by Christa Wick
For a decade, Declan had kept his past out of the public eye. That tight hold had only begun to unravel after he took Melanie to bed.
"Are you okay, honey?"
She wanted to shake her head again and sob the truth, but she sucked a breath in and lied. "Mostly. I'm just tired of the constant stream of hate."
That much was true. The world had to have gone insane if her relationship with Declan was garnering more media time than any shooting with a body count below five.
"You probably want to see how Roger is doing," Melanie suggested. "And I need to find Declan."
"Of course, Melanie. Go. I love you."
"I love you too, mom."
Melanie hung up before she could break down in tears. Almost two decades had passed since the last time she had wanted to climb onto her mother's lap and cry her heart out. It wasn't that she hadn't suffered childhood heartbreaks in the intervening years, but she’d learned how hard it was for her mom to give herself over like that. Instead, her father had filled that role until his death.
Now, with Roger in the picture, Nancy oozed motherly comfort and Melanie was too damned far away to take advantage in the sudden change in her mother's behavior.
"Stop the pity party," she growled.
Standing up, she shoved the phone in her pocket, refusing to open her browser and look at any more coverage. Just as the assault claims had mainly targeted Declan, she had a feeling that this attack was aimed mostly at him. She needed to find him, needed to know if he had already read the articles and, if so, how he was holding up.
After another quick brace of cold water against her face, she dried off and left the bathroom in search of Declan. A quick walk through the rooms they commonly used on the second floor proved fruitless. She checked each of the first floor rooms, including her sewing room, the garage and even the float tank, then the basement with its screening room, then she peered out every window that showed a scrap of the walled in yard before dashing over to the guesthouse and finding it empty, too.
Returning to the main house, she walked around each level once more, calling his name before giving up and returning to their bedroom. Sinking onto the floor next to the bed, Melanie wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her head on her knees.
There was no getting around it. Declan had read the coverage and was hiding from her. Remembering her question on whether there were more concealed doorways after the first time he had revealed the bathroom near the float tank, it frustrated her that he’d responded with a wink and nothing else. Her new sewing office had been one of those winked at rooms with a concealed doorway. Now he was off in another one and she didn't know how to find it or whether she had the right to intrude even if they had proclaimed their love to one another.
The urge to cry pinched at her eyes and nose. She rubbed it away, uncertain whether it was frustration or sadness fueling the need to unleash. She didn't even know why he was hiding. Nancy had said they were dredging stuff up about Declan's mother, but was that really a reason to hide himself away?
Her mouth pinched again. She had long sensed, even before their affair began, that his childhood was painful. There was too little mention of his time before Hollywood in his official biography. He also seemed to deflect the innocent attempts she had made to learn more. And he never invited her to talk about her childhood, like she imagined lovers usually did.
When she talked about it anyway, he always seemed to steer the conversation in a new direction, or distract her from talking all together.
All she really knew about Declan was the Hollywood version, a few months on set and the month or less they'd spent together in his house—under his control.
Melanie drew a long breath and released it slowly, then a second one, followed by another until she felt like she was thinking clearly for the first time in weeks. Slowly, she stood up, blood returning to her legs and making her feel a little dizzy for a few seconds.
Recovering her balance, she went into the princess suite Declan had first put her in. She had yet to spend a night in its bed, but it had become home to her laptop. Using her tablet for most of her art work, she’d only turned the computer on a few times. The ease of the keyboard made it too tempting to search out all the horrible comments floating around the internet.
After weeks of avoiding those comments, she desperately needed to know what was being said. As much as she wanted to know, she was slow in extracting the computer from its bag, slow to turn it on and even slower to open the browser.
Her cheeks flushed with the realization she was giving Declan time to come out of hiding or, better yet, to come back from an unannounced walk someplace with no idea the wolf had returned to their door. As far fetched as it was, the latter scenario was the one that made her fingers clumsy with hope as she opened the landing page for Celebrity Zone.
* * *
Declan Bain Doing the Dirty With His New Sister
* * *
Melanie stabbed at her touchpad to open the link, a growl vibrating her lips. The fuckers were just plain wrong on the degree of relationship and didn't even have the decency to add "step" to the already lying headline. They weren’t siblings; they were step-cousins. Barely. Heck, there were probably people out there in the farthest parts of the world that those ancestry DNA sites could find her being more related to than Declan.
But it didn’t matter. Already, there were countless morons in the comments section screaming "incest!"
With Dash further failing to include how recently Nancy and Roger had wed, there were accusations hiding as questions, such as how young Melanie had been the first time Declan been intimate with her and whether he had really blackmailed Strake but carefully used language from the movie's original script to do it.
All followed by the inevitable suggestion that he or Melanie or both of them do the world a favor and die.
Collapsing the comments section, she saw another stomach turning headline.
* * *
Declan Bain's History of Twisted Relationships
* * *
Her finger hovered over her touchpad until there was just a little too much pressure and the page opened.
