The Deceit by Sara Foster

Author:Sara Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2022-11-07T19:11:36+00:00

chapter sixteen

CLAIRE

It’s painful to allow the memories in when she’s been holding them back for so long. Alone, she can try to pretend that Ryan is the only one who stalks her nightmares . . . but, there’s another person who haunts her: and she doesn’t know how she’ll even bear to say his name, let alone tell Lenny the whole story.

She reaches back far enough into the past to find a safe place to start and takes a deep breath. “When I was eighteen, I took a year off from studying because I had a shot at reaching the national athletics team,” she begins. “I was rated in the top twenty-five across the country at long-jump, and among the top fifty sprinters too.”

“O-kay,” Lenny says, sitting back in confusion. “That’s a sizable chunk of new information about you.”

She balks at his tone. “There’s a lot more to come, so if you want me to tell you about this, you’ll need to let me finish without interrupting,” she says testily.

He doesn’t reply but holds up his hands in contrition.

“I was going hard on the training,” Claire continues, “and I started strength sessions at the local gym. I’d been there about a month when I began bumping into this guy called Ryan.” She works hard to keep her voice even, as it begins to slip and crack on the name. “He was very friendly, obviously interested in me, and he began turning up when he knew I’d be there, helping me with different equipment. And I didn’t stop him,” she says. “I just thought he was kind and helpful.”

It’s unnerving to remember how she’d felt at the time. She’d completely misread his swagger as confidence, and his attention as normal attraction. Therefore, in hindsight she felt she’d unwittingly encouraged him for way too long. He’d given her lots of advice about using the gym equipment properly, which meant he’d often touched her: gently pushing her legs in the right position for maximum extensions or pushing the heel of his hand against her shoulders as she worked on the chest press. At the time she hadn’t minded: their chemistry was instant, and she was grateful that the exercise accounted for the flush that regularly stole across her face. But now it’s one of the hardest things to remember: how completely she’d been fooled.

“Eventually, he asked me out . . .” She hesitates, recalling those first inklings of something amiss. Ryan had turned up with a bunch of twelve long-stemmed roses, but then hadn’t talked to her at all during the car ride, singing along to thrash metal instead and drumming on the steering wheel, his head jerking around in time with the music. She’d sat awkwardly, not wanting to join in, and it had been a long forty-five minutes to get to Takapuna. At a little beach-shack restaurant they were shown to a table outside with a view of the water. Ryan obviously knew the chef, who had told her to order anything she wanted from the menu, on the house.

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