by Eve Gaddy
Since he couldn’t stop her, Gabe let Lana get him settled on the couch with his leg propped on the table and his knee iced. But he drew the line at the drugs.
“I took aspirin. The doctor said I was all right, so quit worrying. It’s you I’m worried about. You need to go to bed. It’s late and you must be exhausted.”
“I’ll go to bed. After we’ve talked,” she said, and went to the kitchen.
He heard her rustling around in there and wished he could get up and follow her. But he’d barely made it to the couch. He’d be pushing his luck to use his leg any more than he had to. He had no idea how long he’d be back on crutches, but at least the doc didn’t think he’d done any new or permanent damage. Come Monday he’d be seeing the physical therapist and he had a feeling that meeting wouldn’t be fun.
Not that his leg mattered. Lana mattered.
A few minutes later Lana came back into the room with coffee, for God’s sake, just as if it was the end of an ordinary evening. She set the cups on the coffee table and sat beside him. “It’s decaf, so it won’t keep us up.Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked him.
“Lana, give it a rest.” He barely stopped himself from snapping at her.
He picked up his mug and drank some even though he thought drinking decaf was pointless. Coffee, in his opinion, should be strong, black and give you a jolt, otherwise, why bother? But if Lana made it for him, he’d drink dishwater.
Lana took a sip of hers, put it down, folded her hands in her lap and looked at him.
“You don’t have to do this,” Gabe said again.
She smiled, but sadly. “Gabe, you know I do. We have to talk about what happened to me. We can’t just avoid it. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve spent two years trying to put it behind me, and when that didn’t work I pretended it never happened. Look where that got me.”
“I don’t want you to have to relive that night again. You’ve already done it once tonight. Haven’t you.” It wasn’t a question. He was almost certain she had.
“Yes, and I could have killed that man because of the flashback. I overreacted. It’s just pure luck I didn’t do worse to him.”
“Blame Winters, not yourself. If he hadn’t accosted you none—”
“They drill it into your head in self-defense classes. Be proactive. Get to him before he gets to you.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Only I misjudged the situation.”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Lana.”
She reached for his hand and took it. Looked at him earnestly. “Please let me tell you what happened.”
He didn’t say anything else, just nodded and waited for her to begin.
She put her hands together again and sucked in a deep breath. “It happened on a summer night, a little over two years ago. I worked in the same E.R. Jay did in Los Angeles. I had split a shift with another doctor because I didn’t want to work late on the weekend. We—my husband and I—had plans. We’d been having problems and we were supposed to go out of town on a second honeymoon. To talk, reconnect. Be together.” She laughed without humor. “We never made it.
“So it was late, about two in the morning. It was starting to storm. A lot of thunder and lightning but not much rain. The parking lot was usually lighted, but that night some of the lights were out. The one nearest my car was one of them. I should have—” She broke off, cleared her throat and started again. “I should have gotten security to walk me to my car when I realized that, but I didn’t. I was in a hurry. I just wanted to go home. I didn’t want to hassle with getting someone so, just this once, I didn’t.”
He frowned, not liking what he heard. “You sound like you’re blaming yourself for what happened.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m just explaining. But other people couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gotten security to go with me.”
“What other people?”
“My husband, for one.”
“He said that to you? Blamed you?”
“Not…not in so many words. But I know he thought it. I can’t tell you the number of times he’d start a sentence with, ‘If you’d only asked security…’” She pressed her lips together tightly. “I finally told him if he said it one more time I’d clock him.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Couldn’t believe anyone—least of all her husband—would have tried to place the blame on Lana. “That’s sick. It wasn’t your fault, Lana.”
She shrugged. “It was an error in judgment, and I paid for it. It doesn’t matter. The point is, I didn’t get help. The parking lot was deserted, except for me.As I neared my car I thought I heard footsteps. But I didn’t see anyone, so I kept walking until I reached it.
“Something hit my arm and I dropped my keys. I turned around and there he was.” She closed her eyes, then opened them. “I can still see him, perfectly clearly. He was about medium height, wearing dark clothes, and he wore a mask. A ski mask pulled down over his face,” she said, and bit her lip before continuing.
“Even though I couldn’t see his face, I could see his eyes. The lightning was intermittent but when it flashed it was bright enough to let me see. But anyway, his eyes…they glowed. With…malice. It sounds silly, but I remember thinking they were evil.”
“That’s not silly. What else would you call someone who preys on women?”
“You’re right. He was evil.” She was silent a moment, then continued. “When I offered him my purse, he just laughed. That’s when I knew what he meant to do.”
“Lana—”
“No, let me go on. He had a knife. He grabbed me, held the knife against my throat. Nicked it so I’d bleed. I felt the blood. It was warm, sticky, trickling down my neck. He told me he’d carve my face, like a—” she closed her eyes, then opened them “—like a pumpkin. Said he’d kill me if I fought him.”
Gabe reached for her hand and held it. “I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry, Lana.” He wished for just five minutes alone with the bastard.
“I didn’t fight him. I was scared to, you see. Because I was pregnant.”
