Page 40 of Jett in Jeopardy

“I shouldn’t. You promised you wouldn’t do anything,” Paula said, desperation turning her voice thready. Clearly, the woman was afraid she’d crossed a line and wanted to backtrack. Maybe she had, but I wasn’t leaving here without a name.

“You haven’t told me anything,” I assured her. “I could find his last name on my own. You would just be saving me a step.”

“Hargood.”

The name hit me, leaving me sick to my stomach. It had to be a coincidence, but even as I tried to convince myself, I knew it wasn’t.

Who the hell was Simon Hargood, and why was he out to destroy my life?

Chapter Seventeen

Jett

Hargood.

The name pulsated inside my skull. A cold sweat slicked my skin as I climbed the stairs, two at a time, to the university computer lab on the third floor.

It had to be a coincidence. Hargood wasn’t a completely uncommon name, after all. Just because it was Simon’s last name too, didn’t mean he was connected to the man who…

My stomach clenched, and I froze halfway up the stairs, gritting my teeth and willing my churning guts to settle. I squeezed my eyes closed and tightened my grip on the banister until my knuckles turned white. Breathing slowly through my nose, I fought to get a handle on the panic swelling inside me before I lost total control.

When my nausea finally passed, and the tingling in my fingers faded, I opened my eyes. I was still alone in the stairwell. I don’t think I’d ever been so grateful to be at school this close to the holidays when the student population was reduced and there was no one to stumble over me on the verge of a panic attack halfway up the stairs. Blowing out a slow breath, I forced my jelly-like legs to climb the rest of the way.

The computer lab wasn’t completely empty. As I entered, about a half dozen students were spaced out among the rows of PCs, focused intently on the work they were scrambling to wrap up before the end of the term. No one bothered to look up when I walked in. I could have gone back to Brody’s and used my own laptop, but I couldn’t wait one more minute. I needed to know who Simon Hargood was now. Besides, a part of me didn’t want to bring any of this—Simon Hargood and the ugly memories connected to his last name—back to Brody’s or any part of my life in The Square.

I tucked myself into a far corner of the lab, away from the other students, and started my search for Simon. He wasn’t hard to find. I pulled up all of his social media accounts. Surprisingly, they had no privacy settings in place, almost as if he’d wanted me to find him, wanted me to see exactly who he was.

You sound paranoid, I told myself, scrolling through Simon’s photo sharing app. There weren’t many posts from this year, just a few moody selfies with various backdrops and a picture of his dorm room from this past August, probably from when he first started school. I kept scrolling back through the images from the previous year. Interestingly enough, they weren’t the typical pictures of partying with friends or selfies I would have expected to see from a high school senior. Instead, they were mostly scenic landscapes with meaningless, cryptic words posted under them—Thinking of you today. Facing the future. I know there will be justice.

But it wasn’t the words that had my stomach sinking to my feet like an icy stone dropping into the ocean. These were backgrounds of Colorado. Until I moved to The Square when I started university, I had lived in this same Denver suburb my whole life. So, I would have recognized those distant, jagged mountains anywhere.

My mouth turned dry, but I kept scrolling, hoping to god that I would find something that would prove me wrong. There was a gap in the images. Simon hadn’t posted anything, and then there was a series of photos posted six years ago at a cabin in the woods, a hunting cabin, if the pictures of a much younger, pre-teen Simon posed with a rifle were any indication. There were a few photos of him alone, then poses with another man who must have been his father.

Gregg Hargood.

My greatest fears gave way. Ihadknown his father. He owned a restaurant back when I bussed tables in my junior year of high school.

The man smiling brightly at the camera with his arm casually thrown around his son’s shoulders looked different from the man I remembered. The last time I’d seen him, he was hunched over, arms wrapped around his middle where I’d elbowed him, his face twisted tight in a mix of fury and pain.

He’d cornered me alone in the small back room with the cleaning supplies. To this day, the stench of bleach makes my skin crawl. In the weeks leading up to that final moment in the backroom, he couldn’t keep his hands off me, gripping my shoulders, rubbing my back. Nothing out-and-out sexual, just strange enough to give me pause, but I’d told myself I was making something out of nothing. He was just friendly and didn’t mean anything by it. Besides, he had a wife and kid, after all.

I’d been more confused than concerned when he’d followed me into the backroom where I went to get the mop after closing. It was odd when he’d wordlessly pulled the door closed behind him. I’d turned to face him and asked, “What are you doing?”

He gave me no answer, quickly closing the distance between us and using his bigger body to back me against the wall. Yet I was still more perplexed than afraid.

It wasn’t until his middle-aged gut, sagging over the waist of his pants, pressed against my side, his hot breath that smelled faintly of whiskey fanned my cheek, and his erection rubbed against my thigh that I realized I was in trouble.

“What are you doing?” I said again, “Get off!” I placed both of my hands against his chest and pushed. He didn’t even budge. He was well over six feet and towered over my five-foot-ten-inch frame. His big frame trapped me against the wall. There was no way to put room between us.

Fear fluttered inside me for the first time since he’d closed the door. I was quickly losing control of the situation—if I’d ever really had any—but a part of me still couldn’t wrap my head around the realization of what was actually happening.

“Shh,” he murmured. “Be still. You’ll like it.” Then he slid his big hand past the waist of my pants and inside my underwear, his thick fingers grasping my flaccid dick.

Panic exploded inside me like fireworks. “Get the fuckoffof me!”

Raising an arm above my head, I elbowed him hard in the stomach, twisting free from his grip at the same time he’d doubled over. Free from Gregg’s grip, I bolted from the backroom and ran straight out of the restaurant. One of the servers had called out to me, but I didn’t look back. I jumped into my car and drove straight home.

Now Gregg’s son, Simon, who was maybe thirteen or fourteen at the time, was here at the same university as me. I didn’t believe for a second that Simon being here was a coincidence.

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