“I don’t understand.” Defensiveness fired through him. He’d been a perfect gentleman where she’d been concerned. “We were young. What we shared was perfectly innocent?—”
“Was it?” She asked the question as if she really needed to have it confirmed. As if she didn’t already know the answer.
“Hell, yes—” he started, sitting forward in his seat.
Gabriella laid a hand on his arm, a new confidence radiating from her that had been missing this morning. She seemed calmer tonight. Maybe the Salon Night was her equivalent of guitar picking.
“Because, Clay, I thought I had a lot of not-completely-innocent conversations with you online that summer in chat rooms.” Her clear blue eyes were focused on his as he felt the floor drop out from under him.
“What?” He shook his head. Confused.
“And it turned out,” she continued, barely pausing to take a breath. “That night I was attacked? I thought I’d spoken to you online just before the incident. It wasyouI was planning to meet in the quarry.”
The revelation seemed to hang suspended in midair between them, not really permeating his brain. He’d heard the words. But they made no sense.
“Gabby—I sent you a couple of emails that spring, I remember. I know you got them, because you answered them.” They’d spoken about it during a math tutoring session. She’d sent him some sample problems that way. “But I don’t think I even knew how to find a chat room back then.”
Unlike most of his generation, the techno-revolution had missed him. He’d been poor to start with, so it wasn’t like his parents had bought him laptops or game systems at Christmastime. He’d been lucky to get new socks. A sweater, maybe. Later, when his alcoholic mom had run off and his alcoholic father had given up completely on parenting, Clay had moved into nicer foster homes with access to more technology, but he’d been low in the pecking order of kids waiting to use an internet connection for homework.
Gabriella folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself as she stared up at the fat full moon overhead for a long moment. There was something so vulnerable about her and strong at the same time. Willowy slim, she had a delicate, feminine grace, but the determined set of her chin and shoulders suggested she would walk through fire if the need arose.
“I knew, of course, that you couldn’t have been the person I communicated with that night.” She blinked and drew a deep breath before continuing. “Those messages came from the man who attacked me. He was just pretending to be you when he sent them, so I believed that it was you who wanted to see me.”
He wondered what the exchange had been about that it had drawn a sixteen-year-old girl out of her home late atnight. And damn, but it sent a surge of cold fury through him to think her attacker had impersonated Clay to get at her.
“That night wasn’t the only time you thought we exchanged messages online?” He had all new reasons to attend that trial for Jeremy Covington tomorrow.
Seized with the need to see the man pay for his crimes, Clay wondered if it was too late to charge him with impersonating Clay in addition to the long list of felonies that including numerous counts of cyberstalking, stalking, assault, sexual molestation, soliciting a minor, and attempted kidnapping Clayton remembered there was at least one impersonation charge on the long list he’d read in the paper, but that had been in conjunction with another incident involving a local teen he’d lured out by pretending to be a mutual friend of Heather Finley’s.
“No.” Sitting forward on the wooden seat, Gabriella tucked her feet around the front rail of the chair as she shook her head. “We chatted five or six times before that in the two weeks prior to that night—or so I thought.”
Clay couldn’t believe the gall of the guy—a respected man in the community, a coach on the high school football team with a kid and a wife—to contact a local girl repeatedly, pretending to be a teenage foster kid. It made sense that Covington would have known about Clay’s fledgling relationship with Gabriella, though. They’d met under the bleachers during football practices.
“For how long?” He couldn’t wrap his brain around it, but he realized he should be comforting her instead of focusing on how wronged he felt. How robbed. But damn it, Clay should have been the one enjoying those conversations with her online. “I mean, how extensive were these conversations? And what did he talk to you about?”
He sat forward in his chair, too, closer to her. Belatedly, he remembered he’d brought his motorcycle jacket outside earlier and he grabbed it off the back of his chair to drape across her shoulders. The flannel he wore over a sweatshirt kept him warm enough.
“Thanks.” Her eyes met his in the moonlight, clear and blue even though the darkness grayed out most colors. “This is where things get awkward for me. I was kind of hoping when I confided this to you that you would have been on the receiving end of at least some of those messages I sent you.”
Her gaze darted away again, searching the parking lot as if she’d rather look anywhere else. Across the lot at the diner, a couple of staffers closed the back door for the night, turning off the last of the lights in the building.
Clay’s attention returned to Gabriella. Her pink fingernails flashed along the zipper of the brown bomber jacket, tugging the leather tighter while her words sent his brain on a kind of wild ride. Just what sort of things had she believed they were saying to each other in those chats?
“I understand where that realization would be unsettling.” He nodded, starting to put the pieces together. “But consider my side. I can’t help but wonderwhyyou were messaging with me, Gabby. I only remember a few cursory exchanges online about times we were going to meet for math tutoring when I wanted to know you so much better. I was pretty much crazy about you back then.”
She went still. Slowly, her eyes tracked back to his.
“That helps, actually, to hear you say that. So, thank you.” She shrugged awkwardly in the big jacket, the fabric weighing down the gesture so it was just the slightest movement. “Because our conversations were fairly flirtatious. I looked forward to those chats, because Iliked you, too.”
And just like that, Gabriella Chance got under his skin all over again. He’d pinpointed the attraction between them alive and well earlier today. But right now, with her soft confession drifting on the night breeze, and her loose ponytail sliding along the shoulder of his jacket as she looked at him with trusting eyes…
She tapped into a spot in his chest that he hadn’t cracked open in a good long while.
Her cell phone vibrated on the porch rail, the light and the sound startling her. She reached for it.
“Sorry to check this,” she said a little too quickly, breathlessly. She flipped over the screen, and the light illuminated her face as she scrolled the pages. “I only leave the notifications on for family and for messages from the hotline for my victims’ support group, so it could be?—”
She went silent, lips pursed as she read.
