It was a dream. Wasn’t it?
Or maybe the sunshine and fresh air were the dream. Maybe delirium had brought vivid images of life back in Boston—Marisala with him in Boston. How unlikely was that? Maybe he’d never gotten free. Maybe…
He stumbled, realizing he was being led upstairs, hands tied securely behind his back. His wrists were raw and his back burned from his most recent beating.
He was going to be beaten again. They never brought him up from his cell for any other reason.
At least he would be outside. The chance to breathe fresh air was almost worth the beatings.
He held his head high as he was led past the captain of the guards, pushing his mouth up into a smile. It always ticked off the guards when he smiled at them.
He’d learned to smile even as the whip cut into his back.
But this time the captain smiled back. “You’ve had a visitor. A girl was so eager to find you, she broke into the compound.”
A girl. Marisala. Fear rose in his throat, threatening to choke him. He worked to hide it, knowing he couldn’t give away the fact that she was important to him. Still, he had to ask, “Where is she?”
The captain smiled again. “I’m afraid she did not survive her altercation with the guards.”
He saw it then. A body. Her body, crumpled life-lessly in the dirt. Long, dark, bloodied hair kept him from seeing her face, but still he knew. It was Marisala. It had to be.
“No!” He broke free from the guards and ran toward her. He could hear their laughter as they chased him, as they easily brought him down, face-first into the dust.
He was barely a yard away from her, but he still couldn’t see her face. “No!”
They dragged him away, laughing and kicking him as he shouted his anger. He had to see her face. He had to know.
And then the wind lifted her hair, and he could see.
Marisala’s face, caught in a grimace of death, eyes gazing unseeingly toward the sky—
Liam bolted upright in his bed, his heart pounding, his breath catching ragged and thick in his throat.
A dream. It was just a dream. Marisala was alive and safe and sleeping two doors down from him.
Or was she? His clock radio said it was nearly eleven A.M. Dammit to hell, he’d slept through Marisala’s first morning of classes.
Closing his eyes, still trying to slow his heart, he forced himself to think clearly, slowly. Maybe sleeping through this morning had been for the best. After all, what had he thought he was going to do? Go to class with her? As much as he wanted to tag along, he knew that was the last thing she wanted.
There was really only one place that Marisala wanted his company, and that was in bed.
She must’ve made three trips down to the kitchen last night after she’d put on her nightshirt. He’d been in the living room, trying to read the latest file on the state sex-offenders registry that Lauren Stuart had given him when he’d stopped by her apartment earlier in the evening.
When Liam had turned away to keep from being distracted by the sight of Marisala’s long legs, she had come into the room to ask him a question. Something trivial. If she didn’t get back in time for lunch tomorrow, would he please walk the puppy?
With her recently brushed hair down and glistening around her shoulders, dressed in an oversized T-shirt that clung to her body, revealing it in brief, tantalizing flashes, with her long, slender, gracefully shaped legs, she was hard enough to resist. But it was the look in her eyes and her smile of awareness that nearly pushed him over the edge.
She was trying to drive him insane.
And she was banking on the fact that she could succeed and end up in his bed before she moved out on October first.
God, how had he gotten himself into this mess?
What on earth had possessed him to agree that she stay with him for an entire month?
He wanted her. There was no denying that a very major part of him wanted nothing more than to throw this girl down and lose himself in her sweet fire.
But he was more than a man with an erection. He was a man who had learned exactly what he could and could not live without. And while he knew he could live—albeit painfully—without Marisala in his bed, he wasn’t sure he could live without her friendship.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. His head was pounding and his mouth tasted like hell. He pulled on the shorts he’d worn yesterday and staggered toward the kitchen and the smell of brewing coffee.
As Liam went in, Hector was cutting vegetables at the counter.
It was strange how much he liked having other people living in his house. He liked waking up to the sound of someone working in his kitchen. God knows he had enough money, he should have thought of hiring kitchen staff years ago.
“How’s Inez today?”
The puppy jumped at the sound of his voice and ran a quick circle of joy around Liam before returning her attention to her rawhide toy. She looked clean, her fur coat shiny. Marisala no doubt had managed to give her a bath last night while he was out picking up that file from Lauren.
“Inez is feeling poorly, señor. She is lying down.” The man at the counter was the same height and build as Hector. He also had the same heavy accent as Hector. But when he turned around, he wasn’t Hector at all. He was a stranger—a much older man, with streaks of gray in his hair and years of wisdom in his dark eyes. “I will be helping her in the kitchen today.”
“Ah,” Liam said, reaching to get a mug from the cabinet. “And you would be?…”
“Ricardo Montoya.” The man bowed very slightly, a smile softening his craggy facial features. “It is a great honor to meet you, Señor Bartlett. You have done much for my country.”
Liam poured himself a cup of coffee. “So, where exactly did Marisala find you?”
“At the Boston Refugee Assistance Center,” Ricardo told him. “Downtown. Marisala came by early this morning. I was delighted to see her. We fought together in San Salustiano.”
Liam sat down at the table. “So, naturally, she invited you to come live here.” He knew this was going to happen. Marisala was going to collect strays until every bedroom in this house was filled.
