Chapter 1 Love-Bombed

# Chapter 1

## Love-Bombed

The autumn air carried a peculiar anticipation as Piper made her way across the campus quadrangle. Golden leaves crunched beneath her boots, matching the nervous flutter in her stomach. She was running late for the guest lecture—not just any lecture, but one delivered by Julian Bennett, the renowned behavioral psychologist whose books had gotten her through her darkest undergraduate days.

She slipped into the back of the auditorium, breathless, as Julian's rich baritone filled the space. He stood tall and composed at the podium, gesturing with elegant hands that punctuated his words about human connection in the digital age. At forty-two, he carried himself with the easy confidence of someone who had long ago stopped trying to impress others, which paradoxically made him all the more magnetic.

"The tragedy of modern relationships," Julian was saying, "is that we've forgotten how to truly see each other. We collect interactions rather than build connections."

Piper found herself nodding, feeling as though he was speaking directly to her. When their eyes met across the crowded room, something electric passed between them—or so she thought until she reminded herself that this was ridiculous. Men like Julian Bennett didn't notice graduate students hiding in the back row.

After the lecture, she lingered by the refreshment table, debating whether to join the queue of admirers waiting to speak with him. That's when he approached her instead.

"You were nodding quite vigorously during my point about authentic vulnerability," he said, his smile reaching his eyes in a way that made her feel instantly at ease. "Either you strongly agreed or you were fighting sleep."

Piper laughed, surprised by his directness. "Definitely the former. Your work on emotional barriers has been foundational to my research."

"And what research is that?" he asked, seeming genuinely interested as he selected a strawberry from the fruit platter.

"I'm examining how trauma reshapes narrative identity in therapeutic settings," she explained, amazed at how steady her voice remained. "How we tell our stories changes how we live them."

Julian's eyes widened slightly. "Now that," he said, "is exactly the conversation I've been hoping to find at this conference." He extended his hand. "Julian Bennett."

"Piper Reynolds," she replied, taking his hand. "But I suspect you read that off my name tag."

His laugh was warm and spontaneous. "Guilty. Though I would have asked anyway. I'm in town for a week—would you consider continuing this discussion over dinner tomorrow? I'm seeking genuine intellectual exchange, not just academic small talk."

She should have said no. Her advisor would have told her to maintain professional boundaries. But there was something in his eyes—a searching quality, as if he too had been waiting for someone who understood.

"I'd like that," she heard herself say.

That dinner became the first of many encounters. Julian was unlike anyone Piper had ever met—cultured but unpretentious, brilliant yet attentive. He listened to her thoughts on trauma narratives with the same intensity he might give to a renowned colleague. When she mentioned her favorite obscure poet, he quoted verses from memory. When she admitted her fear of vulnerability in relationships, he didn't offer platitudes.

"I've spent years studying human connection," he told her one evening as they walked along the riverfront, "and I'm still searching for that rare, true soul connection. Someone who sees beyond the surface, who isn't afraid of the complexity beneath."

Three weeks into knowing him, Julian surprised her outside her apartment building at midnight, violin in hand. He played Debussy under her window, the notes rising like prayers into the night sky. The next day, a package arrived containing a bottle of perfume—not just any perfume, but a limited-edition scent she'd once mentioned in passing, with a note: "For the woman whose presence lingers even in absence."

When her thesis draft came back with his annotations, she found a margin note that made her breath catch: "You shine like the only fire in a city of darkness." It was poetic, excessive, and exactly what the neglected corners of her heart had always longed to hear.

"He's just so... present," Piper told Dr. Felicity during their regular therapy session. "It's like he's studied the manual on everything I've ever wanted and decided to become that person."

Dr. Felicity adjusted her glasses, her expression neutral but attentive. "And how does that make you feel?"

"Seen. Understood." Piper hesitated. "Sometimes it's overwhelming. But isn't that what everyone wants? To be completely known and still be wanted?"

"Many people do want that," Dr. Felicity acknowledged. "Just remember that healthy relationships develop gradually. There's no rush to—"

"I know," Piper interrupted, unable to contain her smile. "But for the first time, I feel like I have what everyone else has been talking about. That kind of love that feels like coming home."

Dr. Felicity nodded, making a note in her pad. "Just keep checking in with yourself, Piper. Your feelings are valid guides."

But Piper was already floating, carried away on Julian's current of affection. When he kissed her for the first time in the rain outside a bookshop, it felt like a scene from a film she'd been waiting her whole life to star in. When he remembered how she took her coffee or which side of the bed she preferred to sleep on, it felt like evidence of his extraordinary attention to her happiness.

"I've never felt this way about anyone," Julian confessed one evening, his fingers tracing patterns on her bare shoulder as they lay entwined in her apartment. "You've awakened something in me I thought had died years ago."

Piper believed him because she wanted to, because his words matched the hunger in her own heart. When friends raised eyebrows at the speed of their relationship, she dismissed their concerns as jealousy. When her own doubts surfaced—why did he sometimes check his phone so secretively? why did he never introduce her to his friends?—she pushed them aside as insecurity.

Six weeks into their whirlwind romance, Piper returned to her apartment after a long day of classes to find a cream-colored envelope had been slipped under her door. No return address, no postmark. Just her name in unfamiliar handwriting.

Inside was a photograph and a note. The photograph showed Julian in an intimate embrace with a middle-aged woman, their lips pressed together in what was unmistakably a lover's kiss. The woman's back was to the camera, but Piper could make out her elegant posture, her carefully styled hair, and—most devastatingly—the distinctive earrings that caught the light.

Custom-designed pearl drops with a small diamond accent. Earrings Piper would recognize anywhere, because she had helped pick them out as a birthday gift three years ago.

Her mother's earrings.

The note, written in the same unfamiliar hand as the envelope, contained just five words:

"You are not the only one."

Piper's hands trembled as she held the photograph closer, zooming in with disbelieving eyes. There was no mistake. The earrings her father had commissioned for her mother, Marion, were as unique as they were elegant.

The room seemed to tilt around her as the implications crashed through her consciousness. Not just another woman—her mother. The perfect man who had seemed tailor-made for her desires was also involved with the woman who had given her life.

The photo slipped from her fingers as Piper sank to the floor, her back against the door, wondering how something that had felt so real could suddenly reveal itself as the most elaborate trap.