How had I not noticed this before now?
“Lara,” he said, pulling back finally, allowing us to catch our breaths. “Love,” he added, closing his eyes and resting his forehead against mine, one hand wrapped around the back of my neck, the other, fingers laced through mine. “You have no idea what hearing those words mean to me. How long I’ve dreamt of hearing something like that come out of your mouth.”
His face pulled back further and for a long moment he just looked in my eyes. For a second I didn’t realise what I was seeing.
But then, I recognised these emotions in myself.
Sadness. Grief. Almost a loss. But none of it made sense until he sucked in a deep breath of air and finally spoke.
“But I won’t hold you to it,” he whispered, as though he couldn’t say the words any louder. He couldn’t bear, in fact, to hear the truth voiced aloud. “You’re not yourself, right now,” he added, making my body jolt from the blow his admission cost. “You don’t know what you’re offering. To believe you would be to take advantage of you, right now. I won’t take advantage of you. I won’t hold you to it. I won’t.”
I swallowed thickly and somehow managed to pull myself out of his embrace, away from his much wanted touch, out from under his sad, grief-stricken eyes. The moment I turned my back on him all the other emotions swelled.
What was I doing? Who had I become?
Carl had turned me into someone I was not. Carl had weakened me to the point that I was about to break apart.
I wrapped my arms around my stomach and bent slightly, as though that would stop the disintegration I could feel imminent. Stop my unravelling. Stop everything.
But I couldn’t. I needed help.
Damon didn’t say anything else. He didn’t approach me either, or move to face me by rounding his desk and sitting back down. I couldn’t even hear him, let alone feel him. And I usually knew exactly where Damon was in a room. An intrinsic knowledge which seemed, right now, to be shut down.
I breathed through the sensations I’d come to know intimately. I held myself together by sheer will. A bubble of hysterical laughter threatening to erupt at any moment. My will was the only thing I seemed to have left. Everything else - being a good detective, a competent police officer, a balanced cop - it was all shot to hell.
But I had my willpower. I just couldn’t decide what I needed to use it on first.
I closed my eyes but all I saw was cherry red lipstick and matching shoes.
“What do you know about Sweet Hell?” I repeated my earlier question. Still unable to look at him, but at least I wasn’t hunched over anymore.
My arms still held me together. My breaths still laboured too fast. But I was working. Functioning. Albeit well below par.
“Gentleman’s club,” he said finally. “Members only, like you said. On Karangahape Road.”
“Have you been there?”
His answer was slow in coming. But somehow I knew he would respond. He’d been hiding. But unlike me, Damon was no coward.
“Yes.”
Such a simple word. Such a complicated reply.
There were so many more questions to ask. Front and centre was why? But that was personal, and right now I needed to keep this about the girl.
“What goes on there?”
I heard his soft footfalls before I saw him come abreast of me. He didn’t stop there, he kept going until he could turn and rest his butt against the top of the desk. We stood no more than a few feet away. But it suddenly felt like an ocean apart.
“Gambling mainly. High stakes,” he murmured. His eyes looked distant, as though he was picturing the inside of the club, what he’d seen. What he’d done. “Obviously alcohol is served, top shelf. I’m unsure, but I suspect they also provide other requirements. Anything really, that the gentleman desires.”
“Drugs?”
“Possibly. I haven’t seen any.”
“Sex?” God, I felt ill.
“Definitely, but discretely. Discretion is their motto.”
“I thought it was, ‘The sweetest of miseries. The hottest of infernos. The nine circles of Hell.’”
Damon cocked his head at me, a contemplative look on his face. A face I’d looked at so closely, for so long, I often forgot he could appear so breath taking, stunning even, with such apparent ease.
God, this hurt so much.
“You’ve visited the back door,” he said quietly. “Why, Lara?”
I shook my head. “We’re not done here.”
“I don’t get to ask the questions? Is that how this goes?”
I held his gaze with an equally sad look of my own.
“No.”
“Lara.” It was almost a plea.
It made me angry. Anger was better than despair.
“When were you there?” I asked.
He let out a frustrated breath of air, but didn’t reach for the back of his neck.
“Last Saturday, and again last night.”
I thought I was ready for it. I thought I’d shored up my defences enough to hear him admit the truth. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t even begun to protect myself, it seemed.
Because his words cut through as cleanly as a sharp knife. I bled. On the inside. I bled and it threatened to drown.
“Why?” I croaked, uncaring that I’d given so much away.
“Love,” he whispered, moving forward, reaching for me, but I quickly stepped back and he had to eventually lower his impotent outstretched hand. “It’s not what you think,” he said, voice low, determined.
“Then tell me.” My turn to plead.
“Can’t you just trust me? Can’t you just believe that I’d never hurt you like that? We’ve been here before, Lara. I thought we’d sorted this all out. But you refuse to believe my place in your world is permanent. You refuse to believe in me.” He shook his head, scrubbed both hands over his face, as though done with it all. “How can you be so damn good at what you do and still fail to see the truth in your own life? What has made you this way? What has happened that would make you so distrustful of the one person who loves you beyond anything else?”
