Private Justice

by Marie Ferrarella

  “No bonding with anyone at any of the foster homes they sent you to?” he asked.

  There had been families she’d tried her best to please. Families she tried to make like her. But it was easier just keeping her distance. Less pain that way. Less disappointment.

  “This was life, not a Disney movie,” she told him.

  Was that bitterness he heard in her voice? It was completely out of character. He couldn’t tell and her expression wasn’t giving anything away.

  More questions began to take root in his mind. He found himself far more interested in her than in his father’s situation.

  He told himself it was only his natural curiosity directing him, but there was more to it than that and he knew it. The truth was he’d been attracted to Cindy from the first moment he saw her and her pouty little mouth. The snippets of her life that she made him privy to just seemed to increase that attraction, despite efforts on his part to the contrary.

  “Was your ex part of the system when he was growing up?” he asked. The words sounded stilted to his ear. Where was the silver-tongued lawyer hiding these days? He could stand channeling him because, right now, he sounded like some freshman law student, incapable of forming a proper sentence. He half expected her to tell him to take a flying leap.

  Instead, she answered his intrusive question.

  “No. I met him at a community college. He was in one of my classes, I forget which one,” she confessed. “What I do remember was thinking that he was everything I thought I wanted—good-looking, charming, sweet, interested in me,” she added with a soft smile. “And kind. Very kind. That was the most important trait of all for me.” Her smile faded. “Turns out that was the biggest lie about him.”

  She sighed, continuing. “Either that, or there was something about me that turned him from a kind, sweet man to a jealous, raving lunatic. He bought me a cell phone and then ruined the gift by calling me all the time, asking me where I was at that second. It was his way of trying to control my every movement. Of keeping tabs on me. He thought he owned me.”

  It sounded like a really rotten existence. “Why didn’t you just leave him?”

  “The day I said I was going to leave him, he grabbed my throat, shoved me hard against the wall and shouted into my face, telling me that if I even so much as thought about leaving him, he’d slit my throat from ear to ear, ensuring that I wouldn’t be going anywhere, ever.”

  Even as she recited the details, she couldn’t help shivering. The threat, made many months ago, still rattled her.

  Dylan could feel himself getting steadily more and more angry. Bullies had always brought out the fury in him. He hated anyone who thought they had a right to throw their weight around, intimidating someone weaker, smaller than they were. Bullies never picked on anyone their own size.

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” he wanted to know. As far as he saw it, it would have been a simple enough manner.

  “With what?” she countered. “I had no proof. It would be a matter of he-said, she-said. And everyone thought he was such a great guy. I was the only one who got to see that awful side of him.

  “I knew that if I pointed that out, they’d think it was all in my head and tell me to get counseling. The whole situation, the fear, the controlling, the mind games, they all gave Dean this sense of power over me.”

  Her voice grew distant as she tried to push the horror she’d lived through away from her, tried to pretend that it had happened to someone else instead of to her.

  “He told me that everything would be all right if I just went along with whatever he said. I tried,” she confessed. “I really did. But that just doesn’t work when you’re dealing with someone who’s completely irrational.”

  She took a breath before continuing. “In Dean’s mind, I could do no right. If I talked to another man, I wasn’t just talking, I had to be propositioning him. So he beat me as if I had slept with the guy.”

  How could she have stood for it? Dylan couldn’t help wondering. She seemed so independent now, it was hard to see her in that other light. “You were working for my father by then?”

  She nodded. “And Dean didn’t like it. He kept pressuring me to quit. When I refused, he retaliated the only way he knew how.” She raised her eyes to his. “With his fists.”

  “He hit you,” Dylan said incredulously. He knew that was what she was saying, but he still couldn’t begin to fathom that kind of a coward.

  She nodded. “Always in strategic places. Places he knew I wouldn’t show anyone, despite the fact that he kept calling me a slut and a—well, never mind what the other names were. You get the idea.”

  He more than got it, Dylan thought angrily. “So when did my father get involved?”

  “The day Dean slipped and left a mark on me that couldn’t be covered up with clothes.” That had been the day, she thought, that she had actually been reborn, although it hadn’t felt that way at the time. “Even makeup wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t cover up the shiner enough to make it disappear.”

  She remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. “Your father took me aside and talked to me. He didn’t believe I had walked into a door the way I told him. I had a restraining order against Dean in my hands by the end of the day, a place to stay and a divorce in the works in twenty-four hours. The senator did all that for me because he said he wanted me to be safe.” Her eyes shifted to Dylan’s face. She could almost see what he was thinking. “And in case you’re wondering, yes, I was suspicious of his motives. I kept waiting for the senator to ‘collect his reward’ for being so helpful.

  “But he never did,” she said proudly. “Never tried so much as to touch me. He was actually just concerned about my safety. That’s why I’m here, helping you help him. Because if the senator hadn’t helped me, who knows if I’d even be alive today? They say that, left unchecked, domestic violence only escalates,” she told him quietly. “In Dean’s case, that meant it likely would have led to murder by now.”

