Unauthorized Obsession (Unauthorized Series Book 3)
Read Unauthorized Obsession (Unauthorized Series Book 3) Online
Authors: Lisa Ladew
by Lisa Ladew
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Copyright © 2015 Lisa Ladew
All Rights Reserved
Book cover by:
http://www.stunningbookcovers.com/
Thanks to my beta readers: Lisa Howard, Joy Sward, Johanne Poirier, Bridget Koan, Sharlena Biron
and my Advance readers: you guys are the best.
and ALL my readers. Without you, there'd be no point.
Contents
“You promised,” Joe said, a note of irritation in his voice.
Kara Price sighed and stood up, heading for her uniform, which was laying on a chair in her bedroom. She shook the pants free of the heavy duty belt that held her holster and started to pull them on, balancing the phone between her ear and shoulder.
“I know. I will. I’ll go in to work early and talk to a detective today.”
“Good, I’ll meet you there.”
Kara could hear the relief in her partner’s voice but she chose to ignore it in exactly the same way she was trying to ignore her own anxiety. She'd been desperately hoping to never hear from whoever this man was again, but now that she had, she was handling it. It couldn’t be a big deal. It didn't fit in with her plan for her life. Besides, they didn’t even know if it was her stalker that her neighbor had seen slinking around her driveway at four in the morning. He hadn’t sent her anything for almost five months now - the last thing she had gotten was the boxful of hair. She grimaced just at the thought of the hair. Luckily, it was at the police station in the evidence locker now.
Since she hadn’t gotten anything in so long, she had been hoping he had given up and moved on to someone else. Or maybe died. Or maybe fell in love. She laughed at the thought of a stalker falling in love with someone who actually returned his love and healed him from the inside out.
“Did Duke bark?” Joe asked.
“Nah, but he’s not much of a barker. At least I don't think he barked. I slept straight through it. I never would have known at all if Bea hadn’t left me a voice mail message this morning.”
“She should’ve woken you up.”
“She said she tried. She knocked on my door and called my phone. I’m a heavy sleeper.”
Joe was silent and Kara could physically hear the weight of that silence. He was thinking about all the things that could have happened to her if she had slept through someone breaking into her house. He worried about her too much and she hated that. If he was worried, it was hard for her not to worry.
She fastened her pants, buckled her duty belt, and leaned over to pull her boots on without making a sound. If he could just get out all of his worries, maybe he wouldn't fuss and fret over her all day long and possibly follow her home this evening. The last thing she wanted was a bodyguard. She was a cop. Cops weren't supposed to need bodyguards.
“She should have called the police,” he said sounding surly, like a petulant child who wasn’t getting what he wanted.
“She did, Yeager and Simmons responded. I talked to the desk sergeant already and he said they checked all the doors and the neighborhood and didn’t find anything suspicious.”
Joe stayed quiet for another few moments while Kara finished putting on both of her boots and headed to the kitchen, pressing the phone to her ear to see what he would say next.
Finally he spoke again. “But you’re going to talk to a detective today? Promise?”
“I promise. I’ll be at the station in an hour. You can come with me if you want.”
“I don't need to come with you Kara, but I don't want you to blow this off anymore. A stalker is a big deal and just because our investigation didn’t find anything doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to find. I’ll feel better when we catch this loser and put him in the slammer.”
Kara grinned at his word choice. “And throw away the key?” she teased, glad to make the moment lighter.
“Throwing it away isn’t good enough. We’ll melt the key down to a little metal blob,” Joe growled and Kara laughed.
“What about the cameras?” he asked, his voice serious again.
“I watched the videos already, they don't show anything but Bea knocking on my door and Yeager and Simmons checking around. The guy didn’t get within their range. Which makes me think it was just some random guy walking home or something - nothing to worry about.”
Joe grunted. “Or he knows you installed the cameras, so he was staying away from them.”
Kara didn’t say anything; she didn’t want to think about that.
This time it was Joe who sighed. He knew how resistant she was to taking this guy seriously.
Finally, he relented. "See you in an hour," he said and hung up.
Kara pressed the END CALL button on her phone and put it down on the counter. She opened the refrigerator and looked inside, seeing nothing that jumped out at her and said
eat me
, but Duke didn’t share her sentiments. Like always, as soon as the noise of the refrigerator door opening made it to his ears, he was up and sprinting into the kitchen to see what he could grab out of the cold depths of delicious food storage before she could get the door closed. Kara heard him coming and swung her body around to get in his way, then slammed the refrigerator door closed. She turned to him, laughing, and knelt to pet his over-sized head. His tongue snuck out and caught her full in the face.
Ew, dog slobber
.
