Chapter 12
TWELVE
ASPEN
The cold air that seeps inside with Cade’s exit is a welcome distraction because his kiss heated my skin to a million degrees.
He kissed me like I’ve never been kissed before.
A bit rough but not painful. A way making me wonder if I’d like to be hurt—hurt only by him.
A little out of control, like he was daring me with his lips and tongue to take the plunge and trust him.
God, what is wrong with me? Because fuck, I wanted to. Want, except this is the very man who’s been stalking me, who broke into my house, and claims I’m his after a year apart.
As if “apart” is even the best term to describe the pen pal relationship.
Smoothing my hair back and fixing my jeans so they’re not pressed into the place embarrassingly damp between my thighs, I attempt to regain some control of this situation, even while Cade’s friend in the corner pretends not to watch.
“What’s your name?” I call to him, but he turns so he’s facing the door instead.
Dick.
By the time my co-worker, Becky, arrives an hour before my shift’s end, my body feels strung out with stress.
She touches my elbow to return me to the present and away from wherever Cade’s gone to—since his friend is zero help. “You okay? You’re pale.”
Pale seems to be my new skin tone.
“I’m fine.”
Her eyes slide to the man seated behind the counter—Scary Guy, as I’ve come to call him, since he refuses to give me a real name.
After an hour of standing by the door, he wordlessly stalked into the back room, grabbed a chair from the office, and positioned it behind the counter but in view of the door.
He’s spent the entire afternoon kicked back in it, glaring at the door, and ignoring every question about him and Cade.
My responses have been a small smirk, and when extra lucky, a quick glance, confirming he’s ignoring me.
At one point, he nearly beat up one of my delivery boys, when learning the hard way there’s a back entrance.
It chimed with their arrival when grabbing the next round of deliveries, and Scary Guy yanked a knife from his boot and lunged into the back room.
I was thankfully able to save the poor guy’s neck in time, earning Scary Guy’s voice when he mumbled, “Sorry.”
“Who’s that?” Becky nudges me again. “Don’t say a new employee.”
“No, he’s, uh…” A friend of my ex-convict pen pal’s who claims I’m his after a year of silence. “A friend.” I go with the simpler explanation.
Becky’s brows shoot to her hairline, but when a customer enters, she heads over to help, which leaves me to continue counting the till for our handover into the evening shift. Behind me, Scary Guy smirks and stares a beat too long at Becky.
Millie meows, watching me pace back and forth in the living room, wearing out a strip on the hardwood.
But there’s nothing else to do. My evening routine often involves relaxing with TV or planning for my role as a research assistant in the coming months, but there’s no way in hell my brain can focus on any of that tonight.
My brief conversation with Tanya stole my focus for a whole three minutes, when I cancelled our movie plans for later in the week. With Cade around—and my second stalker—there’s no way I can focus on anything social.
Not as another note marked with a V, in the same handwriting as the first, is gripped in my hands.
Stay away from Cade if you know what’s good for you
If only the note were the worst part. No—the fact that I discovered it leaning against the vase holding the calla lilies from Cade was. The empty vase. The flowers are nowhere in sight.
The fucker stole them.
Once I realized that, I dropped the note and ran around my home searching for anything else he might have stolen, checking my bedroom for anything amiss and making sure Millie was all right.
Once finding her safely stretched on my bed, I was pissed that once again, whatever drama of Cade’s life dragged itself to the safety of mine.
The fact that someone who illegally broke into my house would dare to be so moralistic—warning me away from Cade—is ironic.
And while they’re the bad guys in this, I’m half-tempted to take their advice because Cade is proving to be every shade of a red flag—every negative decision a person can make.
He’s yet to return, so until getting answers, my nerves are stuck on the edge.
Doesn’t help that with every turn of my living room, the empty vase once home to calla lilies taunts me.
A part of me should be thrilled, considering keeping them sends a message to Cade, but it felt like a slap in the face.
After everything, something good from his re-arrival was taken.
It’s close to ten at night when the door handle jiggles. Considering my bodyguard outside, I presume it’s Cade, so my pacing ends, wondering when and why Cade became the safe person in my life—earlier thoughts aside.
As he slips through the door, he discards his coat and tosses it onto my couch.
His boots trail an irritating path of snow chunks inside, as if he owns the damn place.
A fight I’m fully willing and ready to have when he sweeps across the room and yanks my face up to his and kisses me with the desperation of a dying man.
He claims every inch of my mouth, reminiscent of our kiss this afternoon and distracting enough from the fact he’s walking me to my room.
“Wait, we need to talk.” I shove the note into his chest. “Read this.”
“So talk.” Pushing my hand away, he kicks the bedroom door shut and angles me towards the bed.
His face is anything but tender, though.
All hard lines and frustration. “While you do that, I’ll be fulfilling months of fantasies.
” His foot knocks against mine, tripping me onto the bed, determined and clearly working through a plan.
“Cade.” I shove the paper at him again, and this time he takes it, reading it with a dismissive sweep of his eyes before crumpling it and tossing it to the ground as if it means nothing. He straightens between my legs, standing there, seething, as if torn about what to do.
“Where did you find that?” His read of the note may have seemed dismissive, but it clearly isn’t, if his expression is any indication.
“In my living room after they broke in.” Whoever “they” are anyway. “You need to start explaining because I’m not letting them steal more from me.”
I cover my mouth, but it’s too late. I hadn’t wanted to tell him about the theft because then he’d assume the flowers meant something to me—which they didn’t.
