Someone to Watch Over Me

by Anne Berkeley

  Someone to Watch Over Me

  By Anne Berkeley

  Copyright by Anne Berkeley

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Note from Author

  Another Note from Author

  Other Books by Anne Berkeley

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Closing my eyes, I let myself zone, my head bobbing to the beat of the music on the radio. Rarely did I get time to myself, but Mother Nature deigned to bless me with a few hours off due to the storm that had rolled through. It was a quick hitter and was over in a flash, but not before it had done its damage. Actually, most of the damage occurred south of home, where I worked, fortunately. Several trees had fallen and taken down the power lines to the surrounding area. Consequently, the office doors closed early and I received the rest of the day off, with pay.

  Storm clouds lingered in the distance, but the sun shined overhead, warming my face as I tipped my head back against the seat, my fingers drumming against the steering wheel to the beat of the music. I had the top down. The air smelled of freshly clipped grass and rain.

  Behind me, someone laid on their horn. The light had turned green and I hadn’t hit the gas quick enough to please the impatient. Flinching, I glanced in the rearview mirror as I eased off the brake and tapped the pedal. They were driving a black Escalade with tinted windows. The thing gleamed ostentatiously, begging for attention. I supposed whoever was driving the thing would be in a hurry. They had to be a workaholic to afford it.

  Me, I was a workaholic just to afford my Mini. I loved my Mini, however, and wouldn’t trade it for a dozen Escalades. The price of gas had much to do with it. I had a decent-paying office job with great benefits and it paid the bills—most of them—but it was a bit of a commute. The twenty-six mile per gallon fuel efficiency made up for the one-hour drive.

  The bills I couldn’t afford, I paid by waiting tables and singing on stage at a local bar called The Loft. It was an old, converted barn. They had great—no amazing—food, stocked an impressive variety of home brewed beers and were large enough to house a decent crowd on band night. In two nights alone, I could rake in almost a week’s pay compared to my day job.

  Taking a sharp right, I pulled into Dairy Obscene. Creative, I know. It was an independent shop. One of a kind. Their ice cream was to die for, with flavor combinations that would curl your toes. Seriously. It caused you to make noises that sounded, well, obscene.

  Shifting the car into park, I climbed out of the car, and was nearly plowed over by the same black Escalade. I took a step back, glaring at the tinted windows. Taking it with a grain of salt, I slipped my cardigan over my shoulders and dropped it in the car, averse to staining it with ice cream. No matter how careful I would be, I was bound to drip something on it. Besides, the air was steamy thanks to the rain and the upper ninety-degree temperature.

  Beside me, the window powered down. “Hey, sweetheart—” The deep, male voice was cut off with a thud. The sound of flesh on flesh if I didn’t know better. “What the fuck, man!”

  Whatever. I locked my car and crossed the parking lot. I had two hours to spoil myself with whatever I desired. It was a rare occurrence. I planned to squander it with countless calories, which was another rare occurrence. I was highly allergic to calories. My body tended to swell whenever I ate too many of them. Imagine that. As my athletic instructor always said, ‘A minute on the lips an hour on the quip.’ Cheesy but true, and I hated the treadmill.

  “Hey! Excuse me?”

  Suppressing a roll of the eyes, I turned, hoping that I’d simply dropped something. A ten or twenty would be nice. But I knew I didn’t have such luck. The douches were hailing me.

  They looked my age. Or close to. Maybe a bit older. The passenger was tall, dark haired with eyes almost black in color. He wore a black designer tee with faded jeans and espresso boots, like the biker kind with squared off toes, not shit kickers. His lower lip was pierced. And his entire arm was cloaked in a sleeve of tattoos from wrist to where it disappeared beneath his shirt. I felt a stir of recognition, but quickly filed it away. Likely, we’d crossed paths before at the Stop & Shop. I stopped there often for odds and ends on the drive home.

  His friends weren’t much different in attire. They all had that same rock star vibe, but looked almost nothing alike. One was blond with highlights that gave him a surfer look. Another had long ebony hair, like the kind of black where it’s flat, lifeless and you know it came from a bottle. The last guy had brown curly hair that hung in sexy waves around his face, framing his bright blue eyes. If he wasn’t mopping a smear of blood from his nose, I might’ve been attracted to him, but as it stood, I didn’t like to be called sweetheart, or be told I couldn’t drive.

  “We weren’t honking at you.” While the guy’s boots weren’t shit kickers, he could still kick some ass. His knuckle was scuffed and bleeding. “Were we, Carter?”

  Carter shook his head and passed us, swaggering through the door of Dairy Obscene. “Don’t believe a word he says, sweetheart,” he said before the door could drift closed. “He can’t be trusted.”

  Another car pulled into the lot. Mr. Biker Boots placed his hand at the small of my back and ushered me forward. “Don’t listen to him. Carter gets cranky when his blood sugar is low.”

  “Low blood sugar,” I said skeptically. I might’ve snorted.

  “Seriously. He really does. Has a medical tag and everything.”

