Kathi S Barton - [Aaron's Kiss 04] by Karen Fuller Read Free Book Online Page B

was already too late.
    ~~~
    Sam was downstairs the next morning when Betty and Sally showed up at five-thirty. Their voices and general moving around while they came in the back door together sounded like a herd of elephants and a bunch of chattering monkeys. She wondered if the two of them ever did anything quietly, then she smiled. She sincerely doubted it.
    Sam hadn’t slept well after she woke sometime after four this morning and had gotten up to sit on the window seat and watch the street start to wake. She wondered about the man in her dream, a very erotic wet dream. She couldn’t shake the feeling of near complete satisfaction and wasn’t sure she wanted to. Her body was relaxed from the orgasm, but she was still tense and on edge. As if she hadn’t gotten enough of whatever had made her climax like that. She blushed at how hard she had come and how much the man in her dream had seemed so real. She tried to shake off the feeling of connection to him, the overwhelming need to find him. Silly, she thought. Just plain silly.
    She showed the women what things to take up front and also let them know where any orders were that were to be picked up this morning. Sam told them that she had a few things to finish up but if they needed her for anything just to shout. She had missed working a full day yesterday and the day before and needed to make up for it. The timer went off for another tray of baked goods and she pulled them out to cool.
    Sam was decorating a layer cake with pink roses when the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She put down the tube of pink frosting and went to the one-way mirror that looked into the main part of the shop. Something was…wrong. Someone was in a great deal of pain, both mentally and physically. She watched the people standing there waiting for their treats and baked goods, reached out to them, and found the one she was looking for. There, she thought, the woman in the blue top and spandex pants. She looked frightened. Then she realized it was terror the woman was feeling—terror and pain, immense pain. This woman was being beaten by someone close to her and quite frequently too.
    Settling deeper into her mind, Sam could feel the woman’s pain and she took a quick inventory of her injuries. She had six bruised ribs and one broken one. Her jaw was also bruised and hurting, but she had tried to cover it with a good amount of makeup. Whoever the beater was had snatched this woman’s hair at one point and she had a large raw place on her scalp from it. Sam was sure that blood scabbed in the area and the woman was terrified that someone might notice. Blue top, as Sam called her in her mind, was wearing long sleeves and a sweater to cover the hand prints left there around her biceps. She was nervous and terrified. The heat and weather alone would be enough to alert most that she was hiding something.
    Sam touched her mind deeper still. She wasn’t surprised what she saw there. The woman was going to kill herself when she returned home. Just a simple as that, something she had added to her list of things to do—make the beds, do the dishes, fold laundry, put gun to head, and pull the trigger. Of course this was after she saw that her husband’s meal was cooked perfectly for him and the whole house was spic and span.
    Anger surged through Sam, hot and sharp.
    Sam planted the urge for Blue-Top to call Sam before she made the beds. She would need to call not just think about it. When she got home, she was to go directly to the phone and call. Sam then gave her the phone number of the cell phone that no one knew about but a very select group of people. There were no small children involved.
    The woman had a son, but he had long since written his mom off, the woman thought.
    Sam wondered fleetingly if the son was like that father. But dismissed it almost immediately. That, Sam thought, was not her concern. Satisfied, Sam went back to work on the pink frosted cake.
    Sam had been helping