Asha King Read online

  She parted her thighs, her fingers delving into her pussy as her hips bucked to meet them. He’d pump into her with just the right amount of frenzy, past tenderness but not brutal. He’d kiss her savagely, his mouth eating her scream as warm tingles gathered in her—

  The phone on the nightstand buzzed.

  Dani blinked and stared up at the dark ceiling, suddenly becoming aware of herself. Jesus, was she actually getting off thinking about Cooper? About to bring herself to a shattering orgasm over him?

  What in the hell was wrong with her?

  The phone stopped buzzing but her body had cooled, breathing had slowed. She firmly put Cooper out of her head and grabbed her mobile from the nightstand. The time flashed only 10:37—early mornings around the farm were definitely leading to earlier and earlier bed times than she was used to. She’d missed an email, of all things, to her one private account she was allowing herself to still check. No fanmail or anything, just stuff from close friends and family.

  She didn’t immediately recognize the name and clicked the empty subject line to open it. Probably some poor Nigerian prince or—

  NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO, I’LL FIND YOU, DANI GIRL.

  Her throat went dry, blood went cold, as she stared at the message. Terror wormed its way through her, her heart beating hard and fingertips beginning to tremble.

  No one was supposed to have that email address. No one.

  The room seemed too dark now, too full of shadows—too foreign. She sat up in bed, turned on the light, and glanced around. No one was in there, obviously. She knew there wouldn’t be, logically, but she felt...

  She felt, for the first time in days, like she wasn’t safe anymore.

  Publicly bothering her was one thing. She was used to it—expected it. Trolls, flamers, douchebags—the internet provided anonymity and people just loved trying to tear down others. She was used to it after all this time. And this guy everyone was worried about—he seemed a distant threat or not a threat at all. It was Therese and Randy who insisted she see a threat assessment expert, since she just kept laughing it off.

  But he’d never come this close before. His emails to her previously were intercepted when she hired someone else to go through her public messages. Aside from some snail mail letters to her home—and really though she guarded it, that kind of info wasn’t hard to figure out—he’d never come this close before.

  Danyiah cast the phone on the dresser and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging them as she curled her head down.

  I’LL FIND YOU, DANI GIRL.

  Cleary she didn’t feel safe because she wasn’t. And might not ever be again.

  Chapter Seven

  It was still dark outside by the time Adam climbed out of bed at five in the morning, though birds chirped eagerly. He didn’t sleep well the day before an event. Honestly, he’d do away with them completely but Gus liked it—said it was good for the farm—so Adam played along, even if he preferred the “boring” work days instead.

  He showered, shaved, and dressed in clean work clothes. He did his best to stay out of view, working behind the scenes when there was an event, but would endeavor to be presentable later when the horses were settled and the focus was on entertaining the people who stayed.

  He’d endeavor to be presentable for her. Even if it wouldn’t do any good, something the past few days had been making him pause a bit longer and take more care getting dressed, using aftershave, and hope he didn’t perpetually smell like a horse. He wanted her to think well of him.

  I’ve lost my goddamn mind—that’s why my problem is.

  Adam’s steps thumped down the stairs, the dampness from the shower still in his hair growing heavy with heat. There was no air conditioning in his personal quarters, nothing to cool him off but fans in the summer—not like the main house. He could’ve had a room in the main house, but he did like his space, after all.

  He parted the bright orange curtain and stepped into the dark, open room below, then reached over to flip on the lights. The night before, he’d paused there to admire Danyiah’s work—she’d put a lot of care into arranging what were actually cheap party supplies.

  Now he stared around in horror, blinking in the bright lights.

  ****

  Adam stomped through the house, his temper fuming. The kitchen lights were already on, Dewey puttering about the stove, the smell of coffee thick in the air. Gus sat at the breakfast bar and frowned, starting to call Adam’s name but he waved the old man off.

  At the end of the hall, Danyiah’s door was open and yellow light shone through—she was awake and moving around.

