounding panicked. “Mom. What’s going on? You hired a private investigator? Isn’t that a little over the top?”

  “Sweetie, if you knew what I know about that boy you’re dating you’d thank me for it.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Okay, so tell me what you know about Johnny.” Mom took a deep breath, and I knew she had been expecting me to argue harder against what she and Dad had done. I just wanted it over with; I wanted to know if there was something else for me to worry about with Johnny or if there was just the same old scandal.

  “One of his girlfriends, a girl called Claire White, killed herself a few years ago,” Mom said. I sighed with relief. It was just the same scandal that had come up before.

  “Mom,” I interrupted. “I know about Claire White. She was Johnny’s girlfriend, they were together in high school, and yeah it’s very sad that she killed herself, but it’s not like someone can blame Johnny for that.”

  “Becky, sweetie — if he could do what he did to her, what’s to say he won’t turn around and do it to you, too?” I rolled my eyes again.

  “Claire killed herself, Mom. What are you talking about? What exactly do you think he did?” Mom gasped.

  “You don’t know? Oh, baby girl.” Mom’s voice dropped and I heard a mixture of fear and sadness in her tone. “It wasn’t just some troubled girl who killed herself. Claire White…a group of boys from that school drugged her and raped her, Becky. They took pictures of her while they were doing it and spread them all around the school.” I felt my blood starting to run cold; I remembered what I had seen on Claire White’s memorial page, what the people had said about the different boys who had been involved all going to jail. And then the comment that Johnny should be with them. Oh God.

  “They raped her? And took pictures?” I heard my voice as if it was far away, I was in so much shock at what Mom was telling me.

  “Yes, Becky. That Claire White girl was so ashamed of herself — she was bullied and made fun of and it was so awful that she killed herself. She couldn’t deal with it. If…if Johnny could to that to one girl, he could do it to you, too.” I shook my head. For a moment, I couldn’t believe it, not any of it.

  “What happened to the boys?” I wanted to hear it. I wanted to hear her say it.

  “The boys are all in prison; all of them except Johnny.” The words made my stomach sink to my knees.

  “Well if Johnny’s not in prison, he must not have been involved,” I ventured to argue. I could imagine my mom shaking her head.

  “The world doesn’t work like that all the time, Becky, and you know it. He’s a big hockey player — he probably got off scot-free just because of that. Nobody wanted him to be carted off to jail when he could be playing.” My throat felt tight, my mouth was dry. “He was a really big deal in that town; a home hero on the ice.”

  “I…I mean, come on, they have to uphold the law. I’m sure there’s just something…” I couldn’t think of anything, though.

  “Our investigator was only able to discover that there was a sealed file on Johnny about the investigation. Nobody knows what’s in it — except for law enforcement. And Johnny, of course. But nobody really knows what his involvement was. Becky…if he wasn’t involved at all, then why would he have a police file?” I didn’t have any answers for her. I had no idea what to say to that. I took a deep breath. There had to be something that I could find out from Johnny himself, something to make this right. I had been wrong to call my mom before talking to the man I loved himself.

  “I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I told my mom.

  “Becky, please be safe, sweetie. If Johnny was involved in something like this…and your dad says that the frat he’s involved with is wild partiers…”

  “Mom, I’ll call you back. Don’t worry about me.” I finally convinced her that I was not going to get murdered in at least the next twenty-four hours and hung up the phone, my whole body feeling numb.

  Chapter Two

  After a few minutes of sitting in my room in shock, my brain started to finally thaw. Mom had to be wrong about Johnny’s involvement in that case. Even if he was a big deal hockey player in his hometown, it wasn’t like the law could possibly have overlooked that, was it? He didn’t come from a wealthy family. He didn’t come from the kind of family that had a lot of clout. I had to talk to him about the situation, as much as it would put a strain on everything between us. I had to know what was really going on.

  As I sat in my room making up my mind, I thought about all of the things I had heard and seen and done with and about Johnny. I thought about the trip out into the woods and how simple and wonderful the date had been, but how scared I had instinctively been whe
n he’d turned onto the trail in his huge truck, away from the town, away from prying eyes. I thought about our trysts in the closet at the country club and in my bedroom. I thought about the way that he had never been anything but sweet to me, but the way I had seen him on the ice, pushing, shoving, and all but brawling with the other teams’ players. I thought about my dream that I’d had — the nightmare of seeing him beating Claire to death with his hockey stick. But that hadn’t been even remotely based in reality, I told myself firmly. Claire’s death had been at her own hands.

  But then I thought that if Johnny had been involved in Claire’s rape, then it would be just as though he had beaten her to death. If he had even been one of the guys taking pictures, sharing them around, laughing at the poor girl who had already been victimized, it was just as bad as if he had abused her — it was abuse, even if it wasn’t physical.

  I had to find a way to get to the bottom of it. I had no idea where Johnny was — if he was in class, if he was anywhere on campus, if he was back at the frat house or in the dining hall. I texted him. Hey Babe, you busy? I couldn’t bring myself to unload the whole horrific mess on him in text message form. That wouldn’t be fair. I had to talk to him face to face. I fidgeted in my dorm room while I waited for him to answer. Even if he was in class, I knew his phone would be close at hand. He’d feel it vibrate and then he’d respond. I could find a few minutes to talk to him alone — somewhere.

  I started pacing my bedroom floor back and forth, waiting. Minutes passed by achingly slowly. After five minutes, I knew I had to try again. Hey Babe, thinking about you. How’s it going? I sent it off and chewed on my bottom lip, pacing some more. I felt like a lion trapped in a cage; all I wanted to do was break out and run amok. I took a deep breath. Maybe Johnny didn’t have his phone on him. Maybe he had it in his backpack and it was on the ground somewhere. Maybe he didn’t know I was texting him because it was on silent. I tried one more time, sending a quick string of emoji. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where he was on campus. I didn’t even know that he was on campus. But I absolutely had to talk to him. I had to get his side of the story on the issue of Claire White.