by Ren Benton
He must have nodded off after that because the ring of her phone jolted him to alertness. The shower was running, so he answered for her. “Hi, Mais.”
“Is this where we are now, back to answering each other’s phones?”
“I guess so.” It came naturally. If Gin minded, she could tell him. “She’s in the shower. How is everybody?”
“Ethan landed safely. Chris was out of surgery by the time we got to the hospital. He’ll be fine but sore and spleenless. There were a lot of beautiful man tears and declarations of devotion.”
“Nice combo of snide and wistful.”
“I learned as a child actor to project my feelings through my voice.” She made a tired, frustrated sound. “It’s been a day. I want somebody to love me. Failing that, I’ll take a glass full of alcohol and ice.”
“If you don’t mind the transient nature of the love, you can find both at any bar.”
A dismissive huff suggested she wouldn’t be embarking on a pub crawl tonight. “I’m a lightweight and make stupid decisions when I’m tipsy. I am too old and motherly for that nonsense.”
“You have the most beautiful baby in the world to give you love.”
“Ugh. Why do you have to be so sappy and right all the time?”
“I learned as a child bard to project sap through my voice. Being right all the time is just a gift.”
“I didn’t miss you at all, you snarky bastard.” She sighed. “Fine. I’ll go retrieve my child to get my love fix and settle for a shot of apple juice.”
“Sounds like a good date. I’ll relay the news to Gin.”
“Relay some D to her on behalf of those of us who will be sleeping alone.”
He slid the phone onto the bedside table and fell back on the pillows to listen to the hiss of the shower. Thank god the prognosis was good. Gin had taken enough hits for one day without a friend suffering critical injuries in a car wreck. Houle was the worst of it, but Simone added to her worries, she’d lost Ethan’s support, and Lex’s breakdown not only forced her into the role of nurse and therapist again but ensured her music wouldn’t be done today as promised with only... fuck. Two more full days before Matt and Piper dragged him away from her.
He’d get it done, dammit. Even if he had to work around the clock, he wouldn’t let her down.
His heavy eyelids threatened to drop again. He frowned at the bathroom door instead. It took at least a couple of hours to fly from Denver to L.A., and the drive from the airport to the hospital in afternoon traffic couldn’t have been quick. In the meantime, he and Gin made a short trip to the hotel, waited for room service, and ate dinner. No matter how leisurely their chewing had been, the time didn’t add up. How long had he been napping?
More to the point, how long had Gin been in the shower?
He rolled off the bed and pushed open the bathroom door.
She huddled in a tiled corner, knees pulled to her chest, face pressed against her knees, arms protecting her head as if the water beating down on her was a landslide.
Her anguish bruised his heart. He turned off the water and stepped into the shower with her. Without a word, he wrung the water from her hair and dried the rest of her as well as he could. He gently wrapped her in a dry towel and scooped her shivering body into his arms. He carried her from the bathroom, shoved the covers aside with his foot, and laid her on the bed.
Her arms tightened around his neck. “Don’t leave.”
He brushed damp, tangled curls from her forehead. “Where would I go?”
“No, stay. Right here.” Her fingers dug into his skin, desperate and rough as her voice. “I can’t take anymore, Lex. Make it go away.”
She needed an anesthetic, like he’d needed alcohol — anything to blunt the teeth of the pain devouring her.
Like alcohol, it would be easy for him to make everything worse. Unlike alcohol, he loved the one seeking solace from him and would stop short of poisoning her while easing her pain.
He lowered his body, covering her. The way she tore at his clothes to get to his skin said she wanted something blinding, exhausting, and consuming, but he couldn’t give that to her. All he had to offer was sweet and tender. Gentle kisses. Reverent fingers. Soft words.
Eventually, she quieted, clung, accepted the pace he set. Fingers twined. Breaths mingled.
“Please,” she whispered, over and over, once for every second it took him to be responsible and protect her before accepting the invitation to sink deep inside her.
He rocked her until she moaned and arched and wrung his own release out of him, and still, she wouldn’t be... still.
He brushed tears from her lashes. “More?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded.
He used his fingers, then his mouth, until she was too physically drained for her mind to continue racing. When at last she was limp and drowsy, he tucked the blankets around her and held her tight in the safety of his arms.
When she woke up whimpering, he let himself be used again.
13
Being in the city made it easy to arrange an in-office consult with the security company Lex wanted to hire. Ensconced in a conference room with a skyline view, they outlined the situation to the best of their understanding for the benefit of Malik Jestus, the threat assessment agent who agreed to meet with them on short notice. He listened and prompted with questions when more clarity was needed. Though he took no notes, his piercing gaze convinced Gin he would be able to recite the entire conversation verbatim, as if it had been tattooed on his memory.
Twenty-four hours after having her beliefs about the worst night of her life torn to shreds, she’d put enough distance between herself and shock to be a bit more objective. “This is purely speculation on Chief Raymond’s part.”
