Sara violently shaking, she pressed hard against the wall and was unable to escape. Her knees so weak, she did not think they would hold her up much longer.
“No. You’re the kind of girl who wouldn’t allow any man an IOU. So where is the cash, Bitch?”
Confusion slowed down the urgent need to vomit on his chest. “Wh-where is wh-what?”
Sara’s hot stinging tears couldn’t be held back; although, it was so much better that she did not have to look at his ugly face and those dark eyes boring snake venom into her.
He didn’t answer this, only gave her more riddles to play with, while his hand lowered from her neck and he set three disgusting fingers between her breasts, touching her at will.
Sara’s eyes were swimming in tears as her adrenaline burned the back of her throat. If he was going to rape her she wanted him to just get it over with. She knew fighting him was a lost cause, and there wasn’t anyone who would even care, other than her.
Why did she turn into such a fool and send Christian away?
“I—I have no clue about any money—I don’t know . . .” she stammered out.
“Oh, you have a clue sweetheart. I’ve been watching you at the restaurant. Playing your little cat and mouse game with all those lucky customers, waiting to pounce on just the right man.”
He kissed her again. Then, he viciously bit her bottom lip drawing blood.
Sara yelped, the pain so unexpected. She widened her eyes and the tears maintained their steady flow.
“You like it rough, don’t you, Bitch?”
“I—I’ll . . .”
The word ‘scream’ didn’t make it past her bleeding lip. The guy bent his elbow, pulled his arm back and punched her right in the face. Sara dropped to the floor like a sack of bricks, her cheekbone screaming in pain.
“And you’re gonna get it rough,” he added, stepping back to undo his belt.
Through the stars in her eyes, Sara inched nearer the wall, desperate for this horrible man to disappear into thin air. She wouldn’t ask God for help. He had others to protect, others who needed Him more.
She wasn’t even on God’s list of concerns . . . at all.
She’d never been on His list.
Sara gingerly reached out and her fingers clamped onto the bottom of a wooden chair as the pain knife-sliced through her skull and cheekbone. By now the man’s pants were at his knees.
He stepped back, laughing at what he’d done, touching himself with an evil glaze to his eyes.
Oh, Christian . . . please come back . . .
****
Christian felt the remorse reach its sharpened claws into his innards and yank harder than ever before. He pulled over to the side of the road as quickly as possible, wrenching on the vehicles’ door handle, then gaining awaited freedom. A half second later, he was bent over and puking out a hastily eaten supper onto the blacktop.
Jesus! What had he done? Why did he step back and simply allow her to throw him out like that?
The putrid mess splattered on the pavement showed him exactly what he’d done. He’d abandoned someone when they most needed him to stay strong.
Shaking violently, Christian staggered back to his car. He then sat on the plush seat for a long while. His eyes closed, his head tipped back against the rich leather, he dragged in deep breaths, flaring his nostrils. Surely he wouldn’t be hurting this badly if what he’d done had been right, even just?
His eyes opened and they darted to the cell phone lying on the passenger seat. The energy it took to reach over and grab the small phone was overwhelming.
Christian gathered in another, deeper breath, and this time he held the air in his lungs for as long as he could. That breath was filled with the stringent but unusually pleasant smell of pine. Oh, God! Could he do it? Turn a blind eye? Pretend she meant nothing to him?
Right or wrong, he had too.
With a slide of his finger, he opened the connection to service. The lump in his throat came back with a vengeance as his contact list appeared on the small screen. Five agonizing seconds later his call was answered.
“Here me out first . . .,” he directed into the miniscule mouthpiece, reclosing his eyes to another jab of pain in his gut.
“Thought you said enough to me while we sat on opposite sides of a desk,” the man answered.
“Please, Ceril? Give me the respect our long-time friendship deserves.”
Chief Berken could be heard sitting down; the resounding creak of old leather rather loud. “Okay. I’m hearing you out. But as far as long-time friendship goes . . .”
Christian blew out the last of his breath, his lungs begging for more. “Ceril, I . . .”
What was stopping him? This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? He knew it was; he just didn’t want it to be the right thing at this point.
“I ain’t got all day, Christian,” the chief added.
Oddly, Christian felt these words as if they’d somehow wrapped icy fingers in a death grip around his soul.
“About, um . . .” Damn! Why was this turning into such a bloody, complicated mess?
“About Ms. Ruby, Reverend Mohr?”
Christian flinched, lowering the phone from his ear. He’d given up being any savior of any sort, mere hours ago. In slow motion the phone went back to his ear.
“She’s going to get caught eventually. So wouldn’t be easier on her, and by the way you’re acting Christian, easier on you as well, if you just tell me where she is?” drowned out all other thoughts.
Christian swallowed hard, re-lowering the phone. A heartbeat later he severed the connection. How much easier would remorse filled with regret feel? The answer to this slapped him in the face. Hard.
Not easy at all.
He tossed the phone onto the seat and whipped the car into a U-turn, heading back toward the motel. The cell phone kept ringing the hour it took to get there, and each time it caught up on voicemail as he redirected his vehicle into a parking lot suddenly swarming with police vehicles.
