LITMIR.BIZ

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again. Each image burning. Hurting. Opening old wounds that had never healed.

      The day unfolding in her mind was so familiar by now, every moment etched in her memory. How many times had she dropped into that buttery leather office chair in front of her father’s big desktop computer in the house where she’d grown up? How many more times would she secretly open a chat window to talk to the boy she had a crush on, the thrill of doing something forbidden giving her almost as much pleasure as imagining Clayton Travers on the other end of the chat window?

      Been thinking about me?

      In the dream, she typed the words one key at a time, mindful of her older brother’s best friend nearby. Samuel Reyes seemed far older than his seventeen years. He was Mr. Responsible, and determined not to let her have any fun, somehow deciding to be her watchdog anytime her older brother wasn’t around. So Gabby typed quietly and quickly when Sam wasn’t looking, desperate for company from a boy who would gaze at her with heat in his brown eyes.

      Clayton.

      The messaging program lit up with a new icon as a response popped up.

      You’re all I think about.

      The butterflies in her stomach went crazy. Wings fluttered at hyper-speed, her nerve endings jumping to life at the thought of Clayton sitting in his foster family’s den, thinking about her. Usually he wasn’t on the computer at the same time as she was, so there would be a delay in their chats. But tonight it was like he was sitting there just waiting for her to type something.

      The butterfly flutter in her belly took on a dark, foreboding chill. But Gabriella knew that sensation was just a product of the dream over time. When that first message had popped up on a bright blue chat window a decade ago, she’d simply been thrilled that Clayton was thinking about her. She hadn’t had a clue what was about to happen.

      Or that she hadn’t been talking to a sixteen-year-old boy at all.

      Legs tangling restlessly in her covers, she fought the onslaught of nightmare memories. The conversation had taken a heated turn that had been confusing but exciting at the time. Afterward she’d understood how thoroughly twisted it all had been.

      Are you wearing a dress?

      How short?

      The chill in her belly spread, encompassing her hips and freezing out her sensuality. That chill had happened later, too—the past and the present getting all mixed up in the dream world. At the time, she’d been warm and excited about the things Clayton—she’d thought it had been Clayton—had said to her. Things that should have been merely a hint of the forbidden coming from someone in her high school. Not anything dangerous. She’d been excited to see him, her teenage exuberance tinged with her immature sexual feelings.

      It had all been delicious—a welcome distraction after the hell she’d gone through with her family earlier that year. Her father had been carted off to jail. Her mother had defected emotionally from the family, caring more about Gabby’s dad than her two teenage offspring, leaving Gabriella feeling like the world’s biggest outcast.

      Those chats with Clayton had distracted her with happier thoughts, and that night’s talk had been the best yet.

      He wanted to meet her.

      But that natural sensual awakening had been terrified out of her by a brute who threw her down in the woods later that night. A big, hairy grown man who knew where she’d planned to meet Clayton. Not an innocent teenage flirtation at all. The man had been masked. He’d ripped the short dress. Called her names that still haunted her even more often than the dream.

      Slut. Whore.

      Screaming at the injustice of the words, the attack, the loss of emotional innocence if not her virginity, Gabriella punched her attacker in the face. Again and again. That part only happened in her dreams, since in the real-life episode, Samuel Reyes had come to her rescue and been the one to pound her attacker into submission long enough for them to escape.

      Now she took her defense into her own hands, pummeling the masked face while she cried.

      Only then did she finally awaken, crouched on her knees on the sagging mattress in a motel cottage off Interstate 65 in Tennessee. The pillow she’d been thrashing was now wedged between the headboard and the box spring while her knuckles throbbed where she’d scraped them against the wood. Face wet with tears and chest heaving from fear and exertion, she levered herself out of the bed and padded across the hotel carpet in sock feet.

      Gabriella turned the squeaking metal knob for the faucet to splash cold water on her face and wash away the last vestiges of the dream. Toweling off with the threadbare white cotton cloth draped over a thin silver rack, she stared at her face under the harsh flicker of greenish fluorescent lights. Her skin was pale beneath the red irritation around both eyes. The best of her family’s genes had gone to her older brother, Zach, leaving Gabriella with hair that could only be described as dishwater blond, and plain features that benefitted from makeup or candlelight. Preferably both.

      But that was okay. Because Gabriella Chance’s beauty didn’t come from the sum of her outer parts. And it sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with the length of her skirt. Her jaw flexed, the muscle working as she ground her teeth at the old memory.

      No. Any appeal she held radiated from her strength of character, evident in her burning, raw knuckles and her clear blue eyes that saw the world for what it was.

      A dangerous place, yes. But a place she had survived. She forged on, slogging through the endless loop of her nightmares to fight another day. More important, she survived to help other victims of cyber stalking to move on with their lives. If that was as much as she accomplished in her life, it was something to be proud of.

      Yet, as she sidestepped her suitcase on the floor on the way back to her bed, Gabriella couldn’t deny a small part of her heart longed for more than that. No matter how many times that dream reminded her of her past, she couldn’t stop longing for a normal life. A normal love. A man who would recognize her real beauty and strength, and help her find it on the days when she forgot where she’d hidden it.

      But now that a whole decade had passed without giving her any peace, Gabriella knew that wasn’t going to happen. She’d returned to the city of the assault—her hometown of Heartache, Tennessee—to witness her assailant finally go to jail. While she was here, she planned to check on a local bullying victim she’d helped through her support group online—sixteen-year-old Mia Benson. But once she’d taken care of the at-risk girl and she had the satisfaction of seeing her own attacker’s face while he was sentenced to life in prison for a whole string of crimes since he’d hurt her, then Gabriella would close this chapter of her life forever.

      Flipping over the lumpy, squashed pillow in the motel outside Heartache, she knew that she was almost done with the past. The nightmares had been slowing down in the last two years. It was only because she’d heard that actual Clayton Travers was back in town that she’d traveled the dream path again tonight. She’d never told him what happened that night, and a short time later she’d fled town with Samuel Reyes and her older brother, Zach. She’d built a different life after that.

      But sometimes she wondered what Clayton had heard about her or what he thought had happened. No one else knew that Gabriella believed she’d been chatting with Clayton online before her attack. There’d been other times that year when they’d exchanged messages for real, and she hadn’t wanted Clayton to get in trouble for the content of those notes if the police looked back at them.

      Clayton had been in the foster system, and those messages might have put him at risk of being booted out of the Hasting house where he was happy. So Gabriella had said nothing, a silence that had always weighed on her.

      And now, completely by accident, she’d learned Clayton Travers was back in Heartache.

      As she closed her eyes to try and fall back asleep, Clayton’s

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