Stalkers: A Dark Romance Anthology

by Ally Vance

  “Yes,” I whine.

  After the incident with Victor, Cannon was officially done with Veil. The next day, he reached out to a detective friend of his. He met with us, took our statements, and a restraining order was put in place. Not for just Cannon and me, but for Desiree, too—she dumped him that same night and banned him from the club, but she was afraid he would come back. Cannon sold Veil to Desiree for a fair price, and now she and her new husband run it together. Last we heard, Victor was working for his family in Dubai.

  Cannon and I have been married for a year now. We dated for six months before he proposed. The first time was in bed after a round of mind-blowing sex. The second time was at dinner in front of my parents, his mother, Heather, and Jesse. Each was special and intimate in its own way, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

  Since neither of us has a lot of family, we decided on a small wedding in Key West. Heather was my maid of honor, and Ryan was Cannon’s best man.

  “I just spoke to your dad. They’ll be here in the morning.”

  My parents love Cannon, especially my dad. He didn’t like Victor, and I was worried he wouldn’t like Cannon either, but they hit it off instantly. I think my dad saw how happy Cannon makes me, and that made him happy. Twice a month we drive down to Sarasota to take them to lunch. Sometimes we go down to Boca to visit his mom. I was so nervous meeting her for the first time. In all the months I was with Victor, he never introduced me to his family. That should’ve been a red flag that things were off.

  “And your mom?” I ask.

  “Same.” He trails his lips down to my swollen belly. “How’s my princess doing today?”

  At the sound of his voice, she kicks. “She’s ready to meet her daddy.”

  Our daughter is due any minute now. I’ve been on bedrest for the past two weeks. I’m miserable, swollen, and ready to bring our little girl into the world.

  Cannon curls up beside me, his dark brown eyes staring into my blue ones. “What are you thinking?”

  My smile is warm and full of affection. “I’m thinking no fantasy could ever compare to this beautiful reality.”

  The End

  About M.A. Foster

  About M.A.:

  M.A Foster was born and raised in Tampa, Florida. She’s married to her high school sweetheart and mother to two grown boys. She loves fur babies, chocolate, lattes and all things sparkly. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s either catching up with friends and family or chatting with her readers and fellow author friends on Facebook.

  Books by M.A.:

  Jaybird (Zach and Jayla)

  Mackenzie (Cole and Harper)

  Cougar (Cam and Emerson)

  Daisy Chains

  Petra J. Knox

  Prologue

  March 1973, Vietnam

  Even though the temperature was mild, I was sweating bullets. The POW camp was swarming with rescue Marines, who were organizing the prisoners and carrying our men out in stretchers. Flies the size of hornets buzzed all around us, attracted to the blood, sweat, and shit that permeated the area.

  I looked at the shirtless man on the ground beside me, his torn side oozing with putrid green pus and rust-colored abrasions that spread out purple under the skin. His face was that of death waiting. He didn’t have long.

  “Hang in there, Davenport. We’re going home, man. Hang on,” I told him. I poured a bit more water from my canteen into his mouth, just a little. Just enough to distract him, mostly.

  His now glassy eyes held mine and his hand went to my wrist, signaling he wanted no more water. “Rose,” he got out hoarsely, “You gotta look after her when I’m gone, Sonny.” He swallowed, his voice way beyond stripped of its normal deep tenor. “Promise me. Promise me.”

  I tried for a smile, but it just wasn’t coming. “You old bastard, stop talking like that. You’ll see your Rose as soon as we get back to the States.”

  Davonport shook his head slowly, his lips hinting at a grin. “Ain’t much older than you, kid.” He panted then, the pain getting the best of his words. “Death is right here, Sonny. I’m ready. Promise me.”

  I held his blue eyes and clenched my jaw. I wouldn’t let despair tear me down now. Not after everything we soldiers had been through. This was par for the course. The way it was. Perhaps the way it would end.

  Relenting, I nodded. “I promise, Captain.”