His hands clamped so hard to the steering wheel, they’d almost cut off the blood flow to the rest of his arms, as he watched in horror a bruised and obviously beaten woman escorted in handcuffs to the back of a squad car.
Christian wrenched himself free of his vehicle, but he was stopped by an officer before the other squad car door closed and locked Sara inside. My God! She looked as if she needed an ambulance, not arrest.
What in the world was happening here?
“Reverend Mohr, I presume?” the man holding him back asked.
Christian nodded, as the mute horror shamed him into silence.
How—why did she get so badly beaten?
“Chief Berken said you’d be joining us soon enough,” the officer added.
“Soon enough?” Christian squeaked out, daring a glance at the officer.
“Chief Berken had you tracked, Reverend,” the officer admitted. “The minute you called him he set out the coordinates to where you were and where Sara Ruby might be. We never thought we would find what we had upon getting here. I’ll be quite frank. We’d thought you’d be here with her.”
“Find?”
Lord, why was only a one-word answer coming out of his mouth?
Christian knew the answer to this as two other officers dragged out in handcuffs a strange man from Sara’s motel room; the guy looking dazed and with a huge gash across his face of which was bleeding profusely.
Christian’s gut tightened so strongly that nothing was going to release the pain. The guy was saying she asked for it.
“The manager heard the screams, but he thought it was like all the others. The one and only time we didn’t get the call. Thank God a passerby wasn’t as convinced her screams weren’t real and called 911. This could have been much worse.”
Christian’s eyes darted to the squad car containing Sara. Her head was bowed to her chin and the tears were streaming down her face. She wouldn’t look up. In fact, she seemed dazed, disoriented, not sure where she was.
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“What happened here?”
He’d almost admitted to his being in the room only hours before; bit hard on his tongue to hold the confession back.
The officer sent him a shrug. “Same as what always happens here. Guy barged in looking to rob the room’s occupant, he found Ms. Ruby still inside, and thinking he’d won the jackpot he tried to rape her instead, but was stopped just in the nick of time by a resourceful woman using a chair over the creeps’ skull. Thank God she was still coherent enough else this would have been a real mess. We’re still waiting for the ambulance.”
Christian tried to pull out of the officer’s grasp. “I need to go to her. I need . . .”
“What you need to do is come with me, Reverend Mohr. Chief Berken says he wants to see you, pronto, and unless I want to lose my job, I’m not to let you go.”
Christian was then hauled to the officers’ vehicle none too gently and shoved onto the back seat, locked in as a criminal would be as the door closed.
His eyes searched for Sara. She tipped her head up and looked his way. That briefest of contact ripped out the rest of his heart.
It didn’t take a brilliant man to see she thought this as his fault—his . . . and God’s.
Oh, if he’d only stayed . . .
Chapter Twenty-one
Two days later, Sara Ruby arrested for vehicular manslaughter, hit and run, she was carted off to the county jail awaiting sentencing. Of course, with faked ID in her possession, all they’d needed was her fingerprints.
Five months later, her life fell apart again. She was sentenced to seven years penance in the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Missouri. Christian hadn’t shown his face at the arraignment or sentencing.
Did she really think he would?
Then again, Sara truly hadn’t wanted to look upon his face, witness the hurt in his eyes, knowing he could have easily made love to her again if she hadn’t told him to ‘go to hell’.
She wouldn’t have been so badly beaten and nearly raped had he stayed with her, and for one lousy second had left his precious protective God behind.
Sara could barely look at her reflection in any mirror, knowing she’d destroyed a man’s values and beliefs.
Whatever happened to forgiveness of one’s sins? Whatever happened to caring about the fellow human down on his or her luck?
Four defense lawyers tried their best to prove it an accident, as well that during the accident the conditions were unpreventable. But they all failed her; more than likely, due to the nature and length of time that passed between Beale’s death and Sara’s arrest, and the nature in which she’d tried to hide her crime by sinking her car into a lake.
The State had a solid case against her, Sara could not slip from their grasp, and all she’d ever wanted was for Christian to say he’d made love to her . . . that it wasn’t just sex, and that the horror just hours later hadn’t occurred.
He didn’t do that for her. Christian didn’t show Sara any act of kindness at all.
It was bad enough she’d been seconds away from being . . . well, worse, it was Christian who spilled her secret to the police.
Why else would have come back upon the very second she put into the back of a squad car instead of an ambulance?
****
My dearest Sara,
Sara read on, but she knew her heart was not in any of the words penned onto paper. She closed her eyes to the pain, reopened them quickly, and started reading once again.
I know it has been quite some time since my last letter was written . . .
This too she did not want to read.
Of course, it had been quite some time. He wrote her only two lousy letters. One came to her when she was first sent to this place. The next was the one in her hand. Each letter separated by nearly six years of incredible heartache.
Time hadn’t stood still between his letters.
I simply wanted to let you know I forgave you, and I look forward to your release . . .
Was he fucking kidding? Forgave her? When she had yet to find any forgiveness for him?
