Chapter 19
JEREMIAH
“Slow, deep breaths through your nose, honey.” With her back to my chest, I eased us both down the cabin wall until our butts met the floor, keeping her wedged between my thighs.
“I can still smell my perfume.” Her voice was pitched high with panic.
That’s what this was. A panic attack. They were common enough with our guests—and Liam—that we were all experienced in handling them. Why would a scented postcard trigger a panic attack in Lennon? That question would have to wait until she was calm.
I grabbed her ankles, one in each hand, and gently positioned her legs so her knees were bent and her feet flat on the floor. “Press your feet into the floor and breathe, honey. You’re safe. Can you feel me breathing? Breathe with me.”
I inhaled, silently counting to four, expanding my belly so she could feel it against her back.
Held for two, then exhaled for six. Her breathing slowed slightly, but not enough.
It was still too quick and shallow. I breathed again.
Inhaled for four, held for two, exhaled for six. This time she matched me.
“Purse your lips like you’re whistling when you exhale, all right? Inhale through your nose. Tell me five things you see.”
“Um.” I felt her shift like she was trying to focus. “The braided rug. Green curtains. Black knots in the pine beams. Blue sky out the window. The bed.”
“That’s great, Lennon. You’re doing so good. Tell me four things you can touch.”
“Jeans.” She rubbed her palms over my denim-clad knees that were bracketing her. “The breeze from the open door.” Her feet wiggled. “My toes,” she said, and I chuckled softly. She leaned back against me. “You.”
“That’s right, honey. I’m right here. You’re safe. Nothing can hurt you here.” Who the fuck had slipped that postcard under the door? I pushed the question aside and focused on the woman in my arms. She needed me calm now, not murderous.
“Safe,” she repeated. Her head tipped back on my shoulder. “Safe.”
The next question would have been three things she smelled, but considering it was a smell that triggered her panic attack in the first place, I thought better of it.
With her face right there, I couldn’t stop myself from pressing my lips to her damp temple. Not a kiss. A quick touch like I was taking her temperature with my mouth. Nothing more.
But then I did it again, and that was definitely a kiss.
She was over the worst of it now. A sheen of sweat glistened on her skin. Her legs trembled violently—the surge of adrenaline leaving her system—and I could feel her body tense as she tried to get her muscles under control. I cuddled her closer, giving her a safety net where she could fall apart.
“I’ve got you, Lennon. I’ve got you. It’s all right.”
With a whole-body shudder, she gave in. Big and violent, even her teeth rattled. I held on until it passed and she went limp against me. Still between my legs, she wiggled herself lower down my body and curled onto her side. I stretched out my legs and gave her my thigh for a pillow.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Tired.” She yawned, and it triggered one of my own.
I sifted my fingers through her hair, pulling it back from her face. My fingertips followed the soft curve of her ear as I tucked her hair behind it, then continued to her jaw. I pressed two fingers there, testing. Her heartbeat had slowed, but it wasn’t completely back to normal yet.
“Are you taking my pulse?” She tilted her head just enough that she could side-eye me from my lap.
“Maybe.”
“Am I having a heart attack? I felt like I was dying.”
“Not a heart attack. A panic attack can feel like a heart attack, though. Have you ever had one before?”
“No, never. I don’t know why it happened now. The postcard surprised me, but it’s not like this was the first one. I don’t know why I reacted like that. It’s so stupid. I feel ridiculous.” She pressed her face into my thigh like she was trying to hide.
My gaze flicked to the postcard, and my brows pinched.
“Sometimes a panic attack is triggered by a memory. Something—a smell, a sound—reminds your subconscious of a time when you weren’t safe.
But sometimes panic attacks happen when we ignore the danger signs until our subconscious can’t take it anymore and we explode.
It’s your brain’s way of telling you to stop gaslighting yourself. ”
She snorted. “Faking a heart attack is my body’s way of warning me I’m in danger? Seems dumb. How am I supposed to run from danger if I feel like I’m having a heart attack?”
I laughed. “No one said a panic attack was a rational response.” I paused, then said carefully, “Tell me about the postcard.”
For a moment, she didn’t say anything as she fiddled with the fabric of my jeans. Then she sighed, pushed to sit up, and snagged the postcard from where it had landed two feet away. “Here.” She flicked it to me.
I studied the photograph of a field of wildflowers before flipping it over.
I DID IT FOR YOU
The words jumped out in purple block letters. What did it mean? I brought it to my nose and sniffed. Sweet and citrusy.
“Vanilla and orange?” I asked, looking at her.
She sat next to me and nodded. “Belle Gourmand. It was my perfume for years, but I stopped wearing it a while ago. It creeped me out too much.”
“Ex-boyfriend?”
“Maybe? I really don’t know. I’m pretty active online.
” I nodded like this was new information.
“My perfume isn’t a secret. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it.
It could be a subscriber.” She glanced at the postcard in my hand but didn’t move to touch it.
“It doesn’t seem like something anyone I’ve dated would do.
I mean, they seemed normal at the time. But how well can you really know a person, anyway? ”
She wasn’t wrong. People had a way of shocking the hell out of me. Hell, sometimes I even surprise myself.
“I don’t know why I panicked like that. Spraying it with my perfume is creepy, but the messages themselves are pretty tame. I get way worse messages from men online.”
“Such as?” I gritted out.
“The usual stuff. Dick pics, graphic fantasies, rape threats.”
My molars smashed together. “I need names.”
“I don’t know them.” She worried the inside of her cheek for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision.
Her shoulders squared and she met my eyes.
“I’m a cam girl, Jeremiah. Subscribers pay me a monthly fee to watch me do 1950s housewife shit naked.
