Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
When I got to the clinic, Joy was trying to figure out with Ava and Roxie how to get the flowers to the local nursing home so they didn’t go to waste. Of course, she was. Just went to prove how strong my woman was.
But despite Joy’s brave front, I could see signs that she was still freaked.
It was in the way she licked her lips and the slight tremble of her hands as she held her purse.
I needed to get her the hell out of there and back to my house, where I could take care of her.
The drive home had been quiet, Joy's brave mask finally slipping as exhaustion took over.
By the time we got home, her bravado had faded away.
My woman had trusted me to take care of her before I led her to the bedroom.
“You make me feel safe,” were the last words she said before she fell asleep in my arms. I wished I could have fallen asleep, but there was just no way that was going to happen.
She’d been too tired and traumatized by the time we’d arrived to answer any questions I had about her previous stalker.
All she said was it had happened while she’d lived in London and they hadn’t caught the fucker.
Tonight, she wasn’t wearing a sleep shirt.
She’d insisted on making love. I didn’t want to at first. I was too worried about her.
I thought she needed holding, not sex. But I finally understood that she needed the intimacy, the closeness that only came when we joined our bodies.
Hell, she was so worn out by the time we were done that she didn’t have the strength to put on one of my tees.
I slowly disentangled myself from her embrace, then got out of bed and grabbed a clean T-shirt out of my dresser. I went back to bed and carefully pulled it over her head and threaded her arms through the holes.
“Graham?” she muttered softly.
“Sleep, baby.”
“S’okay.”
As I smoothed the tee over her torso, I looked at the scar on her side, just under parallel to the bottom of her breast. I’d asked her about it before, and she’d said it was just a foolish accident.
Now that I took a good look at it in the moonlight, I thought accident my ass.
My gut clenched. Terror and fury mixed together as the cold thought that her stalker in London had stabbed her slithered through my mind.
Motherfucker!
Was this the same guy?
As soon as I got the shirt on her, I wrapped her close in my arms and listened to the soft sounds of her breaths. They finally lulled me into a fitful sleep.
When Joy entered the kitchen, I turned around with a smile on my face.
“My God, Graham, who’s coming over?” she asked. “All the men from Onyx and their wives? They better be, because there’s no way the two of us will be able to eat all this food.”
I looked down at the strips of bacon on the paper-towel-covered plate, sitting beside a good-sized bowl of fried potatoes and a platter of cut-up fruit, and now that she was up I was pulling out the stack of pancakes that I’d been warming in the oven.
Ten pancakes, to be exact. I’d gotten up at five o’clock, and after an hour and a half of reading the end of a bestselling thriller, I figured I’d cook her a good breakfast before the day started.
“Now that you’re up, you can tell me how you like your eggs,” I said as I took the carton of eggs out of the fridge.
“I like them cold. As in, left in the fridge. I’m serious, Graham. You feed a fever, not a freak-out.”
I snorted. I put the eggs back in the fridge and opened my arms. “Come here. I need a hug.”
She flew across the room into my arms. I caught her close and held on tight. I shoved my face into the side of her neck, drinking in her scent. Honeysuckle and Joy, how could I ever be anything but happy when I was surrounded by that smell?
We stood that way for a long time, neither one of us wanting to break away from the other.
“Graham?”
“Yeah?”
“I like my pancakes warm.”
I chuckled and let her go. She sashayed over to one of the bar chairs next to the counter and hoisted herself up.
“Joy, are you wearing panties?”
“I’ll tell you after you feed me.”
“That so isn’t fair,” I groaned.
“Food. I was promised food.” Joy plucked a strawberry off the platter of fruit and took a slow bite.
I groaned again. I forced myself to turn around and get plates down out of the cupboard.
Along with the plates, I gathered silverware and glasses, then turned back to Joy, who was now eating a piece of melon.
I quickly had our places set and pancakes, bacon, and potatoes dished out. I went back to the fridge to get out juice. “Do you want hot sauce or ketchup to go on your potatoes?”
“Hot sauce, please. Heck, Graham, you should know I like it hot.”
Shaking my head with a grin, I put out the hot sauce, syrup, butter, and juice. Then we both tucked into our food. Like normal, Joy had little to say when she was eating. I liked how she took her food seriously. I grinned around a bite of potatoes. Was there anything I didn’t like about this woman?
