Wild at Heart

by Jane Graves

  “You said you wanted to hear about my stepfather,” she said quietly. “Do you still?”

  God, how he wanted to say no. He knew whatever words passed his lips in the next few minutes could either help or hurt, and he sure as hell didn’t want to hurt her anymore.

  “Don’t worry,” she murmured. “I promise not to cry anymore.”

  “I don’t care if you cry all night long. Just tell me about it, okay?”

  She sat up slowly and stared down at her lap. She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. The longer she went without speaking, the worse he knew the story was going to be.

  “When I was fourteen, I found photographs that he’d taken of me.”

  “Photographs? What kind of photographs?”

  “The kind I didn’t know he was taking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was in my bathroom. I don’t know how he did it, exactly. A hole somewhere in the wall, a hidden camera …”

  Her voice trailed off. Slowly Alex understood, and his stomach twisted with disgust. “He took pictures of you? Nude pictures?”

  She closed her eyes and nodded. He took a deep breath, trying to remain calm.

  “How long had he been doing this?”

  “Judging from the pictures, right after we came to live with him. I was nine.”

  “God, Val.” The very thought revolted him. She’d said the man was sleazy. She hadn’t said it strongly enough. “I hope you burned every one of them.”

  “No. He caught me. He came into the room when I was looking at the pictures. He told me that if I said a word, he’d make sure every pornographer in the world had copies of them, then reminded me that I’d never be able to prove that he was the one who took them. He was right.”

  Alex was trying very hard not to overreact, but it was a hard-won battle. That son of a bitch.

  “Then he thought maybe it was time to have the real thing.”

  Alex felt as if the ground had dropped right out from under him. “He didn’t. Val, don’t tell me—”

  “No, he didn’t. But he tried. I went crazy. I kicked him. Hit him. Bloodied his nose. Scratched his face. Pictures were one thing. He’d already taken them, and I couldn’t stop that. But he wasn’t going to get away with anything else.”

  “And you were only fourteen?”

  “Yes.”

  He felt a rush of admiration. She was tough. Damn, she was tough. How many girls that age would have the guts to fight back?

  “I’d hated him from the beginning, I think because I could always feel what he was. I didn’t know specifically. I was too young. But every time he looked at me, there was something about him that gave me the creeps. In a strange way, though, I was glad I found those pictures. I was sure that as soon as I told my mother, she would divorce him.”

  “What happened?”

  Val swallowed hard. “The moment I opened my mouth and started telling her what he’d done, her face went stark white. At first I thought it was because she was horrified. I guess she was. Horrified that I’d found out.”

  “She knew?”

  “Yes. She told me not to say another word. I started to cry. She shouted at me that I’d better not tell anyone anything, that if anyone found out, my stepfather would divorce her and she’d end up with nothing.”

  Alex felt every muscle in his body tighten, every nerve ending come alive with anger. “She knew, and she didn’t protect you? Jesus, Val, what kind of a mother was she?”

  “One who cared about her lifestyle more than she cared about her daughter.”

  Alex couldn’t imagine such a thing. He couldn’t imagine any parent abusing a child like that.

  “I hope you told somebody else,” he said hotly. “I hope you made that bastard pay for what he did to you.”

  “I thought about it. But who would I tell? I knew he’d win. No matter what I said, he was William Hamilton. All I’d get for my trouble would be humiliation. See, I was one of the bad kids. The ones who caused trouble. The ones nobody would believe in a million years.”

  “Did he try anything again?”

  “He said crude things to me all the time, suggesting that he could have me anytime he wanted to, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.” She paused. “But I swear I would have killed him if he’d actually laid a hand on me again.”

  “You said he died. When did that happen?”

  “When I was fifteen. He had a heart attack.”

  “Good. I hope he’s burning in hell.”

  “In the end, though,” Val said, “my mother was the one who lost.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not only had my mother signed a prenup, my stepfather had excluded her from his will. After he died, she was left with nothing. How’s that for irony?”

  “So what did she do?”

  “She sold all of her jewelry and managed to get us an apartment and a car. She worked as the assistant manager at the apartment complex and brought in enough money to feed us. But I couldn’t even look at her. School was terrible. Bad attitude. Bad grades. I barely remember those times. It seemed as if I was getting sucked down inside something dark I’d never be able to crawl out of, and there was nothing I could hang on to, to pull myself out.”

  She stopped for a moment, her eyes closed. “It gets worse before it gets better. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  No. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to hear it, but she needed to tell it, so he intended to sit here all night if that was what it took.

  “Of course. Go on.”

  She took a deep, ragged breath. “My mother couldn’t handle having nothing. Being stripped of everything that was so important to her. And I think she realized just what a terrible thing she’d done to me, but she had no clue how to repair the damage. One day when I was sixteen, she took a handful of pills. I got home from school that day and found her dead.”

  “God, Val.” His words came out on a choked breath.

  “I tried to feel grief for her, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I actually felt relieved she was gone, so I’d never have to look at her again. I know that’s awful, but—”

  “No, it’s not. Not after what you’d been through.”

