Chapter Forty
CLARKE
I had been prepared, of course.
For something dangerous to happen.
Years of martial arts practice with both male and female instructors who had stressed to me the importance of getting out of 'rape position' and how vital it was never to 'give up my back.’ They had told me that the best way to avoid an ugly variety was never letting a man get me into those positions in the first place.
And, well, growing up with a cop—then detective—father had exposed me to sit down talks that most impressionable tween and young adult girls likely never had to learn.
It was an odd thing, after all, for a girl who was still going through that awkward 'I neither know what colors suit my skin tone nor know how to apply the makeup I bought' phase to be learning how to plunge a knife and twist, causing the maximum amount of damage possible. Most young don’t women receive a knife as a gift on their eighteenth birthday, nor a chart on the most vulnerable areas on the body to plunge it.
I had been raised to believe that the worst-case scenario was always around the corner, that bad things happened to girls like me all the time. Being prepared gave me an edge.
Which was why there was a knife under my thigh, a hammer under my seat, a screwdriver in the panel of the door, a crowbar in my trunk.
All save for the knife were perfectly legal to have on you. I mean, after all, maybe I was doing renovations on my house. They didn't know. But they worked as perfect blunt—and in the screwdriver's case, given enough determination—sharp objects.
Stun and run.
That was the way my father had phrased it, and my instructors had been full of similar advice. Never try to win a fight; instead just get them hurt enough to allow you a small window to run away, get safe.
I also knew that hanging out in my car for hours on end made me the metaphorical sitting duck, so I had been sure to be on my toes.
I had clocked him as he moved down the street.
He was a bit hard to miss—tall, thin to the point of worrying about his well being, brown hair a little long and a little unkempt, dressed in one of those ultra-soft t-shirts that cost like fifteen dollars per tee in a nondescript gray-blue color, and a pair of pants that were neither slacks nor jeans, but some kind of sturdier material that somehow also looked buttery soft.
His sneakers had at one time been white, but were scuffed, the laces frayed.
He'd been texting a bit frantically at his phone, and I had immediately written him off as lost, or trying to find a place where he and his friends agreed to meet up.
I was usually a good judge of people.
I'd been shocked to see him sliding in beside me in an oddly calm, confident way for someone who looked like he should be jittery with anxiety and millennial uncertainty.
Nothing against millennials; I was one myself.
But some individuals just seemed to wear the title on their sleeve more than others.
As a whole, I always pegged my fellow generationers as slightly less dangerous than older ones. Minus frat boys. Those fuckers could never be underestimated or trusted.
But there he was.
Completely unfazed by the knife at his throat, even turning his head, so it nicked him, not even wincing at the little trickle of blood.
Up close, I clocked things I had missed from afar. Like how strong his bone structure was. I wasn't sure if he knew he was attractive, was bothered by it, and tried to hide it with the somewhat wild hair and the large glasses, or if he simply didn't know he was good-looking.
His eyes, which in the dark seemed brownish, but when a car passed, headlights shining on his face, there were hints of green in them as well.
But that wasn't what struck me about them.
There was a depth there, something that made me think of that guy a grade above me in school whose gaze seemed to hold the secrets of the universe.
Whoever Barrett Anderson was, he was smart—maybe even scarily so. Which was perhaps why my dad had chosen him over his brother who, while I didn't live in Navesink Bank, I knew of and had heard the reputation of: ex-military, opened his own really successful private investigative service.
Apparently, so had his brother. Though I had never heard his reputation before, I just knew the sign from visiting the NBPD.
Once he'd left the car, I had—after locking my doors this time—pulled out my burner phone, looking into him.
I found very little, aside from his business listing and a really well-designed website.
But one that didn't even have a way to contact him.
He was one of those rare unicorns. You know.
.. people who actually preferred meeting face-to-face.
The freak.
Maybe he thought it helped him get a better read on a situation. Which, well, I understood.
