by Lila Dubois
“I didn’t hurt her,” the man said. He touched his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at the blood. “I’m not the one you want to hurt.”
“Then who is?” Tim barely recognized his own voice—it was a snarl as deep as the wolves’.
“She’ll have to tell you herself.”
“Why don’t you tell me? You don’t show up here with my woman, hurting and damn near dead, without telling me what you did to her.”
“Your woman? What an American thing to say.”
His light tone enraged Tim. As he took a half step forward, Caera coughed. Tim whirled to her. She coughed again, and Tim lifted her upper body onto his lap, unsure what else to do.
“I did nothing to her,” the man in the doorway said, “except give her a job in a place that holds many secrets.”
Tim looked up at the man, then at the wolves, which had retreated into the hall. Now that they were in the light, he could see that they were dogs. Really big dogs.
“You’re the owner.”
“Yes. Seamus O’Muircheartaigh.”
Struggling to find patience, Tim asked, “What happened to her?”
“She was strangled.”
Rage blinded Tim, but he fought it down. “Who? Who did it?”
Seamus shook his head. “Not who. What.”
Tim looked down at her, then back at Seamus. “I don’t understand.”
Caera coughed again, then moaned, her eyes fluttering.
“It’s no matter,” Seamus said, “because she understands.”
With that, he closed the door, leaving a bewildered, frightened Tim sitting on the bed, clutching Caera as if he’d never let her go.
She hurt. That was Caera’s first thought when she woke from her faint. Her second was Tim. She could smell him, feel the heat of his body. She was lying with her head on him, and his arms were wrapped around her.
“Tim.” Her voice was harsh and scratchy, as if she were sick with the flu.
“Oh God, Caera.”
He bent over her, his cheek touching hers. Tears sprang to her eyes. It felt so good to be held by him.
“When I saw you, I thought for a moment…”
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She kissed his cheek, his jaw, reassuringly.
“Your neck looks bad. We should go to the hospital.”
“And tell them what?” Tim helped her sit up. She gratefully accepted the glass of water he offered her. Her throat felt better by the moment, and the water was blessedly cool. “Tell them that I was strangled by a ghost?”
“Uh.” Tim looked at her with an expression on his face that she could only describe as resigned.
Caera laughed. An hour ago, she’d felt like she’d never laugh again, and now here she was, curled up with the man she loved, laughing.
Only one thing stood in their way.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Caera said. “But first, I’d better explain this.” She touched her neck.
After another few sips of water, Caera told Tim what had happened in the garden. When she described the feeling of tightening the noose around her neck, smelling the wax from the candles in the church and hearing the clatter of the bench as she kicked it out from under her feet to hang herself, Tim hugged her so tight she thought her ribs would break, but she didn’t complain.
In the cheery light of the bedside lamp, her story seemed like a nightmare or hallucination. If not for the fact that Seamus had been there, had seen the ghost and rescued her from it, Caera might have wondered if she’d imagined it.
After she finished her story, Tim sat silently on the edge of the bed. He rubbed the back of his head with the palm of one hand, then got up and paced the room.
“Let me see if I’ve got this.”
Caera lay her head back, content to just watch him.
“That guy Seamus thinks that one of the reasons you came to work here is because this scary ghost girl drew you here, and she drew you here because you remind her of herself.”
“That’s what he said. I don’t know if I believe it.”
“Either way, the ghost chick attacked you, and you ended up living through her breaking up with her boyfriend and then killing herself after her boyfriend died.”
“Yes.”
Tim dropped heavily onto the bed. “That’s…wow.”
“It sounds crazy.”
“No, it sounds scary.” He frowned at her. “Don’t go in the garden by yourself, ever again.”
“I won’t.”
“How does your throat feel now?”
“Much better.”
Tim tipped her chin up, examining her neck. “The marks are almost gone.”
“I’m glad.”
They were silent for a moment, then Tim said, “Listen, Caera, about what I did. I’m s—”
“Tim, wait. There’s something I need to tell you.”
It was time to tell him the full truth about her past and what she’d done. Though only yesterday the idea had terrified her, she now realized that the worst thing would be to punish them both by letting it stand in the way of their happiness.
“I told you some of what I did, when I was seventeen.”
“You ran away with a Spanish musician, thinking you were going to be his opening act, but instead he was just the bass player in a metal band.”
“Yes, but there’s more to it than that. When I left, I didn’t think we were just tour partners. I thought we were in love. I was a virgin until I met him, and I thought that having sex and going to Europe were just the first steps to getting married. I imagined that by the time I came home, I’d be famous, rich and married.”
It hurt to think about the naïve girl she’d been. As a woman grown, Caera ached for that girl.
“I felt so stupid, so betrayed when I found out that he wasn’t the musician, or the man, I’d thought he was.
“It wasn’t long before I hated myself. I realized quickly that I’d made a mistake, but I was too proud to call my parents and ask for help getting away. I thought I could still get what I wanted from him.