  Val paused for a moment, closing her eyes, and he could tell she was fighting tears.

  “What did you do then?” he asked. “You were still a minor.”

  “I went to live with my grandfather. I hadn’t seen him since I was seven years old. You’ve heard of parents disowning their children? Well, my mother disowned her parents. They were blue-collar Mexicans, and she wanted desperately to rise above that. By the time I was seven years old, she decided she didn’t want anything to do with them. My grandmother died shortly after that, and my mother pretended she didn’t even have a father.”

  Alex thought about his own family—brothers he’d fought with since he was old enough to throw a punch, and a sister who was so nosy and intrusive that sometimes he wanted to lock her in a closet. But he loved them, anyway. To disown his own family—he couldn’t even imagine it.

  “He persuaded me to come live with him in Austin,” Val said. “To this day I don’t know why I did it. Maybe because I had no place else to go. I hated him as much as I did her, just because he was her father. He was in his early sixties, so it was kind of a strange situation, me living with him when I was only sixteen. But it was the only real stability I’d ever known. He laid down the law and made me stick to it, which I fought like crazy. I gave him more crap than you can possibly imagine. But he took it. He took every bit of it, until one day I realized that he wasn’t going to fight back like my mother had. He was just going to continue to tell me the rules and make me abide by them. And always—always—he told me he loved me. Why, I don’t know, but he did. And pretty soon, I loved him, too. He died when I was twenty-one.”

  Her lips tightened, and her jaw began to tremble. “Okay. Maybe I lied. Maybe I am going to cry.”

  Alex put his arm arou
nd her and pulled her next to him. She tucked her head against his chest, sobbing softly. She’d been without love her whole life, and once she found somebody to love her, she’d lost him. How she’d managed to get through all that, he couldn’t imagine.

  “Did I mention that my grandfather was a cop?”

  For several seconds, it was as if nothing in the room moved. Not a single molecule. And all at once Alex was transported back to Val’s kitchen that night he’d brought her home from the emergency room. The photograph he’d seen on the shelf. The photograph of her with an older man in a police uniform.

  Her grandfather.

  “No,” he said. “You never told me that.”

  “Yeah. Can you believe it? The rotten kid goes to live with a cop.” She sighed, tears still lacing her voice. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Suddenly it was as if all the pieces of Val’s puzzle had fallen into place. Why she trusted no one. Why she wore armor an inch thick. Why she’d wanted to be a police officer when everything about her personality said she was better suited to any other profession on earth.

  “I guess wanting to be a cop was my way of holding on to him,” she said. “To the things he stood for. I don’t know. Still, for a long time after he died, I didn’t believe that there was anything in life that was permanent. Dependable. Trustworthy.” She paused. “And then you came along.”

  His heart nearly stopped. “Me?”

  “You were a rock, Alex. What you believed, you believed one hundred percent, and nothing on earth could sway you. Every move you made was grounded in some kind of principle. It went beyond doing what was right according to the law. It came from inside you. For somebody who’d grown up the way I had, you seemed unbelievable to me. Almost untouchable. I’d never met anyone like you. In my mind, you were like my grandfather. Everything I thought a cop should be.”

  He’d had no idea. None at all. She’d spent so much time challenging him back then, trying to get under his skin, that he couldn’t have imagined how she really felt. How important he’d been to her. And how much power he’d had to hurt her.

  “Then you came to my apartment that night,” Val went on, her head resting against his chest so she wasn’t meeting his eyes. “I can’t describe the feeling I had at that moment. I thought, ‘He’s here. Oh, God, he’s here. Finally …’ ” She took a deep, shaky breath. “It wasn’t just because I was so attracted to you in a sexual way, although God knows there was plenty of that. It was so much more. Even though we fought all the time, still I thought you cared about me. And then you kissed me. I couldn’t believe that you were even there, much less that you wanted me. And I had this crazy idea that …” She paused. “That if you ever decided you loved me, that nothing—I mean nothing—could ever make you stop.”

  Her words were astonishing. If he’d had any idea back then what was going through her mind, what would he have done? How would he have reacted? He honestly didn’t know.

  “Then I woke up to find you gone,” she went on. “And then later that day—”

  “I know.” He let out a breath of frustration. “Val, I know I screwed up a lot of things back then. But please believe me. Dismissing you—I had to do it. I swear to God I had no other choice.”

  She was silent.

  “You challenged everything I said. You wanted to do everything your way. Like shoot/don’t shoot. You gave me crap when I told you that you couldn’t open fire on a suspect in a crowd of bystanders, no matter how good a shot you were.”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “You fought me every single step of the way. So what was I supposed to do?”

  “Exactly what you did.” She lifted her head and turned to look at him. Tears glistened in her eyes. “You never wavered, did you? Not once.”

  Alex stared at her a long time, the truth of the matter coming to him in small bits, until finally he understood. Every time she’d challenged him, it had been a test of sorts. She’d been searching for structure. For limits. For somebody to say the buck stopped here. She was trying to see if there was one more man on earth like her grandfather, the only person who’d ever made her feel safe.