  He nodded, tactfully refraining from commenting. It was enough that she was aware of what could have happened to her. He wondered if this was as over as she apparently thought it was. Something told him it wouldn’t truly be over until the man was in prison. “Where’s your ex now?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Moreover, she didn’t want to know. She just hoped she’d never have to see him again. “The last thing he said to me was that he was going to get even with me for humiliating him the way I had, even if it took him a lifetime.”

  That explained pretty clearly why she was so jumpy, Dylan thought. It didn’t take a genius or a psychic to figure out that she was afraid that her ex was going to make good on his promise.

  Apparently his father wasn’t the only one who could do with having a bodyguard around.

  “And you haven’t heard from Dean since?” he asked her.

  Cindy shook her head, suddenly feeling very weary. “I think he’s afraid that the senator was going to do something to him, legally or otherwise. They had a confrontation when Dean came to the office that last time. Dean threatened to drag me home to ‘talk’ to me. The senator overheard Dean and informed him that he wasn’t to bother me. Not only that, but if he ever saw him near me again, he was going to make Dean’s life a living hell.” She stopped, her eyes widening as a thought dawned on her. “You don’t think Dean’s behind this scandal hitting the media, do you?”

  This Dean character didn’t sound as if he was capable of any involved plotting. “Does he have a way of accessing that kind of information?” Dylan asked her. Cindy shook her head. “Then no, he’s probably just a lot of hot air. Remember, a bully is someone who depends on fear doing his work for him.”

  She flushed, realizing that she’d just wasted precious time talking about herself—Dylan had stopped working to listen to her. “How did we get started on this topic, anyway?”

  “I asked you a question,” he told her, then went on to say, “I needed to know about you.”
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  The confession both warmed her and made her extremely nervous. She felt as if some of her safeguards had just crumbled. “Why?”

  “Because you seem to see the good in my father and I wanted to know what it was that you saw and what made you stick by him in the first place,” he told her honestly. “You didn’t strike me as a gold digger.”

  She was sure Dean would have had another, far more derogatory term for it.

  “That’s nice,” she replied dryly.

  He hadn’t intended to offend her. “It was meant as a compliment,” he pointed out. “You not being one.” God, next he was going to drop his articles and his pronouns. What was the matter with him?

  “And I took it as such,” she answered. Then, to prove her point she asked, “You can still walk, right?” There was a smile glimmering in her eyes as she asked.

  An isolated lyric from an old song buried deep within his childhood, left there courtesy of an Irish nanny, flashed through Dylan’s mind—“When Irish eyes are smiling.” The point of it was, he finally understood what “smiling eyes” were.

  “C’mon, it’s late,” he said, pushing away from the desk and standing up. “Let’s call it a night and I’ll buy you dinner.”

  She was getting tired, she thought. Maybe it was time to go home. Raising her gaze to his, she said, “I’m not hungry.”

  He wasn’t about to get turned down that easily. “All right, I’ll buy you a cup of tea and you can watch me have dinner.”

  Everything she’d ever been through told her to turn him down and say no. But there still remained within her a tiny kernel of the optimist that she longed to be. And, looking back later, she realized that it was that kernel that was ultimately responsible for her saying, “All right.”

  Chapter 11

  The name of the restaurant he took her to, Gallagher’s, suggested an old-fashioned pub that focused on alcoholic beverages rather than on the food that they served, but the establishment prided itself on what they referred to as “home cooking” and it was—if home happened to come along with a resident chef who knew how to bring out the very best in every meal. The portions, rather than minuscule servings artistically arranged on a plate, were of a decent size, designed to satisfy the appetite of a functioning adult rather than of a supermodel watching her waistline. The lighting was subdued and the atmosphere soothing.

  All in all, it seemed like the perfect place to come to at the end of a long, hard day.

  They were seated almost immediately, ushered to a table for two that had its share of privacy. After leaving them each with a menu, the tall, thin young waiter unobtrusively passed by their table twice. Each time he would glance in their direction, waiting for the proper cue that they were ready to order.

  After a couple of minutes, Cindy opened her menu and began to scan the pages inside. Tempting photos went along with descriptions of the various meals that were offered, and they stirred her dormant appetite. “I guess maybe I will have something to eat after all.”

  Dylan looked up at her, pleased that she’d decided to join him. “Appetite finally kicked in, I take it?”

  There was a little of that, but that wasn’t her main reason for deciding to order something more substantial than just tea. “It’s more that I just don’t want to have the waiter continuing to look at me funny.”

  Dylan looked around for their waiter, but the blond food server, who looked barely old enough to shave, wasn’t watching them. He was taking another table’s order.

  “He’s not looking at you funny,” Dylan assured her, turning back to his menu. “He’s admiring you and being jealous of me.”

  That came out so smoothly, she almost believed him. Except that she knew better. It was just a line. “Why would he be jealous?”

  “Because he thinks you’re with me. And, technically speaking, you are, but not the way he thinks. Not the way it counts,” Dylan added, raising his eyes to hers.