Duke was her black and tan, four-month-old Rottweiler mixed with Great Dane puppy who desperately needed obedience school. He had been a gift from Joe after she had started rehabilitation on her leg and found herself being uncharacteristically depressed. She thought back to almost five months ago when she had been shot in the leg at a stupid loud party call. The only silver lining she’d ever been able to find to being shot in the leg was that she never would’ve discovered she had a half-sister if it hadn’t happened. She never asked herself very closely if she would choose to be shot in the leg again if it not happening meant that she would never have discovered her relation to Ivy. Was discovering you had a sister worth the pain and suffering that she had gone through? She considered Ivy’s dark eyes, so much like her own, and Ivy’s whip-smart personality and sweet, but sometimes dark disposition. Her father’s face swam in her mind. Her father who was trying so hard to make it up to Ivy that he had never been around during her childhood. He even bought her a car, something that embarrassed Ivy greatly, but also pleased her. He had insisted it was twenty-four years of missed birthday presents all rolled into one.
Kara was happy that she had found a sister, but she was even happier for her father. He seemed overjoyed that he had another child to spoil.
Yeah, maybe she would choose being shot in the leg again …
Kara straightened up and felt the twinge in her hip that she always felt these days when she moved that leg. It wasn’t awful, but she did sometimes miss her click-, twinge-, and pain-free body that she had before the shooting.
Then again …
She shooed Duke out of the kitchen and put him on the back porch, closing his doggie door so he couldn’t get inside, then went back to the refrigerator. She decided on eggs. She would eat and then give Duke a bit of extra attention before she headed off to work early. Maybe throw his stuffed bear for him a few times in the backyard.
Her neighbor, Bea, would be home in a few hours and would play with him the rest of the evening. Bea loved Duke as much as Kara did and had volunteered to take care of the dog while Kara was at work. They had even installed a doggie door in the fence that divided their two yards so that Duke could go between them whenever he wanted. Bea worked road construction during the day, driving a front-end loader, and was always home in the evening when Kara was at work, so it worked out well for all of them. If Duke was alone for too long he dug holes in the yard. Kara was afraid one of these days he would dig under the fence and escape if he got too bored, but Bea did her best to keep him busy so that didn’t happen. She walked him, played with him, and let him curl up on her couch with her while she watched
Lifetime
movies and fed him tiny pieces of dog treats.
Kara quickly cooked her eggs and ate them in silence while she thought about what Bea had said she had seen. Bea got up early every morning, before the sun rose, in order to get to work by 5 a.m. She had gone out to get the paper and had startled a man who had been standing in Kara’s driveway, behind her car. The man had been dressed all in black with a dark baseball cap pulled over his face. Bea said she couldn’t see anything of his face at all. She described his body type as tall, almost six-foot, a bit chunky around the waist. Bea had retreated inside to grab her phone and when she came back to the door the man was gone.
As Kara finished her eggs, Duke started to get restless. He didn’t bark, but she could tell by the noises coming from the doggie door that he was chewing on the outside of it. She rolled her eyes and walked outside to see the damage.
“No! Bad dog!” she scolded him, pointing at the deep grooves he had made in the plastic. Duke hung his goofy black head and looked at her sorrowfully. She relented immediately and dropped to the ground to pet him. “Where is your bear, Dukey?” she asked in her best aren’t-you-the-cutest-puppy-in-the-world voice. Duke immediately ran across the yard, sniffing the ground as he went, to find his bear. Kara watched him and was struck by how big he had gotten in such a short amount of time. She’d only had him for six weeks, and when Joe had placed him in her arms, assuring her that he would help take care of him, Duke only weighed about sixteen pounds, which was still huge for a puppy. Now at four months old, he was almost sixty pounds. And there was a good chance he would double that weight before he was done growing. So far, he was still thin and gangly, all legs, like a deer. She knew he would fill out soon and become quite an imposing dog. Daily, she wondered how much he would eat and if she could afford it.
As she watched him flounce back to her, his stuffed bear between his jaws, a sudden realization shot across her brain. Joe had known she was open to getting a dog but never had because of indecision about what breed to get. He knew she didn’t mind big dogs, but he had gone out and gotten her the biggest dog possible – not as a companion, but hoping the dog would protect her. She remembered back to his irritation today when he had thought she was going to try to worm out of going to see a detective again, and realized that protection had probably been his plan all along.
Well the joke was on him. So far, Duke was all clumsy legs, floppy ears and sloppy kisses. He didn’t bark, and he loved everyone he met. No bark and no bite makes for a pretty poor guard dog.
Duke skidded to a stop in front of her and almost knocked her over. She laughed and pulled the stuffed bear from his jaws, then threw it across the yard almost to the fence. As she watched Duke run headlong into the fence she knew she didn’t care if he was a poor guard dog. Like she’d said, she could take care of herself. She hoped.
