The Defiant Hero

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Locke opened her eyes.

  And shut them fast as the brightness of the day assaulted her.

  What had she done?

  She opened her eyes just a little, squinting against the light and the pain. Oh, God, she was completely naked, with Starrett sprawled next to her, naked as well, amidst the rumpled sheets of his bed.

  She was sticky with something that looked like . . . chocolate? With horror, she saw that it streaked the T-shirt that hung off the handcuffs that still connected her to Starrett, too. The shirt she’d been wearing yesterday before she’d let Sam Starrett undress her—oh, my God, what had she done?

  Another flash of memory ripped through her, this one of her gasps of pleasure as Starrett ran his tongue from her breasts to her stomach and then lower, as he licked chocolate syrup from her body. She’d done the same to him, licking him, and taking him into her mouth and . . .

  What had she done?

  All of the whiskey she’d had the night before churned inside of her and she sat up. The movement made the top of her head feel as if it were going to lift off, and she knew that she was, without a doubt, going to be sick. Dear God, could she even make it to the bathroom? It was impossibly far away and she wasn’t sure if she could get her legs to work—forget about dragging Starrett.

  Beside her, he stirred. He stretched, and winced only slightly as he opened his eyes and the morning light hit him.

  “Uh-oh.” One look at her face and he somehow knew. It was awkward with the cuffs on their wrists, but he got her off the bed and into the bathroom in record time.

  Just in time.

  Locke crouched naked on the bathroom floor and leaned over the toilet bowl.

  It was violent and vile. Her stomach churned and her throat burned, and vomiting took precedence over all else—including the humiliation.

  Although through it she had patches of awareness, a sense of Starrett holding her, murmuring words of nonsensical comfort. It’s all right. What, was he stupid? This was close to the farthest place from all right that she’d ever been in her life.

  She felt him wipe her mouth and her face with a cool washcloth. “Go away,” she gasped when the sickness subsided enough for the humiliation to take center stage. “Please go away!”

  “I can’t,” he told her softly, as if he somehow knew that talking more loudly than a whisper would split her head open. “I’m sorry, Lys. You’re stuck with me until we can make it into the living room and get the key.”

  The key to the handcuffs.

  “Oh, God,” she groaned, resting her head against her arm as she still leaned against the toilet. It was going to take a superhuman effort to stand up and walk into the living room, but until she did, she was locked—naked—to Roger Starrett.

  Her mortal enemy.

  The way she was crouched, she was curled into a ball. That was bad enough, but the idea of having to stand up in front of him and walk—naked—into the living room was mortifying.

  “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she moaned. Talk about self-sabotage. Fifty billion men in the world, and she had to go and have a one-night stand with Roger Starrett. “Fool,” she chastised herself. “I’m such a fool.”

  “Give yourself a break.” Starrett rubbed her shoulders and neck with a familiarity that was chilling. “You’re human. You had too much to drink. It’s not that big a deal, Lys.”

  “Don’t touch me!” She couldn’t bear it another second and pulled away from him, even though the movement made her head explode. She whipped a towel down from a rack and wrapped it around herself. “And don’t call me Lys.”

  Starrett sat on the bathroom floor, much too close, just looking at her. He cleared his throat. “You liked being called Lys last night.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t like it now.” She couldn’t meet his steady gaze, couldn’t bear even to look at him. He was completely unconcerned about his own nakedness, completely comfortable inside his own extremely bare skin.

  And why shouldn’t he be? Even hungover, with gold-tinged stubble glistening on his chin, with his hair a mess and his eyes rimmed with red, with streaks of chocolate still on his chest and stomach, he was sexy as hell.

  He sighed. “We’ve reached that part, huh? The part about the regrets and recriminations. The embarrassment part. The light of day, dawning of common sense, morning after part.” He laughed, but it was without any humor. “Shit.”

  Locke hauled herself to her feet, and her head managed to stay on her shoulders, but just barely. “Please. I need to get the key.”

