It was like being in a warm, cozy cave, she thought. Surrounded by thick walls, safe from predators. But as she’d learned all too painfully, safety was an illusion, one that, in her life, rarely lasted for long.
There was a wooden table with three chairs in one corner of the room, and it was there Clint served their breakfast. He waited for her to get there on her own, watching her as if measuring her steadiness, but not intervening. She didn’t want to admit, even to herself, how ready she was to sag into the chair by the time she got there. It wasn’t that far, but never before in her life had she felt so weak.
Of course, she hadn’t eaten much for days.
Clint apparently believed breakfast should be the day’s biggest meal. She found herself looking at platters heaped high with toast, bacon and scrambled eggs.
“That’s enough for an army,” she remarked in surprise.
“I think you’re hungrier than you realize,” he responded.
“I think I’m going to prove you right.” She was famished, in fact. Except for the cocoa and soda last night, and the crackers and little bit of cinnamon roll, she hadn’t eaten in days. Whatever Kevin had intended to do with her, feeding her hadn’t been part of it. Three days, she figured. Three days since he’d kidnapped her from Killeen. But that was just a guess, since she’d been stuck in his trunk a lot of the time.
“Want to tell me what happened?” Clint asked.
“Not really.” But she knew she would tell him anyway. If the thoughts wouldn’t stop running around in her head, where could the harm be in speaking them out loud?
“Eat first,” he suggested. “That’s the most important thing.”
It was. With a shaking hand, she helped herself to healthy portions of eggs, toast and bacon. Hungry though she was, it still seemed difficult to focus on chewing and swallowing. The better she felt, the more the urge to flee grew in her. She had learned that when she held still, danger would find her.
And she could no longer believe it wouldn’t find her, regardless of what this man promised.
“So what do you do?” he asked. “For a living.”
“Whatever I can. Usually that’s waiting tables. It’s one of the easiest jobs to get when you’re new in a place.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Mostly. The money is good enough if you work in the right restaurant.”
“Do you have any savings?”
“Probably not anymore.” Her mood sank again, and she poked at the food on her plate with her fork.
“You know, you should call your bank and tell them your credit card or whatever was stolen on the day you were kidnapped.”
“No!” Panic gripped her heart in an icy fist. “Don’t you understand? He always finds me somehow. If I poke my head up, they’ll want to know where I am. They’ll want to know where to send another card. They’ll want me to sign things. Once that happens, he’ll find me.”
He sighed. “You’re right, I guess. Sorry, I’m still kind of an electronic Luddite. I keep forgetting that somehow everything is available if you just know how to look for it.”
“It seems like it. Almost twenty years ago, the post office stopped giving out forwarding addresses so stalkers couldn’t follow people who moved. Maybe that helped back then, but today you can get the address of anyone in the country for a few dollars. And if you have more than a few dollars, apparently you can find out a whole lot more. I’m not sure exactly how he does it, but once I’ve been in a place for a while, Kevin finds me. Three times now. How the hell do you hide?”
“Actually,” he said slowly, “you can hide. But it’ll involve a lot of changes. We can talk about it later.”
She offered to help with the dishes, but he declined, telling her it was better for her to rest. Twenty minutes later, he rejoined her in the living room.
“Do you need to shower?” he asked before he sat. “I can get you some more sweats.”
“Maybe later on the shower.” She needed one, but she wasn’t confident enough of her stability yet, and she sure didn’t want to have to ask this stranger for help with that.
“Sure. More coffee?”
He freshened her mug and got one of his own before settling into his easy chair. The storm outside kept right on ripping around them. He tilted his head to one side. “This isn’t going to blow over soon.”
“That’s okay,” she said. It gave her a few additional hours of safety before she would have to figure out how to move on again.
“I suppose it is.”
No, she realized, it wasn’t. Not for him. He was a self-confessed hermit, and now he was stuck with an invader until such time as he could reasonably boot her out the door.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“Imposing on you like this.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete!”
She shrank back against the pillows. He was an unknown, and she hadn’t meant to anger him. He could do almost anything to her.
But he remained firmly planted in the chair, though he looked disgusted, a change from his usually unrevealing attitude. “Look,” he said, “I know neither of us likes this situation. I prefer my solitude, and you’d sure as hell prefer not to have a lunatic ex-boyfriend trying to kill you, chasing you everywhere you go. But you know what? Sometimes we don’t have a choice. We just have to do what needs doing. And right now what needs doing is giving you the safety and space in which to recover. So what if it disturbs my sacred solitude?”
“I’m still sorry,” she said, weakly, not sure whether she was sorry for angering him or for the whole damn mess.
“Quit apologizing. You don’t have a thing to apologize for. I know I’m not exactly a warm, fuzzy kind of host, but if you think I resent the fact that you need help and I’m here to provide it, you’re wrong.”
“Okay.” She wanted to get away from this topic as quickly as possible.
But even though he could have dropped it there, he didn’t. Evidently he had plenty of thoughts on this subject.
“You have rights, and I have responsibilities,” he said flatly.
Now, that really did confuse her. “What rights?”
“You,” he said, “have a right to exist without terror. You have a right to expect the rest of us to step up and get you away from this guy, since he seems hell-bent on following you wherever you go. You have a right to expect help, and apparently you haven’t been getting it.”
“But you have rights, too.”
“Hell, yeah, but I can protect my own.”
“And you don’t have a responsibility to me.”
“Oh, yeah, I do.”
She tried to shake her head, but as soon as she did, she remembered her concussion as pain stabbed her head. “I’m nobody. You don’t owe me a thing.”
“You’re not nobody. You’re a human being, and that gives you certain rights in my book. And I’m a human being, and that’s enough to make me responsible to do what I can for you.”
Her mouth opened a little as she stared at him. She couldn’t remember anyone ever putting it like that before.
He leaned forward, putting his mug on the coffee table, then resting his elbows on his knees. “You want to know one of the reasons why I