Chapter 7 – Jensen
Chapter Seven
Jensen
Kenzie was only a couple of steps away from having a breakdown. I’d never had a stalker, but I could remember the feeling of panic wash over me as a kid.
There’d been so much I couldn’t control then: my addict parents and how they would behave. Then once I was in foster care, I’d never known how long any given family would want or have room for me.
Feeling like you weren’t in control of your life was pretty fucking scary. So, if Kenzie needed me to hold her for a little bit while she figured out how to put herself back together, I would damn well do that.
Not that it was any hardship to hold this petite beauty with her big personality. Hell, I’d driven all the way around the opposite side of town just to have a few minutes of talking with her before coming here. I’d probably scared her to death. When I’d made that joke about not kidnapping her, she’d laughed a little too brightly.
And I had no idea why I’d felt the need to talk to her about the cabin I was fixing up. That wasn’t something I generally brought up with anyone, even though it was some of my best woodworking. But somehow, I wanted Kenzie to know about it.
That didn’t make any sense at all. Hell, none of my behavior when it came to this woman did.
“Charlie told us some of the facts of the case, but do you want to talk about it?” I finally asked. Talking about it at least got stuff out in the open where it didn’t have to feel like it was suffocating you. I knew that for a fact, too. Although I wasn’t very good at following my own advice sometimes.
She nodded, pulling away a little so she could see my face. I hated seeing the sadness that lingered in her dark-brown eyes. A turbulent storm shone in their depths, and all I wanted to do was make it disappear. I wished she didn’t have to deal with any of this.
“I’m sure you have to be thinking I’m overreacting.” She stepped back completely out of my hold.
I found myself wanting to pull her back in, but I stuffed my hands in my pockets instead. “I don’t. Not at all. I promise.”
“I just want this to be over.” She wrapped her arms around herself like she was trying to keep herself together.
I moved over to her side, staying close but not touching. “It will be. I’m sure of it.”
She stared out in front of her. “This past July, I posted about an upcoming series of seminars I was hosting. Different aspects of commercial real estate. I’ve done these for a while now, and they’ve always been pretty popular. Gives people a chance to know what to expect in the business.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear her seminars were popular. Kenzie was obviously friendly and engaging. People would respond to that. “I’m sure you sell out your classes.”
She shrugged. “They’re generally pretty full. But for some reason, this summer, my seminar posts kept getting flooded with vicious comments on social media sites. At first, my friends and I thought they were bots attacking the classes.”
“But they weren’t?”
“No, bots are usually fake posts trying to get people to click on fake links. These posts were personal attacks against me.”
I didn’t fucking like that. Involuntarily, one of my hands clenched into a fist. “In what way?”
She shrugged again. “You know, the usual cyber abuse—commenting on stuff like my clothes, my hair, my weight, my gender.”
“What the hell?”
“How I should shut up and stop talking about things I don’t really understand,” she continued. “The comments upset me, but I’d dealt with them before. It comes with the territory of having a bigger following. As more people became aware of my online presence and posts, the creepers, particularly men, commented and sent me DMs.”
My eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”
“Mostly ignored them. It’s a male-dominated industry, and there are always guys who get butthurt over a woman breaking into their good ol’ boys’ network.” She shot me a side glance. “No offense.”
I rolled my eyes. “Any man who’s threatened by a woman’s legitimate success is not much of a man at all.”
She gave me a short nod of respect.
“In August, the messages became more abusive online, but they seemed to come from the same source. I told myself it was just the fuddy-duddy, disgruntled agents I’d dealt with before or ex-coworkers from previous employments. I had phone calls to my office line where they’d hang up. Annoying, but nothing too bad.”
“But then it escalated.” She wouldn’t be hiding out here in Garnet Bend otherwise .
“Yes. I think someone tried to run me off the road, but I had no proof. My office was vandalized.”
I narrowed my eyes. “The cops did nothing?”
She shook her head. “Not at first. They said nothing could link the events together. Said the driver might have been drunk. The vandalism wasn’t necessarily related to any stalking since other vandalism had happened recently in the area.”
She pulled out her phone and scrolled through pictures. I scowled when she handed it to me. A photo of her showed X marks over her eyes. The next picture showed a typewritten letter that read You’re not welcome here. Get out.
