“You’ve lost me again, how do you not know how old you are? I feel there’s a lot more to this story than should be told while we’re dripping wet practically in my doorway. Why don’t we get into some warm clothes and then go sit down, and you can start from the beginning?”
“No. If I change clothes, it’ll give me time to change my mind, and I need to get this out. I need to tell you all about it before I chicken out. You deserve that.”
There was no doubt in his mind that she would back out, lock herself back behind that wall of privacy, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. He wanted her to trust him enough to tell him everything. If that meant they stand dripping wet at the entrance to his apartment, then so be it. He wasn’t about to force her to do anything she didn’t want to do, but he wanted to make her more comfortable.
“How about we sit at the kitchen table?” She nodded her head, and he moved to the table and pulled out a chair, but she stayed on her feet and began pacing, chewing on her bottom lip until she seemed to come to a decision and stopped and looked at him, then slowly sat down in the chair.
“You bring emotions out in me I don’t know how to handle. I pride myself on my strength, in how I came out of that forest a better person, but when I’m with you, I feel weak.”
“You’re not weak. I’m helping you to feel, to let the toxins out of your system from all those years of holding it all in.”
“I don’t remember how old I was when I was first given to him. I know that he kept me around for years. Grooming me would be the term they use these days. I would call it old-fashioned brainwashing. Then one day he deemed me ready to marry him. He waited until I was twelve before the real hands-on training started, but it wasn’t until my menstrual cycle started that he started to really become interested in me, and it wasn’t until I was fourteen that he told me it was time to marry him. He told me I was officially a woman, and because of that, it was time for me to take a husband. Like I said, until then he had done…things to me, but we never had intercourse.” She choked on the last word. He didn’t miss the use of the cold, clinical term.
“He systematically convinced me that without him I would cease to exist, that I needed him for food, shelter, love. I thought I loved him. It took me years to realize that I didn’t love him, that what we had wasn’t even remotely close to love. As soon as I figured that out, I knew that I had always hated him. I hated him so much that sometimes I could hardly stand it, but at the time he was all I had, so he was all I had to love me.”
“What changed? What made you run?” he whispered.
“He brought another little girl home. He was saying the same things to her that he said to me. That was the first wake-up call. Suddenly, I knew it wasn’t right, that he wasn’t right, but I still thought that was what love was.”
“How were you to know any different?”
“He was telling me how I was her mother now, and I had to take care of her, that he was the only one that cared about her, that when the time was right, he would make it legal and take care of her. I knew…I knew he was getting ready to get rid of me, to sell me.”
“Sell you?” the words were an angry whisper of sound this time.
“Like he did the girl before me, the one who had been told she was my mother. He only kept her around until I started my menstrual cycle, and then he deemed her old enough. We didn’t know what that meant, until one day a small group of men came out, and he auctioned her off to the highest bidder. He told her he was divorcing her and that she was going to go live with the other man. She left kicking and screaming. The new man beat her in front of all the others, and no one said a word. The man that bought her was in a uniform with a shiny badge. I didn’t know what that meant at the time.”
Son of a bitch! The bastard was a cop. How could she even stand to look at him? Or to think of him as anything other than a monster? Her whole world was skewed to the point where she didn’t know what was right, what was moral. Then a man who should have helped her wasn’t more than another monster in a world full of them.
“He told me she had been bad and that was why he divorced her, that I would be a much better wife. Then he came home with this little girl. It took a while, but I started to realize that he would only keep me so long. The men that had been there that night had been pure unadulterated evil. Maybe even worse than he was.” She got up from the table and began to pace again.
“I decided I would leave, even if he found me and killed me. It would be preferable to being given to someone worse than him. At the time, I was brainwashed by him into believing that the beatings, the raping, was all his way of showing me how to be better, how much he loved me, and if I just did everything the way he wanted, he wouldn’t need to beat me. He liked to tell me about the other men and the things they did to the girls he sold to them. I was terrified and knew I needed to get out of there.”
Ethan felt his blood boiling. If there ever was doubt in his mind before, it was gone. He would kill this man if given the opportunity, and he wouldn’t even blink an eye. If anyone could get away with it, it was him.
“Go on.”
“I began to devise a plan to get away. It took longer than I had expected to get enough money from the loose change I found all over and to hide away some food that would keep without him noticing, but finally, everything I had waited for fell into place. I waited until he was gone on one of his business outings. When he left, I sprang into action. It had been a while since he’d locked me up. He trusted that I wouldn’t try to leave, that I was so controlled by him that I wouldn’t even try. I was almost out of the house, with what little food I had scrounged up when I realized that I couldn’t leave the girl.”
Of course, she couldn’t. Not the Quinn he knew. That girl would rather die than let someone else be a victim. It was one of the many things that he loved about her. He had seen her with countless victims, anger under the surface, but compassion, always one hundred percent compassion for the person telling their story to her.