“John Raymond likes to keep a low profile, but he’s a legend in the law enforcement community. If he’s speculating, I like his odds of being correct.” Jestus opened a laptop so thin and sleek, she hadn’t noticed it on the table in front of him. “He’s not the only one who thought it was bullshit that a hundred-and-nothing pound woman in the process of bleeding out would be capable of inflicting that kind of damage on Fogle.”
Gin crossed her arms across her middle. For ten years, she’d believed just that.
“A colleague in forensics did an experiment with a crash test dummy body and a pig’s head. I won’t sicken you with the details, but it took a man twice your size nearly two minutes to get an unresisting subject on the floor and replicate the extent of the damage to Fogle’s skull. He did another experiment, the details of which even I would rather not know, and concluded with your injuries and an exerted heart rate, you’d have been dead in less than a minute. The position in which you landed and physiologic shock saved your life, but you clearly had nothing to spare for a fight.”
Lex prowled the floor separating her and Jestus. “It would have been nice if this consensus about her innocence had come up during her murder trial.”
Jestus spread his hands. “Nobody asked. None of the medical details came out until the trial. Up to that point, everybody was rooting for the plucky heroine to have slain the hydra. By the time the geeks worked out that the reports owed no allegiance to the laws of physics, she’d been acquitted. If the jury had been less sympathetic and she’d had to appeal a conviction, trust me, her lawyer would have been drowning in expert witnesses.”
“It’s great she didn’t get the chair, but it would have been even better if she knew she didn’t kill a man.”
It might have been one weight off her soul, but it wouldn’t have changed anything. “It’s not his fault, Lex.”
He turned on his heel and stalked toward the corner she’d staked out for herself. When he reached her, he cupped her face in his big, warm hands and pressed his lips to her forehead.
She smiled when he returned to his furious pacing.
Jestus watched her without a trace of humor. “I’ll keep that in mind if it comes up again. Everyone knew there had
to be another player involved, but I don’t remember anyone fingering Houle for it. He seems like an opportunistic bottom-feeder who’d run from a tougher fish, but if he tipped Fogle with your location to arrange a photo op and ended up arranging a double homicide instead, it’s possible self-preservation motivated him to cover his tracks.”
Lex slanted an uncompromising glare in her direction. “She needs protection.”
Jestus noted the decree was aimed toward her, and his question was likewise directed. “Is there a dispute about that?”
As long as people Gin loved — Lex, Ethan, Maisie and Reina — were anywhere near her, she would endure the constant presence of security to keep them safe. “There’s no dispute.”
“Good. Help yourself to the fridge and TV while I coordinate a team.” Jestus tucked the laptop under his arm and strode toward the door. “If you need anything else while you wait, Alexis at the front desk will work miracles if you ask her nicely.”
As soon as the door closed him out of the room, Lex’s agitated roaming subsided. He leaned against the edge of the table. “I expected you to resist.”
“Not again.”
“What do you mean, ‘again’?”
She tightened her arms around herself. “If I’d hired guards ten years ago, Ryan would be alive. I won’t lose someone else because I’m careless.”
His lips flattened to a grim line. “Your brother didn’t die because you were careless, Gin. Jeremy Fogle murdered him.”
“I should have stopped it.”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
She’d asked herself that question a thousand times but never expected to hear it from Lex, especially not in that blame-laden tone.
“Why didn’t you stop it, Gin? You were right there.” He continued to hammer her. “Why didn’t you keep Ryan locked in the house that night?”
She curled her shoulders forward. “I couldn’t keep a grown man chained to the radiator.”
“Why didn’t you have a dozen security guards on duty?”
“He... he didn’t tell me Fogle was escalating.”
“Why didn’t you stop me from drinking? Why didn’t you keep the pills out of Olivia’s mouth? You were right there.”
Pressure built in her chest, crushing her heart and lungs and pressing her ribs out until they ached. It grew more painful every second she kept her mouth clamped shut, determined to torture her until she confessed. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop you. I can’t control anything, I can’t fix anything, I’m useless.”
Once started, the words gushed out of her. She waited for the relief he promised upon saying the one thing that must never be spoken, but it didn’t come. The pressure increased, forcing a whimper into her throat. “That was it. That was the thing I haven’t admitted out loud, and it doesn’t feel better at all.”
“Because it’s a lie, the lie you’ve been telling yourself all this time.”
She cringed deeper into her corner when he approached her.
He stopped two steps away. “I hurt you in a minute. How much damage have you done to yourself believing that shit for ten years?”
Her teeth clenched until her skull hurt, and she shook her head in denial — of what, exactly, she didn’t know.
“That lie is the hook you have to take out of yourself, Gin. When people keep the truth from you and act against their own best interests, you’re not responsible for what happens. You told me the same thing two days ago. Say it for yourself.”
She couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t taken responsibility. At a young age, she had to take care of herself because her parent wouldn’t. She was always cleaning up after Ryan and apologizing for Simone. Her job was telling people where to stand and what to say, with an eye toward guiding an audience where to look and how to feel about what they saw. All her life, she’d been shaping the world through sheer force of will.