“Fucker,” I breathed. I thought I said it under my breath, but she must have heard because she nodded in agreement.
“I got that in my mailbox in September. And in October, I was walking to my car one evening after work, and someone shoved me from behind. I was knocked to the ground. Whoever it was disappeared before I could get a look at them.”
“Were you hurt?” I asked.
She swallowed hard. I knew this was hard for her to talk about—not that anyone would blame her for that. “Bloody knees, skinned hands. Nothing awful.”
“But still damned scary.”
“Yeah. And frustrating. I don’t want to say that the police weren’t helpful, but it sure felt that way. They kept saying the incidents were isolated, so they couldn’t really do much.”
“That’s a shit-ton of stuff to be isolated.”
She let out a sigh. “I’ll never forget an officer explaining that sometimes bad luck just happened. And that just because it did, it didn’t mean someone was after me.”
“This was definitely more than bad luck.”
“Finally, later in the month, I came home and found my house door ajar. The whole place was trashed.” Kenzie cleared her throat. “The words GET OUT were painted across the walls in blood. I’ll never forget that.”
Blood? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That was some next-level shit. “That had to have been terrifying.”
“I found out it was animal blood, but still…” Her lower lip trembled.
I edged closer, fighting the urge to put my arm around her. She slid toward me, though, leaning into my side.
That felt good. Right . I didn’t want to think about it too deeply, just wanted to lend my support.
“I went back to the police, and they still dismissed me. Said it was a Halloween prank. But my mom and dad told me to go to another station. My friends came with me, adamant that someone listen, and that’s when we were put in touch with Detective Watters. He looked at it all as a whole and agreed I was definitely in danger.”
“Finally.”
“I couldn’t go back to my place, but he advised me to lie low elsewhere. I floated between my friends’ houses and my parents’, but that was risky too. I didn’t want my friends or family to be targeted, so I switched to hotels and bounced around, trying to stay under the radar. And messages were coming nearly every day. Every single time I got on my computer, I had emails and messages from the stalker.”
The tremor in her voice and dejected slump of her shoulders told me how much this was costing her. She was on the verge of tears.
All I could think of was that I wanted to protect her. To do whatever she needed to help get her through this. Knowing we were opposites or that things couldn’t ever work out between us had no effect on the need.
It was instinct, plain and simple. And I didn’t have the first inclination to fight it or even try to understand it better .
“So, you came here,” I said.
She nodded. “Detective Watters knew Charlie and thought my getting out of town would be a shake-up of sorts. That the stalker would make some sort of mistake or do something that would give us a clue as to who it is.”
We were still touching, so I didn’t move. I wanted the connection between us. “Some of the guys at Resting Warrior are looking into it too. Jude is pretty impressive when it comes to computer stuff.”
She let out a sigh. “The cops didn’t find anything useful when they tried to dig into the stalker’s online footprint.”
“Yeah, well, Jude isn’t restricted by stuff like Miranda rights and chains of evidence. If there’s something to be found, he’ll find it.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “I just want this to be over.”
“I know it has wreaked havoc in every part of your life. If it’s okay, the Resting Warrior guys and I are going to take turns keeping an eye on you and around here. I’ll make sure you meet everyone so you recognize them.”
She pulled away, and I had to tamp down my disappointment. “You guys don’t have to do all of this.”
“That detective sent you to Garnet Bend for a reason. Part of it was because he knows Charlie, but it was also because of Resting Warrior, I’m sure. We take care of our own.”
“But I’m not one of your own.”
I winked at her—actually winked at her; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that to anyone. If the guys could see me now, they’d harass me to no end.
“Consider yourself temporarily adopted, City.”
“City.” She smiled softly, like she liked the impromptu nickname. And damned if that didn’t make all sorts of different parts of me sit up and take notice. “Okay, thank you.”
“I’ll get your car fixed.” I tapped the hood lightly. “Nothing that was tampered with will be a problem.”
She reached out and squeezed my hand. I felt the same electricity I had that first day we’d touched. “Thank you for that too.”
“You’re probably going to get sick of having people around you so much, but after what the stalker tried with your car, we don’t want to leave anything to chance. We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”
I knew I meant every word of it.