Regardless of not being able to find much on him—the man didn't even have a social media presence which was, well, almost creepy—I knew he must have been good if my father had chosen him to look for me instead of someone else who had a much stronger presence online, had ratings, reviews, and a solid reputation.
My father and I maybe had some rough times. It was never easy for a young girl to come to terms with a father who often seemed to choose work over her. It was a knee-jerk reaction to feel rejected, unloved, not good enough, like I was not important to him.
It took a long time to understand that while my father didn't always love me the way I wanted to be loved, he loved me in his own way.
He always made sure he paid his child support, and then sent me spending money on top of it.
He had a security system installed on my mom's and my new house—to which my mother screamed at him for overstepping and being controlling and lots of other things heavily punctuated with colorful language.
He paid for my martial arts classes. He gave me lessons on protecting myself, how to clock a dangerous person, and the good and bad areas I needed to know about.
He looked out for me.
Even when I knew he couldn't always afford it.
He made it happen.
So if he chose Barrett Anderson to find me, he did it because he knew something about him that wasn't apparent to me.
And the longer I thought about it as I got back to my hotel room, slipped out of my sweaty clothes, and climbed in the shower to scrub it all away, the more it nagged me that he had been able to find me, that he had so effortlessly snuck up on me.
I'd been careful.
Incredibly so.
I hadn't left a single clue.
Or so I had thought.
And I was wrong, clearly.
There was no denying it as I stood in my underwear and a tee, brushing out the hair that I couldn't quite get used to, always dragging the brush too hard, too far down, expecting longer strands, ending up scraping the side of my neck and shoulder with the brush tips.
It bothered me that he got the better of me.
It bothered me because it reinforced something I had been told more than once recently.
That I simply didn't have what it takes.
I wasn't good enough.
Everything I thought and believed about myself was wrong.
There are a lot of hard pills to swallow, but your own ineptitude was possibly the most jagged of them all, catching and scraping all the way down, leaving you awake with a stomachache all night.
I knew part of the reason I got myself psyched up... only to fail.
I was impulsive.
Even as I thought it, I further proved the rightness of the statement as I dragged on a pair of shorts, a tee, and my Chucks, grabbed my purse and keys, and left the hotel room I had been dying to get back to for hours, to cool off, to lay naked in the bed feeling the air conditioning whisper its secrets over every inch of my skin, eat a whole pizza by myself while trying to tell myself it wouldn't go right to my thighs, then get some much-needed sleep.
But once I got the idea in my head, there was no use pretending I wasn't going to act on it. I would usually let it eat at me for a couple of hours, then drag me out of bed until I acted on it.
I figured it was better to do it then than at five in the morning.
So I drove around town, looking for the rusted piece of crap he'd driven off in, eventually finding it parked out in front of a motel—the kind with the room doors that lead into the parking lot.
The less safe types my father had warned me against when I was a teen going away on spring break.
But guys rarely had the same concerns that girls did, even when we did the “smart thing” and stayed in motels and hotels in packs.
It was no surprise that no one noticed me; people at these kinds of places were always apt to mind their own damn business since what brought them to cheap places like this was generally something somewhat nefarious.
So the guy out smoking in his doorway—and not a plain old cigarette—didn't even glance my way as I ducked down to pick Barrett's lock, pushing the door open slowly, so it didn't creak, or I didn't surprise him too much and end up with a searing new hole in my body.
The door made a slight clinking sound as it hit something, making me reach in the space, finding a glass sitting there, a makeshift security system if someone came charging in all willy nilly.
I may have been impulsive, but I was also careful.
Judging by the still form on the bed, Barrett had no idea I was there.
Until I dropped down on his bed, of course.
"What are you doing in my room?" he asked, his voice sleep-rough, and—as every woman knew—automatically sexy.
"Asking you how you found me," I reminded him, wondering if he was one of those people whose brains didn't function for a while after being woken up unexpectedly. Me? I swear my brain never actually turned off. I woke up thinking.
"How did you get in here?"