Abby

 

Grudgingly, I had to admit that I didn’t mind Brody. He was a good-looking young man with a good heart, though I doubted he was ever accused of being the smartest in the bunch. He was of average height for a guy with broad shoulders and a wiry frame that made him look kind of gangly. His sandy brown hair wasn’t a particularly flattering color—I thought it looked like dishwater blonde—but his eyes were pretty. He’d stuttered through our introduction and asked for an autograph before he could catch himself. Still, he kept things light and kind of lazy, and in the end, I didn’t even throw a fit about being sequestered in my home until Kade got back.

 

I wasn’t thrilled, but it wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. It helped that Brody liked to play cards.

 

“You may like to play cards,” I teased poor Brody as we continued with our hundredth game of poker, “but you’re not very good at it.”

 

“I’ve got this one, really!” he answered me, a determined look on his face that made him look like a five-year-old trying to figure out how a car worked.

 

I smiled at him sweetly, knowing that he didn’t stand a chance. I’d had lousy hands the last six times and had managed to out bluff him every time, but this time I had a real winner. Full house, kings and tens, and I knew the poor boy wouldn’t be able to beat that. It almost made him feel sorry for him and I might have taken it easy if we weren’t playing with sticks of sugar-free gum instead of real money. As it was, I intended to walk away from this table with several packages of that awful minty sugar-free goodness.

 

Just as I was about to annihilate him—again—the door opened and Kade walked in. I was sitting in the right spot to catch sight of him first, and I found my breath catching as I did so. It was silly, ridiculous even, to find my heart thumping wildly in my chest all of a sudden at the mere sight of him, but it did. I’d already seen him in that heather gray shirt and those dark jeans, but he still sent a shiver of need through me.

 

Brody was laying out his cards as Kade approached us, his eyes locking onto mine and burning a hole straight through me, searing into my flesh until I thought I might explode. When he spoke finally, his voice shredded through me, leaving me raw and exposed in its wake, needy and breathless.

 

“You’re relieved, Brody.” His eyes never left me.

 

Startled by his sudden reappearance, Brody shot up from the table, jostling it so that some of the gum slid over the side and onto the floor. “Kade! When did you get back? We weren’t doing anything.”

 

I actually laughed at the guilty sound of Brody’s voice.

 

Kade’s eyebrows rose skeptically. “I can see that. What have you been playing?”

 

Brody’s shoulders slumped as he mumbled, “Poker. And whatever you do, don’t trust her.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “’Cause she’s got one hell of a poker face.”

 

I grinned wickedly at his words, wondering if I couldn’t get Kade to play a little poker with me. Maybe with higher stakes.  A little strip poker never hurt anyone after all.

 

Before I could say anything suggestive, Kade let out a laugh. “Well, she is an actress you know.”

 

Brody ruffled his hair sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, good point. Guess I should have remembered that.”

 

Kade nodded. “Next time.”

 

Brody agreed. They spoke for a little bit as I cleaned up the playing cards. I’d pretty much dismissed the idea of strip poker because I’d come to know Kade well enough to know that, although I was fairly certain he’d want to play, I was starting to realize that he was trying not to act on those wants.

 

Which means I’ll have to think up something else to tempt him with, whispered a voice in my head that could have been the little devil on my shoulder. If I believed in such things.

 

They continued to go over things—in hushed tones, the bastards, so that I couldn’t hear what was going on—and I had just packed up the cards when my phone rang. I froze. It’s probably my agent. Or Caleb. Or…but I didn’t have any more or’s, because by this time, I’d realized that the ring tone was the one I used for unsolicited calls or numbers I didn’t recognize. It meant that whoever was calling me wasn’t someone I knew.

 

And honestly, I didn’t give my phone number out to a lot of people to begin with so the list of people it could have been was pretty damn short to start off with.

 

I must have been staring at the phone charging on the counter for too long because Kade and Brody had stopped talking. Now, Kade was looking at me instead with a little frown beginning on his lips. His eyes darted to the phone and I tensed, then reacted before I even had the chance to think about what I was doing. I sprang up from the table and rushed toward the phone, knocking over one of the chairs as I did so. Just as I reached for it, Kade snatched it up out of my grasp.

 

With horror, I watched as he put it to his ear and said simply, “Hello?”

