Chapter Eight
S he had come to enjoy this last trip outside before bedtime each night for her and Theo.
With her daughter asleep in her room, Jenna would take the dog down the staircase and out the back door to the fenced dog yard.
In the moonlight, with the murmuring sound of the ocean not far off and the random peeps and calls of the various night creatures who lived nearby, she found it peaceful. Almost meditative.
Once, she had been afraid of the night. Those were the hours when she felt most vulnerable, at risk from a boogeyman whose name she knew all too well.
Since Aaron Barker had been arrested, Jenna worked hard to overcome her fear of nighttime. She wouldn’t let him take that from her forever.
Okay, she still walked outside with pepper spray in her pocket. She could be brave and cautious at the same time, couldn’t she?
On impulse, tonight she had brought along Theo’s leash as well as her phone, where she had a security camera linked up in the living area of the apartment so she could hear if Addie woke for a glass of water. She decided to walk the dog down the beach a short way, only to the water’s edge directly west of the house.
As she watched the moonlight dance on the waves, she released a breath, all the pent-up frustrations and concerns of the day floating away on the tide.
She had worked that day at Rosa’s gift shop, and her shift had been unusually stressful from start to finish.
The day had started with her catching a shoplifter, her least favorite thing. Worse, the person who had slipped into her purse a handcrafted necklace valued at several hundred dollars turned out to be someone she knew, the aunt of one of her students.
It hadn’t been the woman’s first offense and not even her first shoplifting incident at By-the-Wind, so Rosa had no choice but to call the police, who had arrested the woman, angry and protesting all the way.
The event had put a pall over her whole day. After her shift and before she had to go pick up the girls from their fourth day at science camp, Jenna had gone to the grocery store to purchase a few things she had forgotten in Saturday’s epic shopping trip and had ended up dropping and breaking an entire bottle of pasta sauce.
She had insisted on helping the store employee clean up the mess. As a result, she had been late picking up the girls and had rushed up to the community center to find them waiting on the curb for her.
She hadn’t even had the chance to talk to Wes that afternoon when he came to pick up his daughter, as Brielle had rushed away with a hurried thank-you as soon as she saw her father’s motorcycle pull into the driveway, eager to tell him about all the things she had learned that day.
Jenna told herself it was for the best. She was thinking about the man entirely too much anyway. It didn’t help that for the past four days she had seen him in the morning when he dropped off Brielle and then again in the afternoon when he picked her up.
Each time she saw him, Jenna’s awareness of the man only seemed to intensify.
What was she going to do about it?
She sighed. Exactly nothing. She planned to remain friendly with him and keep a safe distance.
“Are you ready to head back?” she asked Theo after a few more moments.
The dog turned its head, tail wagging. At odd moments, she almost felt as if he understood exactly what she was saying. As far as dogs went, Theo seemed unusually intuitive.
Sure. And maybe during those odd moments when he seemed to be staring at nothing in the corner, he was really communing with the Brambleberry House ghost.
She shook her head at herself. He was a great dog but he wasn’t some kind of canine medium to the other side.
“Come on, Theo. Good boy.”
The dog trotted beside her, already well-behaved on the leash. So far, he was fitting into their little family as if he had been there forever.
She keyed in the password to the locked beach gate and made her way through the garden, pausing occasionally to sniff the lavender and the climbing roses over one of the trellises.
She again felt so fortunate to be living amidst such beauty. Not only were the gardens of the house spectacular, but the view was beyond compare. On stormy nights, she loved watching the clouds roll over the water and seeing the waves churn.
Tonight was calm, though, only a light breeze, lush with the smell of flowers and pine and sea, to send the leaves shivering.
She was nearly to the house when the dark shape of a man stepped down from the porch.
She let out an instinctive shriek and reached for her pepper spray.
“Easy, Jenna,” a low voice said. “Easy. It’s me. Wes. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I had no idea you were out here or I would have given you some kind of warning.”
Her chest felt tight and shaky and it took her a moment to catch her breath again. With her heart pounding, she slipped the pepper spray back into her pocket.