Make dinner, dust and vacuum, put together pretty floral arrangements.
That kind of thing. I have no idea who my subscribers are unless they tell me.
The host company handles subscriber accounts and financial payments, not me. ”
“You report these threats to the police?” I kept my voice calm, but there was nothing calm about the rage surging inside me.
“The police? You want a cam girl to report rape threats to the police?” She rolled her eyes.
“Mostly I just block them and move on with my day. It’s not like they can actually hurt me through a computer screen, even if it feels like they can.
” She flicked the postcard with the tip of her nail as if she didn’t want it to contaminate her.
“Maybe that’s why this bothers me so much. It proves they can find me offline.”
No return address. No stamp. No postmark. It hadn’t gone through the post office. Someone had hand-delivered it. How had they known she was here? Had they paid someone to deliver the postcard, or was the asshole actually here in person?
“We’re circling back to that cam girl shit, just so you know. I’m not going to let it go.”
She flinched. “Does it matter?”
“Does it matter?” I repeated incredulously. “Of course it fucking matters, Lennon. Rape threats? Death threats? You can’t ignore that.”
“No, I mean—” She huffed a small laugh and shook her head. “I mean, does it matter to you personally, Jeremiah Bell, that I paid my bills by camming?”
No was the right answer, but it wasn’t the truthful one.
I didn’t care that men had seen her naked.
I didn’t even care that they had paid her for that privilege.
That was before she had ever come to Wyoming.
I’d had no claim on her then. I had no claim on her now, but that didn’t stop me from wanting her all to myself.
“It matters,” I said. “I’m jealous as hell, Lennon. But as long as I’m the only one touching you, it’s something I can live with. If camming is something you plan to keep doing, we need to find a way to keep you safe.”
“Jeremiah,” she said softly. The way she looked at me made my chest hurt. “There’s nothing you can do about it. If I report them, they find a way to create a new account and harass me from there. Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s not your problem.”
She actually believed that? I twisted to look at her.
“It’s not a problem, Lennon. It’s a wrong.
Problems have a solution. There’s no solution for wrongs.
You have to cut them out or they will spread like cancer.
It doesn’t matter if the wrong is happening to you or to someone you know, or to a complete stranger.
Wrongs belong to everyone. You see it, you fix it. That’s what you do.”
“What you do, maybe,” she muttered. “Some of us are too busy trying to survive, and some of us are nothing but cowards.” She lifted her gaze to my face, her dark eyes searching mine. “You’re a good man, Jeremiah.”
“Am I?” My father’s words still echoed in my head. Sinner. Banished. Son of perdition. “I suppose goodness is in the eye of the beholder.”
She huffed, then grabbed my face with both hands. “Well, it’s my eyes doing the beholding, and I’m looking right at you. You’re a good man, Jeremiah.”
I swallowed past the sudden thickness in my throat.
She couldn’t absolve me for sins she didn’t know I had committed.
If I sank to my knees and confessed it all, would she still look at me like that?
I wasn’t going to find out. Not today, and probably not ever.
She would be gone from here in another month.
Better for everyone that she didn’t carry my sins with her.
So instead I looked her dead in the eyes so she’d know I wasn’t fucking around, and said, “I’m going to ruin their lives, Lennon. Anyone who threatened you, I’ll ruin them. Is that what a good man would do?”
She considered that, and then her lips tilted up in a little smirk. “I’ll allow it.”
“Good. Now tell me about the postcards. When did you start receiving them?”
“About two years ago, I think. I got one every week for a couple of months. I thought they were funny at first. They were almost…friendly? I don’t know how to describe it.
They would say nice things about my outfit or my new haircut.
But then they started getting more judgmental.
Telling me I shouldn’t be with the guy I was dating, or that I always made bad choices when it came to men.
The postcards stopped when I moved apartments, and I was relieved.
I didn’t get one for a couple of weeks. And then they started up again.
That’s when I got scared. I moved again, and they found me again.
My last apartment, it wasn’t even really mine.
It took them longer to find me, but they did.
A postcard arrived a few days before I came here, to Mercy River. ”
That wasn’t good. “Did they always come like this? Hand-delivered, no postmark?”
She nibbled her lip. “No. They didn’t have a return address, but they had a stamp and postmark.”
Fuck. That was even worse. “Do you remember the cities from the postmark? Were they all mailed from the same place?”
“The cities?” she repeated. She blinked rapidly, then let her head fall back against the wall with a thunk. “The postmark says where it was mailed from. Holy shit, I’m such an idiot. I never even checked. I just threw them in the trash.” She squeezed her eyes shut.
“You’re not an idiot, Lennon. But we’re going to take this seriously now. I need you to tell me everything.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. “I just told you everything. There’s nothing else.”
My gut was telling me there was something else here. “What brought you to Mercy River Ranch? How did you find us?”
“The brochure. One of those mailers you send out.”
Brochure? I stared blankly at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”
She pushed to her feet. “I’ll show you.” She went to her bag, rummaged through it, then pulled out a folded brochure and handed it to me. “This showed up. The same day as a stalker postcard, actually.”
“I’ve never seen this before.”
I flipped through, feeling like I was looking at an alternate reality. It was a glamourized, dude ranch version of Mercy River. No mention of veterans or first responders, just tranquility, trail rides, and spa sessions. Fucking hell.
I scanned the QR code with my phone. It took me to a website proclaiming to be Mercy River Ranch, but I knew for a fact that it wasn’t ours.
“Fuck, Lennon.” I scrubbed a hand over my face.
“What? What’s wrong?” Her gaze bounced anxiously from my face to my phone and back again.
“You didn’t come to Mercy River Ranch by accident. You were lured.”