by R. R. Banks
“You okay?” I ask.
She nods. “I’m fine.”
“Sorry about that.”
I clear my throat, and once traffic starts to move again, I drive on. I’m so distracted by the woman in the back seat I almost got us into a wreck. Yeah, that would go over real well.
Twenty minutes later, we’re pulling into the parking lot for her condo community. It’s a nice place overlooking the Sound. I get out of the car first and look around. Night has fallen, so the shadows everywhere are thick and inky. A cool breeze blows, sending leaves skittering across the parking lot with a dry, scratchy sound.
I walk around the SUV to let Felicity out of the back, and when I put my hand on the door handle, I feel a prickling on the back of my neck. It’s a feeling I’m very familiar with – we’re being watched. My time in the Corps made me learn to trust my gut. The one time I didn’t, people died. So ever since that day, I’ve never failed to listen to my instincts. They’ve never steered me wrong.
Which tells me that somebody’s out there watching us. Maybe it’s completely benign – somebody out walking their dog or something. I don’t know. All I do know is that we’re being observed by somebody.
I hold my finger up to the window so Felicity can see me telling her to wait a minute. I walk to the passenger side door, open it, and pull the .45 from beneath the passenger seat. I chamber a round, then tuck it into the back of my jeans. Taking one last look around and not seeing anybody lurking within eyesight, I let her out of the back and usher her through the parking lot, one hand on the small of her back, the other hovering near my back, ready to pull my weapon and go to work.
“What is it? What’s going on?” she asks.
“Just keep walking.”
We make it to the elevators, and I push her inside ahead of me. I don’t see anybody, but that feeling of being observed is growing stronger. We take the elevator to her floor. When the doors slide open, I step out, quickly glancing one way and then the other. Seeing nobody standing in the way, I motion for Felicity to come out.
I walk closely beside her as she leads us toward her place, a look of near panic on her face. I glance out a window and look at the way the moon shimmers off the Sound and at the darkness clinging to the parking lot several floors below.
“Is everything okay?” she asks. “Is he out there?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “It’s just a feeling. But I trust my gut.”
We get to her door and Felicity unlocks it, quickly stepping inside. I follow close behind and bump into her when she stops short. Her keys hit the tile of her foyer with a sharp clatter. Her gasp is audible.
“What is it?” I ask.
I close the door behind me and step around her, ready for anything. Felicity’s face is pale, drawn, and she covers her mouth with both of her hands, tears shimmering in her eyes. The foyer opens up to a large living room area. Sitting on the oak coffee table are red roses in tall vases. A couple dozen of them. Even worse, there are pictures of Felicity – random, candid shots of her at the store, or the coffee house. There’s one of her standing on her balcony with a cup of coffee in her hand.
All in all, there must be four or five dozen photos of her. Judging by her reaction, they’re not sitting there because she’s a narcissist who enjoys looking at herself.
“So, he broke in,” I mutter, pulling out my phone.
I dial the police and ask to speak to Stanton. I tell him what’s going on and that he needs to send some detectives out immediately. He puts me in touch with a Detective Reid, and I give him the broad strokes of what’s happening. Reid promises to be out shortly, so I have Felicity start to gather her things.
“There’s no way in hell I’m letting you stay here tonight,” I explain.
“What about my cat?”
I run a hand through my hair. “Bring it with us. I don’t know how long you’ll be gone.”
Her eyes well with tears, but she summons her strength and fights them off. I can see her brain spinning. I know she’s looking for a way out of this, but if this creep not only knows where she lives, but has already broken in, there’s just no way she’s going to come back here until he’s caught and jailed.
She hands me a bag that contains a cat that’s hunched down inside yowling and hissing at me. Lovely. I’ve never been much of a cat person, but since I have no idea when she’s coming back, I can’t rightly tell her to leave it here where it’ll starve or die of thirst. I’m an asshole, but I’m not that big of an asshole.
With all of her things put together, I lead the way out of her condo and let her lock up behind us. We take the elevator down and cross the lobby, pushing our way through the doors and out into the parking lot to load up my SUV and wait for Reid to show up.
We exit into the cool night air, and Felicity starts hyperventilating. I put my arm around Felicity’s shoulders and tell her to lower her head, pulling her into me. I lead her quickly across the parking lot and toward my car, still whipping my head around to see if Graham is nearby. By the time I load her into the back seat and put her cat in her lap, she’s in tears. I close the door and lock it behind me, then make a quick sweep around my car, my .45 raised. My adrenaline is pounding, and the feeling of being watched from before is shooting through the roof.
But there’s nothing there.
As the police cars roll in, sirens blaring, I notice the lights going on in the other condos and faces pressed to the windows, trying to see what all the commotion is about. I’m sure this is going to look great to Felicity’s homeowners board.
As I stand there, still keeping watch at the edges of the parking lot and waving the officers over to my position, the one thought that has burrowed its way into my brain and keeps digging at me is a simple one – how in the hell did he get inside of her home?