  “I don’t know!” she hissed, her voice nearly halting him. “But what am I supposed to do? You’re the expert. You said that I’d—”

  Her voice cut off but nothing followed—she had to be on the phone. Her tone was laced with distress and his heart gave a sudden hurtful pang at the sound.

  But no. He didn’t care. Wouldn’t care. He burst into the room and she turned sharply, eyes red-rimmed and huge, staring at him. Still in her pajamas, which were white short-shorts and a camisole, contrasting beautifully with her dark skin and showing tantalizing amounts of it.

  “Just find out how it happened,” she said into the phone, staring at him still. “I’ll phone you back.” She slowly ended the call and set the cell down. “What?”

  What. What.

  He grasped her wrist, ignoring her protests and marched from the room. She stumbled after him, swearing up a storm. They passed Dewey and Gus, questions passing in a blur, as he dragged her outside. The glow of dawn began in the horizon but it was still dark.

  “You goddamn Neanderthal!” she shouted, tugging at him as he strode down the path toward the lit building he’d left, but still he said nothing. Two steps onto the creaky porch and he jerked open the door, hinges squealing, and stepped inside.

  “You want to tell me what the hell you did?” he shouted, stalking a few steps into the room as he let her wrist go. Adam gestured around at the overturned chairs, torn streamers, popped balloons. All the decorations were shredded and scattered across the worn hardwood floor, a mess of pink and blue and white and yellow.

  Trashed. The place had been utterly trashed.

  “I—”

  He swung around and thrust his finger in her direction. “You had the key. No one else besides me and Gus do. You. So who did you give it to?”

  She planted her hands on her hips, gaping up at him. “No one! So, what, you think I did this? Why the hell would I—I was the one who decorated it in the first place!”

  “Because you’re completely mental and bipolar?”

  “That is really fucking offensive—”

  “If you didn’t, then you left the goddamn door unlocked—”

  “I did not! Someone must’ve—”

  “The windows weren’t touched. Lock isn’t broken. I would’ve heard someone breaking in.”

  Her chin lifted and eyes flashed angrily. “Well maybe you were otherwise engaged and too busy to hear anything!”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Hey!” Gus’s voice carried over them both, pushing them to silence. Generally he was quiet but he had a hell of a bellow when it was called for. He ambled into the room, leaning heavily on his cane, but didn’t look at the destruction: his gaze darted between Adam and Danyiah. “Dani,” he said in an even tone of voice, “did you forget to lock the door yesterday?”

  “No! I specifically remember closing the door, locking it, closing the screen door, and leaving just before dinner.”

  He shifted his attention to Adam next, eyes hard. “If she says she locked, she locked. If she says she didn’t do it, she didn’t do it.”

  Jesus— “Then who did it?”

  Gus waved him off. “You know kids can—”

  “How did someone get in here? Do you have your key?”

  His boss retrieved his ring of keys from his pocket—eight of them, and none seemed to be
missing.

  “And mine’s right here,” Adam patted his back pocket where his set of farm keys was a familiar lump, “and no one broke in. So what happened?”

  Danyiah spun and fled from the room, around Gus and out the door. The porch rattled under her feet and then silence as she, presumably slipped back to the house.

  Gus raised his hand before Adam could say anything. “Don’t. If she says she didn’t, then she didn’t.”

  There were only so many people on the property, though. He’d’ve heard someone illegally entering downstairs during the night, wouldn’t he?

  “You know how I feel about the doors—”

  “And locks and break-ins,” Gus finished. “Yes, I do. And I know you don’t know her like I do, but she’s not careless and she’s not dishonest.”

  Gus made no move to leave so Adam waited, crossing his arms at his chest and expecting a reprimand.

  “There’s a lot to do today, not the least of which is cleaning up this mess and redecorating,” his boss said. “You have your chores to do as well. I’ll talk to her and get this place sorted—and I’ll not have another harsh word from you about her. Is that understood?”