  She needed to take a shower, wash the stickiness of the chocolate from her body, wash away the scent of Starrett—the sweet, faint smell of sex.

  If she could, she would wash away the bits and pieces of memories that were coming back, stronger and longer, with remarkable clarity. Condoms. They’d used condoms, at least, thank you, God.

  He just sat there, head in his hands, and she tugged on the handcuffs. “Come on.”

  Starrett looked up at her. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll run away the minute you unlock me?”

  “Please,” she whispered. There was no way she could drag him into the living room. She was barely going to be able to drag herself.

  He pushed himself to his feet. “Guess not. Guess it’s me who’s afraid to unlock you. I wish I had more of an appreciation for irony, because—”

  “Just don’t talk, okay?” Locke held the towel tightly around her as she led him into the living room. Her jacket was on the couch, but . . . “Where’s my fanny pack?”

  Starrett scratched his stomach, then flopped onto the couch, pulling her down next to him. “I’m not supposed to talk, remember?”

  Locke struggled to get free of the soft pillows so that she could look around the sides of the couch, as well as behind and beneath it. She looked under her jacket again. Her head was pounding. “Help me find it, Starrett.”

  “Gonna be hard to do without talking.”

  “Please.”

  He sighed. “Well, where’d you put it down?”

  She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead with her uncuffed hand. “If I knew that, then I wouldn’t need you to help me find it.”

  “This place isn’t very big. Did you leave it in the kitchen? What color is it?”

  “It’s aqua. You know, kind of green.”

  “I know what aqua is. Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She held her head with both hands, hoping that would keep the top of her skull attached. “This is very difficult for me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he countered, his voice suddenly gentle. He sat forward. “Look, let’s take a time-out, okay? Let’s just take a deep breath and start again.” He took her hand and gently helped her up, and carefully, gingerly, as if she were an extremely fragile package, led her into the kitchen area.

  She couldn’t look at the kitchen table.

  One of the chairs had been knocked over, probably when they’d . . . Oh, God.

  Starrett picked it up, set it upright next to the little refrigerator, and gently pushed her down into it. As she sat there, he took out the bottle of Coke from the fridge, and, using only his right hand, poured her a plastic cupful.

  “Little sips,” he ordered her as he handed it to her.

  From one of the cabinets, he took out a bottle of painkiller—some nonaspirin hangover remedy—and shook two pills out. She took them, unable to do more than glance into his eyes. It was almost harder to deal with this when he was being nice.

  “Maybe we should close the curtains, make the room dark, and go back to sleep,” he suggested. “When you wake up, you’ll feel a little better, and then we can deal with finding the key.”

  “I want to find it now. It’s in my fanny pack,” she said. Going back to bed—naked—with Roger Starrett was not an option.

  “Which doesn’t seem to be in the kitchen,” he told her. “It wasn’t in the bathroom or the living room. Is it possible . . .” He broke off.


  “What?”

  He was silent.

  “If you have an idea, please don’t keep it to yourself.”

  He shook his head. “I was just wondering if maybe you left it in the bar?”

  Dear, sweet God. Locke looked at him with horror. If her fanny pack wasn’t here, then the key wasn’t here, either. Oh, God.

  She took a deep breath, forcing herself to concentrate. To remember. “I had it on in the bar. No, wait, I had it on in the pool hall. I didn’t have it in that other bar, did I?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember seeing it.” He laughed. “Oh, shit. I think I remember . . .”

  Her dread grew. “What?”

  “When we got to the hospital, you threw a bunch of stuff into the trunk of your car.”

  “Oh, my God!” She had. She remembered now.

  The key to these handcuffs was in her fanny pack, which was safely locked in the trunk of her car, which was parked in a garage near her sister’s hospital.

  All the way across town.

  “How old is your daughter?”

  Meg jumped, startled. God, she’d almost forgotten about the man sleeping in the backseat.

