Page 100 of See You Soon
“I’ve never lied to them about something important before, so they trust me,” she said miserably. “I never told Declan about what was happening in Connecticut. I only said I needed a fresh start. What good would it do for them to know? If there is nothing anyone can do, they will just worry—they all have extremely stressful jobs. I’m not adding to that.” She cut her eyes to him. “Or, they would try to force me to move in with Luke. I don’t want that.” Cara finished in a whisper.
Wes’s heart skipped a beat. This roommate situation was always intended to be temporary, but he didn’t want to think about not being able to see Cara’s smiling face every day, or not smelling the honeysuckle that trailed along with her.
She wasn’t smiling now. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone look so hopeless.
“There’s something more, isn’t there?”
Cara’s lip quivered, and tears filled her eyes again, spilling down her cheeks. Every cell in Wes’s body compressed into a tiny knot of dread in the center of his chest. “Tell me.”
He mentally braced himself for whatever it was she would say, but it didn’t prepare him for what came next.
She pulled back, wiping her nose, her fair cheeks blotchy from the tears. “I blocked him on social media and my phone, and now he’s angry. He sent me a burner phone and said if I don’t answer he’ll release these.” Cara half turned and picked up a handful of the photographs on the bed behind them.
Wes’s heart jumped into his throat, and his ears pounded. A rage he didn’t know he was capable of built. The bastard was watching her.
In their home.
He would kill him with his bare hands.
The photos clearly showed the bedroom they were in. Cara in a towel, Cara in lacy lingerie bent over her dresser, pulling out clothing. Living her life, where she should feel safest. She handed him a folded piece of paper and visceral anger gripped him as he read the words.
“I don’t know if I can go through that again.”
“Son of a bitch!” Wes surged to his feet. His eyes scanned the room, assessing which angle the stalker took the photos from. Her computer sat closed on the small end table. He picked it up and unplugged the charge cord.
“We’re calling the police.”
“It won’t do any good. There’s no way of finding who it is. Until something happens to me, I mean.” Fear clouded her beautiful eyes.
Fuck that!
The police may not have the ability, but Wes sure as hell did.
“It occurred to me it might be my stepmother. This all started after she bought into Peachtree Pictures. It could just be her sadistic way of torturing me.”
Whoever this person was, they were a coward and a bully. She might be right. It might be her stepmother and not some perverted psycho, but Wes didn’t care. His blood flowed like lava in his veins, and all he cared about was destroying whoever was responsible.
“I’ll take care of it.”
She frowned. “I appreciate it, Wes. I do. But I don’t know what you could do.”
“I said, I’m going to take care of it. Even if the worst happens, and he puts pictures on the internet, I’ll get them down.” His lips lifted in a humorless smile. “But I plan on setting a trap, and in the meantime, I can find out who is behind the phone numbers.”
“How?” Understanding skated across her face, and she frantically shook her head. “No! Wes, you can’t! It’s not worth the risk! Seriously, my being embarrassed online isn’t worth you taking this risk. You would go to jail.”
He stared at her for a long minute, the feelings he’d refused to accept hovering on the tip of his tongue. Without thinking, he lifted his hands to either side of her face. “You’re worth it,” he said and pressed a hard kiss against her lips.
“Wes!”
“Go to bed. Try to get some sleep. I promise I can fix this.” He tucked her computer under his arm, his brain already ticking through a list of things he could do right away.
He needed to find the remote-access trojan, the RAT, that had been used to access her computer. That would take some time. There was no way of knowing what the virus had been originally attached to. Wes wouldn’t wipe it. He would use his software to trace the asshole back to wherever he was hiding. The second he tried to spy on Cara again, Wes would have him. He bent to scoop the burner phone off the floor. “I’m going to take this.”
Cara nodded. She looked so forlorn, sitting on her bed, that he paused in the doorway. She lifted her eyes to his and gave him a sad smile. “Thank you for helping me.”
Apparently, five simple words were all it took to make him see the truth. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for her—and that was terrifying.
Wes shook himself. There were more important things to do than make sense of his confused brain. He pulled up the pictures he’d taken of her call logs and began cataloging the steps he needed to take in order to mask his own intrusion into the telephone carrier’s server.
