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“No need to apologize. It wasn’t a big deal.” He didn’t want her to worry about it. Hell, he’d rather have her thinking about reliving happier times when—he’d thought—they’d been on the verge of acting on an attraction.
“But I was actually planning on seeking you out tonight to tell you the other reason I left the table abruptly this morning.” She bit her lip, her pale forehead furrowed. “It’s awkward. And embarrassing.”
A breeze toyed with the loose strands of hair around her face, and his hand itched to smooth away the silky pieces. Put her at ease somehow.
“I wish it didn’t have to be. Are you sure you don’t want to sit inside where it’s warm?” The motel cabins were tiny, but each unit had a kitchenette. A small sofa.
“I’m fine.” She shook her head, but wrapped her arms around herself, hugging her coat tighter to her body. “I wouldn’t mention this at all, but I hoped if I talked to you about it, maybe it would put some unsettling parts of my past to rest for me.”
Concern rooted him to the spot. “You’re worrying me. I hope I don’t have anything to do with unhappy parts of your past, Gabriella.”
Beyond the parking lot, a tractor trailer whizzed past, rumbling the whole porch under his feet and sending the foliage of a few overgrown bushes whipping against the small cabin.
“Not through any fault of your own.” She shook her head slowly.
Sadly.
“I don’t understand.” Defensiveness fired through him. He’d been a perfect gentleman where she’d been concerned. “We were young. What we shared was perfectly innocent—”
“Was it?” She asked the question as if she really needed to have it confirmed. As if she didn’t already know the answer.
“Hell, yes—” he started, sitting forward in his seat.
Gabriella laid a hand on his arm, a new confidence radiating from her that had been missing this morning. She seemed calmer tonight. Maybe the Salon Night was her equivalent of guitar picking.
“Because, Clay, I thought I had a lot of not-completely-innocent conversations with you online that summer in chat rooms.” Her clear blue eyes were focused on his as he felt the floor drop out from under him.
“What?” He shook his head. Confused.
“And it turned out,” she continued, barely pausing to take a breath. “That night I was attacked? I thought I’d spoken to you online just before the incident. It was you I was planning to meet in the quarry.”
The revelation seemed to hang suspended in midair between them, not really permeating his brain. He’d heard the words. But they made no sense.
“Gabby—I sent you a couple of emails that spring, I remember. I know you got them, because you answered them.” They’d spoken about it during a math tutoring session. She’d sent him some sample problems that way. “But I don’t think I even knew how to find a chat room back then.”
Unlike most of his generation, the techno-revolution had missed him. He’d been poor to start with, so it wasn’t like his parents had bought him laptops or game systems at Christmastime. He’d been lucky to get new socks. A sweater, maybe. Later, when his alcoholic mom had run off and his alcoholic father had given up completely on parenting, Clay had moved into nicer foster homes with access to more technology, but he’d been low in the pecking order of kids waiting to use an internet connection for homework.
Gabriella folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself as she stared up at the fat full moon overhead for a long moment. There was something so vulnerable about her and strong at the same time. Willowy slim, she had a delicate, feminine grace, but the determined set of her chin and shoulders suggested she would walk through fire if the need arose.
“I knew, of course, that you couldn’t have been the person I communicated with that night.” She blinked and drew a deep breath before continuing. “Those messages came from the man who attacked me. He was just pretending to be you when he sent them, so I believed that it was you who wanted to see me.”
He wondered what the exchange had been about that it had drawn a sixteen-year-old girl out of her home late at night. And damn, but it sent a surge of cold fury through him to think her attacker had impersonated Clay to get at her.
“That night wasn’t the only time you thought we exchanged messages online?” He had all new reasons to attend that trial for Jeremy Covington tomorrow.
Seized with the need to see the man pay for his crimes, Clay wondered if it was too late to charge him with impersonating Clay in addition to the long list of felonies that including numerous counts of cyber stalking, stalking, assault, sexual molestation, soliciting a minor and attempted kidnapping. Clayton remembered there was at least one impersonation charge on the long list he’d read in the paper, but that had been in conjunction with another incident involving a local teen he’d lured out by pretending to be a mutual friend of Heather Finley’s.
“No.” Sitting forward on the wooden seat, Gabriella tucked her feet around the front rail of the chair as she shook her head. “We chatted five or six times before that in the two weeks prior to that night—or so I thought.”
Clay couldn’t believe the gall of the guy—a respected man in the community, a coach on the high school football team with a kid and a wife—to contact a local girl repeatedly, pretending to be a teenage foster kid. It made sense that Covington would have known about Clay’s fledgling relationship with Gabriella, though. They’d met under the bleachers during football practices.
“For how long?” He couldn’t wrap his brain around it, but he realized he should be comforting her instead of focusing on how wronged he felt. How robbed. But damn it, Clay should have been the one enjoying those conversations with her online. “I mean, how extensive were these conversations? And what did he talk to you about?”
He sat forward in his chair, too, closer to her. Belatedly, he remembered he’d brought his motorcycle jacket outside earlier and he grabbed it off the back of his chair to drape across her shoulders. The flannel he wore over a sweatshirt kept him warm enough.
