Secrets (A Standalone Novel) (A Suspense Romance)

SECRETS

By
Claire Adams

This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Claire Adams

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“I’m fine Rebecca, the taxi just turned down my
street.”

“I’ll just stay on until you get inside the house.”

“Seriously Rebecca, I’m not going to get murdered in
two blocks. It’s Bain, Missouri for gosh sake!”

My ability to humor Rebecca and her mothering
significantly decreased the
more exhausted
I was. We had been friends for most of our lives, but she still didn’t think I
was capable of taking care of myself.

“Are you at the house yet? Did you get inside?”

“I’m paying my taxi driver now,” I sighed as I walked
up to the door to my house and looked for my keys.
Unfortunately,
I had forgotten them
inside
the house. Nothing to worry about though; I had a spare key, somewhere.

“Walking up to the door…unlocking the door… going
inside,” I lied to her.

“Alright. Remember to take some Tylenol and drink some
water. Do you have orange juice for the morning?”

Since losing my parents, Rebecca had tried to fill in
the emptiness. Her heart was always in the right spot, but she never understood
what it was like to be without any family. Moving into my grandparent’s house
and remodeling it was the best way I could cope, at least for now.

“Yes, I will drink orange juice, take two pills and
call you in the morning.”

“Great, yes. Call me when you get up,” Rebecca said.

“Ok mother Rebecca. Talk to you tomorrow.”

With Rebecca off the
phone,
I went to work looking for the spare key. I remembered putting it somewhere
around when I had visited my parents and my mother was too sick to get up to
the door. But after she died I had moved the key again.

Really it shouldn’t be all that hard to find a key,
but when you forget things as fast as I do, you would understand. This key was
going to be near impossible to find.

After searching the mat, flowers, and all the rocks around
my grandparents old Victorian home, it finally dawned on me that I had put the
key over in the neighbors’ rocks.
The fake rock
that held the spare key fit perfectly with their rocks and since the home had
been empty for at least five years, it seemed like a good place to hide the
house key.
Now if only I could remember which rock I was looking for…at
two o’clock in the
morning,
it was
amazing how every single rock looked exactly the same.

Well this was just perfect. On my
hands and knees in the grass was not how I wanted to be spending my Saturday
night.
I was crawling around in the wet grass and looking
for the key to my dead parent’s home. Well, the house was actually my grandparent’s
home, and then they passed it to my parents and finally on to me.

Why couldn’t I just have a normal life? Like those
girls at the bar tonight. They had the kind of busy lives with friends and
parties all the time. But no, I had by far the most boring life in the history
of Bain. Fixing up my grandparents’ house was the only thing interesting on my
calendar for the next three weeks.
Oh,
how I longed for some excitement, but instead I was here digging through rocks
and grass in the middle of the night.

The rock that held my house key eluded me. I screamed
out in frustration and threw a rock
from
the neighbor’s yard to my own.

“Can I help you?”

My breath caught as I looked up to see a strongly
built man standing at the corner of the house. He looked to have been just
woken up and stood there with sweatpants and no shirt.

The no shirt part is what had me so distracted. Even
in the moonlight I could see more muscles
on
his stomach than I probably had in my entire body.

“Um. Well, I uh…I’m looking for my house key.”

“And you keep it in my flower bed?”

The way he stood there looking at me, it was like I
amused him. He watched as I struggled to stand up and then fidgeted with my
dress. As much as I tried to hide the level of my intoxication, I’m pretty sure
there was no hiding it. The look on his face showed enough pity toward me that
I knew he could tell I was drunk.

“I’m uh, yes I did hide it here. It’s a rock.
Well,
it looks like a rock. It’s a fake rock
with a key in it. But I can’t find it because they all look the same.”

I watched as the mystery man walked closer to me and
looked at the rocks surrounding the house.

“What’s your name?” he asked me.

“I’m Katelyn. Katelyn Peterson.”

I waited for him to respond with his name, but he did
not.
Instead,
he reached down and grabbed
a rock from the back of the pile of rocks. He handed it to me and I instantly
knew that it was the rock I had been looking for. It was light and I could hear
the jingle of the key as I moved the rock in my hand.

“There you go Katelyn.”

His voice was smooth, seductive and sexy, which was
hard to pair up with the body that stood in front of me. The man in front of me
looked more like a killer than a seducer. The muscles in his arms bulged with
definition
. Not bulk, but a refined sense of
power. Even the way he clenched his jaw made me think of someone who was hiding
something and wasn’t going to let you find out.

“Wow, thank you. That was pretty amazing. How did you
know which one it was?”

“Just luck I guess,” he said as he looked me over.