 

It could be someone else, I told myself silently, a prayer more than anything else. It could be someone else, a fan who got ahold of my leaked number. Someone who was calling for the last owner of the number. A wrong number!

 

But even as I tried to calm myself with these unlikely possibilities, I could tell by the features on Kade’s face that I wasn’t so lucky. I watched as his eyebrows went low, forming a thick line over each eye. The line of his mouth grew hard and grim. His eyes were sharp, like daggers looking for a target. And his hand gripped the phone so hard that I thought it might break from the force. I silently prayed that it would.

 

A moment later, with forced calmness, Kade put the phone back in its charger. Then he turned his dark eyes to me. I flinched at the look shining in them.

 

“What the hell was that?” he demanded in a low voice, and I could see that Brody off to the side looked a little panicked, too, his eyes wide and scared.

 

I tried to be calm, forcing a smile to my face, glancing between the two larger men. “What did they say?” I asked, hoping that it was all a misunderstanding, even though I was far past the point of believing that anymore.

 

“‘Stay out of it.’ Any idea what that might mean?”

 

I shuddered. Had my stalker known that Kade would pick up? No, don’t be ridiculous! Kade barely got to the phone before me! I admonished silently. But it didn’t do anything to ease the feeling inside of me. Kade wasn’t the only person to have ever picked up the phone and gotten my stalker. But he was the only one my stalker had actually spoken to.

 

I didn’t think that was a good thing.

 

The stinging in my eyes began, though I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to be weak right now—hadn’t I don’t that enough lately? And especially in front of Kade. But I couldn’t help it. I kept calm even when the tears started to roll down my cheeks and my voice was level as I finally came out with the truth.

 

“I don’t know for sure,” I began in a detached voice. “But I think he’s the same one who wrote the letters.”

 

Kade let out a vicious curse, then grabbed my phone up off its cradle again. Kade easily chucked my phone to Brody, who scrambled to catch it, surprised by…well, everything, I was pretty sure. The poor guy didn’t look like he had any idea what to do. He hot potatoed the damn thing for a full thirty seconds before getting a good hold of it.

 

“Get it to Caleb. See if they can trace the last incoming call.” When Brody just stared at him a little dumbfounded, still a little scared, Kade snapped, “Now!”

 

“Right!”

 

Brody turned and hurried out the door, leaving it open as he raced to his motorcycle—which he’d forgotten was parked underground, so he actually had to come back in and hurry downstairs to get to it because he didn’t know how to open the garage on his own.

 

I would have laughed under normal circumstances, but right then I was too scared—of my stalker and of how mad Kade was.

 

When we heard the rumbling of Brody’s motorcycle, Kade stalked over to me in two strides, stopping barely a hairsbreadth away from me. “What the fuck, Abby?”

 

In a voice that I cursed for being so small, I said simply, “I’m sorry.”

 

“Goddamn it, how long has this been going on?” He ran his hands through his thick, dark hair, but spoke again before I could find my voice to answer. “You need to tell me everything, Abby! Everything. How the hell am I supposed to protect you when I don’t even know what the hell I’m trying to protect you from? Jesus, Abby!”

 

I bit my lower lip, worrying my teeth along it. Kade hadn’t stepped away yet and we were close enough that all I had to do was lean ever so slightly forward and we would be touching. Electricity sprang between us—at least, I could feel it—and I didn’t want to talk about the bad things anymore. I wanted to talk about how I thought I might be falling for him, hard. I wanted to taste his lips on mine and be grateful that he was here to swallow up my fear.

 

So when I felt my neck elongate, trying to get my mouth closer to his, I thought it might happen, that kiss I was so desperately craving. “You know everything now,” I found myself whispering, staring at those lips. “I trust you.”

 

He looked down at me fiercely, and it didn’t look like anger anymore. Instead, he looked like he was thinking the same things I was. Like he wanted to close that last little space between us and cover my mouth with his.

 

Finally.

 

But he never did. Instead, he sucked in a heavy breath and said in a barely audible whisper, “I…I should call Caleb. Give him a heads-up.”

 

As he turned away, disappointment washed through me. I couldn’t figure out what the wild, incongruous signals meant, but I hoped still that they might eventually line up with mine.