“Thanks.” Her eyes met his in the moonlight, clear and blue even though the darkness grayed out most colors. “This is where things get awkward for me. I was kind of hoping when I confided this to you that you would have been on the receiving end of at least some of those messages I sent you.”
Her gaze darted away again, searching the parking lot as if she’d rather look anywhere else. Across the lot at the diner, a couple of staffers closed the back door for the night, turning off the last of the lights in the building.
Clay’s attention returned to Gabriella. Her pink fingernails flashed along the zipper of the brown bomber jacket, tugging the leather tighter while her words sent his brain on a kind of wild ride. Just what sort of things had she believed they were saying to each other in those chats?
“I understand where that realization would be unsettling.” He nodded, starting to put the pieces together. “But consider my side. I can’t help but wonder why you were messaging with me, Gabby. I only remember a few cursory exchanges online about times we were going to meet for math tutoring when I wanted to know you so much better. I was pretty much crazy about you back then.”
She went still. Slowly, her eyes tracked back to his.
“That helps, actually, to hear you say that. So, thank you.” She shrugged awkwardly in the big jacket, the fabric weighing down the gesture so it was just the slightest movement. “Because our conversations were fairly flirtatious. I looked forward to those chats, because I liked you, too.”
And just like that, Gabriella Chance got under his skin all over again. He’d pinpointed the attraction between them alive and well earlier today. But right now, with her soft confession drifting on the night breeze, and her loose ponytail sliding along the shoulder of his jacket as she looked at him with trusting eyes...
She tapped into a spot in his chest that he hadn’t cracked open in a good long while.
Her cell phone vibrated on the porch rail, the light and the sound startling her. She reached for it.
“Sorry to check this,” she said a little too quickly, breathlessly. She flipped over the screen, and the light illuminated her face as she scrolled the pages. “I only leave the notifications on for family and for messages from the hotline for my victims’ support group, so it could be—”
She went silent, lips pursed as she read.
“Something wrong?” He admired her for using her own experiences as a victim of cyber stalking to help others, even if it interrupted a conversation that had captured his undivided attention.
“There’s a local girl I’m planning to check on while I’m in Heartache—someone I’ve communicated with off and on over the last two years through my online group.” Gabby worked the keypad on the screen while she spoke. “I’m really worried about her. She’s so young and she’s alone taking care of her dying—” after an awkward pause, she stopped typing to peer up at Clayton, her eyes widening with what looked like a “lightbulb” moment “—father.”
“What is it?” He’d been behind the eight ball from the beginning of this conversation, so it was no surprise he’d missed a step somewhere.
“Her father is dying of cirrhosis and he lives just over the town line. Heading toward Franklin.” She frowned. “And you had mentioned that Pete—”
The truth slammed into him.
“You’re meeting my half sister Mia?”
* * *
NOT EVEN CLAYTON’S warm leather jacket could ward off the chill that his words sent skittering over Gabriella’s skin.
Gabriella had communicated with Mia Benson for two years online. And although she hadn’t built up enough trust for the girl to confide her name until a few months ago, Gabriella never had any reason to connect her to Clayton.
They didn’t have the same last name, for one thing. Then again, Mia wouldn’t be the first offspring that didn’t share Pete Yancy’s surname.
“You know her.” She repeated the fact only because she was still having trouble making sense of it. “She’s your half sister?”
Clayton gave a clipped nod. “Yes, she’s my half sister, but I didn’t even know about her until very recently. But why are you worried about her? Is she being bullied? You met her through that victims’ group you run?”
He fired the questions fast. Impatiently.
“She’s not being bullied,” Gabriella assured him honestly, although she could kick herself for mentioning anything about the girl, even if she hadn’t used her name. “But I’m not at liberty to say anything more without her permission. I had no idea you would know her, Clay. I swear. She was in the foster system.”
And just how on earth had Mia ended up in foster care when she had an older brother who might have stepped in? Defensiveness on Mia’s behalf simmered.
Gabriella needed to call the girl back, but since Mia hadn’t flagged the message as urgent, Gabriella couldn’t walk away from this shocking conversation with Clayton just yet.
“I had no idea she existed until Pete told me about her two weeks ago when he called to say he didn’t have long to live.” Clayton shoved out of the wooden chair he’d been seated in, edging past her on the narrow porch to stalk freely around the patch of grass in front of his motel cabin. He paced like a tiger—trapped and not happy about it.
“I’m surprised the foster system didn’t—”
“So am I.” Cutting her off, he swung back toward the railing between them, grabbing the wood in two hands as he leaned closer, his knuckles turning white at the tight grip. “And you know what’s really messed up about that, Gabby? I made it my mission to find all my half siblings after I graduated high school. I ended up being so damn good at it—unearthing one heartbreak story after another in the form of my sad and disjointed family until I had eight of us accounted for.”
The haunted expression on his face made it clear that not all of his siblings had navigated through childhood as successfully as he had. And Gabriella remembered firsthand how rough his experience had been. He’d told her once about getting separated from a younger brother when social services removed the boy from Clay’s father’s house.
