Page 13 of Love at First Write

She screams.

My blood turns to ice.

I quickly move to the window I found earlier—on my perimeter check—that didn’t seem very secure. I just have to slide my knife under the lip and it pops for me. Quickly I climb in, moving through the house in the direction where I think the scream came from.

She screams again.

I go into the room expecting to find a rodent or something that’s causing her panic. Instead, she’s looking straight at me. She’s sorta standing, but kind of bouncing, on the bed, a bedside lamp hoisted above her head.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

I’m doing my best not to notice that she’s wearing a tank top that leaves nothing to my imagination about how fabulous her tits are. So just that tiny tank top and panties. This is not the time to get an erection.

I hold up my hands. “Kelsie, calm down. It’s me. It’s Ethan.”

“I don’t know an Ethan!” she shrieks.

“You sure about that?” I ask.

The bouncing stops as she stills, arms still overhead, ready to throw the lamp at me if I move in her direction.

But she frowns as her gaze moves over me, cataloguing all my features. Then her arms lower—just an inch or two as I see recognition dawn in her eyes.

So, she opened at least a couple of the emails I sent.

That’s when I notice that her arms are shaking from the strain of holding that lamp over her head.

I pull a can of pepper spray from the pocket of my cargo pants and toss it onto the bed. “There, use that.”

“On you?” she asks, looking from me to the canister.

“If you need to. I want you to feel safe.”

Still studying me, she lowers the lamp and clutches it to her chest, then nods towards me. “Do you have any other weapons?”

“I have a Glock in my truck. Just a handgun,” I explain. Then I pull the knife from my boot and step forward to place it gently on the mattress. “And this.”

“Why are you here? How did you find me?” she asks.

“Do you want to get down from up there? I don’t want you to fall.” I hold my hand up to her.

“I’ll stay here, thank you.” She sits down on the bed, cradling the lamp in front of her body, which effectively blocks my view of most of her curves.

“You’re so beautiful,” I say even though I hadn’t meant for the words to come out.

“Sure,” she says. “You followed me?” She moves her hand in a rolling motion as if to tell me to ‘get on with it.’

“Right. Yes, I followed you here. I thought that if we could be alone for just a few minutes, if you would listen to me, then we could move past the stupid shit I did in the past.”

“In other words, you wanted to create a situation where I was forced to listen to you make more excuses?”

I hang my head because she’s right. That’s exactly what I did. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You’ve got me tied up in knots and it’s making me crazy. I know it was wrong to let you keep thinking I was Tommy. But you hooked me, and I couldn’t walk away. I mean, would you have kept writing me if you knew I was just a random guy on Tom’s team?”

She swallows, her throat movement drawing my eye the creamy expanse of her neck and the exposed skin of her shoulder.

“No. Probably not. I would have still sent cookies though. Sending a thank you to service men and women is an honor.”

“It’s not your cookies I got hooked on, Kelsie darlin’, it’s you. Your words, your sass, your addiction to the best show on television. I mean what are the odds we’d both independently love that show and then happen to become pen pals?”