Oh, God, she’d been pregnant. With the child she later lost. Had the rape been the cause of her miscarriage?
“I thought I was protecting my baby. So I let him drag me off, behind some bushes. He told me to get on the ground. I said no, and he asked me if I wanted to die. So…I didn’t resist. I just…let him. And then he raped me. He hit me. Kept hitting me the whole time he was raping me. Cursing me, hitting me.
“I was scared. So scared he’d kill me anyway, no matter what I did. It seemed like it took forever. I think he wanted me to fight back, but I didn’t. I heard later he had used the knife on the women who resisted. He carved their faces, like he’d threatened me.”
“You did the right thing. You’re alive.”
She looked at him and her eyes were bottomless wells of sorrow. She wasn’t crying, but he wanted to. “I survived. But my baby didn’t. I lost her anyway. I should have fought him. He wasn’t very big. I might have been able to stop him. Or get away.”
It just kept getting worse. How much was she supposed to endure? “Lana, for God’s sake, he had a knife. He’d already cut you with it. He could have killed you if you’d resisted. You made the right decision. You’re alive. No one blames you for not fighting him.”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “Someone did. My husband.”
The pain on her face broke his heart. He gathered her close, though she resisted at first, he pulled her into his arms. “He was wrong, Lana. He couldn’t have been more wrong.”
She was stiff for a long moment, then she broke. She turned her face into his chest and wept. He just held her, stroked her back gently and added her ex-husband to his list of people he wanted to make pay for hurting her. A long while later she finally stopped sobbing.
She pulled back from him, straightened, wiped her face with her hands. Then she got up and walked into the bathroom. He heard her blowing her nose, splashing water on her face.
She came back
carrying some tissues. “I need to finish. To tell you the rest of it.”
Sitting down again, she took in a shaky breath and continued. “After he raped me, he left me there. On the ground, bleeding. He threatened to kill me if I told anyone. Said he’d hunt me down and kill me. At that point, I’m not sure I cared. I was already cramping. I think I knew, even then, that I would lose her. When I was sure he was gone, I got up and went back to the emergency room.
“I had them use a rape kit, and they called the police. Hospital security went out to look for him while the doctors worked on me. I went into labor, but the doctors managed to stop it. Security didn’t find him, neither did the police, not that night. The police found him later. When he attacked another woman.”
“I’m glad they caught the bastard,” he said, then his stomach sank as he remembered what she’d said earlier. “Oh, God, no. You told Maggie he got off on a technicality.”
“Yes, he did.”
“I’m so sorry, Lana.” Pitifully little he could say. Nothing he could do to ease her pain.
She looked at him and her eyes were hard. “Terence was sorry, too. Sorry it went to trial.”
He stared at her for a minute. She was serious. Even after all she’d said about her ex, he was shocked. “Why?”
“Oh, he was happy enough they caught him, but he didn’t want me to testify. He seemed to think I should just forget it. Pretend it never happened. I should put it behind me, he kept saying.”
“I don’t understand. Isn’t that what you were trying to do?”
“He didn’t see it that way. I think he was embarrassed. Embarrassed that everyone in the hospital knew what had happened. He worked there, too, and he didn’t like the publicity.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That was Terence,” she said, and shrugged. “I didn’t listen to him. I testified against that bastard because I didn’t want him to ever hurt someone else. I sat in that courtroom and let the defense attorney rip me to shreds, make me feel like I was the one on trial. It was almost like being raped all over again.” She looked at Gabe and shook her head sadly. “Maybe I should have listened to Terence. It was all pointless in the end. The rapist got off. I did it for nothing.”
“Not nothing. Could you have lived with yourself if you hadn’t testified?”
She looked surprised for a minute, then nodded slowly. “No, you’re right. I couldn’t have. I had to try. Even though the trial was—” She swallowed. “It was indescribably bad. But as bad as that all was, the worst was losing the baby.”
“You said they stopped your labor.”
“They did. That night they stopped it with medicine. They pumped so many drugs into me, but they did manage to stop it. Then a few weeks after the attack, I got an infection. I went into labor again. Nothing would stop it that time and they tried everything.
“I delivered my baby at eighteen weeks. She lived for a few moments, long enough to give me hope. But she was too small, too delicate. She—” Her voice broke but she went on. “She died in my arms. My doctor believed the infection was a result of the rape.”
She broke down again, and again, he held her, rocked her, hurt for her. After she stopped, they were quiet a long time.
“Tonight brought it all back to you,” he finally said. And he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to help her. She’d had to battle her demons and Winters by herself. Gabe should have protected her. Should have been the one she could count on, as she hadn’t been able to do with her husband. But for his damn leg, he might have been able to prevent Winters from coming at her.
She pulled back and looked at him. “Yes. At first, when he moved toward me, I did get…confused. I did think I saw a knife. I did…remember that night. But then I came out of it. I realized he wasn’t the rapist. I knew I was in a different place, a different time. But I still thought he had a knife. I fought back as I’d been trained to do. As I would have the first time if I’d known how.”
“You shouldn’t have had to,” Gabe said harshly. “Winters probably wouldn’t have accosted you if you hadn’t been with me. He hates me and he knows I’m no physical match for him.”