  His gaze was so deep, so penetrating, Cindy felt her breath catch in her throat. She told herself not to be stupid.

  Her mouth curved just the smallest bit. “I guess your father’s ability to be charming and smooth talk his way into things did get passed on after all.”

  At any other time, Dylan might have taken that as an insult. But he knew she didn’t mean it that way. “One big difference.”

  “Oh?” Cindy closed the menu, giving Dylan her undivided attention, even as she had to tell herself that her pulse wasn’t actually launching into double time. “And that is?”

  “Sincerity.” Dylan never blinked an eye. “My father’s smooth talk is second nature to him. He’s used it as a tool to charm his way into the sort of lucrative situations that most people only dream about.”

  She wasn’t about to be snowed. Or distracted. “And you? You don’t ‘smooth talk’ your way into things that are to your advantage?”

  Very slowly he shook his head. “I don’t smooth talk at all. That’s where the sincerity part comes in,” he told her, the smile on his lips sneaking its way under her skin. Pulling her in despite her firm desire to resist.

  “You’re sincere,” she said, her tone telling him exactly what a crock she thought that was. “Every word out of your mouth is sincere.” It wasn’t a statement, it was a challenge. She was daring him to say yes.

  Dylan leaned in, his eyes holding her completely captive even though she was putting up what she would have considered to be one damn good fight.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Especially just now.”

  No, don’t believe him, Cindy. You know better. It’s all just empty talk.

  Her heart increased its tempo, now beating in triple time. Cindy broke eye contact with him. She took the deep-green linen napkin from the table and pretended to be engrossed in watching her hands as she carefully unfolded it and spread it out on her lap.

  “I’ve been here before, Dylan,” she informed him quietly.

  The seemingly sharp change in conversational direction caught him up short for a moment. “You mean to this restaurant?”

  “No.” She’d made a fatal mistake, she realized the second the words had come out of her mouth. She really didn’t want to talk about her failed marriage. Cindy raised her eyes to his again. “No,” she repeated. “To this line of conversation. To this sort of subtle deception.”

  His hands tightened on the menu he was still holding. It was the only outward sign of his ire. “Meaning your husband.”

  Raising her chin defensively came instinctively to her. “You probably think I have to be some kind of village idiot to have been taken in by Dean. To have believed him when, after each incident, he said he would change.” And maybe she was, she thought, struggling not to think of herself in those terms. “At his best, Dean was charming, kind, sweet. In short, everything any woman could have possibly wished for. It was only after we were married that he started to let his mask down.”

  Is that what she thought? That he was judging her? Not having walked in her shoes, he had no right to do anything like that.

  He almost reached for her hand in a show of comfort, but somehow knew she’d only withdraw into herself if he did that. So he kept his hand where it was.

  “No, I don’t think you’re a village idiot. A lot of people are taken in by people like that. Taken in because they can’t begin to imagine lying to someone. They don’t understand why someone would go to such lengths to lie to them and then go back on their word and mistreat them all over again.”

  Dylan saw the surprised look in her eyes. “See, I do understand,” he told her, his voice low, soothing. “The reason I think you might be just slightly lacking in mental acuity is that you don’t see the difference.”

  “The difference?” she asked, not following his meaning.

  He nodded. “Between someone like that miserable excuse for a human being and me.”

  “Because you’re so sincere,” Cindy said, repeating his claim. There was a touch of mockery in her voice. She was still afraid to let h
er guard down, even a little.

  If he wasn’t completely honest with her, he was never going to get her to trust him. Here goes everything, he thought.

  “Look, I feel that there’s something going on between us, something more than just both of us being interested in saving my father’s hide. Something intense,” he emphasized. “And as intense as I think it is—as intense as it is to me—I want you to know that I’m never going to do anything you don’t want me to do. Simply put, if anything’s to happen between us, you’re going to have to give me the green light here.”

  She stared at him. Did he really think she was that simple minded?

  “And if I don’t?” she challenged. “If, let’s say, we’re at my door and you’re kissing me good-night. Really kissing me good-night. Things look as if they’re about to get hot and heavy and then, to use your metaphor, I suddenly have second thoughts and turn on the red light—” Her voice trailed off, waiting for him to complete the statement.

  “Then I stop.”

  Yeah, right, she thought sarcastically. “You stop,” she said out loud, completely unconvinced. “Just like that?”

  A self-deprecating smile curved his lips. “Well, no, not just like that. I’ll probably have to take a hell of a long, cold shower.” His eyes touched hers. “But, yes, I stop.” He could see that she still didn’t quite believe him. Dylan sighed, shaking his head. “Cindy, you need to wrap your head around the fact that I will never hurt you.”

  She found herself wanting to believe him. Really wanting to believe that there were men out there who weren’t like her ex. Decent men who didn’t turn into sadistic monsters once they had worn her down.

  But she could only work with what she knew. “You say that now,” she began.

  Dylan cut in. “I mean that now,” he told her quietly, firmly. “And I’ll mean it later. Cindy, you really need to believe that your worthless ex-husband was the exception, not the rule. Most guys are not like him.”