Total pages in book: 767
Estimated words: 732023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 3660(@200wpm)___ 2928(@250wpm)___ 2440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 732023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 3660(@200wpm)___ 2928(@250wpm)___ 2440(@300wpm)
I might not have claimed her yet, but she’s going to be mine.
Sara helps her parents bring out the appetizers and sits down next to the lawyer. I crank up the audio feed and listen as the two of them make small talk. For someone who just found out about her husband’s double life, the little doctor is remarkably composed, her smiling mask firmly in place. Nobody looking at her would know that before coming here, she hid in her closet for hours and emerged less than forty minutes ago with her eyes red and swollen.
Nobody would suspect she’s terrified because I want her.
It took everything I had to let her stay in that closet and cry on her own. She went in there to escape my cameras, and I let her have this time to herself. She would’ve been even more upset if I’d gone in and embraced her—if I’d tried to comfort her the way I wanted.
I need to give her more time to get used to the idea of us—and to trust I won’t hurt her.
The dinner lasts a couple of hours; then Sara helps her mother clear off the table and makes an excuse to leave. The lawyer asks for her phone number, and she gives it, but I can see it’s mostly out of politeness. Her cheeks are perfectly pale—there isn’t even a hint of the color that floods her face in my presence—and her body language speaks of indifference. Joe Levinson doesn’t excite her, and that’s a good thing.
It means he gets to go home alive.
I follow Sara at a distance as she drives to the clinic, and then I wait in my car until she emerges, entertaining myself by watching her through the cameras I installed inside the clinic. I know what I’m doing is stalker behavior at best, but I can’t stop myself.
I have to know where she is and what she’s doing.
I have to make sure she’s safe.
I could entrust the physical guard duty to Anton and my other guys—they already watch her when I can’t—but I want to be here in person. I want to see her with my own eyes. With each day that passes, my need for her intensifies, and now that I’ve held an actual conversation with her, my fascination is quickly morphing into an obsession.
I have to have her. Soon.
She comes out of the clinic some three hours later, and I follow her as she drives to a hotel. She probably thinks she’ll be safer there than at her house with all the cameras, but she’s wrong.
I wait until she checks into the hotel and goes up to her room, and then I get out of the car and go in.
Chapter 16
Sara
The clinic shift was particularly rough today. I had a fourteen-year-old patient who asked for morning-after pills because her brother raped her and another patient barely out of her teens who came in with her third miscarriage. I did what I could, but I know it’s not enough.
Nothing I do for those girls will ever be enough.
I’m so emotionally drained it takes all my energy to shower and brush my teeth with the little toothbrush the front desk gave me. Coming here for the night was an impulse decision, so I don’t even have a change of underwear with me. I’ll have to stop by my house tomorrow morning before going to work, but it’s better than being home and knowing that my deadly stalker might be watching me at that very moment.
Watching me and wanting me. Maybe even jacking off at the sight of my naked body.
It’s sick, but heat licks between my legs at the thought.
Exiting the shower, I wrap a towel around my chest and stare at myself in the mirror. Visine eye drops did a good job of removing the redness from my eyes, but my lids still look swollen from my crying jag earlier today, and my face is reddened from the hot shower. I also have a tension headache that makes me disinclined to think, which is just as well.
I did too much thinking earlier as is.
George as a spy. George leading a double life. It seems impossible, yet it would explain so much. The FBI agents’ protection that came out of nowhere. His long absences when he supposedly chased a story yet often came home without one. The moods that started shortly after our marriage six years earlier. Did something go wrong on one of his covert assignments?
Could his real job be the reason he changed so much in the years leading up to the accident?
My headache intensifies, and I realize I’m doing it again. I’m thinking about George, obsessing about the past I can’t change rather than focusing on the future that’s still within my control. I should be trying to figure out what to do about the killer who’s stalking me, but my mind simply refuses to go there.