Saving Her (Her Protector Book 2)

  Saving Her

  Katy Kaylee

  Copyright © 2019 by Katy Kaylee

  All rights reserved.

  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 written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Description

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Saving Beth (Excerpt)

  Best Friend’s Li’l Sis (Excerpt)

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  Also by Katy Kaylee

  Description

  She’s the miracle I didn’t know I needed.

  God sent her to save my failing ranch,

  But there’s more to her than what meets the eye.

  Her mesmerizing curves, her timeless beauty…

  I get it, I’m not supposed to be falling for her.

  But when I see her tending to the horses on my ranch,

  Listening to my employees with compassion,

  Solving everyone’s problems…

  I realize I need her to solve my biggest problem – her!

  God…I love the woman…

  But she’s got secrets of her own.

  Secrets that involve a stalker…

  Or is it her crazy ex?

  I can see it in her eyes – the hurt, the fear, the vulnerability.

  And I’m going to protect her, save her, claim her –

  Her and the baby growing inside her!

  Prologue

  Zoe

  “Are you sure you can’t stay? I would feel so much better. Safer.”

  Elliot flashed me an irritated look but it only lasted a second before it melted into a small smile as he drew me close. “I told you, Zoe. This is a big meeting. Head of the department wants to see my pitch. I have to get ready for my presentation. This could be the big break I’ve been working towards. Besides, the cops have already told you there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “No, the cops said there was nothing they could do without proof. As if I didn’t give them enough already, with the letters, the threats, the…other things.” I tried to tamp down my shudder as I stared up into his handsome, clean-shaven face. The brown eyes that I knew so well. The dark hair perfectly swept to one side. Yes, I knew how hard he had worked for this meeting. I knew how much it meant to him. I also knew that out there, somewhere, some obsessed person was sending me threats and gruesome photos…and worse.

  It had been going on for months now and the police had just shrugged it off. So had Elliot. I had tried, but lately it had been getting worse. More detailed, more obscene, and then the boxes had started coming. Tiny, delicately wrapped presents containing a dead bird, a mouse.

  I shoved the thoughts away and forced a smile to curve my crimson stained lips.

  “I know, Elliot. I just wish you could stay and watch me.”

  “Zoe, I’ve seen you perform hundreds of time,” his smile turned up a little more, “Honestly, you hear Mozart once and that’s all you need.”

  “I’m not playing Mozart, El. I’m playing my own composition, for the first time and–.”

  “I asked you not to call me that.”

  “What?” I paused and looked up at him, confused.

  “El. You know I hate that. I’m going to be the new director of development at HG Productions. I can’t have you calling me El.”

  I bit back the retort the sprang to my lips, drawing in a deep breath. “Sure. Of course. You just know how nervous I get before a concert. And with everything else going on…” I waved it away, wishing I could bat away the butterflies fluttering madly in the pit of my stomach just as easily.

  The nerves always came, before a performance, waiting in the wings backstage just as I was now. They had ever since I was ten and had played my first piano recital. And before every show in the fifteen years since, without fail. It was worse tonight.

  “I know, Zoe. But you’ll be amazing. You always are.” Elliot leaned down and brushed a dry kiss across my cheek and some of the nerves dissipated, replaced with the warmth of love and familiarity.

  “I can’t wait until we get married.” I whispered the words on a sigh, drawing another smile from the man that I’d known and dated since my freshman year of college. The man who I knew better than I knew myself.

  When the only thing I’d ever known was chaos, Elliot was the stable one, the steady one. The one who had brought order and stability to my life. I loved him for that.

  “As soon as I get this promotion, I promise.” He repeated the words I’d heard for a year and half, “Today is my chance, our chance, Zoe.” He kissed me again, his gaze catching mine. “I’m doing this for us, Zoe, you know that right?”

  “I do, of course I do, I just–.”

  “Miss Carlyle? You’re going on in ten. You ready?” The stage hand said before moving his attention back to the clipboard in his hands, not realizing the chain reaction of bombs he’d just set off inside me. My pulse skittered out of control and I had to drag in three more deep, gasping breaths before I could speak again.

  “Yeah. Yes, I’m ready. Tommy, right?” I waited until the young man nodded, “Could you do me a huge favor and have some hot tea waiting in the green room for me during intermission? It always helps calm me down before the second half.”

  “Sure thing, Miss Carlyle.” Tommy said with a serious look on his face as he carefully jotted down my request on his clipboard, “Anything else I can get for you?”

  “No, that would be perfect. Thanks.”

  I smoothed down the tight fitting red gown that I chose to wear for tonight’s concert, some of the butterflies calming with the conversation but as the stage hand walked away they came flurrying back up inside me.