“They were like any band. There was lots of alcohol, drugs. I was sleeping with him, and each time I liked it less and less but didn’t say anything. Part of me still thought that maybe he loved me, that he lied to me because he wanted me close.”
She cleared her throat, and Tim refilled her water cup from the bathroom.
“Thank you. On the day that I should have started university, I fell apart. I could have been in a class at Trinity, studying music, making friends, and instead I was sitting alone in a hotel room in Budapest. I was so angry with everything, especially myself. Every night they partied and every night I turned down the alcohol, the drugs.
“That night I didn’t. I took two ecstasy and drank rum for the first time.”
“Shit.”
This was the part that was hard to say, that was hard to admit, even to herself. “I liked it. I liked the way it made me feel.
“The next night I did it again, and again after that. The other men in the band would laugh and cheer me on. Soon I was the biggest partier in the group. It took less than a month for me to move from E to heroin and cocaine.”
Tim’s face was blank. She wanted to draw back the words, but he deserved the truth, not only about her, but about why she now behaved the way she did.
“I was using needles, until one night when someone slammed into me while I was shooting up and it ripped open my vein. I nearly died from blood loss. I went back to snorting and smoking and would tell anyone who listened that the high wasn’t as good, complaining about it the way normal people complained about a bad selection of fruit and veg at the store.”
She rolled the glass between her palms. Sometimes, alone at night when she was sad, she craved the euphoric nothingness that drugs brought.
“When I was high, nothing mattered, everything was great.” She took a steadying breath. “I started fucking them, all of them.”
“Caera.”
“Don’t think I was a victim. I was willing. Before every concert, I’d blow them, one right after another. That’s why I pulled away from you that day. I reveled in it all. Nothing mattered to me except feeling good, and sex made me feel good, same as drugs.”
“You were a kid. They shouldn’t have exposed you to that.”
“Maybe, but it wasn’t just the guys in the band I was sleeping with. We met other bands, club promoters. Anyone who was down to party, I was game.
“I don’t actually know how many people I slept with. I don’t know their names or where we were when we had sex. I have vague memories of someone videotaping sex one time, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. I know there are nude photos of me, photos of me smoking and snorting.”
She met Tim’s eyes, wanted him to know that she was done hiding this part of her past.
“That’s why I can never have a music career. It would only be a matter of time before these things would come out. Even if I were a rock star, those photos could ruin me, and no one wants a harp player, or traditional singer, with a past as a drug and sex addict.”
Tim rubbed his head, stared at his feet.
Caera’s throat tightened with sadness, but she kept going. She’d finish this story.
“One night, we were doing coke and drinking, just me and the band, in a hotel room. A hotel room like any other, a night like any other. But that night, one of them said something odd. They said that I had been a good choice for band girl. I asked what they meant, and they explained that they took turns finding girls to bring with them, that the girls were meant to be shared and that they preferred to find virgins so they didn’t have to worry about AIDS.
“Until that point, part of me still believed that he’d brought me because he thought I was beautiful, special and talented. At the very least I thought I was there because he wanted me—and part of me had wanted to make him suffer by fucking his friends. Yes, he’d lied to me, but that was to get me to come with him, so I excused it. It wasn’t until then that I realized that I’d never been more than sex to him, and that getting me to come with them was a game, a game he’d won.
“Strangely, it was only after I went wild, drinking and doing drugs, that they valued me. I was fun, I’d have sex with anyone, and I’d try anything. They loved that. They spent the rest of the night talking about other girls they’d had as ‘band girl’. They mocked these girls who’d refused to have sex with more than one of them or who were so inexperienced and bad in bed that they’d leave them behind when the tour moved on.
“Hearing that sobered me, and I hadn’t been sober in a long time. I had time to think about where I was and what I’d done, and I disgusted myself. I took half a bottle of pills, snorted two lines of coke and washed it all down with Jäger, and then fucked each of them, one right after the other, until I was numb inside and out.
“When they were asleep, I went out on the balcony, ready to throw myself off. I’d ruined my life, and there would be no one to mourn me. But I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking that suicide was a mortal sin, and that if I did it, I’d never see my family in Heaven. I’d committed too many sins to count, but that one I couldn’t.
“I left the next day. I found a church—I didn’t know where else to go. They kept me safe, helped me get to a shelter that protected me while I detoxed, while I screamed and cursed God and myself for what had happened to me. When I left there, I had nothing but clothes and the money they gave me. From there, I started working my way home. It was easier than I had any right to expect, because no matter how large or small the place, there’s an Irish pub, and they were always willing to take me on. Work in pubs turned to work in hotels. Eventually I found my way home, but I wasn’t the person who’d left. I’d destroyed my dreams. My relationships with family and friends were long dead.
“I knew I could never sing again professionally, knew I would never fall in love or get married, though I’d tested clean, thank God. I accepted that…until you came. You made me want things I shouldn’t, made me remember what it was like to be alive.”
“Caera…”
“I know this changes things, but you had the right to know.”