“Hello. You startled me.”
“I can tell. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
Heat soaked her face and her skin felt tight and itchy with embarrassment. “Yes. Fine. I was surprised, that’s all.”
“Are you sure that’s all?” He stepped down from the porch and moved closer to her. Jenna fought the urge to back away.
“What do you mean?”
“When I first moved in, I thought something about me was causing you to be so jittery.”
She sighed, embarrassed all over again. “It’s not you,” she whispered. Or at least not completely him.
He peered down at her in the moonlight. “I think I’m beginning to figure that out.”
He reached out and laid a hand on her arm. She didn’t feel threat from him. She felt...comfort.
“Why are you so nervous, Jen? Did someone hurt you?”
His voice was gentle, like a cottonwood fluff floating on the breeze. He sounded concerned, not nosy or intrusive, as if he genuinely wanted to know so that he could figure out a way to help her.
“It’s a very long story,” she said.
He sat down on the bench there in the garden surrounded by rhododendron, iris, rosebushes. He gestured to the spot beside him, not demanding, only inviting her to share if she wanted to, offering a listening ear.
She wanted to tell him, suddenly.
She did not like to talk about what had happened to her two years earlier, especially nights like tonight when the fear and emotional distress seemed so raw and close.
Yet somehow, she wanted to tell Wes.
After a moment, she lowered herself to the bench beside him, strangely aware of the hard slats of the bench beneath her, the sweetly scented night breeze, the soft knit fabric of her sweater.
“I told you a little about my husband and how he died.”
“Yes. I’m sorry again for that.”
“I loved Ryan dearly. Together we created the family that neither of us had before. He was a kind man. Not perfect, but perfect for me, if that makes sense.”
She glanced at Wes in time to see a muscle twitch in his jaw. “He sounds great,” he said.
“He was. I was devastated by his death. So was Addie. I didn’t expect to ever date again. But a year after he died, friends pushed me to try online dating. I didn’t think I was ready for anything serious, but they persuaded me that I didn’t have to marry a man just because I went out on a date with him. It would be good practice, they told me, and would help me figure out what I might be looking for if I ever wanted to let someone else into my heart.”
She picked at the cuff of her sweater, unable to meet his gaze. “I didn’t want to date anyone. At the same time, I was beginning to feel terribly lonely. I taught all day and then was alone with Addie all evening. I missed adult conversation, especially because Ryan had been sick for so long and hadn’t really been a partner for that last year. I thought maybe dating again would distract me from how much I still missed my husband.”
“I’m going to assume something went south,” he said, his voice low.
She sighed. “You could say that.”
She leaned back on the bench, finding an odd sort of strength from Wes’s company. How strange, that this dangerous man could make her feel so very safe.
“I met a few guys who seemed nice enough. We went out for coffee or a meal, but things never progressed beyond that. I figured that was enough, then I made one more match on my profile. A man from a nearby town. Aaron Barker.”
She couldn’t seem to say the name without her whole body tensing. Did Wes notice?
“Aaron seemed very nice on the surface. He was charming and kind. We went for coffee and had a lovely conversation. For the first time, I was tempted to go on a second date with someone. We went to lunch one afternoon. It was pleasant. Enjoyable, even. We talked on the phone a few times and met a few nights later, for dinner this time. After dinner, he walked me to my car and...kissed me.”
At this rate, she was going to unravel her sweater, so she forced her fretting fingers to relax.
“It was too soon for me. I got into my car and drove away. Before I could make it home, I had to pull over and be sick.”
“Not a good reaction for a first kiss.”
She remembered, suddenly, how she had reacted after Wes had kissed her. She had certainly not been sick. She had been achy and hungry and wanted more.
“He called me that night to check that I made it home safely and I...tried to break things off. I explained that I wasn’t ready to date yet, that it had been a mistake for me to create a profile on the dating website and that I should not have let my friends push me into it. I tried to be as kind as possible and assure Aaron that he had done nothing wrong. I told him I liked him but that it wouldn’t be fair to date him when my own emotions were still so tangled up with my late husband.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t take it well.”