“He had her locked up, but one of my jobs was to take care of her. I had access to the key. He even trusted me with that. I got her out, got her dressed in some of my old clothes. They fit but were baggy, and we left. I didn’t know where we were. I had no idea how to get us to safety. I just knew that I had to be careful, and I started walking. With this little girl, who was maybe five. When she got tired, I carried her. Eventually, I found a road and followed it, but I stayed in the tree line, far enough in that I didn’t think I could be seen, but not so far that I lost sight of the road. When I got to a small town in North Dakota that was, ironically, named Hope, I left her at a gas station and asked the woman attendant to call the police—that I had found her wandering in the woods. The woman tried to stop me from leaving, offered me food and water. I took what she offered and then left. I risked checking the news once, after I was safe, to see if she made it home. All I could find was an article about a young girl being left in a rural town and that they were appealing to the public to help find her parents. I never was able to find out what happened to her and then, later I was too scared to even chance looking for her.”
“What did you do after you left her there?”
“I kept walking until I couldn’t walk anymore, and I was sitting, lost, tired, and hungry, on the side of the road when an old woman saw me. She stopped and asked if I needed help. She told me she could get me some if I wanted it, and I should trust her to get me out of there. I got scared, and she said she wouldn’t call the police, that the local police weren’t to be trusted. I wasn’t sure what the police were, but I told her I didn’t want her to call anyone, and she took me to a center like ours, and I lied about everything. She knew I was lying, but she didn’t care. She knew how much I needed to disappear.”
“So, she helped you.”
“Yes. She gave me a new identity, complete with an ID and birth certificate. She helped me change my appearance, and then she moved me to a friend’s house who lived in Wisconsin. Th
at friend happened to be an amazing woman who took me under her care and got me the education I needed. I didn’t know how to read or write, but she taught me how. I was able to get my GED and go to college all because of her.”
“Your real name?”
“I can’t tell you that, not today. I know that changing my identity by those means was illegal—”
“As if I would care at all about that. I’m not talking to you as an officer of the law right now.”
“I appreciate your silence.”
“You don’t need to appreciate it. I wouldn’t compromise your safety.”
“Thank you. I will tell you my name, some day. I just can’t while the wounds are still so open.”
“Fair enough. How long were you with him?”
“Best guess is nine or ten years. Any other questions that you need to be answered today? Otherwise, I think I’m going to take a warm shower, if you don’t mind?”
“How did he get you all those years ago? Do you know where he found you?”
“I can only go off what he told me.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I had no reason not to believe him.” She shrugged and moved to leave.
“What did he tell you?”
“That my heroin-addicted parents sold me to him for the price of their next fix.”
24
Quinn was emotionally exhausted and just wanted to curl up under a blanket and sleep for a week, but as she turned to leave, Ethan stood and stopped her with a hand on her arm. When she didn’t move or turn to face him, he gently turned her himself, but she didn’t look up, her eyes locked on his chest.
“I know that you were just on an emotional roller coaster. But don’t walk away, don’t shut me out. I want you to know how much you mean. To everyone at the center, to Kara, to Taylor, to me. I won’t tell anyone what you told me tonight. That’s between you and me. Your identity is safe with me. There are good men, good officers of the law out there, and you can trust me. If you’re actually married to him, as hard as it is, I won’t force you to divorce that son of a bitch, and I won’t hunt him down and kill him.” Because he knew now how important it was for her to stay hidden.
“You know then, why we don’t have a future, why we can’t have a future?”
“No. I don’t know that.”
“What?” she asked, taken aback. “I just told you I’m married, and I can’t divorce the monster, or he’ll find me. What part of that did you not understand?”
“Oh, I understood it all. Be assured that the only reason I’m not going to hunt him down is because of the slim chance I would get caught and be taken from you. I also think there are other legal avenues we can pursue. After all, you were only fourteen at the time. How could he marry an underage person?”
“My parents signed off on their parental rights, and we lived in a state where it was okay to marry at fourteen if your parents gave permission. I checked that, too, hoping that the marriage wasn’t legal.”
“Something still doesn’t add up. First, it’s disgusting if a parent can say it’s okay to marry at fourteen. Second, if he was given legal guardianship then how could he still marry you? He would, in essence, legally be your father.”
“I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe he gave the guardianship to someone else. I just know he was smart enough to cover all his bases, and I don’t want to find him to ask him. I never want to see him again. In fact, I hope he’s dead and rotting somewhere, but I’m too scared to even search for him, and even if I did search for him, I doubt I’d find him. A smart man would have changed his identity by now, just in case.”
“Even if you are legally married to him, in the end, I don’t care.”
“But we can’t ever be legally married without my divorcing him or at least finding out if he really is legally tied to me, and I’m too scared to even search for him. I mean, if we gave this a shot and things progressed to that point.”
“You’re right, legally we could never marry. But I don’t care about that. I just care about having you in my life, in my arms, in my bed. A piece of paper means nothing to me if you are here, beside me.”
“Even if I can never tell you my real name?”