I took another step backwards at his declaration of love. No, not just a declaration. A proclamation. Said with such conviction it was almost written in stone. I knew he loved me. It wasn’t the words. It was the way he said it. As though he believed it with his body and soul. As though he’d lay down his life to prove it. But there was something else. Something dark and dangerous beneath the facade. Cracking the stone.
He didn’t believe in me. He didn’t believe I loved him. He was losing faith. He didn’t believe that I’d lay down my life to prove it. That I loved him above all else.
He didn’t believe in me.
And why should he? My track record was poor. Our history mired in my mistakes. And now, I was one step away from falling apart. His belief in me was fracturing right alongside my world.
I was losing him. And I’d lost so much. I couldn’t lose Damon as well.
I stood there, waiting for him to take it all back. For him to make it better with his touch. With his softly spoken words. Anything but this raw agony that cleaved my body in two.
He didn’t believe in me.
I didn’t know what to do.
Push on? Or retreat? If it was easy to choose which path to take, we wouldn’t end up falling potholes, would we, Sport?
My hands came up and gripped the hair on the sides of my head, a silent scream reverberating inside my skull.
Get out! Get out! Get the fuck out!
I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t function with Carl inside my head. I couldn’t breathe.
I was drowning.
“Shh, love,” Damon whispered. “It’s OK. You’re OK.” Not we’re OK. But you are.
It was a lie. We both knew it. I was so far from OK it was no longer funny.
I needed help.
But I am what I am. A daughter of a cop.
We don’t ask for help. We deal. We
survive. We ignore the problem or we bury it under everything else.
I pulled away from his embrace again and heard the annoyance in his harshly expelled breath. I held a hand up to stall him, sucked in my own refortifying breath of air, and forcefully pushed Carl from my mind.
The woman. I had to concentrate on the woman. There’d come a time when I could focus on myself. And midway through a murder investigation was not it.
I turned back to Damon and lifted my chin. My eyes clear. My back straight.
My heart breaking apart as swiftly as I feared my mind might be as well.
“Sweet Hell,” I said. The tone of my voice brooking no argument.
He sighed, slumped down on the edge of his desk again, and rubbed a hand over his face in defeat.
“Sweet Hell,” he repeated. “Fuck,” he spat out on a heated breath of air. “I fucking hate that bloody place.”
Chapter 6
“Push on? Or retreat? If it was easy to choose which path to take, we wouldn’t end up falling potholes, would we, Sport?”
I hadn’t expected that. His anger. His… vehemence.
The fact he despised Sweet Hell.
How could he attend a gaming hell if he didn’t like it? A small burgeoning bubble of hope expanded inside my chest.
“Start at the beginning,” I urged, moving to take a seat on a couch off to the side. I forced myself to pick the cup of coffee up that Damon had placed on the side table when we first walked into his office.
It was a purposeful move. One I’d practised with witnesses before. Seemingly lowering my defences so they would lower theirs. If Damon saw the move for what it was, he didn’t show it.
He also didn’t pick up his coffee cup either.
He let a breath of air out as if releasing his last hold on something precious. Something important to him.
“I didn’t mean to keep it from you,” he murmured.
An admission that I was too emotionally spent to accept.
“I thought I’d be able to resolve it easily,” he added.
“Without having to involve your police detective girlfriend?” I offered, trying to lighten the statement with a wry smile.
Damon didn’t smile back. Just a huff of breath that was more even than the last.
“But she’s in deeper than I’d anticipated,” he finally said. And I knew. I damn well knew, that his sister had fucked things up again.
“Carole?” I asked, sipping my now almost cold coffee just for something to do with my hands.
I wanted to reach for him. Comfort him. But I couldn’t seem to make myself move more than to lift the fucking cup.
“You were right,” he whispered, and the shock of hearing him say that had me spilling coffee down the front of my shirt. I wiped at it ineffectually as I watched Damon confront his own kind of hell.
Carole Michaels had been a thorn in her brother’s side for years. Since their parents died and she went off the rails getting involved in back room sex clubs and addicted to drugs. She’d been staying at a halfway house for recovering addicts out at Piha Beach. A supposed relaxed environment for the mentally ill and substance abused to recover in.
I’d checked it out. It was all above board. Expensive and exclusive. Damon and Carole came from old money. They didn’t flash it around, but it was in everything they did. But even though the residence Carole had been staying in was well maintained and appropriately run, I’d stupidly pointed out that Piha was known for its druggies.
I’d been right. So she was off the wagon again.
I placed my cup on the table to my side, silently glad to be rid of it. Then ran a hand through my hair trying to pick my words carefully. I had a tendency to be too honest. Especially when it came to breaking the law. I’d grown up with the blinkers off, my father had not couched my education as a teenager. I knew what he did, what he saw each day. What he had to face. I just never knew how it made him feel.
“So, Carole has been visiting Sweet Hell,” I said levelly. “Cawfield told me that it wasn’t just a men’s only club. That women could gain membership as well.”