She shook her head. “He refused to listen to anything I said. It was almost as if he didn’t hear me. He kept talking about how we clicked and he knew for sure that I felt it as well. I tried to let him down as gently as possible, but he would not listen. Not that night and not the next night when he called me again. He started to became...forceful.”
He grew rigid beside her. “Oh, Jenna.”
“Not that. He didn’t...sexually assault me or anything. He just refused to accept that I didn’t want a relationship with him. He would write me love notes, send flowers to me at work, text me endlessly at any time of the day or night. I finally blocked his number, but he would get another number and start all over again. I changed my phone number and my email, but he always seemed to figure out how to connect with me.”
“Did you talk to the police?”
“He was the police,” she said simply. “He was a patrol officer for a small department in a nearby Utah town. His uncle was the police chief and he wouldn’t listen to any of my complaints. Not only that, but Aaron specialized in cybercrime, which made him a tech whiz. He could infiltrate all my social media, my contact info, even my private school email address. I couldn’t escape him. This went on for weeks, until I was completely terrified.”
“I can imagine.”
“And then he went after Addie.”
“How?”
The single clipped word contained both shock and hard fury. It should have frightened her, coming from such a fierce man, but somehow only made her want to lean against him and let this man protect her from the world.
“She was in kindergarten and he picked her up from school early one day. I hadn’t said anything to my coworkers about what was going on with me. I guess I was too embarrassed. So when he showed his badge to the kindergarten teacher—who was elderly and should have retired years earlier—and told her we were old friends and that he wanted to take Addie to visit her father’s grave and pick up a birthday present for me, she didn’t blink an eye.”
“I hope she was fired,” he said, without a note of sympathy in his voice.
“She was retiring that year anyway, so it was all swept under the carpet. Anyway, he returned her to me about an hour after school was out. He kept her just long enough to terrify me and make it clear that he could get to either of us anytime he wanted. I knew I had to leave. He wasn’t going to let up. If anything, he was escalating.”
“Sounds like it.”
“That very day, I happened to get a phone call from my dear friend Rosa.”
“Rosa? As in Rosa our landlady?”
“One and the same. We were college roommates. Somehow in the middle of our conversation, I ended up spilling the entire ugly story to her. For so long, I had carried the burden by myself. It felt so good to tell someone else.”
“Rosa was a good choice.”
“Yes. Her father was in law enforcement so she wasn’t naive. She knew what could happen if I didn’t take action. She insisted I come to stay with her. She set me up in my apartment, got me a job at her gift shop and basically helped me begin the process of putting my life back together.”
“Good for you.”
“I can’t explain how wonderful it felt to finally start believing I was safe. I really thought Addie and I could make a new start here. I was even thinking about trying to get an Oregon teaching certificate.”
Her voice trailed off and she once more gripped her hands together in her lap.
“I take it that didn’t happen as seamlessly as you had hoped.”
His gentle tone soothed her somehow. The memories were still hard, but they seemed slightly less hard through sharing them.
“Addie and I had a few good months here. We were finally starting to feel safe. And then Aaron found me.”
“How?”
“A fluke, really. Apparently someone from his little Utah town came to the coast on vacation and spotted me working at the gift shop. I should have expected it. Many people from other western states come here to enjoy the Oregon Coast. It was my bad luck that one of his friends who had seen a picture of me decided to come to Cannon Beach.”
“Did Barker try to come after you?”
She nodded with a shiver she couldn’t restrain. The events of that afternoon, here in this very garden, suddenly felt closer than they had since she testified at his sentencing hearing.
“Aaron couldn’t understand why I had fled. But he magnanimously told me he was ready to forgive everything as long as I came back with him. When I tried to flee, he...attacked me and especially Rosa, when she tried to protect me. She was so brave. Though she and her dog were both hurt, they still managed to distract him long enough for me and Addie to escape into the house and call 911. I’ll never be able to repay her for her courage. She showed far more grit than I did. I was petrified.”
“Understandable, after everything you had been through. What happened to Barker? Was he caught?”