And it was all a lie. Bad things didn’t happen because she let her guard down. Bad things happened right in the midst of her hypervigilant paranoia because her guard didn’t matter. She gave it credit for a long lucky streak that would have happened even if she hadn’t been so uptight, even if she’d had fun and thrown herself into adventures and taken more chances. Life — good, bad, indifferent — would have happened anyway.
She couldn’t have stopped it.
Through her strangled throat, she whispered, “It’s not my fault.”
She’d been right to fear those words. The lie that had been growing inside her for a decade tore free and took chunks of her with it. She’d spent ten years blaming herself because believing she could have changed the outcome hurt less than accepting life was randomly unfair and cruel and everything could be lost in an instant, snatched away by forces as unfeeling as a lightning strike.
She clung when Lex wrapped his arms around her. His chest muffled her sobs. He hadn’t said anything she hadn’t told herself over and over again. He wasn’t the reason everything hurt, and she would never again push him away when holding him was a possibility.
She felt desolate, but the quality of the pain had changed. It remained to be seen if it was a better kind of pain.
Gin’s hand smoothed the tear-drenched fabric covering his heart. “You must be sick of me bawling all over you.”
Lex had claimed a chair and gathered her in his lap so she could bawl in comfort. “I hate that you have a reason to cry. I hate that I can’t do more for you.” His fingers curved around the back of her neck, willing into her all the support and protection he had to give. “But if you’re going to cry, I want to be here for you to do it on.”
Ruthlessly unromantic, she pointed out the tragic flaw in that plan. “You’re leaving in forty-eight hours.”
As if he could forget. “All part of my standard courtship ritual. Great first kiss — see you in three weeks. Thanks for the sex — catch you in two months. I love you — maybe we can get together again sometime next year.”
“That’s not what happened.”
Their first kiss lasted three days. They didn’t leave her apartment for a week when the sex was brand new. Her first I love you was followed by a two-month separation, but he made an event out of his and stuck around to make sure she was suitably impressed.
There was never enough time for him, though. “Felt like it to me. Every half inch of progress was immediately punished with a thousand miles of separation. Even when I had you all to myself around the clock for a week, I knew I’d be losing you soon. I was always under pressure to make time with me something you wouldn’t forget when you didn’t see me for three months.”
“Is that why everything you do has to be explosive, because you think it’s possible for me to forget anything about you?”
If only his ego could take the fall. “I do so many things I don’t want you to remember. I’d rather stand out in your memory as a bombastic idiot with good intentions than a guy who was obviously counting the minutes until he could escape from you and find a drink.”
She seized his jaw and forced him to meet her gaze, just as she had when that description first shamed him. “You hid your drinking from me so well, I rarely got a glimpse of it. Your addiction was never as overwhelming for me as it was for you. It was never how I defined you.”
It was difficult to remember no one could see the jockey riding his shoulders, sawing on the reins to steer him toward the nearest booze, whipping him when he didn’t run fast enough. His constant companion manifested to others only through his own contemptible behavior. “You thought I’d sabotage your movie.”
“Not because I remember you as someone who would hurt me. I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near the movie if I really believed you’d damage it. Too many people are depending on its success for me to put it in the hands of anyone I don’t trust absolutely.”
She could have chosen a thousand other composers but extended her trust to him. “You were afraid, though.”
“I was guilty. I owe you an act of revenge because I abandoned you
when you needed help the most. If you wanted to take a shot at me, I deserved it.”
Say it.
He’d brutalized her to force her to be honest with herself. She deserved the same honesty from him, even if he was still a long way from having the right words to explain it. “Being abandoned by you was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
She shrank in his arms because he couldn’t have chosen worse words.
“Not because I wouldn’t have made a deal with the devil to have you hold my hand through it all.” He clasped her hand to his chest, right over his panic-paced heart. This was far from his first bad beginning. Gin, of all people, would give him a chance to get back on the path — preferably a less explosive, bombastic path. “I realized that day in the hospital that we both expected you to save me.”
“Instead, I made you worse.”
She’d said the same thing five years ago, and he still couldn’t wrap his head around how far it was from the truth. “I had my first beer at eight. I was on hard liquor by fourteen. I fell apart when I did because of two decades of cumulative damage, not because of anything to do with you. In fact, since I never wanted you and Drunk Lex to meet, all the time I spent with you was a trial run of sobriety.”
“But not enough to save you.”
“That wasn’t your job, and dragging you into my addiction only made you another hostage. I was fiercely glad you got away so it couldn’t hurt you anymore.”
He’d never felt more alone and hopeless, but at least Gin was safe. He blamed his broken heart on the alcohol and developed a seething hatred for the enemy, which fueled him through a lot of weak moments. “Having everything a man could ever want didn’t fix what was wrong with me. When I had nothing left but a broken body and a lot of time to reflect on what I’d lost and why, I discovered how much I want to live, even broken and empty. I had clarity for the first time in my life, and I don’t think it was just the lack of booze. I needed the emptiness.”
Her fingers grazed the approximate location of the claw marks inked onto his chest.