Flint eyes scan the rest of my bedroom. “What the hell did they take?”
“The calla lilies you gave me yesterday.”
His scan abruptly ends as he focuses on me, while the corners of his mouth lift slightly. But he doesn’t comment on my feelings regarding what was stolen. Instead, he abruptly yanks his phone out, putting it against his cheek.
“They were inside her fuckin’ house,” he practically shouts the second the poor soul on the other end answers.
“Do whatever you must to get me information on them—or you won’t enjoy who I’ll become.
Tomorrow, I want guys posted outside her place, regardless of if she’s inside or not.
It was a note this time, but next time…”
Millie. Who’s to say whoever this is won’t ramp up and hurt my cat? Or steal something valuable? Or destroy my home?
He hangs up and turns to face me, but I start before he can, gesturing to the phone he just slid into his pocket. “Who were you talking to? Who are these ‘guys’ who’ll hang out here? Cade, what is happening? You need to start explaining!”
He shoves me onto the bed, on my back. The hand tattooed with my name bands around my neck, keeping me pliant and submissive as he nips down my chest and into the collar of my shirt.
My traitorous body doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t want to stop him, but the instincts that have kept me alive this long push him away.
They’re the instincts that wrote the goodbye letter to him once, so I have to trust them.
“Cade.” I push into his shoulders as he edges my shirt up. After finding the note and his reaction, we can’t just move on from that.
But he also makes focusing impossible.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted you to say my name like that. How long I’ve dreamed of making you beg for what only I’ll give you. To beg for forgiveness after making me obsessed with you, only to take yourself away.”
To make me beg? The woman with self-respect pushes her elbows into the bed, ready to tell him off. But the flash of longing in his gaze as his fingers grip tighter, helping me sit up, has the words dying on my tongue and the two other words I’ve wanted to say to him for a year slip out.
“I’m sorry.”
No matter the choices I made, I see now, leaving how I did hurt him.
He’s my MA thesis personified. The lonely prison inmate wanting a connection, even if lessening everything Cade is to such a definition doesn’t feel right.
This fascination he has with me, chasing the friendship once found in letters, is simply the conclusion to my essay.
His fingers tighten around my throat, but nothing restricting.
“For?” The age-old betrayal combined with the flash of heartbreak found within his expression erases the Cade who kissed me when he arrived.
His voice is a few degrees colder—closer to what I imagine his cell being.
As cold as he had to be to leave prison mentally stable.
“Cutting you off.” His fingers lift from my throat one at a time as he straightens back to his full height.
“Why’d you do it then?”
Admitting the past should only benefit me. Guilt will finally leave me the hell alone, and if he hates me, it’ll drive him away. No more stalking. No more breaking in.
So, explain the twist in my stomach at the thought of all that.
“You’ll hate me.” My gaze flits to the laptop plugged in by the corner of my room. It hasn’t been used much lately; after doing years of research for my thesis, it’s nice to not be chained to a computer. Until I start working towards my PhD anyway.
He follows my gaze with a quirk of a brow. “Somethin’ over there you wanna tell me, sweetheart? Nothing you say will change what I’m about to do to you but enlighten me.”
“I’ll explain if you admit what you know about today. About whom you are.”
His tongue runs over his teeth once, and then again a few seconds later, before he finally agrees with a tip of his head.
Here goes… He lets me by to retrieve the computer where I find the file saved right on my desktop, where I moved it months ago for ease of locating.
Even as my screen flashes with the way-too-familiar title page, I remain in the corner of the room just in case.
As much as I want to trust he won’t hurt me, I truly don’t know this man.
Not really. Not enough to predict how he’ll react to what’s in the document.
“Do you remember I once mentioned completing my MA in psychology? Well—”
“I remember everything you ever wrote. Every fuckin’ word. I memorized them because they were all I had of you.” As his hands come up to cross over his chest, his knuckles with my name—still processing that one—rest over his heart.
Disclosures like that certainly don’t make this easier.
“Okay, well…okay. Yeah, so my thesis—the final capstone project, in case you didn’t…
” My explanation trails with his smirk, but at least he doesn’t seem insulted over the insinuation.
“Never mind. Mine was all about the long-term psychological effects of loneliness and focused on different groups within society to support my points across a spectrum. Elders living in retirement homes, kids in school struggling with social expectations, adults living alone…and prison inmates. During research, one of my profs mentioned a pen pal program from the local prison, so I signed up.” I stop, gripping the laptop screen as I drag my gaze from it to him, finally meeting his eyes, following the firm line of his jaw to the iciness.
His chin lowers a fraction, like death incarnate. I grip the computer tighter and count my steps from here to the doorway, wondering, if needed, if I could make it.
“You signed up,” he begins, chewing each syllable and dragging out my nerves, “and got paired with me. The entire time, I was your li’l project.”
Oh, god, this might be worse than pictured. “Your letters gave me the information I needed for my research, yes.”
“Show me.”
It’s a full circle. There was a time I never wanted him to read my words, afraid of how he’d react. But now, if it prevents strangulation and my death, I’ll read him the whole damn thing myself.
I cross the room and hand him the laptop after scrolling to the parts about him. He takes it after a considering stare, almost reluctantly shifting his attention to the device. His eyes dart over the screen, and the room falls so silent that I swear my thrumming, nervous heart breaks through.
My torment lasts forever before he shuts my laptop, tosses it onto the bed, and commands, “Come here.”