  A kind of peace came over his face, and I knew then that he wouldn’t make it.

  I clenched my jaw harder and looked past him, past the rescue team, past the medics, past the bamboo cages, past the wet leaves and foliage, and into the blue-gray sky.

  I swore to myself right then that I’d never look back on this war. This atrocity and sham of a campaign that had nothing to do with humanity. The sacrifice of everyday people, innocents, women, children. Soldiers barely old enough to grow a beard, let alone face the ugly truth of what humans were capable of. We were never meant to see that. But we did. And I never wanted to see it again.

  So I shut the door on it all as I laid my hand on my friend and mentor, my Captain, touching his brow before I closed his eyes, shutting the blue gaze that had remained on me as he died. “So long, brother.”

  After a few moments, a pair of black boots stopped in front of me, and I looked up into the fresh face of a saluting Lieutenant, his clean uniform pressed and without stain. I knew immediately by the lack of deadness in his eyes, the one all of us combat soldiers shared, that he’d never stepped foot on this land prior to this rescue mission.

  “Sir, the chopper’s ready. The sick and wounded are boarding the plane for takeoff in twenty. The rest of the regime is ready to depart now.”

  I nodded and looked behind him, noticing the tell-tale signs of a chopper’s blades fanning the tall bamboo in waves. “Make sure Captain Davonport here gets seen to.”

  The young man barely glanced at the Captain lying on the wet ground. But I saw him swallow. “Yes, Sir.”

  Later, as the chopper lifted and the cool air swept my face, I didn’t look down at where I’d spent the past four years in hell. Instead, I held a photograph of a pretty young woman. My Captain’s daughter, Rose. Though the picture I held was crinkled, stained, and thin from handling and traveling, the image shone through. Golden hair, bright blue eyes shaped like a cat’s, and straight white teeth from a genuine smile. The young woman was squatting down on a suburban sidewalk, petting a ragged looking pooch. She wore a blouse and a pencil skirt, her legs primly posed to the side, her low-heeled pumps revealing the possibility of long, lean legs. She was beautiful. But what always caught my eye first whenever I looked at the photograph was the daisy in her hair.

  Davonport’s prized possession was this picture. Even though he and his wife had separated when Rose was three, and he had been absent for all of her fifteen years since, he’d told me that his greatest accomplishment in his life was his daughter.

  And the old bastard, who was as much a father to me than he ever was to this girl I looked upon now, had charged me with protecting her, watching over her in his stead.

  My eyes traced her face and then landed on that daisy in her hair. Just like I had promised to never look back over the past few years, I made another promise: Rose Davonport would be mine.

  Chapter One

  September 1973, California

  The haunting voice of Karen Carpenter played through the speakers as I drove down the highway, heading west. The sun was setting like an orange flame in the California sky. Being from the northeast and raised in a small town filled with green forests and summer rains that puddled every street, the Sunshine State’s barren landscape was as foreign to me as another planet. The heat, I grew used to. The long days and tan dirt, the sparse sagebrush, and the wide starry sky at night was like a balm to my soul, especially compared to where I’d been the past few years half-way across the world.

  It had taken me more time to acclimate to day-to-day living as a post-war American than I’d thought. After a few weeks spe
nt on base, then afterward with all the paperwork and finding a placement outside as a civilian, I had slowly found my groove again.

  The first thing I did, once rehabilitated, was hire a private investigator, an old friend from my first military stint, retired Officer George Steele. While I tied up loose ends in North Carolina, he’d send me weekly updates on Rose—her comings and goings, her habits, and later, her graduation. By the end of May, I was ready to take over and move to her in Montana and begin what would be Operation Daisy.

  In my mind, I’d no longer called her Rose. She was forever Daisy now.

  The first time I saw her in person, the day after my arrival in Montana, I was sitting in a booth in the back of one of her favorite haunts, some hole in the wall diner where all the teenagers hung out on Friday nights. Her group of girlfriends had just walked in, and my eyes practically strained to search that head of golden hair that I’d only glimpsed from the latest photographs George had sent me.

