Chasing You (Thirsty Hearts Book 4) (26 page)

A
dam kept his physical distance
, but his presence dogged Alexa through dozens of phone calls and text messages. She ignored him for three more days before replying simply via text message that she needed more time.

> I can come over and cook dinner.

>> No. Don’t come over. We can talk next weekend.

She couldn’t sort through the jumble in her head and her heart with Adam smothering her with demands for communication.

On Monday, after training back-to-back all afternoon, Alexa skipped out on work and picked up an industrial-sized bag of Skittles and a bottle of vodka. She didn’t often indulge her desire to pig out and check out, but tonight, this seemed like the perfect recipe.

She made her way down her street with the music blasting enough to force out her persistent anxious thoughts. Just when she thought that it was working, she spotted Adam’s rented charcoal gray sedan parked on the curb in front of her house.

Rather than parking in the driveway, which could be seen from her living room window, she pulled her car up to the curb a few houses down. Once in “Park,” she snatched her phone from her purse and called Melissa.

“Hey, Alexa. What’s up?”

“I just got home—or nearly home—and Adam is parked in front of my house.”

“You’re kidding! Is he in the car?”

“I don’t think so. I’m down the street, but the car looks empty. But he couldn’t be in my house. I never gave him a key.”

“Then, where is he?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine what he’s doing here.”

“Do not get out of your car. Don’t go in the house.”

“He wouldn’t do anything crazy.”

Melissa’s voice wound tight, shifting her normal tone. “Chica, you sound like the white girl in the movie who hears a noise and wanders into the basement with a serial killer on the loose. Call the police.”

“I can’t believe he would do anything crazy.” Alexa fixed her eyes on her driveway. “Maybe we’re overreacting. I’ll just see if he’s in the house. I won’t go in. I’ll just open the door and check.”

“What if he’s not in the house? What if he’s just waiting in the bushes?”

“He’s not waiting in the bushes. I don’t have bushes big enough to hide a full-grown man.” Alexa twisted around to get a better view of her front yard. She couldn’t see anything from her vantage point. “I’ll call you back.”

She climbed out of her car and ventured slowly down the street. His car was empty. Her front door was closed. She scanned her yard, including her stubby bushes, but found no signs of Adam. Then, she caught movement in the living room window. Somehow, he’d gotten into her house.

A wave of rage nearly pushed her inside to find his crazy ass and demand an explanation. Two steps up the drive, and Alexa heard Melissa screaming in her head. She turned, prepared to sprint back to her car.

The creak of her front door swinging open spun her back around.

Adam stood in the doorway with a kitchen towel thrown over his shoulder. Alexa froze.

“How the hell did you get in my house?”

“I had a key.”

“I never gave you a key.”

She questioned the wisdom of engaging in a dialogue with him, but as long as he didn’t move, she figured she’d be fine.

He leaned one shoulder against the door jamb. “I found it when I was here cooking dinner. I locked up when I went to the store and forgot to put it back.”

The only time he’d gone to the store was when she was home. Did he think he made sense? Who lifts someone’s house keys?

A person with serious boundary issues and a screw loose.

“I’m going to walk down the sidewalk back to my car, and I want to watch you leave my house, close the door behind you, and get the hell away from me. If that doesn’t happen, I’m calling the cops.”

Alexa circled around to keep Adam’s car between him and her, which meant walking down the center of the street. She kept a fraction of him in her peripheral vision as she scurried. When she reached her car, she turned around and saw him standing in the yard.

“I’m not joking,” she yelled. “Get your shit and get out of my house.”

He didn’t move. His fists fixed at his hips, and he took several steps toward the sidewalk. Alexa dialed 911.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“My ex-boyfriend showed up at my house, and he refuses to leave.”

Alexa gave the dispatcher her address as she got back in her car and started the engine. She stayed on the line with the 911 operator giving her a blow-by-blow as Adam went back into the house, then came out with his keys. Just when it looked like he was going to get in his car and leave, he strode up the street toward her.

She put the car in gear and accelerated down the street. Rolling down her passenger-side window, she slowed as she passed him.

“The police are on their way, so if you don’t want to get arrested and deported, you better leave.”

She circled the block once and saw him sitting in his car. She pulled off again. When she came back around, his car was gone. However, she still didn’t want to go into her house until the police showed up.

It took ten minutes. Finally, a police cruiser pulled down her street and stopped at her address.

“The police are here. I’m pulling up in my blue BMW.”

She parked behind the police car and got out.

“Ma’am, is this your house?” One of the officers, a thickly muscled man with a crew cut, kept his hand on his holster and faced her squarely. A skinnier officer who looked like he couldn’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three flanked him, also with his hand on his hip.

“Yes. I’m the one who called 911. He left after I called you. I haven’t gone back inside. I don’t know what he was doing in there.”

“Do you have any ID on you? Something with your address on it.”

The suspicion in his voice pissed her off, but she resolved not to get herself in trouble—even though
she
had called the cops.

“I live here, so yes. It’s in my car. Do I have to go get it?”

The stouter one eyed her for a second, from her head to her feet. “No. You stay here with Officer Brigham while I check inside.”

He hadn’t been inside more than two or three minutes when he came back out and gave the all-clear. Officer Brigham walked with her up to the door. The older cop stood in the center of her living room, swiveling his head.

“It’s like Valentine’s Day exploded in here. And he was your ex-boyfriend?”

“He is now. We’d had a fight.”

Rose petals fluttered on the floor as a burst of wind swept in from outside and caused the scores of helium balloons to swirl on their strings. The scent of heavy spice assaulted her. She felt certain she would never eat curry ever again.