  Adam nodded.

  “Good.”

  “But,” Adam said as Gus turned to go, “sir, there’s still the matter of who did this.”

  “I’ll have her pick up a new lock from the hardware store and you can install it later. We’ll deal with the rest after we get through today.”

  ****

  Dani was hurriedly yanking clothes out of dresser drawers and shoving them back in her bag. She’d stopped long enough to slip on a proper bra and shoved her legs into jeans, but that was it.

  There was a soft knock on her door. She turned, ready to bark something at Cooper, but it was Gus in the doorway.

  “Oh, Dani, I’m sorry,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You don’t get it.” The cell phone still sat on the bed where she’d left it and she plucked it up again, cycling through to the email she’d left in place at Dr. Van Ike’s request. “He knows I’m here.”

  Gus accepted the phone and glanced over it, then shook his head. “You don’t know that.”

  She made a violent gesture in the direction of Adam’s building. “Oh no? He sent that last night and this morning we find the room trashed. That’s not a coincidence.”

  “It very well may be.” Gus dropped to sit on the chest at the end of her bed, resting his cane across his knees. “We get vandals out here, especially Friday and Saturday nights. We have a gate at the end of the driveway but kids climb the fence. Sometimes people try to steal things—horse equipment, mainly. Sometimes they try to dump things like their garbage. Sometimes it’s youngsters with too much free time. Why, every other week in the summer, Dewey will be doing rounds about the property and come across some torn sleeping bag and condoms from kids getting frisky in the fields. And sometimes still, in the morning we find barrels of grain tipped over, horses spooked, spray paint over fences. Even now, we had people camping out here overnight because they have horses in the show tomorrow, but a few of them I don’t know well at all.”

  Dani sat on the edge of the bed, hugging the stack of clothes in her arms, and said nothing.

  “I think maybe this fella who’s been bothering you probably sent the message hoping you’d do something like—”

  “Like leave,” she finished for him. “And come home so that he can find me. I know. That’s what Dr.—what the threat assessment expert says.”

  “You want to leave, Dani,” he rested his hand on her shoulder, “and you’re welcome to. You’re no prisoner here. But if you are in fact still safe, I’d very much like to have you remain.”

  “I know.” She loosened her arms around the stack of clothes and took a deep breath, offered a smile. “And you’re probably right. Dr. Van Ike is probably right. It just...”

  “Stressful few days, too little sleep, and bad timing,” he said. “Are you up to redoing the room for the dance afterward?”

  She suppressed a shiver and nodded instead. Soon the sun would be high, bright light of day blasting away the shadows that had her scared, and she’d feel like herself again. “Yeah.”

  “Good.” He patted her shoulder before rising. “You’ll have to head into town and pick some things up.”

  “Okay. I’ll be on the road before they open at nine.”

  “Good girl.” Gus pressed down on the cane as he walked, hobbling back through the open doorway, and closed the door behind him.

  Dani sat there for a moment, staring blankly at her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. He was right, she knew—they both were, Gus and Dr. Van Ike. She didn’t normally get this rattled. In fact, she never had. But the creepy warning sent to her private email seemed to make real what everyone had been telling her for so long: this actually was serious. Dr. Van Ike said going on hiatus from her public life and disappearing privately would throw her stalker off kilter, force him to act and probably mess up. Things might escalate but virtually no one actually knew where she was going—she made sure not to leave any info anywhere. He was just trying to scare her back home.

  She stared at her own red-rimmed, tired eyes for several minutes longer and prayed the sun would rise soon.

  Chapter Eight

  Dani sat at the top corner of the bleachers several feet from everyone else, watching the evening entertainment the barrel racers provided.

  And doing everything in her power to avoid Adam Cooper.