When Joy pushed her plate back, I figured I could ask the question that had been bothering me half the night and all morning.
“Spit it out.”
“Huh?”
“There’s something on your mind, Graham. So just say what you want to say.”
I was more than a little shocked. The only person I could think of who could guess that I was out of sorts was Simon Clark, and I figured that was because we had both led Navy SEAL teams, that meant it was part of his job description.
But Joy?
That didn’t make any sense.
“Graham, you still haven’t told me what’s bothering you.”
We were sitting side by side. I swiveled my stool so it was pointing at her, caught her knees, and turned her so that she was facing me.
“This is serious, huh?” she asked softly.
I nodded.
She cupped the side of my face. “Just tell me, it’s going to be all right.”
I swallowed. “How did you get that scar on your ribcage?”
Joy looked down, which was all the answer I needed.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” I fought everything within me to keep my tone calm.
She nodded.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
She dropped her hand from my cheek to grip my wrists with both hands. Tight. Like she was hanging on to the only life raft in the ocean. Her nails dug into my skin, but I didn’t care.
“The Smythe family didn’t take what I told them very seriously,” she whispered. I hated it when her bottom lip trembled.
“The Smythe family?”
“I worked for them while I was in London. They were rich, they lived in this posh townhome, but it’s not like our townhomes. It was a mansion. I was an au pair to their two children.”
I nodded. “Okay. But what do you mean, at first? What happened before you got stabbed?” I tried to keep the frustration and anger out of my voice, but I did a shit job.
She didn’t look at me. She was lost in the past.
I tucked my finger under her chin and pushed it up, so she was forced to look at me. It killed me seeing her hesitant expression. I couldn’t tell if she was reluctant because of my outburst or because of her memories. I forced myself to dial it back. “Tell me,” I softly coaxed.
“It started out so harmless. It was flowers. Same as yesterday, only innocent and sweet. Somebody put a May Day posy of daisies on the doorknob of the Smythe’s townhome addressed to me.
Everybody thought it was cute. We all thought it was one of the children from the park where I took Lionel and Susie. ”
“What’s a posy?”
“It’s just a little cone of construction paper with ribbon taped to it, so you can hang it on a doorknob, then you put flowers in it. Sometimes there are dandelions in it. I got daisies. It said, ‘For Miss Magill.’ It was written in red crayon.”
Her voice trailed off, so I nodded, and she started up again.
“We all laughed. The children asked everyone at the park the next day who gave it to me. Nobody confessed to it. But then, two weeks later, there was a ballet slipper shoved through the mail drop slot. There was a ring wrapped in tissue paper shoved into the toe of the shoe, along with a note. It said, Will You Marry Me, Miss Magill? It was written in crayon again, like a little kid wrote it.”
“A ring? What kind of ring?”
“The ring was something you could get at a candy store. I got spooked, but Mr. and Mrs. Smythe were sure it was some child who had a crush on me. It was all so childish. So was the handwriting. They convinced me it was nothing.”
“Somebody should have called the police or whatever they call them over there,” I bit out. “Your instincts were spot on. Your employers were wrong.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But hindsight is twenty-twenty.” Joy was trembling now.
I didn’t think about it. I slid off my stool and picked her up, then took her to my recliner.
“You’re always taking me here,” she protested. “You need a couch.”
“There’s too much space on a couch. This way, you can’t get away from me.
” I forced her to cuddle close, with her legs hanging over the side of the chair and her head resting against my heart.
Her shirt tugged upward, and I didn’t even give a shit if she was wearing panties or not.
All I cared about was comforting her while she was telling me her story.
“Then what happened?” I prompted.
“Eventually, I forgot about the shoe and the flowers. It must have been a month later. Susie was only four years old, so she still had a baby monitor in her room. It was connected to the one in my room. I was asleep one night when I heard a man’s voice say, Joy, why are you fighting it? You’re meant to be my wife.”
“Fuck,” I breathed out. Hell, I even shivered. I hugged her closer. “That’s creepier than fuck.”
“I ran to Susie’s room with the monitor in my hand.” She looked up at me and gave me a cheeky grin. “I wore a full set of pajamas with panties when I lived with the Smythes.”