  Finally, I spotted her. She was the last to arrive in the line of giggling girls. Tall, graceful, and smiling, she was a stunner. I had paused in my admiration to look around the diner at the many patrons sitting in their booths. Just as I’d suspected, all the males in the long aisle turned and twisted to watch her pass.

  My gaze returned to her, and I watched my Rose, my Daisy, swing her hips as she walked down the aisle, her miles-long legs displayed in a pair of pink calf-high boots. She wore a miniskirt of blue and red paisley design. Her pale blue blouse billowy and soft.

  A walking dream.

  She and her friends had chosen a booth diagonally across from me, next to the windows, giving me a perfect vantage point to watch, and possibly listen, yet far enough away not be noticed in my darkened booth next to the kitchen door.

  The topic of conversation that night was like those of all girls her age; boys and fashion, but also idealism. The innocence of youth always granted a brightly painted window of the wide world. I knew in my younger days, growing up in the 50s and 60s, the promise of a better tomorrow always felt a hand’s breadth away, something you could reach out and grab onto if only you could drop the veil of society’s mores.

  Nam had changed me more than age did, however. And I think it changed all of America. Music was different. Movies, not that I saw many these days, just weren’t the same. Hollywood’s golden days were at an end, heralding in a grittiness and a certain dusting of taint. As for women, the days of free love had given birth to loose morals and a naïve independence that turned my stomach, for the most part.

  Which was why I was so thankful to be able to watch over Daisy. Rose Davonport was a dreamer, and if I read the wind right, a pretty, young dreamer was bound for trouble.

  As the weeks went by from that night at the diner, I continued to watch the nineteen-year-old beauty. I had rented a room on the top floor of an old couple’s three-story home downtown. Every morning, I watched from my window to the street below, where Daisy would walk to work at the record store. And in the evenings, I’d sit on the bench on the opposite block, newspaper fanned open, my eyes on her as she left for home. Then, after five minutes would go by, I’d throw out the paper in the bin beside me and, with my hat down, my hands in my pockets, I’d meander up the sidewalk, discreetly following her to the bus stop, where she’d hop on the bus that would arrive just in time while I pretended to be on my way down the block. Instead, I’d jump in my car and park on her street, a few houses down from her own. There, I’d watch and wait till sleep found here before walking behind her house and to her bedroom window for a while, eventually driving back home to repeat it all over again the next day.

  She never noticed the man following her every day. It probably wouldn’t even occur to her, being so young, so sheltered, so lost in her own world, one filled with color and daisies and promise. No, in her world, a thirty-five-year-old man, a stranger, stalking a young woman, was only something one would see in a bad movie.

  Months had passed, and now I paused in my recollections to read the sign up ahead. Five more miles until my turnoff and the motel where I planned on staying. It was in the town of Saint Marlot, and according to the sign, had a population of three thousand people. It was there that Daisy and her friends, both male and female, had traveled to for some prayer meeting to honor the recent death of J. R. R. Tolkien. There they would stay for a few nights, and then head on out to the coast.

  Apparently, college wasn’t in the cards for my Daisy. She’d given her mother hell and had put her foot down when she’d told Mrs. Davonport that she wasn’t going to go, that she wanted to “find herself” and spend a year traveling, maybe head to Hollywood. The whole argument had been heated and loud. I knew because I stood outside in the darkened doorway at the kitchen, listening to the words that poured out from the open window a few feet away from where I was stealthily spying.

  Daisy won the argument. Being a single mother who worked too much for too little, her mother had relented, letting her daughter, her only child, decide her own fate.

  Although I wasn’t too hip on the idea of Daisy cutting school and skipping a chance at a better life than her mother’s, I was happy to see she’d inherited her father’s spark and grit.

