Joanne Rock - Wishes At First Light

“Oh.” Not sure what else to say, she gulped the fresh coffee, sizzling off a few taste buds in the process. Ow.

“Would you rather I stay somewhere else besides the motel? Is that too close for comfort?” he asked, raising a dark eyebrow.

Was it just her overactive imagination, or was there a wealth of innuendo in those words? Their flirtatious online chats came to mind. How many of them had Clayton actually authored? She knew for sure he hadn’t been the one to send her those last messages. Jeremy Covington had impersonated Clay online, deceiving Gabriella into meeting him out at that quarry.

She remembered Covington vaguely from her teenage years. His wife taught at the high school and he’d been an assistant coach on the school’s football team. Since she’d learned that he was her attacker, she remembered that in his work with the football team, he would have seen her and Clayton together when they met after school near the bleachers. The football players often practiced on that field at the same time. Covington must have known enough about the fledgling relationship to impersonate Clay.

“No. Of course not.” She wished she could hide behind her cup. She had no idea how to read him and suddenly, she wasn’t sure she wanted to. How many times had she confused his words with her attacker’s in her dreams? “Just surprised you aren’t staying at the Heartache B & B,” she finished lamely.

“Really?” He tossed bills on the table before she could fish her credit card out of her wallet. “Time hasn’t changed me all that much, Gabby. I’m still not a center-of-town kind of guy. And outside of the B & B there aren’t many habitable choices. Which is how we’re ending up neighbors of sorts.”

For a moment the shared smile brought her a small amount of comfort. A reprieve from memories that time had filtered, altered and amplified.

“It’s been a long time since we knew each other.” She set her credit card next to his cash, needing to pay her own way. “The years have changed me, as I’m sure they have you.”

Her independence had been hard-won.

“You’re right about that. Up until last week I thought you ran away with Sam that night.” He let the waitress take both forms of payment, putting her more at ease. “Did you know that was the word on the Crestwood High School grapevine at the time?”

“School was the last thing on my mind,” she told him honestly, flinching when a table full of deep-voiced men broke out into laughter.

Heartache made her jumpy. Or maybe it was the upcoming trial. She really needed to see that bastard Covington in jail and move forward with her life.

“Hell.” He hung his head for a second before giving her an embarrassed grimace. “That was an idiotic thing for me to say, and totally unnecessary.”

“No. It’s a credit to my brother that he kept the whole story about what happened on lockdown like I asked him to. For a long time, you thought I ran away to live the party life or join the circus or...have a wild affair with Sam. I can’t resent that when that’s exactly what I wanted people to think. I was too much of a kid to realize who I might hurt by hiding the truth.”

The waitress returned with Clayton’s change and Gabriella’s receipt, but he didn’t move to take it. He frowned at Gabriella.

“You had to do what was best for yourself, Gabby.” He sounded fierce on her behalf. Indignant.

“I know.” She took her time stuffing her credit card and her receipt in her purse. “But it’s strange having the truth circulating now after all this time. I have shared what happened with my support group in San Jose, but people in Heartache are only just starting to hear the truth. I’ve been back twice since it happened, and it’s certainly nothing I ever shared.”

He leaned forward, one muscular arm braced on the table. “They’ll all find out once you testify against Covington, though, right?”

“I submitted a written statement, but I don’t know how important it will be in the big scheme of things. I haven’t been called to testify yet since they have far more damning testimony than mine. Most of it in the form of his computer records.” Gabriella had been shocked to learn that Jeremy Covington’s wife had turned over all the computers she had access to in their home to the prosecution, but apparently the woman had had enough of his cheating and crimes. “Still, I sent a personal letter to the judge. I want to share my story.”

“You said Covington was cyber stalking.” Clayton nodded thoughtfully. “Was he watching your movements online?”

The question cut right to the heart of what made it so damn difficult to sit across the table from Clayton.

Her throat dried up. Cold clamminess broke out over her skin in a panic that had everything to do with her dream world and nothing to do with the handsome and decent man across from her.

“I—” She was at a loss for what to say. “Actually, Clay, do you mind if we catch up another time?” Her heart beat faster. She stood to leave before thinking how rude that would appear. “I’m sorry. I just remembered I was supposed to meet my friend Amy this morning. I don’t know where my head is today.”

“Let me walk you out—” He was already reaching for his guitar.

But Gabriella didn’t hear the rest. She’d fallen into dream mode—that place where the past and her fears mingled, growing larger than life—and she needed a breath of fresh air. She hadn’t experienced a panic attack like this in years. Shoving her way through the entrance to the Owl’s Roost, she nearly ran into a big, burly man carrying a toddler into the restaurant.

“Sorry,” she apologized, never slowing down.

The cold wind blasted over her face, tugging strands of her hair across her cheek and drying some of the dampness from her skin.

Pausing at the porch rail, she took big, gasping breaths of air into her lungs.

She would plan a private time to speak to Clayton Travers again. She hadn’t been emotionally prepared to see him this morning, and it was so early in the day she still had one foot in her unsettling dreams from the night before. But she was in Heartache to put the past to rest for good. She would see Jeremy Covington go to jail. And she’d share with Clay the truth about the conversations she’d thought she had with him over that summer. There was a chance she’d only been talking to him half the time she thought she had been messaging with him.

True, it all happened a long time ago. But she owed it to herself to find out how much of that online relationship Clay had participated in over those weeks she’d been falling for him—and how much of that time she’d been talking to Jeremy Covington. It was just one more step in the healing, and not anything to do with the fact that Clayton Travers still made her heart skip a beat.

* * *

IT HAD BEEN a long time since a woman had run from him.

Ten years, in fact. And the last perpetrator was the same as today’s—one Gabriella Chance.

Walking more sedately out of the Owl’s Roost, Clayton knew he was attracting stares. The people in the booths nearby were probably wondering what piece of crap man would send a woman sprinting for the door by herself. More than a little on edge by the time he made it through the exit, he was surprised to see Gabriella still on the front porch.

Her back to him, she gripped the rail so hard it made her shoulders and arms rigid. The late-autumn wind tossed a few strands of dark blond hair, her loose pants fluttering against her legs. As he neared, he could see she took deep breaths that lifted her whole chest, exhaling through her mouth like she was doing yoga breathing.

“I’m in a sticky social situation here,” he noted wryly, standing a few feet away and staring out over the parking lot the same way she was doing. “Do I give you the space you seem to crave and walk past you? Or do I stop and try to be a gentleman because you seem distressed?”