  Except he wasn’t asleep anymore.

  The way John had tied him, she couldn’t see him in her rearview mirror.

  “Mine was eleven when she was murdered,” he told her. “Her name was Ayesha.”

  Oh, dear Lord. Meg gripped the steering wheel. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I have had a taste of your anger and pain.” Razeen’s voice was gentle, drifting bodilessly from the back of the car. “How old is she? Your Amy?”

  “Ten.”

  “It is a good age,” he said. “For daughters. Is it not?”

  Meg nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  Razeen laughed lightly. “Ah, yes. Ayesha had such a smile, you know? As if life held such joy for her—and thus she brought joy to others.” He was silent for a moment. “She was shopping with her mother when there was trouble in the market.”

  Meg didn’t want to hear this. She didn’t want to know that Razeen had had a daughter, didn’t want to hear of his pain and his loss. She didn’t want him to be anything other than a terrorist, a villain, a man deserving of death.

  “They were rounded up by the Kazbekistani Army,” he continued, “simply for being Muslim. Someone protested too loudly, an argument broke out, and the government soldiers opened fire into the crowd. Just like that, Ayesha was gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again—but it was meaningless. What good did her being sorry do him?

  “Seventeen people were killed that day, thirty-nine wounded, and the incident was pushed aside by the government. It was forgotten. No one was ever punished. No one even apologized. Of course, that day the casualties were low. Such incidents have happened many times before and many times since then with death tolls of innocents in the hundreds.”

  Meg was silent. What could she say?

  “This is a government that is committing genocide,” Razeen continued, “but the world doesn’t seem to care. I have tried to make changes politically, but our government cancelled the elections when it looked as if we might take control. I myself was taken into custody and tortured. When I finally escaped, I joined the GIK. And up to the day Ayesha died, I was an advocate of nonviolence. But that day she died, I changed my mind.”

  In a terrible, awful way, Meg understood. Here she was, with one gun still hidden in her boot, another on the seat beside her, doing things she’d never dreamed she could possibly do—all to protect her daughter.

  “I have done some terrible things,” Razeen told Meg quietly. “I have done things that are hard to live with. I have taken lives, just as surely taking away someone else’s Ayesha. And I know that she would not have understood that. Not at all.” He sighed. “No, not at all.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Meg whispered.

  “I want you to understand,” Razeen told her. “If my death can both save your daughter and bring attention to my people’s suffering, then perhaps I will be forgiven. Perhaps I will again find peace.”

  “I received one last letter from Ralph,” Eve told Amy and the Bear. “It was some months after he’d joined the British Expeditionary Force, after Hitler had invaded Poland, and the BEF were stationed across the channel, in France.

  “He’d taken the time to write out a detailed lesson plan for Nicky,” she told them. “His letter was completely impersonal—he mentioned nothing at all of our marriage, nothing of our friendship.” She shook her head, remembering how her heart had leapt when she’d received his packet and how hurt she’d been when she’d read his tersely worded note. Compared to his other letters—and she’d kept and read that entire boxful until they were ragged—this one had been written as if by a complete stranger.

  “I used that letter to locate him in France.” The Bear was scowling, but Eve knew the young man was listening as he cleaned his gun in the early morning light. “He was with the Fiftieth Royal Anti-Tank Regiment, and in the early spring of 1940, I put on my best outfit and my warmest overcoat and I took the ferry across the channel.”

  She’d used all she’d ever learned from her mother to charm Ralph’s commanding officer, who’d bent over backward in his attempt to accommodate her, allowing her to use the privacy of his office to meet with Ralph.

  Who was terribly stern as he was led into the room, more like a man meeting a firing squad than a man coming face-to-face with the woman he’d claimed to have loved enough to marry.

  His face looked grim, all sharp angles and high cheekbones beneath his military short hair. Of course the chill in his eyes added to the harsh effect.

