In Self Defense, Susan Sloan [best classic romance novels txt] 📗

“But it’s my birthday,” she insisted, holding him off and pressing her back against the car door for support.  “I don’t want to just up and leave them.”

He almost pouted.  “I thought it would be fun, you know, just you and me for a change,” he said.  “But if you’d rather not, then perhaps some other time.”

“Oh, Richard,” she said, don’t be childish on the tip of her tongue to add.

But he was already heading back toward the house, leaving her with no way to negotiate the distance by herself.  She looked after him, so many emotions churning inside of her that she could barely sort them all out.  He would realize her predicament after a moment or two, but he wouldn’t come back himself.  He would send one of the children out with her crutches.  Clare sighed and then smiled and then shook her head.  She knew her husband so well.

Two

“Hello, Clare,” the voice at the other end of the telephone said -- the voice she had come to recognize, without actually recognizing it, for the past three weeks.

With one hand holding the receiver to her ear, and the other holding a coffee mug halfway to her lips, she froze.  It was nine-thirty in the morning on the first Monday in October, and Clare, not even a month back at work, had been in her office on the third floor of Thornburgh House for less than ten minutes.

The office was much like the woman who occupied it -- warm and inviting, with exposed brick walls and soft lighting, a Persian rug that covered most of the polished wood floor, and sturdy, comfortable furniture, cluttered with books and manuscripts and potted plants, family photographs and memorabilia.  And Clare, who preferred the personal approach, liked to answer her own phone whenever she could.

“What do you want?” she asked, her usually soft and gentle voice gone so flat and cold that her secretary, bringing in the morning mail, was momentarily taken aback.

“Did you have a nice weekend?” the voice asked.

“Yes, I did,” she replied.  “Now what do you want?”

“You know what I want,” the voice taunted.

“No,” she cried.  “I don’t know.  You just keep saying I know, but you never tell me.”

Nina Jacobsen, a lanky, dark-eyed brunette in her early forties, stepped out of her office directly across the way.

“Is that him again?” she mouthed to the secretary she shared with Clare.  Anne-Marie Todd nodded and Nina rolled her eyes upward.  “Why doesn’t she just hang up?”

“I want you, of course,” the voice said.

“But don’t you understand, I don’t want you,” Clare declared, and both women could see that she was close to tears.  “So why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“Because you’re just too beautiful,” the voice crooned.

“How would you know that?” she demanded.  “We’ve never met.  We don’t know each other.”

“Really?” the voice said.  “Well then, it must be in my dreams that I see this exceedingly attractive woman with big brown eyes and blonde hair that feathers down to her shoulders.  Oh yes, and by the way, you look quite lovely in that shade of blue.”

With a little gasp, Clare dropped the receiver, and ran out of her office, her eyes peering up and down, as though frantically searching for someone who might be playing a joke on her, someone who knew what she looked like, someone who might have noticed, when she came in ten minutes ago, that she was wearing a blue dress.

She was barely three weeks off her crutches, and still walked with an awkward little pitch to her gait that made her appear to be on the verge of falling.

“Hasn’t this been going on long enough?” Nina inquired as she and Anne-Marie stood in the corridor and watched Clare’s antics.

“I guess you could say that,” Clare agreed with a shaky breath.  “But I don’t know how to get him to stop.”

“Well, if he isn’t getting the message, why don’t you call the police?”

“The police?” Clare repeated, genuinely startled.  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“What would I tell them -- that some man I don’t know won’t stop calling me?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you tell them,” Nina declared.  “It’s called harassment, and it’s against the law.”

“Oh, but I’d feel so foolish,” Clare said.  “I mean, he’s just a crank caller, after all.  He hasn’t really done anything.”

“You don’t think calling you half a dozen times a day, every day for weeks now, is doing something?”

“It isn’t really that often,” Clare corrected her, “and you know what I mean.”

Nina raised her eyebrows.  “Do we know what she means, Anne-Marie?” she asked the secretary.

The fresh-faced, red-headed secretary shook her head.  “I don’t know what she means.”

“Neither do I,” Nina said, and turned to Clare.  “But what I do know is that you’re a nervous wreck, you jump a mile every time he calls, and lately, whenever we go out, you’re looking over your shoulder a whole lot more than you’re looking ahead.  Now, this is serious.  Obviously, this guy has misplaced some of his marbles.  And he knows where you work.  What if he also knows where you live?  Have you thought about that?  You have a family.  You have a husband and two kids you care about.  Do you really want to put them at risk from this lunatic?”

“No,” Clare admitted, as tears began to press against the corners of her eyes.

“Then stop being such a ninny and get some help.”  Nina Jacobsen was nobody’s fool.  She had been around the block a few times and had two ex-husbands to prove it.  She had known Clare for four years, and now she leveled a probing glance at the frightened woman.  “Unless, of course, you’re afraid of what will happen if Richard finds out?”

Clare looked away.  “You know he never wanted me to take this job,” she said.  “I had to kick and scream and cry real tears to get him to let me go back to work after Peter started school.  But he’s never