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  Table of Contents

  Copyright and Disclaimer

  Title Page

  Book Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  A Note from the Author

  Taking Her (Sample)

  About the Author

  Protecting Abigail

  R.R. Banks

  Someone is hunting Abigail.

  I’m going to make him my prey.

  My past left me numb.

  I don’t let anyone in.

  Not to my billions, not to my heart.

  All I cared about was my little girl.

  Then my best friend asked me to shelter his sister.

  A scarred and broken angel,

  I saw the hurt in her eyes before I noticed her beauty.

  She woke up the beast inside me.

  Seeing her play with my daughter broke down my walls.

  Protecting her became my purpose.

  But the bastard who hurt her is still playing games.

  He doesn’t know who the f*ck he’s dealing with.

  There’s nothing I won’t do to protect Abigail and my child.

  And I’ll destroy anyone that gets in my way.

  Chapter One

  Xavier

  I’m drawn out of my sleep by a bright light hitting against my eyelids. It's not the soft glow of the dawn or even the vibrancy of late morning. This is a searing, fierce light. One I know all too well.

  My eyes snap open, and I look toward the bedroom window. Through the curtains, I can see pulsing flames raging outside of the house. Throwing the blanket off me, I rush out of bed and run toward the window. I push the curtains aside and see the fire coming toward the house. I can't see how deep it is, or where it started from.

  One of the flames stretches up, licking the needles of a low-hanging pine. The branch resists, but it's only a matter of time before one of the trees catches, or the scattering of dry needles and leaves below them are fully engulfed.

  "Get up!" I shout. "Wake up! Now!"

  Fear grips my heart as I tear open the bedroom door and run into the darkness of the living room. The brightness of the flames has shrunken my pupils so tightly I can barely see anything in front of me. But I can't hesitate. I can't slow down. My hip rams into a sharp corner of the dining room table, and I wince at the pain as I reach forward to grab for anything that will guide me across the room. I have to get to the other bedroom. I shouldn’t have let her stay there. I should have never let her be so far away from me.

  "Get up!" I scream again.

  Finally, my vision starts to return, but everything around me is hazy. I realize the light that's guiding me now is from the fire itself, and that means it's grown. My hands touch the doorknob of the opposite bedroom, and I grab it. As soon as I attempt to turn it, I realize it's locked. I fight against it, trying to break the lock mechanism. I don't have time to go back into the other bedroom to find the key. I don't understand why the door is locked. It shouldn't be locked.

  "Anna!" I yell, pounding on the door.

  "She's not there!" a voice cuts through mine.

  I turn around just in time to see a tree outside the window ignite, sending droplets of fire raining down onto the porch.

  ********

  Abigail

  Three years earlier...

  The sound of the contents of my purse crashing to the kitchen table and scattering across the surface sends a shiver down my spine. I try as hard as I can to not let it show. Even as my favorite bottle of foundation, usually tucked safely in the bottom, cracks and runs in a narrow rivulet along the grout between two white tiles I just cleaned this morning. I don't want Trevor to know he's affecting me, but I don't know if that's going to work. Sometimes remaining calm keeps him under control, but other times it only seems to push him further. I never know how he's going to react, but I feel less overwhelmed when I manage to stay calm and collected.

  Trevor starts pushing everything from my purse across the table as if making sure every item is visible and accounted for. I watch as my change purse, lip stain, breath mints, sunglasses, and a granola bar smear through the makeup on the tiles. If I think back far enough, I can remember a time when there would have been so much more in the bag. It seems meaningless, but memories like that weigh heavier on me every time Trevor flies into one of his rages, which is happening with rapidly increasing frequency.

  "Are you looking for something specific?" I ask.

  He turns his searing dark eyes toward me, and I know I shouldn't have asked. I'm expected to stand here silently and wait for him to address me. It's not something he's commanded outright, but it's understood.

  "Don't talk to me like that," he hisses through fiercely gritted teeth. "Don't treat me like I'm stupid."

  "I'm not –"

  "There's something in here. I know it. I just have to find it. And if it's not, it means you got rid of it."

  "Got rid of what?" I ask.

  "Proof."

  "Proof?"

  "Yes, proof. Proof of what you've been doing when you leave the house."

  "I was gone for two hours this afternoon," I say cautiously.

  "Conveniently when I was at work," he mutters, a slimy note in his voice.

  "It's not a matter of convenience," I explain. "Your hours at work happened to coincide with when I needed to be out."

  "Needed? You needed to be out? What was so pressing that you needed to leave the house without me?"

  I know he didn't remember. I had tried to hold out hope that maybe he had something planned, but it was just wishful thinking.

  "I was with Lilith celebrating...a birthday," I sigh.