  “If you say so.” Turning, I stepped over the curb and entered the store. Cool air wafted across my shoulders, raising goosebumps over my skin.

  “Hey Coop!” said Ash, waving from behind the counter. Levy, my two year old son and I, were regulars. And nobody could resist Levy, so I was known by association. “The usual?”

  “Nah, going all out today.”

  “No Levy?”

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she told me. Handing a cone to the blond surfer guy, she wiped her hands on her apron and turned to the next customer.

  “No rush.” Scooting onto a stool along the counter, I smoothed my pencil skirt down over my thighs. When I looked up, I found Mr. Biker Boots and his friends staring at me.

  “The usual?” Mr. Biker Boot inquired. He slid onto the stool next to mine. I suppressed a sigh. So much for ‘me’ time.

  “Vanilla.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  Behind the counter, Ash gasped with mock outrage, clutching her chest. He’d totally dissed her shop. “You’ve never had our vanilla before. Here try a sample.” She passed him a small, white, paper cup with a tiny pink spatula.

  “For real?” he said, eyeing the spatula
with disdain. Shrugging, his pinky popped out as if he were holding a cup of tea. My mouth quirked in a dim smile. Trying the ice cream, his eyebrows arched in surprise. “It’s good. Still boring, but good. What makes it so special?”

  “The vanilla beans,” Ash explained. “Baboons find them a real delicacy. They eat them by the dozen. The pods ferment in their stomach, which magnifies and enhances the bean’s flavor. Once they pass, the villagers go around and collect them from the dung.”

  His friends busted out laughing. So did I.

  “Dude!” Carter gasped, holding his stomach. “That’s just wrong on so many levels! You just ate monkey shit!”

  Unfazed, he finished the vanilla then turned to his friends and delved his tongue into the empty cup, licking the paper clean in a manner that was anything but polite or couth and could be construed as nothing but blatantly sexual. And dear god did he go to town on the thing.

  I could feel my face flush, my mind going places I had no right to be.

  Realizing his gaffe, he blinked and curled his tongue back into his mouth. “Sorry, that was really crude. Been hanging around the guys too long.”

  I raised one brow. “Oh, so you swing that way, eh?”

  This only sent the guys into another round of gibes. “Oh man!” said the guy with the fake black hair to the surfer. “That was an epic fail! She just totally shot him down!”

  “Kidding,” Ash said to Mr. Biker Boot, as she passed me my cone. “Really. We use Madagascar beans, only the best heavy cream, and our ice cream is all hand-churned.” She smiled congenially. “So what can I get for you?”

  “What she’s having.” He jerked his head in my direction. Ok, maybe I was enjoying my ice cream a little too much, but like I said, it was toe curling. I was determined to enjoy it.

  “One Cooper special coming up.”

  “Cooper special?”

  Ash beamed, flashing her pearly whites. “White chocolate ice cream with a raspberry sorbet swirl and a dark chocolate shell on a sugar cone. Cooper concocted it and we kinda stole it for our own.”

  “Cooper must be special if you’ve named an ice cream after her.”

  “What can you say? Cooper’s got good taste.”

  Cooper would have to disagree. Cooper made all kind of wrong decisions in her life. Picking ice cream, however, wasn’t one of them, so I pinched a smile.

  “Cooper,” said Biker Boots, “is that like your last name?”

  “Nope. It’s like my first name.”

  “Your name’s Cooper?” He gave me a look that said, ‘Bullshit.’ I returned it with a look that said, ‘Really?’ “It’s a boy’s name is all. I know you probably hear it all the time.”

  “A million times.”

  “So what’s your last name, Sharp?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’ve heard that a million times, too.” I made the mistake of calling the quip ‘cheesy’ once. You know…Cooper Sharp cheese…so lame. It was completely unintentional, but the guy trying to pick me up at the time thought I was flirting back.

  I never made that mistake again.

  Nibbling the last of the dark chocolate shell from my ice cream, I dragged my tongue along the edge of the cone. When I looked up again, he was staring. I suspected I wore the same expression when he tongued the paper cup in front of me. Gathering my composure, I grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and wiped my mouth.

  “So…?” he prompted. When I declined to answer, he asked, “What? Is it a secret? Some hidden identity you’re trying to maintain?” He smiled at some private joke. Ironically enough, he had no idea how close to the mark he’d come.

  “Sorry. I just don’t give my name to every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

  He smiled, liked the challenge. Except for me, it wasn’t a challenge. “Good thing my name’s not Dick. It’s Tate.” He stabbed his hand in my direction. “Tate Watkins.”

  I stared dumbly, and then choked on my ice cream as recognition set in. Pounding myself on the chest, I slid from the stool. My face turned six shades of red. Tate stood, following me as I backed across the room, his brows raised in concern. “Are you alright?”

  I nodded and waved him off. No, I wasn’t ok. I was far from ok. I was standing beside Tate Fucking Watkins. The lead singer of Hautboy. For the past ten years, at any given time, you could find at least one of their albums fluctuating on the top-ten list. Everywhere they went, the freaking cameras followed. The paparazzi swarmed around them like flies on shit. Jesus. Were they here already? My head snapped to the door looking for long white lenses and flash bursts. Christ, I was so screwed.

