by Amelia Autin
The backs of her eyes ached, but the tears she’d sworn she’d never cry again were denied her. She turned her pillow over, seeking a cool spot, and tried to force herself to sleep. But it was useless. Finally she got out of bed, belted her new terry cloth robe around her waist and crept into the other room for a glass of water.
She’d just put the glass down on the counter when a slight sound made her turn around sharply. Liam stood there in the shadows, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxer shorts, his hair rumpled from sleep. With a gun in his hand.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He glanced down at the gun he held, and made a face. “I heard a noise and thought I should investigate.” He disappeared back into his bedroom, then returned without the gun. “Couldn’t sleep?” Cate shook her head. “My fault,” he said in his deep voice. “I wasn’t sleeping all that well myself. I apologized...but I know it wasn’t enough.” His eyes were sad. “Please forgive me.”
At nearly one in the morning, with darkness surrounding them like a blanket, Cate could speak honestly. “It hurt me,” she admitted. “It hurt that you would think I was the kind of woman who...”
“I didn’t. I didn’t think that.” He sighed. “I don’t know why I said it. I just... I wanted to be the one you felt that way about, and I... Jealousy is an ugly, destructive emotion, Cate. Especially when it’s your own brother you’re jealous of.”
“You don’t have to be jealous of Alec.” Her voice was low but intense. “I care for him. I admit that. But I never wanted him to touch me...that way.” There was a long pause fraught with things they’d both left unsaid. Until she whispered, “I never wanted any man to touch me that way...until I met you.”
Liam took a step toward her, his face betraying both disbelief and a desire to believe. Warring emotions written plainly. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
Cate took a step back. “Yes, I know. But just because that’s how I feel, doesn’t mean I can. I can’t. You have to know that about me.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then looked at him with all the despair nine desperate, lonely years had engendered in her. “There’s nothing I want more than to be able to come to a man clean and whole. But I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?”
She turned away so Liam could only see her profile. “Nine years ago I was brought to this country to be a...” She swallowed. Hard. But she couldn’t get the word out. “Vishenko saw me in that house where I was taken.” She turned back to face him. “He picked me, you understand? Out of all the women in that room. All weeping with terror and fear of what by then we knew would happen to us—all but me. I don’t know why I wasn’t crying, but he told me that was why, out of all those women, he picked me to be his toy,” she said in a bitter voice. “His personal plaything.”
Liam’s brows drew together in a frown. “Nine years ago? You couldn’t have been more than—”
“Sixteen. I was sixteen.” Self-mockery crept into her voice. “I wasn’t forced with repeated beatings, threats and drugs to service hundreds of men, like the other women. Oh no! I was Vishenko’s chosen one. He raped me, and then he kept me for himself...for two endless years.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I would rather have been among the other women.”
* * *
Cate’s despair ate at Liam, fueling his anger at the man who’d done this to her, who’d forced her into feelings of shame and worthlessness no woman should ever have to endure. He reached out to touch her, to comfort her somehow, but she shied away. “Please don’t,” she whispered. “I can’t. Not after what he did to me.”
“Cate...”
“You don’t understand,” she cried out, pain and self-loathing in her voice. “The scars you’ve seen—they’re nothing. Nothing!” She fumbled with the tie on her robe, then the buttons of her pajama top, her fingers clumsy in her haste. “At first he would just rape me,” she panted in a desperate undertone. “But it wasn’t enough for him.” Then the last button pulled free and she turned, exposing her bared back. “This is what he did to me,” she told him, her voice breaking. “When I refused to cry, when I refused to submit, this is what he did to me—to make me beg him for mercy. To make me beg him to let me go.”
“Oh God.” Liam closed his eyes and averted his face for a moment, fighting the sickness that rose in him. Not the sight of the scars themselves, but the realization of the agony Cate must have endured when each and every scar was inflicted.
Then he turned his gaze back to her. Gently, so gently he didn’t know he had that much gentleness in him, he pulled the pajama top up and turned her around. He drew the edges of the top from her unresisting grip and pulled them together. Then he buttoned the buttons with fingers that trembled slightly.
Her breathing was ragged as she tried to drag in enough air. “You wanted to know what Alec knows. I didn’t want that. Didn’t want you to know.” Her face was stony, her eyes bitter. “I wanted to keep my shame a secret from you as long as I could, but you wanted me to tell you.” Her next four words dropped like hard little pebbles thrown into a pool of water as smooth as glass. “So now you know.”
Liam couldn’t bear it. Those words were uttered as if she believed he’d turn and walk away from her now, as fast as his legs could carry him. As if she believed that would be any decent man’s normal reaction to her revelations. As if she was responsible for what happened to her.
He drew Cate into his embrace—taking her by surprise so she had no chance to pull away—and held her close, rocking her like a little girl. Comforting her the only way he knew how, the way his mother had comforted him when he three...four...five. Then he heard it, a sound he’d never expected to hear from Cate. Weeping. Soft, heartbroken sobs that ravaged his heart to hear.