“It was good of you to look them all up. Provide a sense of family for them.” She’d relied on her brother so much since her father went to jail and her mother wasted away waiting for him. Her mom had moved to the tiny town in Kansas where her father sat in a federal penitentiary.
If not for Zach, Gabriella wouldn’t have a family.
“Yeah. A real hero. Except that I stopped looking after I accounted for eight kids. As if the old man had suddenly given up going home with strangers and fathering more children he had no intention of supporting.” Clay’s bitterness came through every word, although it wasn’t clear if he was more upset with himself or his father. “I guess I resented the old man so much that once I was done with that job, I didn’t look back. Didn’t visit. Didn’t write. Didn’t ask how many other kids he planned to shove out into the world with no means of support before he finally kicked the bucket.”
With that, he pushed away from the porch rail. Straightening, he walked away from the cabin, out into the moonlit parking area. She watched as he sucked in one long breath after another, before turning on his boot heel to stalk back toward her.
She waited until he was close enough to hear before she spoke.
“I’m glad to know that Mia has you now.” She reached over the rail to take his hand, willing him to look at her. “I’m sure she felt alone and reached out to me because she didn’t know she had you. But things must have changed for her since you came into her life.” Gabriella had been frightened at the references Mia made to much older men back in the days when she was under her mother’s care before social services stepped in. The girl had joined the support group after that, to ask for help dealing with a teenage boy at her first foster home, but she had wound up resolving the issue and moving into a better home before Pete got himself together enough to get her out of the system.
Or so she said.
Still, Gabriella got the impression that Mia had enough dealings with her mother where she was still exposed to some unsavory types.
“That’s kind of you to think, Gabby.” Clay squeezed her hand where she’d taken it, his warm, callus-roughened palm sending a surprise thrill through her despite the grave nature of the conversation. “But since I haven’t even met Mia yet, I’ve been exactly no help at all to her.”
“You said you found out about her weeks ago.” She slid her hand away from his, regretting the loss of warmth but wondering how well she knew Clayton Travers after all. Protectiveness for Mia rose inside her, and yes, a sense of identifying with the confused teen. Gabriella knew how it felt to be abandoned by a parent. “I guess I thought you would have already gone to see her.”
“I needed some time to research more and find out if Pete had any other offspring I’d overlooked.”
“And?”
“Mia is the last one—the only one I’d missed. She lives with my father. And while I resent the old man bitterly, I thought they had a peaceful relationship if she chose him over the stability of a foster home. I figured he must have mellowed with age and his illness since the hospital forced him to get sober,” Clay explained. “But if she’s still reaching out to a victims’ support group, maybe life in the Yancy household sucks as much as ever. I’ll make sure she knows that there are good homes in the foster system that will give her more stability.”
There was a cold finality to the words.
“You’d send her back into foster care?” She couldn’t believe the boy she once knew could have grown so heartless. “What about you? You could take her in. You would be a good role model—”
“Me?” He sounded shocked she would consider it. He shook his head. “I’ve made enough of a mess of my own relationships. I wouldn’t be any help to a girl her age.”
“You’ve dealt with so many of the same things and gone on to be a successful adult.”
“Because I broke away from my messed-up family.” The jut of his chin told her how much he would stake on that belief. “I wouldn’t be doing Mia any favors to invite her back into the screwed-up legacy that is her genetic birthright. Better for her to find a good foster home like I did, with people who are committed to understanding at-risk teens.”
“She had very different experiences in the foster system than you. It’s hard for her to trust anyone.” Gabriella understood that much about the people who called her hotline or emailed her privately looking for help. Victims of stalking and bullying were less inclined to trust.
And although Mia wasn’t currently being bullied, that was the situation in her first foster home when her foster mother’s teenage son had tried to coerce her into sex in exchange for extra privileges in the house.
Of course, Gabriella couldn’t share any of that with Clay. It was information protected by the privacy policies of her support group. And although the policies were more flexible where the underage participants were concerned, Mia had shared the information with her caseworker. And for her part, Gabriella would do what she could to protect Mia’s privacy for as long as she could.
“That, I understand. But I will explain to her how getting out from under the dark cloud of the Yancy influence helped me.” His dark eyes glittered with determination, his square jaw set. “She’ll be far better off in the system with experts watching out for her.”
Standing, Gabriella realized their conversation had come to a definite stalemate. She’d worked through enough of her past tonight without taking on Mia’s future, too. She would save that for another day, when she had time to think over her best course of action.
Besides, she wanted to talk to Mia and make sure she was okay.
“It seems we did a good job of surprising each other tonight.” She slid off his jacket and laid it gently over the wooden railing for him, the scent of the leather—of him—lingering along with the warmth. “You had no idea I was baring my soul to you online ten years ago. And I had no idea you were the kind of man to return a teenage sibling to the foster system.”
She walked away without waiting for a response. She heard him call out to her, but she was too tired and upset to continue a heated discussion tonight. Not with the trial starting tomorrow.
Besides, if Clayton Travers wasn’t concerned about Mia going back into state custody after Pete’s death, that was his business. But for her part, she planned to call the girl and see if she could help.
Gabriella understood all too well what it was like to have the people you counted on abandon you.
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