Shiver

I sighed. “She said that I wouldn’t last long, and that I may think I know you but I really don’t.”

“You think the latter part’s true,” he sensed.

“I think she knows you better than I do.”

“She’s known me longer than you have, and she knows more about my life. But it doesn’t automatically follow that she knows me. You can know someone all your life and never really know them.”

It was a valid point, wasn’t it? My relationship with Michael was a perfect example of that.

“Yes, but you’ve met his stepmother too,” Clear said, snapping me back to the present.

“Briefly,” I said.

Smiling brightly, Clear lifted her glass. “I’m sure your family will come to love her, Blake. Kensey’s easy to love, even with her little ways.”

Blake lifted a brow. “Little ways?”

I sighed. “She’s referring to my neat-freak habits. And she has no right to judge, given that she’s a thousand times worse than I am.”

“Living together had its challenges,” said Clear.

Blake frowned, struggling to understand. “You’re both neat freaks, but you found it hard to live together? Shouldn’t that have made it easier?”

Clear shook her head wildly. “Two neat freaks can’t always live in the same house without some form of trouble, because we often have different ways of doing things. My idea of proper order is different from Kensey’s.”

Blake looked at me. “So, your idea of teenage rebellion against your mom was to develop neat-freaky ways that clashed with hers?”

I pursed my lips. “Huh. Never thought of it like that. If it was a type of rebellion, it was unconsciously done.”

“I know she went through a goth phase,” Blake said to Clear. “Any others?”

Clear frowned thoughtfully. “Not in her teenage years, so I’m afraid I have no embarrassing stories to share with you. Really, the oddest thing she ever did was refuse to play with dolls.”

“She refused?”

I gave a defensive shrug. “I just couldn’t attribute life to inanimate objects.”

Blake’s mouth quirked. “I see.” He kissed my temple and, once again, Clear melted. She also gave me a big thumbs-up. I just rolled my eyes.

A little later, when Blake and I climbed into his Maserati and I was clicking on my seat belt, I said to him, “Thank you.”

He jammed his key into the ignition. “For what?”

“Being nice to her. A lot of people aren’t.”

“I won’t pretend it’s no big deal that she married Michael Bale. I won’t lie to you and say I don’t care—I do, because it negatively affected you in several ways, and that’s not okay for me. But I can see that she loves you, and I can see she wants better for you than what she has for herself.” Cupping my chin, he took my mouth in a long, wet, drugging kiss. Pulling back, he looked at my smirk and sighed. “She’s watching, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

He switched on the engine. “Home.”

Home … I liked the sound of that more than I should.

After work the next day, I ate dinner and then thrust myself straight into my book. At that point, I had only two chapters to review and edit before I could officially say that the manuscript was finished. As such, I almost grabbed Sarah by the throat for showing up at my apartment when I had only three pages left to review.

I banished her to the kitchen and told her to stay out of my way as I read through the last of the draft. Unoffended and unapologetic in equal measures, she did her best to hide her smile as she obligingly disappeared from my sight.

When I was finally done, I took a long, relieved breath. No, my entire system took a long, relieved breath. My shoulders didn’t feel quite so tense or weighed down, and the chaos in my brain began to smooth itself out. Fuck, I was so happy, I dug out the tequila.

Sarah and I drank shots as she gave me yet another update on life with Bastien. It was going pretty well. I could tell that she cared for him, although she didn’t seem ready to admit it to herself yet.

“Do you still have those handcuffs I got you as a joke?”

Looking up from my shot glass, I blinked. “Say that again.”

“I want to use them on Bastien as a tit-for-tat thing. It’ll be hard to catch him off-guard, but I’m patient.”

“I may still have them.” I headed into my bedroom and searched the top drawer of my dresser, making an aha sound when I saw the brown envelope filled with photos of Blake.

Sarah tensed. “More pictures?”

“No, they’re the old ones. Blake keeps asking for them, and I keep forgetting to hand them over to him.” I threw them on the bed and went back to rummaging through the drawer. Spotting the cuffs, I announced, “Found them. Not sure they’ll—”

“Um, Kenz?”

The shake in her voice made me turn with a frown. “What is it?” I asked. She was looking at one of the photos, seeming utterly perplexed. “What’s wrong, Sarah?”

“When you threw the envelope, one of the pictures slipped out and I noticed …” She lifted the photo in her hand to show it to me. It was one of Blake with Emma. But his face had been crossed out with a red marker.

Sarah emptied the envelope onto the bed and spread out the pictures. “It’s the same on all of them. Someone put a big red ‘X’ over Blake’s face.”

I just stared at them, unable to process what I was seeing. Then my heart slammed into my chest, and my pulse started galloping. “He’s been back here,” I said. “That motherfucker has been back.”

Eyes bulging, she spluttered. “But how? If he tried getting inside, he would have set off the sensors, right? A notification would have been sent to your phone.”

“I didn’t receive anything. But how else can we explain this?”

Sarah cursed a blue streak and then pulled out her cell phone.

“Who are you calling? I’d really rather not—”

“I’m doing an internet search,” she said. Her thumbs tapped and swiped over the screen of her phone. “Says here that there are devices that can jam the frequencies of wireless security systems and block the alert signal from reaching you. The burglar would need to know what kind of system you have in order to know exactly what device he needed. It wouldn’t be easy to mess with the system, but it could be done.

“Of course, a burglar would be more likely to just choose a house that wasn’t alarmed rather than go through all that trouble.” Sarah twisted her lips. “But Smith isn’t a burglar. He’s someone who was intent on getting inside. Still, why go through all that just to draw some X’s on the photos?”

“When he called me, he said I had to know that he could get close to me. He wants me to know that he still can. Marking the pictures was just his way of ensuring I knew.” I thrust my hand into my hair. “I have no idea when he did it. No idea if it’s the only time he’s been back here.” Hot tears of frustration and anger stung my eyes, but I refused to shed them. It didn’t matter that he’d never see, the point was—

My spine snapped straight. “I’ve just had a thought. As I said, it’s important to him that I know he’s close and that he’s watching. But I haven’t seen him anywhere, Sarah. I haven’t seen a single person who looked even remotely dubious. Yet, he knows things about me.”