Closing her eyes, she shook her head. Declan wasn't ready to tell her about this part of his life—and she would find nothing but lies, exaggerations or facts offered out of context.
She knew that.
But he could have avoided someone else telling his story to her, could have avoided her first exposure being filled with lies and hyperbole and twisted facts that could never be called the truth. All he had to do was trust her and open up—just a little.
But he hadn't.
Covering her face with her hands, Melanie breathed against her palms. The little trick of reflecting warm air back on her skin once again working to involuntarily relax the muscles pinched achingly tight for too long.
Dropping her hands to the keyboard, she opened her eyes and began to read.
37
Two hours later, Melanie was in her sewing room, the fabric and equipment pushed to the side or scattered around the floor. The worktables were covered with papers and photographs, the contents of four of the eighteen-gallon totes Declan had purchased spread around for Melanie to study and despair.
She had been in the room for little over an hour, driven to unlock the secrets of the bins after morbidly reading through the articles she could find while Declan remained out of sight.
Melanie didn't know if the information about his life being made, at last, so very public had already been gathered and was waiting for the right trigger, but it seemed like the revelation that she and he were, in the barest, most technical sense of the word, related to one another was like pouring buckets of blood into the ocean.
The sharks had come out in full force. Anyone with past knowledge of Declan's life now figured he was fair game. His history was on sale to the highest bidder, or the one with the highest web hits, which seemed to be Celebrity Zone at the moment.
After a month of letting Decl
an fuck her, Melanie learned for the first time that his mother, Skye, had been institutionalized several times as a schizophrenic. Declan had, in fact, been born during one such period, Skye's psychiatrist waiting for the pregnancy's end before medicating her back to temporary sanity.
His first six months had been in the nursery ward of a psychiatric institution.
Her heart had ached reading that, the muscle memory of the pain reminding her of when Nancy had delivered the news about the death of her father. She kept imagining how, for six months, Declan had only the touch of a nurse, someone putting in their time on shift, other infants to care for—bottoms to diaper and guts to feed and nothing more.
Trying to dislodge the images, Melanie forced her attention back to the mess in front of her. It had come out of the bin in the same disordered state in which Declan had placed it. The pieces of paper ranged in size from torn scraps barely an inch long to large rolls of freezer paper.
Hypergraphia
Seeing the word in one of the articles, Melanie had a sense of its general meaning. Opening up the first few bins had given her a far greater understanding. Some of it made no sense, talks of assassination, names she figured had to be a code that only Skye had understood. Sometimes the print was small and cramped, other times sprawling. Words were layered over words, only their different colored ink and orientation giving any sense of them being separate.
Then there was the bible—not the King James version or anything like it. At least Melanie couldn't remember laser beams and cloning in the bible on her father's bedside table.
Declan had lived with all of this as a child, or at least all that Skye had written until he finished high school. He’d inherited it when she committed suicide the summer before his junior year at Harvard.
Yeah, suicide.
What did it mean that Declan hadn't mentioned any of this to Melanie?
For all the bins she'd torn through, not one of the scribblings surrounding Melanie was the true object of her search. The obsessive detailing of Skye's delusions were detours—a powerful distraction. It was Willie who had started the hunt, drawing Melanie away from her computer upstairs to the bins in the sewing room.
Rather, it was Wilhemina Crown who had started the hunt.
Wilhemina, the grade school friend of Declan.
The person to whom he had devoted a big chunk of his career.
The woman he had allowed Melanie to refer to as a man a dozen or more times without correction.
Swiveling in the sewing chair, she eyed the remaining bins. A quick count showed there were eight left, neatly stacked in the corner in two columns of four. Her gaze landed on the bottom bin hugged on two sides by the walls and a third side by the second column of eighteen gallon totes.
Had he gathered up everything to do with Willie first?
How telling was it if he had?
Propelling herself onto her feet, she started across the room, stopping for a moment to engage the small latch that served as a feeble lock on the panel door. Careless with the other bins, she tossed them to the ground and pulled the lid off that bottom most container. Face up, an eight by ten black and white photograph mocked her.
Sinking to the ground, Melanie tucked her legs beneath her and reached for the photo.
A hoodie framed the girl's face like a cowl, the shadows and contrasts of the photo giving her the air of an ancient priestess of the dark arts. Her story was as tragic as she was beautiful—dead at twenty-two from a fire. Some of the articles said it was suicide, just like Declan's mother. The official fire department report linked to by Celebrity Zone said the fire started in the walls from wiring that had been cut and stripped.
Just like in the script, Melanie mused as an image of Willie writing by candlelight resurfaced in her mind.
She returned the picture to the bin. She didn't need to dig deeper. The photo's placement on top of the other contents told her all she needed to know. It was the last item Declan had looked at before he closed the lid. It was in the bin he had put most out of reach while keeping it in plain sight.
