by Celeste Hall
Secret Admirer by Celeste Hall
A Modern Erotic Romance
Secret Admirer tells a cute story about a clumsy, small town waitress who gains the unwanted protection of a very sexy high school teacher after she begins receiving threatening letters and the teenage boy next door tattles on her. Her hunky bodyguard moves himself right into her house and begins turning her quiet little life completely upside down.
Secret Admirer is currently available in digital or paperback from most major bookstores. It can also be downloaded in .pdf or .rtf (Word doc) to read on your home computer, by visiting Smashwords, the first link below.
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Secret Admirer by Celeste Hall
Excerpt
Warning: May contain spoilers!
With a flick of his bushy gray tail, the squirrel scurried back up into his tree to chatter at her from the safety of his nest.
Mister Fuzzbutt – as Bethany had taken to calling her diminutive neighbor – was going to have to live with his disappointment today.
Although she had a bag full of unsalted peanuts tucked under one arm, the envelope Bethany held in her hand had driven all memory of it from her mind.
It was another letter from him, she was sure of it.
No postage stamp, no return address, only her name printed in carefully blocked letters.
Bethany wasn’t anyone special. She wasn’t a movie star or a fashion model or a famous musician. She was a simple waitress at a nice family restaurant, who lived a very quiet lifestyle.
When the ‘secret admirer’ notes started showing up in her mail box she had thought it was just one of her friends playing tricks on her. But the letters were getting scarier, and none of the people she knew seemed capable of using such foul language, or suggesting such frightening acts.
There was a sudden thunk-thunk-crack, followed by a very audible curse.
The bag of peanuts slipped out of Bethany’s arm as she let out a terrified squeak and spun to face her attacker.
Only it wasn’t an attacker at all.
It was Jimmy Thompson, the teenage son of her next door neighbor’s, Bob and Wendy.
The fifteen year old had his back to her as he fought to shove a tottering pile of boxes back into the garage with one hand, while extracting the lawnmower out of their path with the other.
The sound she’d heard had been the top most box in the stack bouncing off the lawnmower and rupturing to spill what looked like a whole lot of well worn romance novels out all over the pavement.
Bethany tried not to smile at his dilemma. It really wasn’t the poor kid’s fault that his mother was such a pack rat! Their garage was stuffed floor to ceiling with boxes, bags, and oddities that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since long before Jimmy was even born.
“Here, let me help,” she offered, rushing over to push the boxes back up into their precarious position as he pulled out the lawnmower.
“Thanks,” he blushed furiously, obviously embarrassed at having her see the mess which was usually hidden behind a closed garage door. His cheeks grew even redder as soon as the lawnmower was free, as it allowed Bethany to bend down and start packing the spilled romance novels into their box.
“I can do that,” he rushed, giving the yard tool a shove towards the grass, and attempting to scoop the books out of her sight before she might see any of the scantily dressed women on the covers. “It’s just my mom’s old stuff. I can take care of these.”
“I know you can,” Bethany smiled. “But sometimes it’s nice to have a little help.”
Together they heaved the box back up to the top of the stack near the wall, and braced a shovel against it to keep it steady.
That’s when Jimmy noticed the envelope she was still clutching in one hand.
“Is that from your stalker?”
Bethany blinked in surprise.
Stalker? Yes, she supposed the author of the letters could be considered a stalker. But it was uncomfortable having even the teenage boy next door aware of the nasty situation she was in.
“I heard my parents talking about it,” Jimmy explained when he saw her face. “I’m in a law enforcement class at school. I talked to my teacher about what you should do, and he said you needed to report it to the police. He said that you should take this sort of threat seriously.”
Oh goodie, he was telling even more people about the letters. Wasn’t that just peachy?
“I did talk to the police about it,” Bethany assured the boy. “And I gave them all the letters. They think it’s just a prank and the person responsible will get bored of it soon.”
She didn’t mention that the police had thought the author was probably a teenager in the area, or that they had actually considered Jimmy as a potential perpetrator.
“That’s crap,” Jimmy stated in a very grown up tone. “Mister North says that if the guy sent more than two or three letters, he wasn’t going to stop until someone made him stop. He says that the guy was obviously watching your house, and might start doing other things besides leaving letters. He says sometimes people like this are really sick in the head and might even hurt the people they’re stalking. He says…”
Bethany realized that if Mister North ‘said’ too much more, she was going to have a hard time falling asleep tonight.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jimmy!” She quickly interrupted. “I’m sure the police know all of that too. They’re probably watching my house to make sure that nothing happens to me. I’m sure they’ll catch the guy before anything really bad happens.”