  And look what he’d done to her.

  He’d slept with her. Then left her. Then kicked her out of the academy. And in the past few days, her flippant remarks, her sarcastic comments, her downplaying of everything that had happened between them—all of that had been designed to get him before he got her because she was so emotionally fragile that she couldn’t withstand him hurting her one more time. And now it just wasn’t enough to say he was sorry.

  “You’ve told me how you felt that night,” he said. “Now I want to tell you how I felt.”

  This was hard, so damned hard, because he’d denied it for so long that he didn’t know the words to say to make it come out right.

  “I’ve been with a lot of women, Val. But you were different. I knew that from the first day I met you. You challenged me. Made me work just to stay one step ahead of you. Yeah, you made me crazy, but there was something else. You made me feel … I don’t know. Alive. I’d never met anyone like you, either. I swear to God that you’re the only person outside of my family that I can’t intimidate.”

  She gave him the briefest of smiles, ducking her head, her hair falling across her cheek. She reached up, tucked the strand behind her ear, and turned her eyes back to meet his again. She looked exactly as she had that night he’d come to her apartment—soft and sweet, without a hint of the cynicism that so often clouded her expression. Damn. He was so afraid of screwing this up.

  “I know you think that the only reason I came to your apartment that night was because I wanted sex. But it wasn’t anything like that. I cared about you, so much so that I couldn’t stand the thought of you walking in there cold the next day. I wanted to prepare you. To break the news. To talk to you and make you understand how much I admired you, how capable I thought you were, and how just because it wasn’t the right profession for you didn’t mean I cared any less about you. I wouldn’t have been able to say any of those things in front of the lieutenant. So I wanted to say them to you then.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head helplessly. “It was just … I don’t know. Something had been happening between us for weeks, and you looked so damned beautiful, and I wanted you so much. And everything I came there to say just went right out of my mind. But what we did that night … it wasn’t just sex. It was never just that. Never.”

  “You left in the middle of the night. What else was I to think?”

  “I know,” he said. “That was the most gutless thing I’ve ever done. And I’ve kicked myself for it ever since. But I couldn’t face you. After what had happened between us, I knew how you’d look at me if I told you what was going to happen. Then after you left the lieutenant’s office the next day, I wanted so badly to talk to you. To try to explain. You wouldn’t let me, and I don’t blame you. I deserved that slap across the face, and a whole lot more.” He shook his head in frustration. “It was selfish. In every way. I was selfish for wanting you so much that I lost track of how much it would hurt you. But the truth is that I didn’t want that night to be the end for us. I wanted it to be the beginning.”

  He couldn’t look at her. He was so afraid of seeing something in her eyes that said, Not good enough, Alex. Try again. And if that happened, he had no idea what he was going to do. It was the only explanation he had, no matter how lame it sounded.

  There was a long silence. Then, after a moment, he felt her fingertips against his chin. He turned, and for the first time he saw not one bit of doubt or suspicion in her eyes. It was the same way she’d looked at him that night so many years ago, right before he’d betrayed her in the worst way possible.

  “Come closer,” she whispered.

  He eased toward her. She put her hands on his shoulders and brushed her lips against his in a tender, delicate kiss. Then she laid her head down on his shoulder
again, exhaling softly, and he felt a swell of relief. They sat there for a long time like that, Val enveloped in his arms, and he realized that five years ago, even though he would have denied it to his dying breath, he’d left a part of himself with her. Tonight he was beginning to believe that he never wanted it back.

  “Your grandfather took you on a vacation to the mountains once, didn’t he?” Alex said.

  Val sighed. “Three months before he died. It was so beautiful there.”

  Alex couldn’t believe what had lain beneath Val’s surface all this time. He’d always known that there had to be more to her than met the eye, but he’d never imagined this.

  “You should take a shower,” he said softly.

  “I know. But I’m just so tired.”

  “Then it’s a bath you need. Stay here.”

  He rose from the floor, plugged the tub, then turned on the water. After testing the temperature with his fingers, he held out his hands to her and pulled her to her feet. She teetered a little. He steadied her, then reached down to untie her blouse. She instantly recoiled.

  “No.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t do that. Not now.”

  “You’re not going to be doing anything. Just relax.”

  “No. It’s not you, Alex. You know that. It’s just—”

  “Trust me,” he whispered. “Just a bath. That’s all.”

  Suddenly Val realized that all he intended to do was undress her so she could take a bath. It seemed so silly, as if she couldn’t do it on her own, but suddenly she felt exhausted. So exhausted that when he reached again for her blouse, she let him untie it and slip it off her shoulders. Then he eased her around until her back was to him. He moved his hands around her hips and reached for the buttons of her skirt. Embarrassment flared again, and she caught his hands in hers.

  “I can undress myself, Alex. I don’t need you to—”

  “I know you don’t,” he whispered against her ear. “But I want to help. Just lean against me.”