  “That’s my cue to get going.” Elliot said, breezily unaware of the turmoil twisting me up. He gave me another light kiss and a half hug. “You’ll be amazing, Zoe. Go knock them dead.”

  “I will.” I sighed the words, inhaling the scent of his piney aftershave. “You too, okay? I want that wedding.”

  I shot him a look through a dark fringe of lashes. He knew I didn’t care about the wedding day, I just wanted to marry him. The man I loved. When he had first proposed almost two years earlier, I had begged him to elope with me then and there, but something had always come up. Something had always delayed us.

  “Soon, I promise.” Elliot grinned back at me, giving my arm another squeeze but this time it did nothing to soothe the nerves. Because a second later he was stepping away, grabbing his briefcase and laptop bag and walking away, all before I could even utter a goodbye.

  I heard the sound of the audience, a hushed roar as the night’s MC
walked out on stage and spoke. I couldn’t understand the words, they were all just a jumble over the ringing in my ears. But then the audience began to clap and Tommy the stage hand nodded my cue.

  I drew in a deep breath and walked out on the large stage. One of the biggest venues I’d played in my home state of California, even though I had toured all over the state and overseas. It never mattered to the butterflies though. Vicious beasts.

  The smile that curved my red lips this time felt as brittle as porcelain as I walked to the gleaming black baby grand piano. A Bechstein. One of the best.

  The piano bench was hard underneath me as I sat down and stared at the sheet music on the stand but I didn’t need it. I knew these songs, this music, by heart. It was in my soul. It always had been.

  I held out my hands, caressing the keys like a lover and just like that, all the nerves fell away. As always, as the first note rang out in C minor, it drew away all the fear, all the stage fright, any worry that I might mess up.

  This was home. This, right here, sitting on the piano bench, was where I always belonged. The only place I had ever always belonged.

  From the time I was a little girl in a house full of chaos, I could sit at Mrs. Magney’s old out of tune upright piano and feel my world right itself. As if by magic. As if the music had some extra power of its own that I could never quite seem to manage on my own.

  My fingers danced across the ivory keys as light as wind and fluid as water. I was hardly even aware of the movement, or the hard bench beneath me, the red dress that was too tight, or the thousands of eyes staring at me from the sold out concert hall.

  The music fell like a spell over the audience and I was just as wrapped up in it. Debussy had taken me over completely, and I let it. I could play Clare De Lune in my sleep and I let my muscle memory guide me, letting the notes fall out of me, soft and achingly sweet.

  One song slid into the next, and before I even realized it, the last note of the concerto played out to thundering applause as the host announced that the lobby would be open during intermission.

  “You did great, Zoe.” Marcus Lamp said as he walked towards me, the curtain falling like a burgundy velvet tidal wave behind him. He was the director of the concert hall, and an avid fan.

  “Oh, thank you, Marcus” I was still heavy under the spell of the music so it took me a moment longer than it should have for me to notice the woman standing next to him. “Hello, I’m Zoe. Zoe Carlyle.”

  Ingrained politeness had me reaching out my hand automatically, when what I desperately wanted to do was escape to the green room and a calming mug of hot tea.

  “Oh, dear, I know who you are,” The other woman tittered, “I’m Alex, Marcus’s wife. When I heard you were playing here, I just had to meet you.”

  I smiled at her as she shook my hand a little too vigorously.

  “It’s an honor,” Alex was saying, still shaking my hand. “A real honor, Miss Carlyle. I saw you in Glasgow a few years ago and I was…Well, your playing just brought me to tears. You have such a gift.”

  “Thank you so much,” I was touched by the woman’s words, but a part of me was counting down the minutes left before the end of the intermission. I wasn’t going to have time for that tea after all.

  We chatted for a few more moments but I couldn’t have said what was spoken. My mind was already on the next half of the concert. The composition I was going to play for the first time. My own composition. The music that only I could hear within me, shared with the rest of the world. Well, at least the six hundred or so audience members of the McArthur Pavilion Hall.

  “Miss Carlyle, I have your tea for you.” A soft voice interrupted from behind, and I turned with a grateful smile towards Tommy.

  “You’re a life-saver.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t have time to go back to the green room, so I grabbed it and brought it for you.”

  I turned to Marcus with grin, “You need to give this guy a raise. Seriously. He’s the best.”

  Marcus smiled and Tommy blushed sweetly as he handed over the cup of tea he held in one hand.

  “Oh, by the way, this was waiting for you in the green room when I went in there. Someone must have an admirer.”

  He pulled a small, delicately wrapped box out from behind his back and held it out with an expectant smile. My whole world froze in that moment, my gaze narrowed down to that small box.