Damon huffed out a derisive sound. “She’s not a member.”
“Then what’s her connection?” I had a bad feeling about this.
For the first time in long minutes he lifted his eyes to my face. I saw a depth of pain there that shocked me. Damon held a lot of his emotions inside. He rarely let anyone, even me, see them. Certainly, he showed me love, desire, affection, occasionally worry. But fear and hurt were well contained.
Except for right now.
“Damon,” I said gently.
“Don’t go all soft on me now, Detective,” he said, sealing the pain away, hiding it behind his own brick walls.
Fine. I could be professional if he wanted professional. But it wasn’t lost on me that by being professional, by being the cop he usually accused me of being first and foremost, I was being exactly what he disliked the most.
I wondered if that was pivotal to our relationship. I wondered, briefly, if we would continue to run around in circles because of what we demanded of each other.
He hated my need for black and white. Yet he seemed to push me there for some reason.
“What’s your sister’s connection to Sweet Hell?” I repeated, voice devoid of any emotion.
My cop voice. And he just smiled at it. A sardonic grimace more than an outright smile. But a telling reaction, all the same.
“From what I gather,” he started and I sat forward on my seat. He’d been investigating. He didn’t know for sure. He’d been trying to find out.
I glanced down at his knuckles, acutely aware that Damon’s methods of interrogation were often quite different from mine.
“She’s gotten herself tied up with Sweet Hell’s darker side,” he finished.
“It’s got a darker side?”
“You saw it,” he offered. “At least, I assume you did. You mentioned the nine circles of Hell.”
I stood up and started pacing, tapping a finger against my lips.
“A back room?”
“Not as such. More like an elite layer to their membership. Invitation only. And even then, you have to pass an initiation period in order to be accepted into the upper echelons of Sweet Hell.”
“You mean the lower circles of Hell?”
His head tilted to the side, eyes contemplative as he surveyed my still pacing form.
“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but I think you could be right.” Which didn’t bode well. The nine circles of Hell involved all sorts of immoral and illegal activities. But I needed to know more to be sure.
“What have you found out so far?” I asked, ceasing the pacing to look directly at him, as I retook my seat on the couch.
He was still leaning against the desk, but not casually. His position appeared more from necessity than anything else. He was exhausted. No wonder Flack had beaten him on the Sky Tower stairs.
“There’s a waiting period. I’m currently in it.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
Damon shook his head. “I don’t know, Lara. I approached a few people,” his fingers clenched, the scrapes across his knuckles splitting, “and managed to gain an invitation.”
I perked up at that. “An invitation to this… nine circles of Hell?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re waiting for something?” I queried, trying to figure this all out. Damon wasn’t exactly being helpful. But not, I think, because he didn’t want to. I truly believed he was as confused about the whole procedure as me, right now.
“I’m in a waiting period,” he repeated.
“But what does that mean?”
“I… don’t… know,” he said slowly, enunciating each word succinctly.
“OK, OK,” I said, trying to bring him down from the edge. Strange how a few minutes could change the dynamics of a room. I’d been the one on the brink of a breakdown, and now Damon was the one teetering on the edge. The edge of
what, I couldn’t say. But a solid guess would be blowing his stack.
“Show me the invitation,” I demanded, returning to my cop persona.
This time his smile was more him. More Damon. Amused with a good dollop of frustration.
Was that what our relationship felt like to him? It didn’t bear thinking about right now.
He pushed off from his lean against the desk and rounded to his chair, but didn’t sit down. He pulled his keys out of his trouser pocket and proceeded to unlock a drawer, then lifted a piece of paper out. Black with gold writing.
“They certainly have a theme going,” I commented, as he brought the slip around and surprisingly sat himself down on the couch beside me.
It took everything in me not to look at his face as I accepted the invitation he held out. We were nowhere near on solid ground, and one look could mean it all slipped out from under me. If that one look let me see his doubt.
He didn’t believe in me. I didn’t trust him. It was a fucking mess.
Just like the rest of my life.
I cleared my throat and turned the invitation around so I could read it. Three sentences. That’s all. But they packed a punch.
To seek Paradise, you must first enter Purgatory and cross into Hell.
Prove your worth.
For the Irreverent Inferno awaits.
“Ooohkay,” I said slowly. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Damon let out a little laugh. We’d finally reached humorous. His body relaxed back onto the sofa and his hand crept out and wrapped around mine, where it rested on my thigh.
I can’t describe the feeling associated with his touch right then. The knowledge that he’d still reach for me, hold me, even just fingers laced with mine, when minutes ago we’d been divided by too many walls.
I needed him. He kept everything I didn’t want to feel, to face, away. I had no idea if that was healthy, or not. But I didn’t care. I needed him.
“The reference to Paradise, Purgatory and Hell is from Dante’s The Divine Comedy,” Damon said, lifting the invitation from my fingers and rereading it himself. I had the impression he’d memorised the words. But clearly rereading it helped him to focus.
“The nine circles of Hell,” I offered.
A Touch Of Heat (H.E.A.T. Book 2) Page 5
