Page 14 of Dangerous Secret

Dread settled like a rock in her belly as she stepped out of her car. She refused to walk to him, so she stood next to the door. She didn’t speak or smile, just waited. Two days ago, she would have cowered under the rage in his eyes, but she was done with that. She straightened her shoulders and stood tall. It was time to stop letting him intimidate her.

“Who was that man you were with?”

“Hello, Anthony. How are you today? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Goodbye.” The urge to scream at him for sending Don to spy on her was so great that she bit down on her cheek to keep from revealing they were onto him. She moved to step around him but wasn’t surprised when he blocked her.

He stepped into her personal space. “Who was he, Harlow?”

That was his command voice, the one he used when he expected to be obeyed. She hated that voice. She could keep acting clueless, but then he’d never leave, not until he got an answer. “Not that it’s any of your business, but he’s a client I’m building a website for.”

“That better be all he is. If I ever catch you with another man, you won’t like the consequences.”

“Do you not understand what a divorce means? I don’t answer to you, and you have no say so over who I talk to, see or sleep with.” Did she really just say all that? She almost cringed at the rage in his eyes. But she wasn’t that girl anymore, and she refused to cringe.

“Your smart mouth isn’t attractive. I taught you better than that.” Suddenly, he smiled. He brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. “We were good together, babe. We can be again. Let me take you to dinner, spend some time with each other.”

“No thanks.” She didn’t trust that smile, not at all. As for his eyes, they were as cold as ever. Jekyll and Hyde. One minute a monster, the next charming. This time when she stepped around him, he let her go. Not that she believed she’d gotten through to him or that he’d leave her alone.

She managed to hold it together as she shopped, but inside, she was shaking with anger. Why couldn’t he leave her alone? What kind of man punished his son by keeping his mother from him out of spite? She hadn’t lied when she’d told Grayson that Anthony didn’t love her. That wasn’t the reason he wanted her back. She was just another piece of property that he owned…or believed he did. And Anthony always kept what was his.

Back at her apartment, she stared at the bunch of bananas she pulled out of one of the bags. She didn’t like bananas, but Tyler did. She didn’t remember putting them in her cart. In another bag, she found a jar of cherries she didn’t remember buying.

Tyler loved cherries, and she’d always kept a jar on hand. Was Tyler’s nanny making sure there were cherries for him, or was she too busy sucking face with Anthony to care about seeing that smile on Tyler’s face when he got to have a cherry?

“Damn you, Anthony. Damn you to hell,” she screamed as she threw the jar across the kitchen. The jar broke, and red syrup dripped down the wall, looking like a freaking crime scene.

She collapsed onto the floor and buried her face into her hands. How had her life turned into this mess? She couldn’t even shop for groceries without Anthony showing up.

Einstein wandered into the kitchen, and she grabbed him before he could walk through the broken glass and cherry syrup. “I made a mess, didn’t I?” She got his container of treats out, put more than he usually got in the corner, then set him down. “You stay over here.”

After she got her mess cleaned up, she finished putting the groceries away. Once that was done, she decided to dust. Then she cleaned the bathrooms. Next was vacuuming. Three hours later, she’d run out of things to clean. Her sheets were washed and put back on the bed, the towels washed and her clothes were clean, folded and put away.

If nothing else, her meltdown had resulted in a sparkling apartment smelling of lemon oil. She got her laptop and tried to work for a while, but she couldn’t concentrate. It was too quiet, so she turned on the TV. After fifteen minutes of scrolling through the channels and finding nothing she wanted to watch, she turned it off. She needed to heara human voice. A kind one. Someone who wouldn’t talk down to her. Someone like Grayson. She chewed on her bottom lip. Should she?

Grayson would want to know that Anthony was waiting for her when she returned home, that he’d asked who Grayson was, that he’d followed her to the grocery store. Before she could talk herself out of it, she went to the kitchen counter where she’d dropped her purse. As she was reaching for it, she noticed the bruises on her arm from Anthony digging his fingers into the skin. She used her phone to take a picture of her arm before she called Grayson. Then she took the burner phone to the sofa.

“Is it okay to call him?” she asked Einstein when he joined her.

“Mrruh.”

“That’s yes in cat talk, right?” If Einstein thought it was all right, then it must be. He continued to chatter while she made the call.

“Hello, Harlow.”

She frowned. “How’d you know it was me? I thought burner phones were untraceable.”

He chuckled. “They still have a number assigned to them, and I know the number to this one.”

“Oh. Is it okay that I’m calling you?”

“Absolutely. I told you that you could. Is everything all right?”

“Yeah…no, not really. Anthony was waiting for me when I got home today.”

“What did he say?”

“He threatened me. I recorded it.”

“Good job on remembering to record it.”

---