She sighed, her story over. She felt hollow, as if the telling had emptied out her heart and soul.
Tim was sitting on the edge of the bed near the foot, while she was curled up at the head. When he stood, her heart clenched. He was going to leave. She could live with that, because now she’d know that she hadn’t let her own hurt and past stand between them.
Tim didn’t leave. Instead, he dropped to one knee at the head of the bed and took both her hands in his.
“Caera Cassidy, I love you and will always love you. This changes nothing.”
Caera smiled even as tears fill her eyes. “Tim, I have no right to expect this.”
“Loving isn’t about who has the right to be loved or who deserves to be loved. I love you. Ta meh, something something.”
She laughed. It felt good.
“Ditto,” she said with a smile.
“I love you too, now and always.”
Their lips met in a warm, soft kiss. Caera leaned away to say, “But now you understand why I cannot sing? It would ruin your reputation if I were part of your record.”
“Caera, my sweet Caera. No one would believe that a beautiful, innocent Irish folk singer had a dirty past. Even if they did see the pictures. And honestly, it’s not that big a deal. Ireland is a bit conservative, so maybe it would cause a scandal here, but the rest of the world wouldn’t really care about some naked pictures.”
“But…”
“I’m going to guess that you didn’t look the way you do now.”
“Well, no, I’d cut off my hair. And dyed it blonde, then green.”
“Even if there were a picture of you holding your passport up for all the world to see your name, people wouldn’t believe. Plus, we’d tell them it was photoshopped.”
“But the men I had sex with, they knew my name.”
“If you don’t remember theirs, why would they remember yours? I’m assuming they were as high and drunk as you were.”
Caera stared at Tim, utterly astonished. He’d taken her greatest fear and shrunk it to a little thing.
And he was probably right.
“It’s a risk,” she stammered, struggling to come to grips with the idea that her past really wasn’t an insurmountable barrier.
“Getting in a car is a risk, eating sushi is a risk, falling in love is a risk. I do all three.”
“Tim, I don’t…I’ve spent so long being afraid.”
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’ll protect you.”
Caera’s mind was going a mile a minute. “We’re going to record an album?”
“Yes. We’re going to record an album.”
“But where? I have a job. And what if we want to live together, where will we go? You have a life in America.”
“Do you really want to figure this all out at 4 A.M.?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Tim climbed onto the bed with her. “First, the album. There’s got to be a recording studio somewhere in Ireland. I can work with any engineer, so we’ll record it here.
“As for where we’ll live, well, when we’re touring in Europe, we’ll live here. If we’re touring in America, we can live in Boston.”
“Touring? But I have a job.”
“If you don’t want to tour, you don’t have to, but I’d rather you tour with me.”
“Tour,” Caera savored the word. “We’d go on a music tour.”
“Yes. Though we have to plan and record the album first.”
“The album. Our album.”
“Yep. Anything else?” Tim yawned in her ear.
Caera leapt out of bed. “How can you be tired? We’re making an album. We need to plan.”
“Ugh, what is it you people say? Jaysus.”
“You said ballads, right? I have a cassette copy of The Dubliners’ Irish Bal
lads. That’s a good place to start. And then—”
“Caera.”
“Yes?”
“Come here.”
He opened his arms.
The man she loved, the man who’d helped her find the dawn after years of night, was waiting for her. Caera climbed into his arms, pillowing her head against his chest so she could hear his heartbeat. This was nice. This was good.
“Woman, I can hear you thinking.”
Caera laughed. “I love you.”
He kissed her, then whispered, “Ditto.”
About the Author
Lila Dubois is a tech writer by day and a romance writer by night. She’s living her own version of a romance novel with her Irish Farm Boy, who she imported to Los Angeles. Having spent extensive time in France, Egypt, Turkey, Ireland and England, Lila speaks five languages, none of them—including English—fluently.
To learn more about Lila, please visit www.liladubois.net or email her at [email protected].
Look for these titles by Lila Dubois
Now Available:
Sealed with a Kiss
Calling the Wild
Monsters in Hollywood
Lights, Camera…Monster
My Fair Monster
Gone with the Monster
Have Monster, Will Travel
Coming Soon:
Monsters in Hollywood
A Monster and a Gentleman
The Last of the Monsters
Glenncailty Castle
The Fire and the Earth
She’d always heard Hollywood was full of monsters.
She didn’t know they meant actual monsters.
Have Monster, Will Travel
© 2012 Lila Dubois
Monsters in Hollywood, Book 4
All of Hollywood is talking about Calypso Production’s new top-secret action movie, and Joanna is tapped to be the Production Designer. There’s just one big issue: the lead actors are monsters. Literally.
Bound by tradition and discipline, Tokaki’s clan of shapeshifers has maintained the old ways even as they’ve retreated from the human race. When members of another clan come up with a plan to expose and explain their hidden existence, he agrees to help. As the warrior who trains all others, he knows how to inflict both the maximum, and minimum, amount of damage. Because of this experience he’s asked to become something they call a “stunt coordinator”.