“Yes. Rosa hit him with a rock and stunned him. He was still coming to when Wyatt and the other police officers arrived. He was arrested and charged with multiple assault and attempted kidnapping charges. He pleaded not guilty, of course. He would never admit he did anything wrong, but he was convicted and sentenced to serve five years in the state prison system.”
“Five years. Hardly seems like enough for what he put you through.”
“He was sentenced to five years but was scheduled for a parole hearing in December.”
His gaze narrowed. “Was?”
Wes, she had previously noticed, didn’t miss much. “Yes. He...he died unexpectedly in prison a few weeks ago. Natural causes. An aneurysm, according to the autopsy.”
“Wow. No kidding?”
She nodded. “I finally feel like I can breathe again, you know? For the first time in two years, I can think about the future. In many ways, I feel as if I’ve been living in suspended animation. Trapped by events beyond my control. I was ready to go into hiding again as soon as he left prison. Now I don’t have to. I can stay here in Cannon Beach. We can make this area our forever home. It’s liberating.”
He looked down at Theo, sleeping at their feet. “Is that what led you to adding a dog to your family?”
She nodded. “I’ve been in survival mode for so long. It really feels as if Addie and I have been in a constant state of turmoil since Ryan died. We’re finally in a good place now. Addie has wanted a dog forever and this seemed like a small thing to do for her, after everything she has endured.”
“He seems like a good dog.”
“We got lucky. He’s really well-behaved and eager to learn.”
He petted the dog, and she couldn’t seem to stop watching those big, calloused hands.
“So now you know the entire grim story. I don’t...trust easily. For obvious reasons.”
“Understandable.”
“It’s easy to fall into the victim mentality. But I don’t want to live the rest of my life that way. That is giving Aaron entirely too much power over me. I would rather not have to think about him another moment.”
“I’m sorry I dredged up all the bad memories by asking what happened.”
She shook her head. “I wanted to tell you. I consider you a friend, and friends share things about their lives with each other, right?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“You were honest with me about what happened to you. I should have been honest in return. I suppose I’m a little ashamed that it has affected me so much, when there are others who have been through much worse things. Like you, for instance, convicted for something you didn’t do.”
“My mom used to tell me not to compare my troubles to anyone else’s. I wouldn’t want theirs and they wouldn’t want mine.”
She smiled. “Well, thank you for the sympathetic ear. I’m glad I told you.”
“So am I. It only reinforced to me how amazing you are.”
She blinked, disconcerted by his words. “Me? I’m not amazing. I told you how terrified I was when Aaron found me. I couldn’t think straight. Two years later, I’m still scared of far too many things. I even scream at shadows, as you saw clearly tonight.”
“And yet you are inherently kind to your students, to your customers at the gift shop and to random strange men who live upstairs.”
He took her hand in his and smiled down at her. Something sparked in his gaze, something warm and glittery, and his throat moved as he swallowed hard.
“Wes.”
That was all she said. All she could manage. His gaze met hers and she was unbearably moved when he lifted her hand to his mouth and gently kissed her fingers.
She wanted to kiss him.
An aching hunger bloomed to life, like the rosebushes bursting with color on a June morning.
She looked at his mouth, breathless as she waited for him.
He lowered his mouth and she leaned toward him, heart pounding. At the last moment, he froze, his expression suddenly tormented.
He wouldn’t kiss her, she realized. Not only because of what she had told him but because she had been clear that she didn’t want more than a friendship with him.
If she were wise, she would count her blessings, gather her dog and rush inside.
She didn’t feel very wise right now. Before she could think through the ramifications, she leaned forward, bridging the last few inches between them, and kissed him.
It was as if she had unleashed the storm. He kissed her back with a fierce intensity that pushed every coherent thought out of her head.
Still, she sensed he was holding back. She could feel it in his leashed strength, in the tight control he was keeping over himself.
She wanted that wildness, suddenly. Would this man ever let himself lose control?
She tightened her arms around his neck and tangled her mouth with his, wanting the delicious kiss to go on and on.