He bent and caught her knees, sweeping her into his arms, cradling her against his chest as he carried her into his bedroom. Oh God, oh God, he begged. What do I do? What do I say? How can I make this right for her?
He laid her gently on the bed, then followed her down, still holding her—just holding her—as she wept. And every sound she made was a lash against his heart. It seemed like forever, but when her tears finally subsided, he reached over a grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on the nightstand. He wiped her face, then held the tissues for her as she blew her nose.
“I’m sorry,” she said between little huffing sounds as she tried to catch her breath.
“Don’t be sorry, Cate. That was coming for a long time, I think.”
“I didn’t cry—after the first time,” she told him brokenly. “Tears didn’t soften his heart.” She didn’t have to name him for Liam to know who she meant. “He enjoyed hurting me—tears would only have added to his pleasure.” She was silent for a long, long time, then added so softly he had to strain to hear, “I have not cried for nine years.”
His heart slowly tore in two, knowing what she’d endured in silence for two years. And knowing, too, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to take her remembered pain away, no matter how much he wished it.
She made as if to pull away from him, but he refused to let her go. “Don’t,” he told her after he cleared the obstruction in his throat. “Just let me hold you the way someone should have held you nine years ago.” What had happened to Cate should never have happened—not to her, not to any woman. The knight-errant in Liam wanted so badly to do something—avenge her. Make Vishenko pay in blood. But that wasn’t what Cate needed now. She needed to be held. Comforted. Not a sexual embrace, but a loving one.
She didn’t resist, and Liam marveled at that. But he wasn’t going to question it. Not now. Not when she was willing to accept comfort from him, the comfort he’d longed to give her since the moment he’d seen those scars on her wrists. No, to be honest, he’d wanted to comfort her since the moment she shied away from him yesterday morning.
Was it only yester
day? It didn’t seem possible. Too much had been crammed into too few hours, and he was still reeling emotionally. But the only thing that mattered right now was Cate. Letting her know how much he hurt for her. How much he cared.
As he held her close, many things started to make sense to him, things he hadn’t really understood before. Cate’s desire to be invisible, to not draw attention to herself, for one. Her feelings for Alec, another. Alec had rescued her from a life on the run. Gratitude was a natural response. And as he’d told her, Alec was a hell of a guy. Admiration—the same kind of admiration he felt for his brother—was another perfectly natural response.
But she wasn’t in love with his brother, and inside he heaved a sigh of relief. What had she said earlier? “...I never wanted him to touch me...that way... I never wanted any man to touch me that way...until I met you.”
And Cate thought she wasn’t brave. How many women would have admitted that to a man they barely knew? How many women would trust a man they’d just met to hold them in an intimate embrace on a bed and not push for more after the woman admitted her attraction to him?
She trusts you, he realized, the shock reverberating through his system. She doesn’t know it, but she really does trust you. He’d wanted her trust, and now he had it—at least up to a point. But suddenly he knew it wasn’t enough. He didn’t just want Cate’s trust in this way. He wanted more. He wanted it all.
Chapter 9
Cate woke first. Liam must have pulled the covers over them at some point during the night, and she was lying with her head pillowed on his shoulder. His other arm was snug across her body, as if to hold her safe.
She couldn’t believe it. She’d slept through the night in Liam’s arms, and no nightmares had invaded her dreams. She hadn’t woken in a panic, either, with that choking feeling and a runaway pulse. Liam holding her wasn’t like Vishenko holding her. When Vishenko had held her he’d wanted to hurt her, and she’d fought him until her strength had given out. It was different with Liam. He was holding her to comfort, to heal. To shelter her from anything that might hurt her. To place his body between hers and danger.
She raised her head to see what time it was, but when she moved Liam woke immediately, his hand already reaching for the SIG SAUER on the nightstand. Then his eyes focused on her, and he subsided back onto the bed, leaving the gun where it was. “Morning,” he told her. And the guarded tone in his voice told her he wasn’t sure what her reaction would be to having spent the night in his arms.
“Good morning.” And it was, she realized. It was a good morning. She smiled at him. A tentative smile, but a real one. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
For not forcing me, she wanted to say, but she knew he wouldn’t understand. He’d be insulted—no, he’d be hurt to think she believed he could do to any woman what Vishenko had done to her. She hadn’t. Not really. But how to explain? “For holding me,” she settled on.
His chest rumbled with soft laughter. “My pleasure, Cate,” he told her. There was a light in his eyes that warmed her, and he repeated, “My pleasure.”
* * *
While Cate dressed and packed her few things, Liam called Callahan on the cell phone. “It’s Liam Jones,” he identified himself when Callahan answered. “I assume you were expecting my call?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t say anything more, and Liam realized Callahan was a man of few words.
“We’re still at the hotel, and we’re going to have breakfast before we leave. But we should be there in about seven hours. D’Arcy said I shouldn’t go to the sheriff’s office—”
“Yeah, Nick asked me to meet you someplace safe, where no one will see you. My office is out—too many people. And I’d rather you not come to the house—my wife wouldn’t say anything, but I can’t guarantee my children won’t accidentally reveal we have a guest staying with us—they’re too young to know better.”