Felicity
I slept most of the hour-long drive into the forest where Knox said he keeps a cabin. The long day combined, with the trauma of the evening, left me feeling wrung out and exhausted. The detective – Reid, I think his name is – took our statements and collected the evidence.
We gave him the name of the man responsible, and he told us he’d bring him in and lean on him. He said that, hopefully, they’ll turn up a fingerprint or something connecting him to the break-in and to hope for the best. But he said if they don’t, and without any actual proof he did it, they’d be hard-pressed to hold him for long.
So, we’re left here hoping for the best.
Knox pulls to a stop in front of a rustic-looking log cabin, and I groan. I’m not looking forward to spending God knows how long out here in the middle of the sticks. I don’t even know if he’s got an internet connection out here.
The door opens and Knox is standing there smiling at me. “Home, sweet home.”
I hand him Agatha’s carrier. “Please tell me there’s running water here.”
“There’s an outhouse out back and if you want to bathe, I can fetch you some water from the lake,” he replies.
I groan again and slide out of his SUV. “Why can’t we stay at a hotel?”
“We need to keep you off the grid for a bit,” he explains. “And this place is about as off the grid as we’re going to get.”
I look around at the soaring trees that surround us, the tops of them nearly high enough to touch the sky. Moonlight shimmers off the lake behind the cabin. Though it’s a beautiful sight, it only reinforces the middle of nowhere feeling for me.
We walk up the three wooden steps to the porch and Knox unlocks the door for us. He pushes it inward and lets me step inside first. He carries my things in, and when he turns on the light, I realize that I’ve been caught judging a book by its cover – the outside of the cabin doesn’t come close to matching the inside.
“Wow. I guess you could say the curtains don’t match the drapes,” I quip.
Knox laughs. “Well played, madame. There’s an immature adolescent inside of you after all.”
“Never said
there wasn’t,” I tell him.
“I was kidding about the outhouse, by the way,” he laughs, setting my things on the table.
“Yeah, I kind of got that impression.”
The interior of the cabin is gorgeously decorated in polished wood and dark colored fabrics. And while it does have a certain rustic charm, it’s purely an affect, since the place is filled with every modern convenience and gadget you could ever dream of.
“There’s a loft,” he mentions, pointing to a set of stairs. “You and the ball of fuzz can sleep up there.”
“Her name is Agatha,” I correct him.
“A thousand apologies,” he teases. “You and Agatha can sleep up there.”
“What about you?” I ask, then point to a hallway. “I can just sleep in one of your guest rooms.”
“One’s an office,” he explains. “And I’d feel better if you weren’t on the ground floor.”
“I thought we were off the grid here in your invisible fortress of solitude,” I tease him right back.
“Nothing is ever one hundred percent,” he concedes. “And I’d rather not roll the dice and have this be that miniscule percentage of something going bad.”
“Fair enough.”
Knox unzips Agatha’s carrier, and I take a step toward him – Ags doesn’t do very well with other people.
“Careful,” I warn him. “Maura can’t get within five feet of her.”
Knox gives me a wry grin and snorts. He reaches inside, slipping her gently out of her carrier. He scratches her behind the ears as he holds her, remarkably somehow getting her to purr. I stand there, stunned. He’s not just holding her but getting her to give him some affection. Ags giving love to a complete stranger is unheard of. Knox gives me a wry smile and hands her over to me.
“Thank you for not making the immature adolescent joke I know you’re dying to make,” I say.
He shrugs. “Too obvious. I don’t always go for the low-hanging fruit.”
Holding Ags against my chest, I feel the rumble of her contented purr and smile as Knox steps into the kitchen and opens up a cupboard. I sit down at the table, still holding onto my cat as he pulls a can of tuna out, opens it, and uses a fork to scrape it onto a small plate.
“Okay fur-face, it’s dinner time.”
Knox sets the plate down on the table and takes a seat across from me. Given all of the excitement tonight, I don’t think there’s any way Ags is going to eat. Surprisingly, she jumps out of my arms and dashes straight over to the plate, digging in heartily.
“It’s like you never feed the poor thing,” he ribs me.
“Shut up,” I laugh. “Ags is very well taken care of.”
As our eyes meet and his crystalline blue eyes lock onto mine, it feels like somebody hit me in the midsection with a sledgehammer. It feels like the wind has been knocked out of me, and I’m having trouble catching my breath. I hate that this man can provoke such a visceral response in me – but I can’t deny it either.
The moment that passes between us is tense and filled with the same sort of anticipation I’d felt hovering back in the tent at the book fair. I know he felt it too. I could see it in the way he looked at me. Only this time, I know Maura isn’t going to storm in and break things up before either of us do something I know I’ll come to regret.
Maura. That’s it.
“I – I should probably call Maura,” I stammer. “Everything happened so fast –”
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” he replies and clears his throat. “I should probably call your brother and update him.”
I stand up and give Ags a scratch before I grab my bag from the table and fish my phone out, noticing that I have a dozen missed calls and two dozen missed text messages from her. Maura worries about me. I hear the front door opening and turn quickly, a bolt of fear surging through me. I let out a silent breath of relief when I see it’s just Knox.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Just outside,” he tells me. “Figured I’d give you a little privacy to make your call.”
