He inhaled to—
“Don’t even think of saying no. You are the kind of person who gets invited in, Caine. At least, you are to me.”
If she’d sucker punched him, it wouldn’t have stolen his breath as much as throwing his words back at him managed to do. And damn if her words weren’t pinballing around in his chest, knocking against things that didn’t often get disturbed. But he couldn’t think about that just then. “Em—”
She gasped and her eyes went wide. “Oh, my God. Caine. Oh, my God.”
Alarm lanced through his blood. “What? What is it?”
“You have to see something,” she said, already moving to cross the street. “Oh, my God.”
He was at her back in an instant. And then they were in her house and stepping across a pile of pillows and blankets. She beelined for the dining room table, Chewy excitedly in tow, and roughly sorted through a stack of mail.
“Look,” she said, turning with a piece of paper in hand. No, a card.
The glassy fear in her eyes just about gutted him. And then he looked at the card.
You Better Watch Out! a Peeping Tom Santa said. On the inside, that same Santa proclaimed, I see you when you’re sleeping! It was unsigned.
What. The. Fuck. Seriously. What kind of twisted company made a card for Christmas that was this goddamned creepy?
“Is there an envelope?” he asked, rage rearing up like a beast inside his chest.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “Here.”
Her name and address had been printed on a label, and there was no return address. “The stamp hasn’t been cancelled.”
“What?”
He turned it so she could see. “It hasn’t been cancelled. There’s no postmark. This wasn’t delivered by the mailman, Emma.”
Her eyes went wide. “Someone dropped it through my door. Personally.”
Trouble stalked around inside Caine’s lizard brain. The part of him that was all instinct, the part where fight and flight and the will for survival lived. And Caine knew. Emma didn’t just have a prowler. Or an intruder. Emma had a fucking stalker.
“Someone’s watching me?” Her inflection posed it as a question, but she was already nodding to herself, working it out just as Caine had. Fingers pressed to her mouth, she started shaking her head. “Oh, Jesus. This might be even bigger…” Her gaze collided with his. “Someone threw a brick through the window of my classroom at school. The weekend you and I met. I got to school on Monday morning to discover the vandalism. Do you…do you think that’s part of this?”
Aw, fucking hell. Alarm bells blared inside his brain. Yeah, there was every goddamned chance that was part of this.
“Don’t hold back on me, Caine. Not about this,” she said.
“Maybe it’s better not to hide from the truth?”
“Always,” he’d told her just moments after he’d broken into her house for her.
God, she was brave. He knew firsthand how hard it was to live knowing your life might be in danger. And to face that danger head on. So he respected the hell out of the way she was handling this. “Given everything I now know, I think it’s too coincidental not to be related.”
She released a shaky breath and nodded. “Okay. Okay.”
“And, if I’m going to take this to the logical conclusion,” Caine said, seeing this whole thing laid out from start to finish for the very first time. Sonofabitch. Why hadn’t he put it all together sooner? “I’m going to have to say that your mugging wasn’t any coincidence either.” And that meant that all of this really was his fault. Because if he’d done what he should’ve that first night, none of the rest of this escalation ever would’ve happened. “Fuck. It’s entirely possible the man wasn’t trying to grab your purse, Emma.”
She put a hand to her forehead and rubbed. “So, if he wasn’t trying for my purse…”
He could tell from her tone that she knew—she was what her attacker had really been after. But she’d asked that he not hold back, so he wasn’t going to. Does that apply to how much you want to touch her again, McKannon? Or how sick your stomach’s been with regret since you cut and run? Or how fucking impossible it was to avoid thinking of her these past days? You gonna come clean with all of that, too? None of which he could deal with now. Not when this thing was so much bigger than he even knew.
“I think he was trying to take you,” he said. Protective rage roared through Caine so hard and so fast that it was like his blood was suddenly made of gasoline. All at once, the combination of his winter outer riding gear with a sweatshirt and a base layer was too much, and he ripped the coat off and hung it over a chair. “Sonofabitch,” he growled. Why hadn’t he seen this sooner?