Please, oh please, don’t let anything bad happen.
“Mister North used to be a professional bodyguard, until he got shot,” Jimmy went on, obviously not taking the hint as Bethany hurried back into her own yard to rescue the bag of peanuts that Fuzzbutt had now chewed through and scattered over the sidewalk.
“He still teaches a self defense class on Saturdays. I asked if he would come show you some things you can do to protect yourself, and he said he would try to find some time. I gave him your phone number too, so he could call you.”
Oh dear merciful lord in heaven!
“Jimmy, please don’t give my phone number or information out to strangers. That’s a really, really bad idea.”
“I know that,” he shrugged, completely missing the point. “Mister North isn’t a stranger. He’s my teacher, and he can protect you.”
“Well, he’s a stranger to me!” She sighed in frustration. “I’ll be okay, Jimmy, really. Please tell him not to bother coming over. I’m sure he’s a very busy man. I can take care of myself.”
“That’s what everyone always thinks,” Jimmy looked up with the soulful gaze of a young prophet viewing her impending doom. “Then they end up dead.”
Bethany left the remainder of the peanuts on the ground for Fuzzbutt to clean up and beat a hasty retreat for the house. She didn’t like to consider herself an alarmist, but little Jimmy Thompson had just scared the living crap out of her.
It was bad enough getting all those letters in the mail, each one of them a frightening new description of how the author would like to ‘break her in’ and then cover up his evil deed by making her ‘disappear’.
The ‘breaking her in’ part suggested that the author knew that Bethany was still a virgin at twenty-three, which hadn’t seemed to surprise the cops. Despite being very pretty – for a redhead with a frustrating number of freckles across her nose – Bethany was rather shy.
But the really scary part about the letters was how each of them went over various new possibilities for killing her and hiding the body. The author really seemed to get off on sharing the vast and twisted extent of his sick imagination.
Bracing herself, she sat down at the kitchen table, where she already had a new pile of threatening letters collecting.
The police officers that had responded to her first call for help, had asked if she could keep anything else the stalker sent to her, just in case he gave away information that might lead to who he was.
They had sounded so sure the guy would just stop on his own Bethany had actually believed them. But the letters hadn’t stopped. They’d gotten worse, and were now making themselves an unwelcome part of her routine.
Every day she would come home from work, check the mail, and find yet another letter forecasting her violent rape and murder.
With growing frustration she abruptly dropped the latest envelope down on the kitchen table and grabbed for the phone.
Why weren’t the police taking this seriously?
She was scared, she wanted help. She wanted the letters to stop.
The dispatcher who answered her call sounded bored and annoyed, particularly when she learned that Bethany had already made one report and was calling back in to press for additional assistance.
Yet despite how angry it made her to be brushed off, Bethany’s meek personality wouldn’t allow her to get verbally upset with the woman.
At last the dispatcher agreed to send a patrolman out to collect the new letters, but warned that they were busy with a barn fire on the other end of town and might not make it over until the following day.
Bethany dropped the phone down beside the envelope, and stood to get started on dinner.
What would it take before the police took her seriously?
Did she have to get herself killed before they would do something about this creep?
The doorbell rang before she could finish her mental tirade.
That was fast! Maybe the police were actually watching her house, just as she’d told Jimmy they would.
Bethany opened the door and found herself looking up – way, way up – into the gaze of a bronze Adonis.
Everything about him was dark, powerful and hinted at dangerous.
He was a study in black. Those broad shoulders amplified by a neatly pressed black button up shirt, which narrowed into well fitted black jeans that hugged a very nicely muscled butt and thighs.
He wore his thick black hair buzzed very short to his scalp, and as she watched he removed the sunglasses he’d been wearing to reveal dark intelligent eyes.
Her imagination immediately pulled up an advertisement for Men in Black, and she was sure this particular agent could have put even the attractive Will Smith to shame. Chasing bad guys certainly seemed to be doing a very good job of keeping this man’s body tight in all the right places.
If the police department ever put out one of those ‘sexy officer’ calendars, this fellow was sure to be nominated for cover model.
It didn’t look like the officer was carrying a badge or gun, but she suspected that an undercover cop had to keep them well concealed.
He flashed brilliant white teeth at her and Bethany couldn’t help but smile back.
“Miss Carter?”
“Yes.”
“How are you? I’m Alexander North.”
She blinked in confusion.
North? As in Mister North, Jimmy’s high school Law Enforcement teacher?
As in Mister North, the man who was not supposed to be stopping by to talk to her about how to protect herself from stalkers?
She had died and gone to hell.
Tagged as: erotic romance, sexy books, steamy romance novels