  "Oh, okay. Then you went to a party without me. What did you do while you were there? Get drunk and add a few new men to your collection?"

  I cringe slightly.

  "We went to lunch and then walked around the mall," I say. "I haven't seen her in months. Besides, even if there was a party, why would it matter? You know I don't drink. Just being in the same room as a man doesn't mean I'm going to pay attention to him. You're at work with women every day. Should that bother me?"

  "We're not talking about me. We're talking about you. I know you're lying to me, Abigail. I can smell it on you. I guess I got home too fast, huh? You didn't have a chance to take a shower and wash it all off you."

  "There's nothing to wash off, Trevor," I insist. "I went to lunch with Lilith; then we walked around the mall to see some of the new summer clothes the stores are putt
ing out, then she brought me home. That's it. There was nothing else."

  "I don't believe you," he growls.

  "I'm sorry you don't believe me," I say. "I wish there was some way I could get you to."

  "It’s simple. Don’t run off, then act like this when I catch you."

  "I didn't run off, and I'm not acting like anything. I haven't worked in over a year, the house was clean, I just really needed some companionship, and I wanted to see her for my birthday."

  I wait for his reaction, for him to realize his mistake and feel guilty. Even for a second, maybe he'll feel some of the softness I used to see in him. But my words seem to mean nothing to him.

  "You don't need any more companionship than what I give you," Trevor says angrily. "That's the point of being in a relationship."

  "No," I say, shaking my head. "That's not what a relationship is supposed to be. We should enjoy spending time together, but not to the total sacrifice of anyone else. I need other people. Lilith is the only friend I have left. My brother called me this morning, but she was the only other one who even mentioned my birthday."

  "You have no reason to need anybody but me," he says slowly as if trying to emphasize his message as clearly as possible. "If you wanted to do something for your birthday, it should be with me. You're not going to run off with some woman you barely know."

  "You never do anything with me for my birthday. We haven't in the last two years. And you know Lilith. I used to work with her. Don't you remember her?"

  "No. She must not have been very important," Trevor says. "Anyway, why should I want to go out of my way to do something for the birthday of a woman who's cheating on me?"

  "I'm not cheating on you, Trevor," I insist. "How would I? I don't have a phone of my own anymore because you say I don't need it."

  "And yet you somehow miraculously came up with plans with this Lilith woman," he says.

  I know that tone in his voice. That's the tone that says Trevor thinks he's come up with a way to catch me in a lie. There's always that slick, smug note in each word like he’s so much smarter than me. He wants me to confess that I have a hidden cell phone paid for by the mysterious, illicit boyfriend he's crafted in his mind.

  "I ran into her at the grocery store," I tell him. "Like I said, I haven't seen her in months. Not since you took me off the phone plan. But she remembered my birthday and asked if I wanted to go to lunch. So, I said yes, and we made plans for me to meet her at La Casita. I had vegetable fajitas, we shared fried ice cream, then we went to the mall to look at the new clothes. She wanted to stay out longer, but I told her I needed to get home so I could be here when you got home."

  "And she refused to bring you?" he snorts.

  Somehow, he is always able to turn anything into a negative situation. No matter what I say, he's able to twist it into a confession or something to support his claims, no matter how outlandish. It often seems the further from reality Trevor flings his theories and rants, the more complicated and twisted his interpretation of anything I say or do becomes. I can hardly say a word without him snapping back.

  "She didn't refuse," I say.

  For what feels like the millionth time in our relationship, I try to calm Trevor down and reassure him. I used to do this without question. I was more worried about him being upset than I was standing up for myself. It always felt like there were countless reasons for me to do it. Those reasons are getting fewer and fewer the longer time goes on.

  "Then why weren't you back here?"

  "It takes time to get back here from the mall," I say. "We took less than an hour to eat, and less than an hour at the mall. The rest of the time was driving."

  "She's a bad influence on you, Gail. I don't want you seeing her again."

  I close my eyes briefly, letting out a breath and resisting the urge to shake off the feeling that name causes to creep down my skin. Trevor knows I hate when he calls me that, and yet he still does it. He says it sounds more like an adult – that Abigail sounds like a little girl’s name. When I was younger and first getting lost in his spell, I found it flattering. He didn't want me to sound like a child, because he was trying to convince me I was grown and old enough to take control of my life and make my own decisions. I believed him then, which is how I let him lure me away. Now, though, it sounds like another way he exerts control over me. Every time he calls me Gail, it’s another chip he takes out of my identity, and I feel even further from myself. When he calls me Gail, that’s his way of telling me that I belong to him, not in the protective and loving way I once imagined, but as a possession.