“If I did this for my girlfriend, there’s a lot of things she’d do, but the list wouldn’t include calling the police.”

“I didn’t get your name.” Alexa’s piercing tone could have popped every balloon bobbing in her living room.

“I’m Officer Donovan.” He walked toward her to shake her hand. Alexa kept her arms folded.

“Well, Officer Donovan, when I tell a man to leave me alone and I tell him not to come over and he comes over anyway and breaks into my house, I’m calling the police.”

The younger officer cleared his throat. “You should probably have a look around and let us know if anything is missing.”

Alexa went room by room and examined each from floor to ceiling. Other than the food on her counters and a simmering pot—plus all the sickeningly romantic decoration—nothing else looked out of place.

Her phone buzzed in her hand.

“Why were you at my house?”

Officer Brigham waved his hands, mouthing for her to hang up. The distance provided by speaking to Adam over the phone emboldened her.

“I thought we could hit the reset button and go back where we started.”

“I told you I needed space. I told you that I didn’t want you coming over. And you show up, unannounced, let yourself in and do all this. Where is my house key?”

“I dropped it in the yard.”

Alexa wasn’t sure she believed him, but it didn’t matter because she was getting the locks changed before nightfall. “I don’t understand this. I don’t know what all of this stuff is.”

“You wouldn’t.” An edge of fury crept into his voice. She needed to hang up.

“It’s not romantic if it creeps me out. And
this
creeps me the fuck out.”

“I—” He began to argue, and Alexa tapped the END button on her phone.

She looked around her home and wondered when and how she could ever feel at peace there again.

* * *

A
lexa had
to open the windows to carry the smell of her would-be dinner out of her house. She dumped the contents of the pot simmering on her stove into a trash bag and immediately took it to the curb.

Melissa came over to help her wash and scrub to get her kitchen back to its original condition. The clatter of pots and pans mingled with the sharp pop and hiss of every balloon Alexa stabbed with her office scissors.

It took a little over an hour, but eventually, they cleared the evidence of Adams’s break with reality from the house.

“I really think he thought he was being romantic.” Alexa scoured her living room floor for deflated pieces of rubber.

“You’re giving him too much credit. This shit is
loco
. No sane man hijacks a key to a woman’s house and breaks into cook her Indian food.”

“He cooked this for me the first time I went to his flat. He said he wanted to take us back to where we started. Not saying what he did was okay. I’m just trying to figure out what he was thinking.”

Melissa snapped the dishwasher shut and turned it on. Then, she flung her dishrag into the sink. “I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you know this was batshit.”

Alexa dumped the remnants of the murdered balloons into the trash and looked her friend in the eye. “It’s completely nuts. Inexcusably cray-cray. I know that. It just came out of nowhere.”

“Not exactly. That controlling crap with Taryn. Plus, every time you talked about him it was just about how locked-in on you he was. He was fixated. You’re probably the whole reason he came to Austin in the first place.”

“Under any other circumstances though, isn’t that romantic? He flew all the way across the ocean just to spend time with me. I guess it’s all champagne and roses until your house smells like turmeric and ginger and you have to call the police.”

Alexa managed a small smile as she surveyed her now-clean house emptied of the crazy.

“What are you going to do now? He’s still in town for several more weeks.”

“I’ll have him served with a protective order. Hopefully, that will be enough to get him to come to his senses. If he pushes his luck and gets arrested, I would think he’d be deported. He can’t want his client to find out about this.”

“Make sure to tell Holly and all the front desk people that they should call the police if they see him.”

“God, this is so embarrassing.”

Alexa flung herself into her kitchen chair and buried her face in her hands. She waited for the tears to come, but they didn’t. Strangely, no emotion came. No anger. Not even any fear. Just a swirling emptiness inside her.

“Don’t be embarrassed.” Melissa bent over Alexa’s chair and draped an arm around her shoulders. Alexa reached up and patted her friend’s hand on her right shoulder. “And don’t let this get you down about finding the right guy. He’s out there.”

“Is he? One thing Adam was right about, I don’t think I’d know love if it walked up and slapped me in the face. My radar is way off.”

Alexa dug the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and rubbed.

“Is that your phone?”

Her ring tone sang to her faintly from the other room. Melissa told her to stay put and retrieved her phone from the other room. She glanced at the screen and handed the device to Alexa. “He keeps calling. You should block his number.”

Fatigue drew a long sigh from her chest. “I don’t even know how to do that. Do I have to call the phone company?”

“You can and maybe you should, but you can block him now on your phone.”

Melissa bent down so she could show her what to do.

“See, I tap on his name and scroll down. There it is,” Melissa pointed to the screen and tapped. “‘Block this caller’ and then ‘block contact.’”

“Thanks.”

Alexa released a long, uneasy sigh. Blocking calls, protective orders, and police reports. She’d have to call her parents. Defeat and dread saturated her.

Her mother was going to have to peel her father off the ceiling. Bullet wounds or no, he would want to rush to Austin and tell Adam where he could go. She’d wait. They had enough going on, and this would only make them worry.

A shiver trickled up her spine as she surveyed the kitchen and through the archway into the living room.

“Why don’t you pack a suitcase and come stay with me for a few days? We can lock the house up and set the alarm. Just for a few days, so you’re not here by yourself before you can serve Adam with papers.”

Part of her refused to let Adam chase her from her own home, but now was not the time for pride. Alexa squared her shoulders. She maintained an unwavering confidence in her ability to handle Adam if he showed up again, but understood the foolishness of inviting the drama.