Liam frowned. “Then where—”
“You know how to get to your brother-in-law’s cabin near Granite Peak?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll meet you there. I’ll be the one with the Smith & Wesson.”
* * *
Aleksandrov Vishenko’s private airplane landed on the single runway of a local airstrip in Arlington, Virginia, then taxied toward the hangar. Once there, the pilot turned off the engines, then he and the copilot exited the plane and entered the office to arrange for refueling and to file a new flight plan. As always, Vishenko wanted to be ready for anything, including a quick getaway if necessary.
He was early for his meeting, but he’d planned it that way. The government official he was there to see—his most dangerous gamble—would not arrive for another hour. But the stage would be set and Vishenko’s men—who’d arrived earlier and were waiting inside the hangar—would search the bureaucrat for weapons and listening devices when he arrived, before allowing him to board Vishenko’s plane. Then, and only then, would Vishenko offer his bribe in absolute secrecy...to the man he feared most. To the man who’d been after him for years and who was one witness away from putting him behind bars for life. To the man who had a reputation as an incorruptible man...but Vishenko had learned differently.
“Every man has his price,” Vishenko reassured himself now as he reviewed the details in his mind. Overtures had already been made—through an intermediary, of course—and the government official had proved...amenable. Corruptible after all. But greedy. He had not named his price—but all indications hinted the price would be steep. If that was the price of his freedom, though, Vishenko would pay it. Gladly.
* * *
Cate and Liam had a leisurely breakfast, during which they talked about nothing in particular, then loaded their things in the SUV. As she buckled her seat belt Liam asked her, “Is there anything else you need before we get on the road to Black Rock? I know the agency provided you with a few changes of clothes and toiletries, but they might have overlooked something. There are stores where we’re going, but your choices might be limited.”
She shook her head. “I’m used to making do.”
Liam sighed softly. “That’s not the point, Cate. If you need something, now’s the time to speak up.”
She hesitated. “How long am I staying with Sheriff Callahan?”
“Hard to say. The trial has been postponed for a month, that’s all I know for sure. The way D’Arcy was talking yesterday, though, I got the feeling he doesn’t plan to produce you until the last minute. So at least a few weeks.”
“I’ll go crazy with nothing to read,” she said finally. Reluctantly. “If there’s a library...”
“I’m sure there are libraries in Buffalo and Sheridan, if not in Black Rock itself. But unless Callahan or his wife checks the books out for you, you’re out of luck—no local address to apply for a library card, remember?” He turned the key in the ignition, then put the SUV in gear. “We have time. We’ll stop and get you some books to read.”
Liam pulled into the parking lot of the first Walmart he came to, then led Cate inside, grabbed a shopping cart and headed over to the book aisle. Once there she glanced around, picked a book off the shelf and read the back cover, then put it down again. She did that numerous times, he noticed, before finally settling on one book.
“This one,” she said. But her eyes stared longingly at the last book she’d set down.
Liam shook his head. “Come on, Cate. One book won’t last several weeks.” He already knew from the conversations he’d had with her that she was well-read. One book might have been good enough for some people, but not her. He went back down the aisle, selected the books she’d picked up but rejected and tossed them into the cart.
“Liam, no!” Her protest wasn’t loud, but it was insistent.
He ignored her. When he had a dozen books in the cart he turned around and faced her. “
If there’s something you really don’t want—fine. Put it back. But if you want to read it, then I’m buying it. This is my money, Cate, not the agency’s, so you don’t have to worry.”
“But, so many,” she said faintly. She glanced at the price of the paperback in her hand. “I can’t let you—”
“I want you to have the books you want to read,” Liam said, cutting her off. He knew his face was set in stubborn lines, but he wasn’t going to back down on this, no matter how much Cate protested.
“But I—”
“No arguments, Cate,” he said. His left hand came up of its own volition and cupped her cheek. She didn’t flinch away, so his thumb brushed gently over her lips the way his lips longed to do. “Let me do this for you,” he said softly. “My way of apologizing for what I said last night.”
“You already apologized.” And her eyes told him she’d already forgiven him.
“Yeah, but this will make me feel better.” He grinned his most engaging smile at her. “And besides, there are a couple of books here I wouldn’t mind reading myself. I’ll borrow them if you don’t mind.”
She didn’t say anything more, just added the book in her hand to the pile in the cart and followed Liam to the checkout. As the cashier rang up their purchases, Liam noted absently Cate’s taste in reading was eclectic, but the majority of books were fiction. Women’s fiction. Or at least that’s what his mother called the genre. Liam still thought of it as romance—books most guys avoided like the plague. All of a sudden, though, something occurred to him, bringing her choices into sharp focus. If Cate read romances, then that meant—in her heart of hearts—she still believed in love.
A rush of excitement swept through him, which he was hard-pressed to keep off his face. Cate still believed in love. Still believed men could have tender feelings for a woman as well as baser urges. Still dreamed dreams, despite what she’d been through. Which meant there was a chance for him. Unbelievably good news, since he was halfway to being in love with her already.
