Rock Hard (Rock Kiss #2)(56)

She shook her head. “When he realized I was serious about breaking up, he began to bombard me with flowers and chocolates, was suddenly the charming boy who’d first made me believe he loved me.” Panic pulsed in her, causing her lungs to struggle, the air suddenly too thin. “But when I wouldn’t budge, he started to get mean.” Shallow breaths, her heart beating too fast. “He spread rumors about me on campus and through the online campus forums, but that didn’t matter so much to me.”

She’d never been a social butterfly, hadn’t cared about the opinions of the popular cliques. “Molly knew the truth, and that was all that mattered.” During their relationship, Richard had tried to manipulate her into dropping Molly as a friend, but that was the one thing on which Charlotte had never given an inch. “The fact that I was a nobody on campus actually helped me—no one cared enough to spread the rumors.”

“Breathe, Charlotte.”

“I can’t. I have to get this out.” Almost panting now, she slid her hand around to his back and fisted it in his shirt. “I thought that would be the end of it, but he started sitting in on my lectures, just smirking at me. And I could feel him following me around campus, but I could never catch him at it.”

Fear licked at her, a memory of how hunted she’d felt, never knowing when he might confront her, hurt her. “Then I started getting anonymous e-mails full of pictures of women being degraded. No messages, just the vilest pictures with my head Photoshopped on the women’s bodies. The phone calls started soon afterward, all from untraceable numbers.” Nausea had swamped her each time she heard the ringtone. “Over and over and over and over at night and during finals, until I had to change the home line and my cell.”

Gabriel’s voice was hard when he spoke. “He was stalking you.”

“Yes, but he was so good at covering his tracks that though the police were sympathetic, they couldn’t stop him. They did give him a warning though—it enraged him. He stewed and stewed on it, and he watched me.”

She shivered, continued to push the words out because she was afraid that if she paused, she’d never start again. “I didn’t know that then. The incidents stopped after the warning, and when they didn’t reoccur over the next two months, I felt safe again. Safe enough to insist Molly go out of town for a special seminar her lecturer had recommended. I told her I’d be fine.”

Dread swallowed her in a dark cloud. “It was what he’d been waiting for. He knew I’d be alone from Friday night to Sunday afternoon when she came back.” Seeing spots in front of her eyes, she tried to draw more air into her lungs, failed.

“Enough.” Gabriel gripped her chin, made her meet his gaze. “I can guess the rest.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Please, I have to finish.” He had to know exactly what he was fighting—because Charlotte didn’t want him to fail, wanted a life that had Gabriel in it. “Let me finish.”

Fury masked his features, but he nodded. “Go on.”





22


BAD THINGS HAPPEN… BUT THEN GOOD THINGS HAPPEN





“HE GOT IN USING a key he’d duplicated while we’d been together.” Charlotte hadn’t had an alarm then, hadn’t even considered it, her neighborhood was so safe. “I never worried he might have a key because I’d never brought him to my place; we’d always gone to his.”

After that horrifying weekend, she’d excoriated herself for her mistake in not thinking to change the locks, until Molly had finally shaken her and said that she hadn’t either. Neither one of them had expected the depth and psychopathic patience of Richard’s rage, having had no experience with his kind of a twisted mind.

“I came in after a late Friday class. It was winter, dark. And he was waiting inside.” Feeling her entire body shake, she held on to Gabriel in an effort to find solid ground. “He waited for me to lock the door behind myself before he came at me.” Her memories of the ensuing minutes were fuzzy at best.

“I came to, gagged and tied to a chair in the kitchen.” Nausea threatened as it had then, her aching head and bruised face the least of her concerns. “He’d brought ropes, and he was wearing gloves and overalls with a hood. So they wouldn’t find forensic evidence.” Charlotte had known then that she was in the presence of a total psychopath.

“At first he just talked to me, told me everything he intended to do.” The mental torture had been excruciating. “In the hours that followed, he’d occasionally come around to the back of the chair, pull back my head with a grip in my hair, and run a knife across my throat just enough to make me bleed.”

Sometimes she still woke to the feel of phantom blood dripping down her neck, ice-cold metal across her throat. “Then he’d leave for a few minutes, walk around the town house and come back to show me things he’d found in my bedroom, things he was going to keep for souvenirs.” Her panties, a ring, a picture of her parents. “Every so often, he’d hit me again.”

Gabriel was rigid beside her, but he didn’t interrupt. He just held her safe, and she knew he’d allow no one and nothing to get to her.

“At some point during that first night,” Charlotte said, drawing her strength from his, “he wrenched back my head again and hacked off chunks of my hair.” Terrified for her life, Charlotte hadn’t cared about the petty act. Ironic then that it was one that haunted her.