  She’d busied herself all morning and afternoon, scarcely taking time to eat or drink. First she picked up supplies from the party store, then redecorated, then started carting over coolers of beer and soda. She got all the snack platters ready. She cleaned. She did everything but meet Cooper’s gaze or pause when he looked like he was about to say something to her.

  She honestly didn’t want to hear it and while Gus had encouraged her to stay, he might change his tune if Cooper said something that inspired her to punch him in his still-extremely-attractive, smug face.

  That was how she got fired from her sex shop job eighteen months earlier—and what incidentally caused her blog hits to skyrocket. Punching a customer who said something offensive to her. Of course, it was an entirely different thing from whatever Cooper probably wanted to say, but would likely get the same result from her.

  Floodlights lit the huge outdoor arena. Gus sat up on a platform, grinning widely, hollering into a microphone various details about the riders Dani hadn’t been paying attention to. The actual races were done that afternoon—the evening show was more like an encore. Last person up was the ever-perfect Carlee Birch on Sweet Pea, who had won the races earlier.

  She trotted out on her horse, waving at the crowd, who cheered. Her smooth hair was pulled back into a long ponytail that gleamed in the harsh lights. She started from the right barrel and took off at a frightful speed, Sweet Pea kicking up dirt. The horse took the right turn hard, tipping at an angel that Dani would’ve found terrifying as a rider, then around the barrel toward the next.

  Watching for a few hours, she’d figured it out, roughly. The horses went around barrels in a cloverleaf pattern as fast as they could. Knocking a barrel added a penalty. The whole thing seemed like a nightmare and Dani came away from the experience determined to never do such a thing, even for a blog challenge.

  Of course everyone applauded stupid Carlee and her horse when she finished, though Dani didn’t stick around to hear much else; she hightailed it down the bleacher steps and straight over to unlock the building for the after party.

  She wore a long, pale pink skirt that reached her ankles and twirled around her legs, letting her feel girly for the first time in nearly a week. A white tank top hugged her torso, the hem stopping two inches above the low-sitting skirt. It wasn’t glamorous and she wore flat sandals instead of heels, but such was life on a ranch. She smelled good, at least, having showered again two hours ago before she changed, and her black hair hu
ng loose around her shoulders. She wore her Stetson—it finally seemed to be sitting right on her head—so she fit right in with everyone else.

  The damn key, she had tied around her wrist with a ribbon. Unorthodox, yes, but she wasn’t about to stuff it in her bra and didn’t want to cart around a purse. She fully intended to hand it to Gus just as soon as everyone moved into the building.

  Dani unlocked and opened the door, and flipped on the lights. A breath of relief passed her lips when she saw everything was where it was supposed to be. The streamers were dark blue, purple, yellow, and white, arcing from the center and whirling around the perimeter. They drifted down, blowing gently in the breeze from the open windows. Balloons were in similar colors, dotted all over the room. There were tables with food and coolers with drinks, and although chairs were stacked to the side, Dewey had carted in bales of hay to really push the “barn dance” feel and give people another place to sit.

  Not that I will be. She scooped a bottle of red ale from one of the coolers and went to lean against the wall, waiting for the “fun” to start. There was a stereo off to the side but she decided not to turn it on as she already knew it was set for country and didn’t want it started any sooner than necessary. The beer was delightfully cold, sending shivers over her skin as she took a sip.

  Stairs creaked to the left; she glanced over to see Cooper step through the curtain that led to his quarters.

  He looked good. Of course. Damn him. No hat this time and his hair was damp, as if he’d showered again. He wore a clean white T-shirt that hugged him deliciously and fresh jeans she itched to peel off and see what lay beneath.

  Dani jerked her head away and took another sip, ignoring him before her thoughts delved into places they had no business going.

  But of course he was moving toward her, his steps steadily thudding on the worn, creaky hardwood. Prickles ran up her spine but she continued staring straight ahead, pretending he wasn’t there—pretending his very presence didn’t set her body burning, pretending she didn’t acutely remember her unfinished fantasy from the night before.