Amusement twinkled in the older man’s dark brown eyes. “No, señor. She asked me to come and stay with Inez today. Hector was offered a one-day job with a landscaping company in Brookline that he felt he couldn’t turn down. But he was unhappy at the thought of leaving Inez alone all day with the baby due any moment. And Marisala has classes until eleven.”
“I was here—she should have just woken me up.”
“She told me she couldn’t bring herself to wake you.” Ricardo turned back to his onion. “She knows too well how elusive sleep can be. I, myself, still have trouble at night, and I only spent two months in the prison. You, señor, were there much longer. Nearly eighteen months, no?”
The prison. Images of his dream flashed through Liam’s head, suffocating him. God, this was the last thing he wanted to talk about. “I don’t remember, exactly. I lost track of the days….”
Ricardo moved to the sink and quickly washed several stalks of celery, shaking them dry and carrying them back to the cutting board. “It was hard to keep track of the days and the nights—it was dark most of the time,” he said. “I remember thinking it was like being buried alive—”
Liam stood up, trying to shake off the sound and image of his cell door swinging shut with an ironlike clank. He didn’t want to think about it. He couldn’t think about it. He turned away. “I better get busy if I want to shower before Marisala gets home,” he said briskly.
“The scars on the back, they fade, señor. But the ones on the soul, they fester unless they’re tended.” Ricardo smiled gently as Liam turned back to stare at him. “And although you walk around, coming and going as you please, if your soul is still locked in the darkness, you are not truly free.”
Understanding hit. “You work for the Refugee Center, don’t you?”
Ricardo smiled
again. “Yes, señor. That I do.”
“And when you introduced yourself to me, you left out a little detail, like the word doctor that comes before Montoya. Doctor—as in psychologist, am I right?”
Ricardo shrugged as he serenely returned to his chopping. “It is merely a label. Unimportant. First and foremost, I am a man—one who has known a bit of the hell you once knew.”
“Marisala asked you to come here not to baby-sit Inez, but to baby-sit me. She thinks just because I have an aversion to basements, I need—”
The phone rang, interrupting him.
Even Ricardo stopped cutting, pausing to wait and listen as the answering machine picked up.
“Hector calls in every hour to check on Inez,” he explained over the sound of Liam’s voice telling the caller to leave a message at the beep. “Don’t worry, señor—I will not pick it up unless I am certain it is him.”
The machine beeped and an unfamiliar voice came on the line. “Hi, yeah, this is Dan Griswold calling for Marisala—you know, from the house on Commonwealth Avenue in Allston?”
Dan. It was Dan of the goatee beard and the too friendly smile. Liam sighed in exasperation.
“I got your message, and I’m sorry that you’re not interested in being one of our housemates, but I understand about your uncle’s friend being a little uptight.”
God, what had Marisala told him? Her uncle’s friend?
“Even though we’re not going to be housemates, I hope we can be friends,” Dan continued. “I, uh, I wanted to invite you to a party we’re having over here on Saturday night, around eight. You don’t need to call me back—unless you, um, need a ride or something. Anyway, I hope to see you then. Bye.”
Liam cursed under his breath. Something about Dan pushed every single one of his buttons. Especially when he called to ask Marisala out on a date.
Ricardo had returned to chopping peppers, but after the machine clicked off, after several moments of silence, he spoke. “Men are drawn to her. Despite all that she’s been through, she has a sweetness most men find hard to resist.” He glanced at Liam and smiled. “You should resign yourself to receiving many more of these phone calls. Or prepare to…what is the American expression? Stake your claim.”
Liam turned abruptly toward the door. He didn’t want to talk about this either. “Right. I’ll be in the shower.”
The puppy perked up her ears and barked, then dashed into the entryway, nearly knocking Liam over in his haste to reach the front door as Marisala pushed it open.
“Well, hello,” she said to the little dog, kneeling down to greet her. “Hello, Evita. Don’t you look beautiful today. Now, wasn’t that bath worth it?”
She looked up to see Liam and blushed. He knew it wasn’t his lack of shirt that embarrassed her, but rather the fact that he’d caught her giving the puppy a name. “You’ve named the dog Evita?” He couldn’t help but laugh.
She laughed, too, even as she lifted her chin defensively. “I couldn’t just keep calling her ‘puppy.’ Besides, her owners haven’t called about her yet.”
“They will.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Mara, don’t let your expectations get too high.” Liam was talking about more than the puppy, and they both knew it.
She gazed up at him. “You must’ve met Ricardo.”
“Yes, I certainly have met the good doctor. He tried to give me therapy with my coffee. I, however, prefer my coffee black.”
“You always were too smart for your own good.” Holding Liam’s gaze, Marisala called down the hallway, “ ’Dias, Rico.”
“Buenos dias, Marisalita,” the other man called back. “Lunch will be ready in thirty minutes.”
Liam lowered his voice. “If I want therapy, I’ll find myself a doctor on my own. Am I making myself clear?”
She didn’t even blink. “I thought it would help if you knew there was someone you could talk to. Someone who had actually been in the prison—”
He changed the subject. Pointedly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t awake to see you off this morning. You should have gotten me up.”