  That didn’t mean I was happy about what she’d been focused on these past few weeks. The crowd she’d been recently hanging with was made up of drifters and dodgers. The type of seed that balked at reality and hard work, banking on the kindness of others to get by. Daisy said she wanted to follow a dream, no matter what, and her ticket appeared to be from this new lot of people.

  So here I was, following the caravan of flower children, keeping enough careful distance from notice, my Daisy always in sight.

  I turned the volume down on an Elvis Presley song and straightened in my seat, flicking the signal for a right turn. The sun was just a smear of color as I made my way to the neon sign that read Marlot Motel. I circled the parking lot slowly when I got there, noting all the rooms, vehicles, and the two breezeways in the middle of the long L-shaped motel where the ice machines would be. Already I had spotted the mint-colored VW bus that Daisy had arrived in. I parked toward the office and went inside to check-in.

  The room the bored lady at the desk gave me was number fifteen, the floor above Daisy and friends, probably exactly above their rooms. If I was lucky, it would be the one Daisy was in. I went back to my car and grabbed my bag, locked up, and headed to the stairs. The place was pretty silent, at about half capacity, which I liked. Not too many bodies, not too little.

  The room was threadbare and basic, with the usual motel smell and comforts. I turned on the TV, locked the door, and took a shower. I knew from the conversation I’d overheard earlier at a truck stop, that Daisy and company were going to go grab a bite to eat at the steakhouse next door tonight. So I had plenty of time before they came back.

  The nightly news was talking about Nixon and Watergate when I came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around me. I sat on the bed while I dug through my bag, looking for a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt. Laughter from outside had me at the window peeking through the curtains. Below was Daisy. The streetlights gleamed off her yellow hair, tinting it pink, as she skipped in the parking lot with her friends. She was happy. Even from inside my room, I could make out that husky voice, the one that shot right to my dick.

  I watched until I lost sight of the group as they headed into the rooms below. Quickly, I got dressed, grabbed my bag, and headed outside. It was time for Daisy to meet me.

  Chapter Two

  I watched from my car in the middle of nowhere as the VW pulled into the clearing that had been set up for tonight’s “vigil.” There were about five vehicles already here, all to gather in memory of The Hobbit’s author.

  It was plum dark out now, but someone had started a bonfire by the time I had arrived. Already the circle of Tolkien fans gathered around the flames. Make-shift chairs of barrels had been set up, and blankets were laid out. I was out of my car by the time the VW ope
ned its doors.

  I chose a seat on the ground across from a hippy who was strumming a Cat Stevens song. Beside me was a young couple making out and laughing. I looked for Daisy among the crowd and spotted her. She was being led by the hand by some girl wearing a bright red poncho. Both girls laughed as they found a seat by the guitar boy.

  I rested my arms on my jeaned legs, the heels of my cowboy boots planted deep into the earth. With my hat hiding most of my brow, I watched her. She had on a short, flowing dress that was sinched in at the waist by a wide braided belt. Her long golden hair fell loose over her shoulders.

  It was all worth it, being here among these clowns. As much as I wanted nothing more than to grab my Daisy and drive off somewhere far away, I was content to just watch, to be close enough to walk over to her and know she was safe. Besides, I’d been doing it for months.

  After a while, the strumming stopped, and the girl with the red poncho stood up, adjusting her wide-framed glasses, and started speaking.

  “We’re gathered here in peace and love with those who share the heartbreak of Mother Earth’s loss of a great man. A man who used his words to embrace millions. A man who created worlds. A man whose imagination and talent stole our hearts. J. R. R. Tolkien.” She paused as she looked at each face gathered. I looked around at the crowd, too, and noticed eyes glistening.

  Jesus Christ, these people were softies.

  I watched Daisy, gauging her reaction. She seemed solemn but not too hard-hit like some of the others who listened on intently, tears in their eyes.

  “—for a moment of silence,” Poncho girl droned on. “Send your blessings to the heavens, for though we mourn such a great soul, we know that his time on this planet has been served, and wherever he is now, we wish him great joy in a new adventure.”