  Tommy put it in my hand and it was all I could do not to drop it. And then they were wishing me good luck and walking off the stage, leaving me alone with it. With no other option but to open it up and look at what it held on my own. A part of me screamed to throw it away, but I had to look. I had to know.

  I could barely get the paper open, beneath that a plain, glossy black box. I didn’t breathe as I opened the lid and my lungs were aching, but I barely noticed. The inside was lined with velvet. It was red and all I could think of was blood. It looked like dark, dried blood coating the inside of the small box.

  I had to force myself to look at the contents, and when I did my stomach heaved. It was an animal of some sort, so small, but I couldn’t tell what it was because of the blood. It was matted in its fur that I could see sticking up in rough tufts.

  Horror filled me as I dropped the box, it slipped from my numb hands and as it landed with a dull thud on the stage floor a square piece of paper fell out. I didn’t want to look. Just like I didn’t want to open the box, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  It wasn’t a piece of paper, but a photograph. A polaroid. And as I watched it was even still developing. The blank gray of the photo transformed, slowing showing rows of chairs, and then a stage with a piano on it. A woman in a red dress, playing.

  Her expression was ecstatic, her heart shaped face tilted up. Her long, wavy black hair pulled back, eyes closed in bliss, lost to the music, to the moment. As the photo came into focus I could make out the red bulls eye drawn on top of her.

  It was me. Oh my god, it was a photo of me. On this stage. And it had been taken from the audience.

  The sound of the curtain raising startled me so hard I nearly fell as I whipped around to face the audience that was even now funneling back in from the lobby. He was there. Out there, somewhere. In one of those seats. Watching me. Waiting patiently. Hunting me.

  I scanned the faces but no one stood out. They all just looked normal, excited, some bored, some smiling in anticipation of the second act but no one looked like a stalker, someone obsessed. Someone who would send me mutilated animals and threats.

  The spotlights flashed on, blinding me as they illuminated the stage.

  I walked shakily back to the piano bench and collapsed, my knees giving way. My breath billowed in and out of my lungs so fast I saw stars sparkle in front of my eyes. My fingers trembled as I pressed them to the keys but only a dark, discordant sound came out. My music, the music that had come from deep inside me, my soul music, was gone.

  I felt hollowed out, and all that was left inside me was a big, black emptiness. Fear filled that emptiness. It filled me up until I was choking on it. He was watching me. I could almost feel his breath on the back of my neck.

  There was a knowledge deep in my gut that told me if I didn’t get away right now, I was dead. Or worse than dead. The polaroid was still clutched in my hand as I turned and did the only thing I could do. I ran.

  1

  Zoe

  One Year later

  I could hear the music in my dream. Like I did every night. It haunted me. Taunting me. Always just out of reach. It drew me deeper into sleep. I chased after it but could never quite catch up to it.

  Even in sleep, frustration filled me.

  “Just leave it for a little while, Zoe.” The all too familiar voice spoke from behind me and I glance over my shoulder at Elliot. I blinked up at him, and I couldn’t even remember what I had been chasing. Everything shifted in that mysterious way of dreams.

  “You’re always distracted,” he said, his soft brown colored eyes
flashing with ill-tempered dissatisfaction before filling with that teasing warmth once more. “Come on, Zoe. We’re at your favorite park. Can’t you just relax and enjoy it for once?”

  I glanced around, not sure why I was surprised to be sitting on the blanket spread out on emerald green grass. Around me was Lavender Peaks, a sprawling park that centered on a bubbling stream that rushed down from the mountains that speared the sky on either side of the valley. The scent of lavender was heavy on the summer breeze, and the tiny purple flowers that gave the park its name all nodded their head as if in agreement. Yes, this truly was one of my favorite places in California. The country, for that matter.

  Elliot leaned in and kissed me softly on the cheek and that warmth spread through me, like slipping into a well-worn coat, even though it was balmy and not a cloud in the clear blue sky overhead. That warmth spread through me, distracting me from…whatever it had been.

  His kiss traveled up and over from my cheek to the corner of my mouth and I sighed, feeling the weight of his body press against mine. The weight of the engagement ring on my finger felt just as heavy as I lifted my hand and spread my fingers across his back.

  We kissed, and it felt like a memory. The sun shining warm and golden down on us as he laid me back onto the blanket. He touched me and I sighed into him, and it was a touch remembered.

  I’ve always felt so comfortable with him. Like a chair worn in all the right places. I always knew where he would stand on things. Sturdy, predictable Elliot. From the first time we met. I was still wide-eyed as a college freshman, still finding my way in a brand new world. He had been four years older than me, a recent graduate and already moving into the corporate world, but still with a youthfulness that had been fading even when I met him.