“Even if you can never tell me your real name, I hope you will someday, but it’s not a deal breaker for me because you will always be Quinn Sanders to me.” With a small tug on her hair, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her fully into his arms, kissing her softly. Almost reverently. “And nothing, no matter what, will stop me from loving you.”
The walls around her heart were crumbling, and she felt herself falling head first, but it took her a moment to actually register the words that he had spoken to her because he was busy kissing her neck, her ear, her brow, and she couldn’t focus. Finally, the statement rang through her head repeating itself: and nothing, no matter what, will stop me from loving you. And then her mind focused on the most important part, loving you, loving her. All the synopsis finally connected, and she sucked in a gasp of air and pulled away, just a bit, to look at the man holding her in his arms.
“Wh-what did you just say?”
“Damn it, you heard me. I love you. Every part of you, every flaw, every imperfection, every proud, blessed part of you. I want it all to be mine. It doesn’t matter what’s behind you; I’m in front of you, begging for a chance.” His eyes, such a beautiful shade of blue, searched hers. “Tell me you’ll give me that chance. That you won’t let what he did stop us—”
Whatever he was about to say was expertly cut off by her mouth crashing into his. All thoughts of why she shouldn’t be doing this flew from her mind as she melted into him, kissing him like her life depended on it. Maybe in some small way it did; maybe it was the fact that she was willing to finally trust someone enough to bridge that void in her heart that had developed after she’d escaped. Maybe it was that she suspected she finally knew what being loved the right way was like. Either way, she was so lost in the moment, that she didn’t realize right away that he’d tensed. Confused, she pulled back from him.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I didn’t tell you that I love you to get you to sleep with me,” he said, his breathing ragged. Ever the gentlemen, that was her Ethan, and he was one hundred percent hers.
“You selfless, foolish man. Don’t you know by now I don’t do anything I don’t want to?” A hesitant smile quirked up one corner of his mouth. “I haven’t since the day I got away. Since that moment, I’ve lived life my way, and I think I finally know what love is. I love you, too. You do know that, right?” His face seemed to relax, and he sagged a little against her, his forehead to hers.
“I hadn’t dared to hope, but God, I can’t tell you how good it is to hear you say that. I thought I would have to wait an impossibly long time to hear those words if I was ever fortunate enough to hear them.”
She reached up and touched his face. She slid her hand into his hair and tugged his mouth down to hers again. There was no guilt for kissing a man while she was legally bound to another, nothing but regret that the monster was still lurking in her past. But she wouldn’t let him control her any longer. If Ethan could look beyond that one thing, admittedly it was a huge thing, she could do the same. With a passion she didn’t know could exist, she kissed him, holding his head to hers, not allowing him to break away again because she needed him. Oh, how she needed him. He groaned and pulled her hips tight to his body, they were now touching from their knees all the way to their chests, and her very erect nipples were in serious competition for the hardest object on their two bodies.
Warm hands glided to the hem of her shirt, and ever so slowly, he pulled the still sopping wet pajama top up and off of her, careful not to bump any still tender spots. Following his lead, she tried to pull his buttons out of the holes but found it clumsy with only one hand to do the job. He reached up and touched her hand, indicating for her to stop. With an infinitesimal step backward, he made quick work of the buttons, and w
ith a flip of the wrist, he discarded the shirt, throwing it to the floor to join hers. Those nimble fingers of his made their way to her pants, sliding them down her legs and waiting for her to step out of them. She raised each foot, and he tugged the material off as he trailed kisses up her inner thighs, until he buried his face in the juncture of her thighs. Her body shook from the contact, and her knees nearly buckled, but then he was back, kissing her mouth with such fervor that she thought she would pass out from lack of oxygen.
While his mouth plundered hers, he unbuckled his belt and shimmied out of his own pants, no small effort considering how wet the denim was and how hard he was, and they stood, once again, pressed together. Without knowing what he was about to do, he had scooped her up in his arms and turned to go toward the bedroom, grumbling under his breath.
“Our first time damn well better not be on the floor of my kitchen.” And then his mouth was back on hers.
With barely a moment to register what was happening, she was laid gently on his bed, and then her legs were spread wide and he was on top of her, still kissing her as if she were the very air he needed to survive, and then that talented mouth made its way down to her breast, where he licked and nipped and teased through the lacy fabric of her bra. She had a moment of fear that she had on her granny panties and then thought, who cares, as those talented lips found their way to her belly, just above the promise land. Her muscles quivered as he kissed a trail to the fabric covering her treasure trove, and he licked and nipped through the lacy undergarment—definitely not granny panties—and even though she was fully on board, she tensed as he moved the fabric slowly down to allow him better access.
He paused a moment, which allowed her body to relax before his mouth was on her again. Her body bucked and arched off the bed when his mouth found her clit. A sensation unlike any other was building in her and much sooner than she had wanted. Her body tensed with the explosion as she rode out wave after wave of the most intense orgasm she had ever had. A small chuckle escaped her, and he looked up, his eyebrows raised.
Breaking Shadows (Darkness Falls Book 2) Page 24
