Joanne Rock - Wishes At First Light

He wanted to meet her.

But that natural sensual awakening had been terrified out of her by a brute who threw her down in the woods later that night. A big, hairy grown man who knew where she’d planned to meet Clayton. Not an innocent teenage flirtation at all. The man had been masked. He’d ripped the short dress. Called her names that still haunted her even more often than the dream.

Slut. Whore.

Screaming at the injustice of the words, the attack, the loss of emotional innocence if not her virginity, Gabriella punched her attacker in the face. Again and again. That part only happened in her dreams, since in the real-life episode, Samuel Reyes had come to her rescue and been the one to pound her attacker into submission long enough for them to escape.

Now she took her defense into her own hands, pummeling the masked face while she cried.

Only then did she finally awaken, crouched on her knees on the sagging mattress in a motel cottage off Interstate 65 in Tennessee. The pillow she’d been thrashing was now wedged between the headboard and the box spring while her knuckles throbbed where she’d scraped them against the wood. Face wet with tears and chest heaving from fear and exertion, she levered herself out of the bed and padded across the hotel carpet in sock feet.

Gabriella turned the squeaking metal knob for the faucet to splash cold water on her face and wash away the last vestiges of the dream. Toweling off with the threadbare white cotton cloth draped over a thin silver rack, she stared at her face under the harsh flicker of greenish fluorescent lights. Her skin was pale beneath the red irritation around both eyes. The best of her family’s genes had gone to her older brother, Zach, leaving Gabriella with hair that could only be described as dishwater blond, and plain features that benefitted from makeup or candlelight. Preferably both.

But that was okay. Because Gabriella Chance’s beauty didn’t come from the sum of her outer parts. And it sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with the length of her skirt. Her jaw flexed, the muscle working as she ground her teeth at the old memory.

No. Any appeal she held radiated from her strength of character, evident in her burning, raw knuckles and her clear blue eyes that saw the world for what it was.

A dangerous place, yes. But a place she had survived. She forged on, slogging through the endless loop of her nightmares to fight another day. More important, she survived to help other victims of cyber stalking to move on with their lives. If that was as much as she accomplished in her life, it was something to be proud of.

Yet, as she sidestepped her suitcase on the floor on the way back to her bed, Gabriella couldn’t deny a small part of her heart longed for more than that. No matter how many times that dream reminded her of her past, she couldn’t stop longing for a normal life. A normal love. A man who would recognize her real beauty and strength, and help her find it on the days when she forgot where she’d hidden it.

But now that a whole decade had passed without giving her any peace, Gabriella knew that wasn’t going to happen. She’d returned to the city of the assault—her hometown of Heartache, Tennessee—to witness her assailant finally go to jail. While she was here, she planned to check on a local bullying victim she’d helped through her support group online—sixteen-year-old Mia Benson. But once she’d taken care of the at-risk girl and she had the satisfaction of seeing her own attacker’s face while he was sentenced to life in prison for a whole string of crimes since he’d hurt her, then Gabriella would close this chapter of her life forever.

Flipping over the lumpy, squashed pillow in the motel outside Heartache, she knew that she was almost done with the past. The nightmares had been slowing down in the last two years. It was only because she’d heard that actual Clayton Travers was back in town that she’d traveled the dream path again tonight. She’d never told him what happened that night, and a short time later she’d fled town with Samuel Reyes and her older brother, Zach. She’d built a different life after that.

But sometimes she wondered what Clayton had heard about her or what he thought had happened. No one else knew that Gabriella believed she’d been chatting with Clayton online before her attack. There’d been other times that year when they’d exchanged messages for real, and she hadn’t wanted Clayton to get in trouble for the content of those notes if the police looked back at them.

Clayton had been in the foster system, and those messages might have put him at risk of being booted out of the Hasting house where he was happy. So Gabriella had said nothing, a silence that had always weighed on her.

And now, completely by accident, she’d learned Clayton Travers was back in Heartache.

As she closed her eyes to try and fall back asleep, Clayton’s return was the one thought that filled her mind. She couldn’t help but wonder if she talked to him, told him about what had happened that night, would it finally stop the dream once and for all?

Damn it.

It wasn’t what she wanted. But given that her attacker was finally going on trial two days from now, his conviction certain since the police finally had damning evidence, and yet the night terrors remained as potent as ever, Gabriella needed to think about other ways to address the fears of her subconscious. This was no way to live—caught in an endless loop of bad memories. And if speaking to Clayton might give her the peace to keep moving forward, she’d damn well try.

* * *

AS A TEEN, Clayton Travers would have given his left nut for the chance to set foot inside Gabriella Chance’s home.

Ironic that now he’d been sleeping there for a week.

After spending the last nine years in Memphis, Clayton had come back home to the small town of Heartache for a reunion of his foster family planned by his foster brother, Samuel Reyes, who was now the town’s sheriff. Since Clayton had a private investigations business, he had done Sam a favor by staying in the Chance household, which was now occupied by Zach, Gabriella’s older brother and also the mayor of Heartache. Zach had needed some extra eyes on his fiancée, Heather Finley, after the woman was the target of an attempted kidnapping. Clayton didn’t mind collecting a paycheck while he was in town, so he’d gladly taken the easy gig for a week. But now, with the threat confirmed to be behind bars, Clayton would find somewhere else to stay until the Hasting family reunion later that week. He packed his duffel at dawn to leave the Chance house, his eyes lingering on an old photo of Gabriella on the sleek, mission-style dresser in the bedroom where he’d slept these last six nights.

She stood in front of a big pink castle in a California theme park, her arm around a huge stuffed panda that must have been a game prize. She wore a long dress too big for her, making her look sort of lost inside it. Wisps of blond hair from her ponytail blew in a summer breeze as she smiled, but there was something off about the photo. It wasn’t a real smile—not like the ones he remembered from the few times they’d ended up staying after school together. She’d been a math genius, helping kids as a student tutor, and she’d been cool about it, too, even though Clayton had been taking algebra when everyone else in his grade had moved on to calculus or trig. It wasn’t that he was totally clueless, he just switched homes and schools too fast to patch together the right credits. He’d fallen behind trying to learn math from teachers who’d taught it with really different methods. Gabriella never made him feel like the flunky foster kid.

Far from it.

Too bad she hadn’t lived in Tennessee for the past decade, walking out of this very house one long-ago summer and never looking back, leaving Clayton to finish his senior year by himself. Sam, the foster brother he’d roomed with at the Hastings’ house, had left town the same time as Gabriella and her older brother. The only way Daniel and Lorelei Hasting, Clayton and Sam’s foster parents, had avoided a full-scale child protective services investigation was that Sam turned eighteen shortly afterward, making him an independent adult.