I dropped the rock as I tried to get the key out and
he quickly retrieved the key from the grass. I’m not sure if he
was
so helpful because I was annoying him by
waking him up in the middle of the night or if he was just a nice person.

He took the key and walked over to my front door. I
tried to keep up, but my short legs and high-heels were no match.

By the time I got to my door, he had it opened and
stood there with the key in his hand.

“Goodnight Katelyn.”

His hand touched mine as he passed me the key and
instantly my body reacted with a surge of energy. I didn’t know who he was, or
why he was living in the old abandoned neighbor’s
house, but
he could touch me with those hands
any time
he wanted.

“So how long have you lived here? I didn’t know anyone
had moved in,” I asked the gorgeous mystery man.

“I just moved in.”

“
Ahh,
so you’re
new to town? How’s that going for you? Wait, why did you come to Bain? It’s not
like we are a happening town.”

As I kept talking I tried to force myself to be quiet
but I just couldn’t stop. The more I looked at
him,
the worse my tongue-tied condition got. The light of my porch intensified his
muscles and I’m pretty sure my brain actually stopped working.

I tried not to make a fool of
myself,
but his body was just too much for my brain to comprehend. He
had muscles so defined he looked like he could be one of those Navy Seals or
something. I fixated on his naked chest with the desire to feel it against my
body. Every impulse jetting through me said not to touch his chest. Yet my hand
had a mind of its own.

Sure enough, without warning, and likely fueled by the
large alcohol courage I had…

…I touched his chest.

Right there on my front porch in the middle of the
night and without warning. My drunken hand reached out and touched his chest! It
would have been bad enough if that’s all that happened, but I couldn’t stop
myself. My verbal garbage kept coming out.

“Oh my god, you work out. Yeah, you definitely work
out. Is that all you do all day long is
workout
?”

He stood there with the same calm and cool look as
when he first saw me on my knees in his flower bed. Hmmm…he seemed to be the quintessential
strong silent type. His face was serious and observed me with just the
slightest bit of a smirk forming at the corners of his mouth.

“To answer your first question, I’m here to relax and
get away for a little while,” he said, and looked down at my drunken hand still
sitting on his chest. “Yes, I work out.”

Maybe it was the alcohol wearing off, but I suddenly
realized my hand was on his chest and I removed it. My eyes looked at his and
then down at his chest again. What had come over me? This was not my usual
behavior. Then again, a sexy guy like this on my front porch was not my usual
evening either.

I could feel the flush of embarrassment start filling
up my face. I stopped looking at his chest and made eye contact with him, but
that was worse than looking at his chest.

“Oh, alright. Yeah, I kind of thought that you were a
workout kind of guy. I like to run. But I don’t get out as much as I would like
and I certainly don’t run for long distances. Maybe down a few blocks and back.
Like one mile tops. I take pictures. That’s what I like to do. You know…photography
and that kind of stuff?”

I wanted to stop talking. I just couldn’t send the
impulse from my brain to my mouth to make it happen.

“
Well,
you have
a nice night Katelyn.”

He turned to walk away and I stood on my porch and
watched him. I waited for him to look back at me, ready with one last wave
goodnight. But he didn’t turn around.

“Goodnight!” I yelled as he disappeared around the
corner of the neighbor’s house toward the back door.

I closed my front door and stood inside pondering who
this man was and what he was doing in tiny little Bain, Missouri. He had this
quiet calmness about him that was fascinating. I had never met a man who seemed
to have so much
self-control
, like a
vigilant soldier with his senses finely tuned.

I turned the lights off in my house and tried to look
out at the neighbor’s house. I just wanted to see if there was any movement
inside of his house. Perhaps I secretly wanted to get one last
peek
at that chiseled chest of his? But I was
disappointed and there wasn’t a single sign of movement throughout his house.

As I drifted off to
sleep,
I couldn’t help but fantasize about being with the gorgeous neighbor. I had not
even considered another man since Michael’s death, so it surprised me how
easily this man was filling my thoughts. Normally the memory of Michael and our
six years together caused me too much pain to even think about it for long. He
had been my first love, my high school sweetheart. After losing Michael a year before,
I never thought I could ever move on. Maybe my interest in the gorgeous
stranger was a signal that I might be ready now.

As I drifted off to
sleep,
I saw the stranger’s face in my mind: his chiseled serious face, with just the
right touch of softness.
His demeanor was so
relaxed and calm
for such a late hour. It struck me as odd that he
was so readily awakened
in the middle of the
night, but I was happy he did wake up. Getting to meet him was just what I
needed to give me hope that someday I could move on from my grief about Michael’s
death.