AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As a little girl she’d been a dancer, and as she got older, she had also started sewing dance costumes for herself and her fellow dancers. Even now, though she hadn't danced in years, she made the costumes for her old studio.
When she wasn't sewing dance costumes, she made Christmas gifts for the people she loved. In the past, she’d made stockings, teddy bears, patchwork quilts, tablecloths, napkin holders, door wreaths, angels, and door stoppers. This year she was making little Christmas cloth books, they were adorable, and although they’d taken her pretty much the whole year to make, she was so proud of them.
Between making dance costumes and handmade gifts for family and friends most of the time when she wasn't at work, doing housework, or running errands, she was sewing. But right now, when she was stressed and scared and needed to do it she couldn’t because all of her stuff was back at her house. She didn't even know what condition it was in. She knew her mannequin was probably destroyed, but all of the gifts she’d already made for Christmas could be as well. The sewing machine she’d received as a gift from her parents for her sixteenth birthday might be ruined. She knew it was only a thing, that it could be replaced, but it was special to her, and she didn't want it to be gone.
“It’s five o’clock in the morning. Why are you up?”
Hayley turned from the window where she had been staring out at the falling snow and daydreaming. Brian was standing behind her, dressed in nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants that hung low on his hips.
He looked good.
Really good.
Had he always been this toned or had he been working out more recently?
She hadn't dated a lot because she wasn't very confident when it came to intimacy, and she wasn't very experienced, but right now all she wanted was to be upstairs, in bed, naked, with Brian’s hands touching her everywhere.
Hayley felt her cheeks heat.
Was her mouth hanging open?
Was she staring?
She was making a fool of herself.
“You okay?” Brian watched her with a small smirk, and she knew that he knew what she was thinking.
Was he going to remind her that they were friends and let her down gently?
When she was being honest with herself, Hayley knew she didn't just have a crush on Brian Xander. She was in love with him. Maybe she did need to hear him admit point blank that all they were ever going to be was friends so she could finally let go of her feelings and move on.
She cleared her throat and then said, “I’m fine.”
“Couldn’t sleep?” He came to stand beside her.
“No. I got an hour or two, but then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I got tired of tossing and turning so I thought I may as well just get up.”
“Did you have nightmares?”
“No. I don’t think I dreamed at all.” Thankfully, she didn't suffer from nightmares and never really had. She knew her mom had been worried that she would have had bad dreams when she first went to live with them, but other than the occasional one, mostly after she had been kidnapped when she was fifteen and again later that same year when she had been in an explosion, she’d never really had them. Her mom suffered from them regularly, even decades later, and knowing what they did to someone she was really grateful she hadn't been afflicted.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. A little sore, but it’s nothing major. I don’t even need to take any Tylenol or anything. It’s more just a dull nuisance than anything else.”
“Don’t be a martyr though, if you start hurting later then take something.”
“I will,” she agreed. “You can go back to bed if you want.”
“If you’re up, I’m up,” he said.
Right.
Because he was her babysitter for the foreseeable future.
Hayley would love to say that she didn't think Jay Turner would be stupid enough to make another attempt on her life and that they were all blowing this way out of proportion, but unfortunately, she couldn’t do that. She had taken away his daughter, and while that didn't bother the man in the normal paternal sense of having his child taken away from him, especially on the heels of his other daughter’s death, it angered him because he thought of Kinsley as a possession. His possession, and she had messed with that. He wouldn’t stop until he killed her.
“Sorry,” she told Brian. She didn't want to be a bother or a burden to anyone.