  Ralph waited until his commander left, closing the door behind him, but then he lit into her, his voice low but filled with a terrible intensity. “You must be insane to have come all this way by yourself!”

  She was sitting in a chair in front of the commander’s imposing looking oak desk, and she crossed her legs with a hiss of silk.

  The muscle in his jaw jumped, and he turned jerkily away to look out the window instead of at her.

  “You’re right,” she said, her heart dropping clear down to her fashionable Italian leather pumps. “I’m insane. But I had to see you.”

  He didn’t say a word, didn’t look at her.

  “How can you still be mad at me?” Eve whispered.

  He laughed harshly, turning to face her. “You’ve seen me.” He held out his arms and turned in a complete circle. “All right? So go home. And go quickly. This is no place for a child.”

  Eve didn’t move. “I’ve been following the news—reading the paper to Nick, and listening to the radio.”

  He was back to looking out the window. She supposed she had to be grateful that he didn’t just walk away. At least he was listening to what she had to say.

  Still, his hostility was daunting. This was, without a doubt, the hardest thing she’d ever done.

  She took a deep breath and lifted her chin. “Hitler’s not going to be content with Poland and Austria,” she told him. “I don’t care what anyone says. War is coming. And you’re going to be smack in the middle of it, here in France.”

  “And that’s what you’ve come all this way to tell me?” His voice was oddly flat. “Thanks so much for the news.”

  “I came all this way because I wasn’t sure I’d ever get another chance to see you. People get killed in wars, you know.” Her voice shook. “I came to tell you that . . .” She closed her eyes and said it. How could he hurt her worse than he already had? “I love you.”

  He didn’t say a word, didn’t move, and, as far as she could tell, he wasn’t even breathing.

  “Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you,” she said, her voice suddenly sounding very, very small in the large room. “Maybe you think it doesn’t count because I’m so young. But Juliet was barely fourteen when she fell in love with Romeo.” She wanted to fall to her knees in front of him and beg him to
forgive her, to hold her, to love her again. Her voice broke. “Oh, Ralph, don’t you remember Juliet?”

  He still didn’t move. “Juliet didn’t lie about her age to Romeo. What you did was unforgivable. And look at you.” His voice shook as he glanced only briefly at her. “You’re still pretending to be someone you’re not, still lying.”

  Eve steeled herself as she stood up. She crossed to the window, stood directly in front of him.

  “Look at me,” she said, forcing him to do exactly that. “I’m sixteen and everyone thinks I’m twenty-one. I can’t help how other people choose to see me. I do what I have to to survive in this world—and that includes taking advantage of other people’s misconceptions. And I’m lucky that I can do this. I’m lucky that people—including my stepmother—believe that I’m old enough to take care of Nick.”

  He didn’t respond, and she kept going, desperately now.

  “You know, if I could wave a wand, I’d magically make myself older, but I can’t. I can only wait. Given enough time, though, I win, because every minute that passes I am getting older. I know in a few years that I’ll actually be eighteen and then, yes, twenty-one. And I hope that in a few years you’ll be able to let yourself forgive me, and that you’ll love me again. And I pray, God, I pray, that in those same few years this war will end, and you’ll come safely home to me.”

  Ralph shook his head. “I won’t,” he said bitterly. “I can’t. How could I ever trust you? Why would I even want to?”

  His words ripped her heart open, but Eve refused to flinch.

  “You know, half the time you were Nicky’s tutor, I dressed in blue jeans and pigtails and didn’t wear any makeup,” she accused him. “I dressed like a fifteen-year-old girl. But you saw what you wanted to see. And you wanted me to be twenty or twenty-five or whatever you thought, so that’s who you saw.”

  Instead of ice, there was guilt in his eyes now. It was almost harder to face. “You’re right,” he said. “God forgive me.”

  “Why should God have to forgive you for loving me?” she asked. “I’d think he’d have more of a beef with you for walking away.”