  "Fine," I mutter.

  I don't want to give in. I don't want to give up my last connection to the outside world other than my brother, but for now, I just want this confrontation to be over. I'm willing to give him the satisfaction of tonight if he'll just let me breathe for a little while. It will be better tomorrow. It always is.

  Trevor glares at me a few more seconds before storming out of the room and toward the bedroom. I let out a breath. Thinking about my brother only makes me feel worse. It's been so long since I've seen or spoken to Evan, I don’t feel connected to him at all these days. He's all I have, and yet I don't even feel like I really have him. Walking over to the cabinet under the kitchen sink to get paper towels and a spray bottle of cleaner to wash away the spill on the table, I feel even more isolated than before. This isn't what my life was supposed to be like. I shouldn’t feel this way. At twenty-two, I should see the world as nothing but opportunities, and be enjoying every moment of my young adulthood. Instead, every day drags by just like the one before. There's nothing to look forward to. No sense of a future ahead of me. It's a stagnant existence – one that feels like it's tightening its grip around me further by the minute.

  I remember before things were this way. I'm not so far separated from it that I can't look back and recall Trevor's eyes before they were so angry. I can almost hear his voice, sweet as honey before it was laced with such disdain. There was a time when he was everything I ever hoped for in a man. I never could have imagined a day when him being the center of my life would be a default setting rather than out of love and devotion.

  When the table is finally clean again, I tuck my purse away under the table beside the back door where I always keep it and walk back into the kitchen to start dinner. I don't know if I'll see Trevor awake again tonight. The next few hours while the pot roast cooks will tell. He will either emerge from the room to sit at the table and have a silent, tense meal with me, or I'll wrap up a plate for him, set it on his specified shelf in the refrigerator, and slip into bed as quietly as I can in hopes of not waking him. Nights like this make me wish even more for the way things were at the beginning. Like when we bought our first piece of furniture for the first apartment we lived in together – a futon. I can still remember how excited I was. It was just a reject from a college dorm room too small to accommodate two, but to me, it was a sign of freedom. Trevor and I pushed it into the center of our dark, cramped basement apartment, and I felt like I had taken a step into adulthood, even though I was barely old enough to know what that meant. Even then, I had visions of a future that was my own. I'd go to school and have a career. I'd come home to Trevor at night, and we'd unwind and relax together. Eventually, we'd get married and have a family.

  It was all so clear in my mind, but four years later we are even farther from that dream than when all we had was a dank, small basement apartment and a little futon. I don't know if he'll ever change. Part of me holds out a little flicker of hope that someday I'll wake up and he'll be the man I fell in love with again. That way, the dreams I’ve had for going back to finish my degree won’t feel as naive and absurd as I’ve come to see them. The rest of me has become increasingly more confident that what I’m feeling is nothing but a desperate cling to what I thought was my salvation. I don't want to let go of it. That would be admitting to all the years I've wasted.

  ********

  The next day…

&
nbsp; Even though I didn't see Trevor last night for dinner, he seems strangely calm this morning. By the time he comes out of the bedroom, a smile on his face, I’m almost finished cooking breakfast. He leans down to kiss my cheek and snatches a piece of bacon from the plate beside me on the counter. It’s almost playful, but the slight glimpse of the man I knew before the darkness took over is more unsettling than if he had come into the room as angry as last night.

  "What are you up to today?" he asks as we sit down at the table across from each other to eat.

  "I thought I'd go to the grocery store," I said. "There are a few good sales today."

  I look at him for a few seconds, waiting for the smile to fade from his face and be replaced by a look of angry suspicion. Instead, he smiles and eats a piece of bacon before nodding.

  "Sounds good. I look forward to seeing what you pick up for dinner."

  As I drive toward the grocery store, those words endlessly repeat through my mind. The tiny house Trevor rented for us had initially seemed like a step up from the apartment, but it’s so far from everything, it quickly felt like another form of isolation. It takes almost half an hour to get to any store, and I've never met our nearest neighbors, whose house isn't even visible from ours. I'm wondering if he meant something more by that statement as I park and walk through the sliding glass doors into the grocery store. Did I forget something? Is today a special event of some kind that I should remember, and be commemorating with dinner? Did Trevor ask for something specific, and he's just waiting to see if I remember and prepare it for him correctly?

  I stop at a display of Trevor's favorite chips and debate whether he would be appreciative that I picked up a snack for him, or if he would be angry and accuse me of being lazy. It's still early in the day, so most of the people roaming up and down the aisles are mothers with very young children. This makes it even stranger when I turn from the display and see Greg, one of Trevor’s poker buddies, just ahead of me in the produce section, walking around a display of potatoes like he's never seen them before.