Sara’s release was in three days. The Parole board agreed to her reduction of sentence if incorporated with two hundred hours of community service. Every day, for one full year, holidays excluded, she would be serving an hour to those who were in need. First up was the local soup kitchen. Although, how the justice system felt a reduction of only six months as reasonable, was beyond thought. But it was six months she did not have to be locked in a cage and her feet could finally touch the silky caress of green grass.
Her first endeavor would be to lie upon the ground and sink as far into the earth as she could get.
I will be sending a car to pick you up . . .
Oh, Hell no! Sara was going to make a huge stink about that, if he so much as dared.
No way in bloody hell was she going to get inside any car that man sends here, simply for him to be able to appease his conscience. She would rather walk two thousand miles through the white hot flames of Hell, than come to within ten feet of such an unkind jerk. He’d made his point crystal six years ago. She was nothing to him, and he was nothing to her—as it should be.
Reverend Mohr could just take his good deed, his bloody damn letters, and his bloody damn car and shove them right up his bloody damn . . .
“Sara?”
Her name called by an unknown voice had her setting down the letter onto her cot.
“Sara Ruby?”
Sara turned her head toward the woman asking this of her.
“Who wants to know?” She wasn’t scheduled for any visits out of visiting hours since her release due in so few days.
“Well, it would seem I do,” the woman supplied.
Staring at her through steel bars the woman looked oddly out of place inside gray prison walls. Where gray the norm around here, she had on a smart, navy blue business suit. Her auburn hair was piled neatly into a huge bun atop her head. And the heels on her feet were six inches high, if not more.
Of course, this could be due to the fact the woman looked about only about five feet tall and needed the advantage high heels gave her in life.
Sara could not place the face.
The woman had in her right hand a leather briefcase. In her left was a large manila envelope.
“The guard told me I could find you in the fourth cell down.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sara demanded. She’d lost her respect for niceties the moment they’d carted her off to prison.
She could have said ‘who the fuck are you?’ but her heart wasn’t in cursing today. ‘Hell’ was good enough. She’d gotten used to the word Hell while stuck in it.
“I’m sorry. Where are my manners?” the woman offered.
Up your pinched ass?
Sara didn’t say as much, but she certainly thought this to be the rightful place. She’d regrettably turned into a hardened individual in six short years. She no longer thought kind thoughts toward others—for a damn good reason.
“Are you another state appointed lawyer they want to stick me with, or my parole officer who I am going to have so much fun with?”
The woman shook her head. “My name is Tina. Tina Mohr.”
Sara flinched back. Holy Mother of . . . !
What the hell! Was this for real?
Sara was on her feet within seconds and closing the huge gap between her and the well-dressed Tina Mohr. She placed her hands onto the steel and clamped her fingers tightly to the cold metal. “And I care why?”
The woman looked startled by her brittle attitude.
“Um, yes, he said you might feel this way.” She’d even taken a step back as if Sara could come through the bars and hurt her.
Sara dropped her hands to her sides, turned, and stormed back to her cot. With shaking hands, she picked up Christian’s letter, carried it over to Mrs. Mohr, slid the paper through the bars, and told the woman exactly what was eating away at her insides.
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��Take this back to him. I don’t want it here. I don’t want it near me. I would have flushed it—” Her voice rose. “—if not completely frowned upon within this dreaded establishment.”
Sara and the hall guards weren’t exactly on friendly terms after her last attempt to flush wads of paper and get the hall on lockdown for a few hours.
The woman staring at her wouldn’t take the letter. She instead smiled at Sara.
“In fact, he said you would specifically react in this way. He also said that I was to wait it out.”
Sara’s brows rose. “Oh? And did he say, as well, that I would inform you I really don’t give a shit to what he has to say? Or what you’re supposed to do about it, for that matter?”
Another smile came her way.
“Yes. He did.”
Sara glared at Tina Mohr’s face. “What do you want from me, Mrs. Mohr?” She was guessing at his married to the woman, since there was a rather significant diamond ring on the woman’s left finger—and she did seem his type. The full-of-it was a dead giveaway.
“I don’t want anything from you. I came here only to give this to you.”
She wanted to hand Sara the manila envelope through the bars, but Sara wouldn’t cooperate. Instead, she childishly placed her hands behind her back and glared through the cold steel. This seemed to unsettle the well-dressed Mrs. Mohr.
“Yes. Well then.” Mrs. Mohr cleared her throat, searching for composure. “I would guess I just leave all of this with the guards then.”
Mrs. Mohr made to turn away and do just that.
“Wait.”
She turned back, another smile set to her lips. “But you just said . . .”
Sara held out her hand grudgingly. Mrs. Mohr then set the envelope onto her palm. She told Sara she had more, and that she was to read what was inside all before her release.
If what was inside the large envelope came from Christian, Sara had no desire to read any of it; the urge to flush so overwhelming, a sudden smile filled her face.
“And it is Mrs. Mohr . . . though not what you think.”
Sara startled, she watched Mrs. Mohr open her briefcase, pull out two manila envelopes from inside that case, then hand them over to the lowly paid guard directly behind her back.
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