She gave Evita’s floppy ears one more rub then straightened up. “I couldn’t. I went into your room, but…you looked so peaceful. Did you sleep well?”
The picture from his dream—her body crumpled in the dirt of the San Salustiano prison—crashed into his mind, pushing aside the provocative image of her in his room, watching him as he lay asleep in his bed. He carefully kept his voice even. “I slept. How were your classes?”
Marisala snorted. “Ridiculous.”
“In what way?”
“In every way. The topics. The professors. The other students. It was worthless.”
Liam sat down on the stairs and took a sip of his coffee. “What happened? Something must’ve happened, because that sounds like a classic Marisala knee-jerk reaction to me.”
“Nothing happened. It was awful. I had two classes this morning—”
“American history and English lit. I know.”
“The history lecture was absurd. There were so many people in the lecture hall, I could barely see the professor from where I was sitting. He spoke in a monotone! I would have learned more from reading a book. And the literature course! We’re starting by reading a book about a dog.” She glanced down at the puppy. “No offense, Evita dearest, but I’m sitting there, thinking why am I here? Why am I going to read a book about a dog when there’s so much else I could be learning? And the literature discussion group was stupid. I’m in a group with six other students—six children—and all they wanted to talk about was the party at the Student Union last night.”
Liam took another long sip of his coffee.
“I hated it,” Marisala said flatly.
He couldn’t hide his smile. “Yeah, I…um, kind of got that impression.”
“It’s not funny! What am I going to do? If I have to sit there,” she fumed, “wasting my time—”
“Maybe you should think about changing your major.”
“To what? I’ve already looked through the course catalog, and I didn’t see any listings for classes in strategic warfare. That’s the only thing I’m good at!” Marisala pushed her way past him up the stairs, the puppy on her heels.
Liam followed too. “Maybe you should think about joining the army, getting into some kind of officers’ program—”
She laughed, but it sounded brittle as she pushed open the door to her room. “Oh, that would be perfect. All those years I spent fighting, living for the day I could stop fighting. And now you think maybe I should spend the rest of my life fighting?”
She sat down on the bed, her shoulders slumped in dejection. “What am I doing here? I should have just married Enrique and gotten it over with.”
Liam stopped in the doorway, knowing it would be a mistake to get too close to her. But he wanted to. God, he wanted to put his arms around her. He held his coffee mug more tightly instead.
“How do you stand it?” she asked quietly. “How do you walk around and still manage to smile?”
She looked up at him, and her eyes were fiercely intense. “During the history lecture, I was sitting next to a girl who just broke her fingernail. She acted as if it were the end of the world. She actually left the lecture to find a nail file. And I was sitting there thinking, is this real? Is this what real people worry about? Broken fingernails. And parking spots? On my way to class, I saw two men nearly come to blows because they both wanted the same parking spot.” She shook her head. “I wanted to slap them and make them see how petty their problems are.” Her voice shook. “I wanted to give them a list of all the children I knew who died in that war I was so good at fighting.”
Liam knew she was close to tears. “Please, just go away,” she told him. “Just close the door and leave me alone.”
He knew he should. He knew that was exactly what he should do. Close the door and walk away.
Instead, he stepped into her room. Instead, he set his mug of cooli
ng coffee on her bedside table. Instead, he sat down next to her on the bed and took her hand, gently lacing their fingers together.
“We’ll figure this out,” he said, wishing he felt as confident as he sounded. “I know a guy, he’s a career counselor—he’s got this standardized test that you fill out, and it tells you what kind of job you’re most suited for. I’ll help you, Mara, and together we’ll find some classes that’ll interest you.”
She glanced at him and smiled, but turned away before he got a clear look at the tear that had escaped from the corner of her eye. As she furtively wiped it away he pretended not to notice. God, when was the last time he’d seen Marisala cry?
“You’re going to help me, huh?” Marisala took a deep breath and forced another shaky smile. “You, the king of the maladjusted?”
“Ouch—that hurt.”
She laughed, and Liam lost himself for a moment in the bottomless depth of her eyes. As he watched, an awareness dawned in those eyes, an awareness and a haunting vulnerability.
She wanted him to kiss her, her body language couldn’t have been more obvious. She wanted him to kiss her, but she didn’t expect him to.
She looked away, but then glanced back. She had something to ask, and in true Marisala style, she took the bull by the horns. “Do you find that my scar makes me terribly ugly?”
Of all the things Liam had expected her to say, that wasn’t one of them. For a moment he was speechless. Ugly?
“I think Santiago wanted me to go to a plastic surgeon because he doesn’t like looking at it,” she continued. “I think he doesn’t like being reminded of the war.”
Liam couldn’t help himself. He touched the side of her face, tracing the crescent shape of her scar with his thumb. “It’s not ugly,” he said. “But when I see it, my knees feel weak, because I can’t help but think how close you came to being killed.”
“So it does bother you.”
He lifted her chin so she was forced to meet his gaze. “Do my scars bother you?”
To his surprise, tears once again filled her eyes, and she nodded. “Yes,” she whispered. “More than you can possibly know.”
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