She put out her hand. Squeezed his. “Gabe, tonight wasn’t your fault.”
Great, now she was comforting him. “Lana, I’d give anything if you hadn’t had to go through the attack. And if you hadn’t had to relive the past tonight.”
“Thank you.” She put her hand to his face and smiled sadly. Her hand dropped and she sighed. “You knew, didn’t you? Before tonight, I mean.”
“That you’d been attacked?”
“You can say the word. I was raped.”
He preferred the euphemism. “I figured it out. I suspected, the first time we went to dinner, and you pulled out the pepper spray in the parking lot.”
“No one else ever picked up on that. I dated a few times right after the divorce before I decided to quit the whole scene. The men I went out with never noticed anything. Was it that obvious to you?”
“It was obvious something bad had happened in a parking lot. When I thought about what you’d told me, I was pretty sure I knew what had happened.”
“And later you were certain.” He simply nodded. “That’s why you were so patient with me, wasn’t it? When you wanted to make love and I kept freaking out.”
“Don’t make it sound like a hardship. It wasn’t.” He’d been patient because he loved her and because he’d suspected that she hadn’t made love since the attack two years ago.
Suddenly everything made sense. All the hints she’d dropped about her ex. The counseling, his affair with the counselor. The son of a bitch she’d been married to had betrayed her with the counselor who was supposed to be helping him deal with his wife’s rape.
Worse, the jerk hadn’t made love to her after the rape, Gabe realized. If he had, maybe she wouldn’t have been so scared, so reluctant to be intimate. Her husband’s rejection, in addition to the attack and the loss of her baby must have made everything even worse for her.
He wanted to hold her. Comfort her. Protect her. “You need sleep.”
“Will you stay with me?”
“There’s no way I’m leaving you, Lana.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GABE WATCHED from the bed as Lana went through her nightly ritual. She locked the doors, washed her face, changed into her nightgown. Rechecked the doors and windows one last time.
She came out of the bathroom looking so vulnerable, so fragile, it almost broke his heart. Not knowing what else to do, he smiled and held out his hand. “Come to bed, Lana. Let me hold you.”
The smile she gave him was shaky but it was there. She turned the bedside light down low, climbed into bed with him and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her close to his heart. She smelled so good, sweet and sexy. Comfort, not sex, he told himself. He turned his thoughts away from lovemaking, knowing now wasn’t the time.
She raised her face up to his and he kissed her. She returned it, her tongue seeking his, her hands sliding around his neck to pull him closer.
He kissed her again, then pulled back. “Lana—”
She put her fingers to his lips, her eyes big and solemn. “Kiss me. Make love to me, Gabe.”
Oh, God, what was he supposed to do? He kissed her fingers, then held her hand. “Lana, are you sure this is what you want? You’ve been through so much tonight, maybe you should just let me hold you.”
She sat up and stared at him. Her lip trembled and tears shone in her eyes. “You don’t want me, do you? I told you what happened and now you don’t—” Her voice broke. “You don’t want me anymore.”
“Oh, honey, that’s not true. I want you so much it’s killing me. Nothing could make me stop wanting you. It’s just—” He stopped and swore softly, gently taking hold of her arms. “It’s late. You’re hurting and you’re exhausted.”
“It’s because I told you. I knew I shouldn’t have. If I’d never told you—”
He interrupted
her by kissing her. “Lana, stop this. I already knew. I’ve known for weeks.”
“But you didn’t know the details. I wish I’d never told you.”
“None of it makes a damn bit of difference in how I feel about you. And it sure as hell doesn’t make me stop wanting you. But I’m worried about you. I can only imagine how hard tonight must have been for you.”
She said nothing, just stared at him with big, sad, ocean-blue eyes.
“Are you sure?” he asked hoarsely.
Again, she didn’t speak, she simply looked at him.
He lay on his side and pulled her into his arms, slowly, watching her all the while. He kissed her, as gently as he could. She returned it, sighing and nestling closer to him, her body warm against his.
Moving slowly, carefully, he caressed her breasts, first through the nightgown and then as she relaxed, he tossed the gown off. “You are so beautiful,” he said, and teased her nipples with his mouth. They hardened immediately and so did he, even more. He sucked each one until she shifted restlessly.
“I want you so much,” he whispered as his mouth trailed lower over her belly. “You can’t imagine how much I want you.” She arched her back and moaned, and he swept a hand down lower, slipped a finger inside her. She made a sexy sound that turned him hard as granite, made him want to plunge inside her right then, but he forced himself to slow down.
He’d always been careful with her, always tried to make sure she was getting pleasure from what he was doing. Tonight he mustered all the patience he could manage, waiting until he was sure she was ready, until she writhed and moaned, before he turned on his side and pulled her leg over his hip, then eased inside her. She was tight and wet, and she felt better than anything he could remember. He pushed forward and groaned, loving the feel of her around him.
She stiffened and put her hands on his shoulders.
He heard her suck in her breath, felt the tension in that desirable body so close to his. “Lana,” he gasped, looking into her face and kissing her mouth. “Stay with me, baby.”