  The problem was Grant Hayes. The guy was a psychopath. Literally, not figuratively. I met him in my freshmen year of college. We dated for six months. I guess you could say our relationship ended with a bang. Or more like a right hook. He fractured my eye socket. I lost vision of my left eye for almost a month. To this day, it wasn’t one hundred percent. I had lost my peripheral vision. I came home from college to heal, and I never went back.

  But it didn’t end that easily. My nightmare had only just started. He followed me across the entire fucking continent. He stalked me, left an odd and threatening assortment of gifts on my doorstep for almost six months. He called around the clock, sent endless streams of text messages and emails. Though the gifts stopped, the latter continued. I guess it was his way of letting me know he was still available.

  No, my story’s not done yet. When I spent that few days in the hospital before and after my surgery, my test reports came back. And the nice lady doctor told me they were positive. Like two pink lines positive. I never told Grant, and I went to all lengths to make sure he never found out. I’d moved three times in the past two years, each time drifting farther from my friends and family. I uprooted my life to keep my secret safe. Yet each time I received the inevitable text that would allude to the fact he knew exactly where I was. It was threat enough.

  If it were just me, I could deal with it, but I had Levy to think of, and there was no way I was letting Grant within a mile of him. That’s all I needed was one little image of my mug to grace the papers, reading, “Tate Watkins’ mystery girl.” I saw them all the time. The fangirls. The groupies. The faces plastered in all the gossip magazines and across the internet.

  Without a doubt, Grant would find me, and I couldn’t allow that to happen.

  “Cooper?” Tate prompted.

  Turning back, I forced a smile. “It was nice to meet you, Tate, but I—” I coughed again, cleared my throat. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “You didn’t tell me your name.”

  I coughed into my wrist. “Smith.”

  “Smith.” He didn’t believe me one bit.

  I nodded. “Smith.”

  “Tell Levy that there’s a cone here with his name on it,” Ash called as I pushed my way through the door.

  “Will do. Bye, Ash.”

  Sliding into my Mini, I pressed the ignition and backed out, scanning the lot with a cursory glance. By the time I’d driven two miles down the street, I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there. I had completely fazed out, which was frightening because I couldn’t say if I’d stopped at either the traffic light or the stop sign along the way. I drew a complete blank.

  In my haste, I forgot about my ice cream. It was running down my fingers and had dripped onto my skirt. Mentally cursing my stupidity, I pulled over and tossed my cone out the window, then dug through my bag for the baby wipes and scrubbed futilely at the raspberry stains, which only made them spread into a wider circle of diluted pink dye.

  “Damn it!”

  Balling the wipe in my hand, I tossed it into my bag and dropped my head against the headrest. My knuckles whitened around the steering wheel. I hated that Grant still had control over me even after all these years. It wasn’t fair. He took everything from me. I liked to think that I had prevailed, that I was a survivor, but deep down inside I knew that’s all I was doing, surviving. I wasn’t really living, not truly. He hovered constantly in the back
ground of my mind. I never made decisions without taking him into consideration first. From where I lived to whom I accepted as a friend, he affected every aspect of my life.

  To my left, I heard the terse honk of a horn. A largish black SUV pulled to a stop alongside me. The window powered down with a soft hum, revealing a lean and dark Tate Watkins. “Car trouble?”

  “No. Just made a mess of myself. I’m trying to clean it up.”

  “So you’re good?”

  “Great.”

  “See you around then, Cooper Hale.”

  He left me gaping as his truck pulled away, listening to the deep sound of his chuckle. Just before the window went up, I caught a flash of white teeth. I needed to have a heart to heart with Ash about doling out my personal information to strangers. And what did he mean by that—see you around? Shit! Damn it! Fuck!

  ♫♪♫♪

  “Hautboy,” said Em in disbelief. “What would they be doing here, in Collegeville? I know we’re not in the boon docks, but you’d think they’d stay at the Ritz Carlton or Palomar.”

  Emily was my closest friend. My only friend, truthfully, though she was a few years older than I was. She lived in the apartment beside mine. The place was a little more lived in and a lot more loved, while mine was bare bones. I hadn’t had time to make it a home. Grant made sure I never did.

  Em watched Levy for me Friday and Saturday nights while I waited tables at the bar. She knew about Grant. I disclosed everything to her for her own safety, just like I had with the landlord. Both parties were surprisingly understanding. Em was quick to take me under her wing. Come to find out, she had been in my shoes once before. So she knew my pain. Her ex was in prison, but she still kept a revolver tucked safely between her mattress and box spring.

  And Mr. Craig, my landlord, he just had a soft spot for broken girls, in a platonic, fatherly way. God bless him. They didn’t make enough men like Garrison Craig.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I was busy choking on my ice cream.” Pulling my legs up behind me, I settled into the plush, floral printed sofa. “He must think I’m such an idiot.”