He had been in love with Willie—he still was.
A soft knock at the panel door lifted her attention. Her lips rolled together. He had hidden from her. Now she wanted to hide from him. Not because she had opened up the bins, prying where he hadn't given her explicit permission to look, but because of the knowledge she had uncovered.
Wilhemina, Skye, hell, even Shayna, who had proven herself to be far from mentally stable—Declan Bain had a history of surrounding himself with crazy, beautiful women.
Echoing in her mind was what he had said during their shower together after the float tank, when she’d told him she was on birth control and he had told her how he had stopped having unprotected sex with women he wouldn't want to share a child with.
With all the crazies putting out...
The memory completed the cold, hard fact Melanie had been slow in accepting. Declan wasn't really in love with her. He just wanted to be in love with her because she was sane, rationale, someone who wouldn't rock the boat. And, inevitably, someone he wouldn't miss when he realized she was just a walk on or a prop in his larger story.
The knock sounded again and he called her name, his voice soft and further muffled by the door. She rubbed angrily at her eyes, knuckles stabbing roughly against her nose as she tried to erase the tears that had started flowing as she looked at Willie's picture.
"Mel..."
She shook her head, her hair bouncing around her shoulders until she must have appeared as wild as the main picture Celebrity Zone had published of Skye.
"Unlatch the door, Mel."
Declan's voice had turned forceful, the tone stern. Her head swiveled lazily in the door's direction. He hadn't tried to open it as far as she could remember. He'd only knocked. How did he even know it was locked?
She looked around the room. Everything had been brought in to create a workspace for her except for the tables, a chair, the dozen totes and a clock on the shelf. Standing up, she approached the clock, picked it up and looked for a camera.
"Mel."
His patience clearly at an end, Declan hit the door with his shoulder, breaking the lock and sending the panel flying inward half off its hinges. He stared at her, ignoring the upended bins and their contents.
"There's a camera in here," she stated, her expression flat. A part of her brain wondered if she was in shock, but that wasn't possible. She hadn't been injured—at least not physically. Or did some people go into a shock-like state when they heard bad news?
Not like someone had died, she mused. At least not in the last ten years or so.
"There's a live feed for all the rooms."
Her head tilted slowly to the side, her gaze narrowing.
"Don't worry, Mel," he ground out. "It's a closed system and I haven't been recording us. I'm nothing like those vultures are claiming."
Even as he said the words, his gaze filled with self-doubt. The web sites and people commenting on them were saying terrible things, making wild assumptions based on Declan's tragic past that had been hidden from the public for so long. She half thought the world was angry at him in part because he hadn't milked those tragedies, hadn't played the victim.
"Where were you?" she asked after studying him for a few more seconds. "Another hidden room ... one with monitors?"
She didn't believe that he'd been watching her the whole time. But she wondered how long he had known she was pawing through his bins and why he had waited until she zeroed in on Willie's bin before he decided to find her.
"There's a safe room," he answered, shoulders sagging.
Her head tilted to the opposite side. He looked defeated, at least slightly so. She'd only seen that posture in him when he was playing a role. She liked the movie version of Declan better, Melanie decided. At least then she knew he was acting, his emotions fed to him by the writer or director.
Moving away from the clock, she approached him. His hands flexed, the finge
rs seeming to yearn in her direction before they snapped back to his sides, his spine straightening at the same time.
Fine, she didn't want him to touch her anyway.
"You didn't think I should know there was a safe room?"
"You haven't been in the house without me, Mel."
She shook her head, anger building inside her. He didn't love her. Wasn't free to love her. For almost a month she'd been paying the price for thinking he did or could.
Another shake of her head and then she jabbed a finger against his muscular chest.
"There are death threats all over the internet. From the very first day, people were saying I should hang myself—if I could keep from eating the rope first. At the very least, knowing there was a safe room would have eased my anxiety."
His mouth flattened into a thin line. He drew a slow, deep breath before answering.
"You didn't seem anxious, Mel—not that way, at least."
Melanie crossed her arms over her breasts, hands flexing with the desire to slam against his chest. Yeah, she'd been "anxious" to fuck him, had dripped with the need. How nice of him to point it out.
She snorted, one side of her mouth jerking up to smirk at him. "Why did you let me think Willie was a man?"
His head angled down, a slow breath leaving him as he closed his eyes. "That's what you're upset about?"
Yes, no, maybe—she wasn't sure. She still hurt to think of baby Declan in a hospital crib, his mother unable to even hold him because she was too unstable. If Declan loved Melanie, she could help him heal. But he didn't love her, wasn't trying to heal. He was just playing it safe.
He sighed and his shoulders dropped a little lower, his eyes remaining shut. "You've read the script. She was a male. She dated girls. She hated that her outside didn't look like her insides felt."
"That doesn't mean you weren't in love with her," Melanie accused.
Eyes flashing open, he shot a dark look at her. "It doesn't mean I was."