I nod, surprised by the thoughtfulness of the gesture. As the door closes behind him, a soft smile touches my lips. Yet another layer of the man is revealed to me. I pace around the front room of the cabin, taking it all in.
Everything is clean. Tidy. Everything has a place, and everything is in its aforementioned place. I guess I was expecting beer cans and pizza boxes all over the floor, posters of naked women on the walls, and general chaos and disorder. I’m honestly shocked by how organized and clean the place is. It’s practically operating room clean.
I don’t know how he pulls that off, given that the place is out in the middle of nowhere. Knox isn’t nearly the hard-living frat boy I’d imagined him to be.
Walking around a corner underneath the stairs, I find myself in a large room that sits beneath the loft. One wall is made up entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake outside. I stand and watch the moonlight shimmering off the surface of the water outside, entranced by the sudden sense of peace and tranquility that washes over me.
Of everything about Knox’s place that surprises me, it’s this room that surprises me the most. There’s a large, overstuffed sofa in the middle of the room, a plush deep wingback sitting next to it, a table sitting between them. Both look well-worn, like Knox has spent a lot of time sitting in them.
And yet more surprising is that the rest of the walls in the room are lined with bookcases – their shelves stuffed with books. And these aren’t just for show. I can tell by the broken spines that all of these have been read – most of them multiple times, by the looks of them.
I sit down in the wingback, looking at the phone in my hand. I’m about to call Maura when I look at the book sitting on the table beside the chair. My stomach lurches and my pulse races. A smile touches my lips as I find myself staring at a copy of Obsidian Fields.
That he reads at all is surprising. I wouldn’t have imagined it. The fact that he’s reading my book is something that blows me away. I don’t know why it gives me such a thrill to know that, but for some reason it does.
Still smiling to myself, I press the button for Maura and hold the phone to my ear. She picks up before the first ring ends.
“Felicity, where have you been? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Maura,” I tell her. “Everything is okay.”
“I saw on the news that –”
“He broke into my apartment,” I say. “Knox thought it best to get me out of there.”
“Where are you?”
I sink back into the chair. “I’m at his cabin,” I confess. “It’s – I don’t know where it is.”
“Then you need to tell him to bring you back to my place, Felicity,” she snaps. “I don’t want you out there with him alone. I don’t trust him.”
“Maura, he protected me,” I protest. “He’s not the one we need to be worried about.”
She scoffs on the other end of the line, and the silence that follows is saturated with disapproval. I can’t blame Maura for not liking him. I mean, he has been an absolute ass to her and revels in aggravating her. But then, Knox isn’t wrong in that she started in on him from the word go. That first night at the bookstore, she looked down on him for being a bodyguard. As if his job somehow made him less than.
I cringe inwardly. Dear God, I’m defending the man. What in the hell is wrong with me?
A thought crosses my mind. She saw on the news? Why would the news have known? I’m just some random author with a small, yet growing, following. The only authors I’ve ever heard mentioned on the news have names like King or Rowling. There were no reporters around, and I doubt the police caused enough commotion back home for it to make it to breaking news.
“Fine,” Maura’s voice is cold. “You’ll be home tomorrow then?”
I chew on my bottom lip, pushing the confusion out of my mind. “I don’t know, Maura,” I tell her. “Knox isn’t sure –”
“That man does not get
a say in this, Felicity,” she states. “He is bad for you in so many ways. Being around him is bad for you.”
“He’s keeping me safe, Maura.”
“By kidnapping you and hiding you in some mysterious cabin?”
“He didn’t kidnap me,” I protest. “My place isn’t safe right now and he thought it best if –”
She grunts in frustration. “Fine. You’re shaken up right now. Who wouldn’t be, given the situation?” she mutters, almost to herself. “You’re not thinking clearly at the moment.”
“Maura, I –”
“Call me tomorrow,” she orders. “We’ll make arrangements to get you into a safe place.”
I pause for a moment to see if she goes on, but she falls silent. “Honestly, I don’t know if there’s a place safer than this, Maura,” I tell her. “We’re completely off the grid out here.”
“Which means you’re completely on your own,” she retorts. “If that stalker shows up, you’re alone out there.”
“I’m pretty sure Knox can take care of it if he does.”
I stand up and start to pace the room, my mind spinning with so many different and competing thoughts. On the one hand, I know Maura’s right – Knox is bad for me on most every level. At least, from a personal standpoint.
Which means I need to separate out the personal from professional. I can’t let thoughts and feelings I have no business having cloud my judgment. I need to remember that this is a business arrangement – this isn’t personal. Knox has been paid to do a job, which is to protect me. And he’s doing that. He’s making me feel safe, and that counts for a lot in my book.
But the fact that I’m seeing these different layers to Knox – seeing that he’s not exactly the mindless meathead I thought he was – has been eye-opening. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some small part of me that wants to know more. That wants to peel back the other layers and see what else he might be hiding from the world.
