by Jan Bowles
Curiosity getting the better of him, he lightly ran his fingers over the badly damaged flesh. He desperately wanted to know what had happened to Paige, and maybe his question was about to be answered, because without opening her eyes, she quietly said, “Ask, you know you want to.”
With her lids still shut almost as though it helped her to speak, she continued, “The specialist plastic surgeon told me the scars have to heal for at least another six months before any scar revisions can happen. Even then I was informed that he and his team couldn’t work miracles. My nipple is too badly damaged to be saved, but Mr. Jackson, my surgeon, told me they can tattoo one in place that will fool most people provided they don’t get too close.”
At least it was a start. Paige was finally opening up to him. Her beautiful face wore an intense frown, and her eyes remained scrunched tightly shut, letting him know just how difficult she found this intimate confession. There was a temptation to fire a barrage of questions at her. How did it happen? Who did this to you? Was it an accident? The list was endless, but he was smart enough to realize that this approach would only cause her to clam up. Instead, he’d coax and gently encourage her to confide in him. Only then would things become clear.
“You sure you want to talk about this, Paige?”
She opened her eyes then reached up and touched her cool fingertips to his lips. “I think I’m ready. You seeing me like this, and not judging me in any way, makes me feel it’s time to unburden myself.
“I can see it in your eyes, Leon. You’re wondering how I came to be like this.”
“Yes, I can’t deny it, but don’t feel you have to tell me right now.”
“Thanks.” She stroked a hand down his cheek. “But I want to. Maybe you’ve been thinking I was involved in a bad car smash.”
He shook his head. “Possibly, but somehow I don’t think so.”
Paige drifted her fingers over her breast, following the line of the unsightly scar. “Not convinced, huh? In that case, perhaps you think this fucking mess is the result of an operation that went badly wrong?” The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable.
He shook his head again, and trying to lighten the mood, said, “Well, if that’s the case, I hope the prick had his medical license revoked.”
Catching his humor, she briefly laughed then, stopping abruptly, said, “Me, too. Butcher.”
He saw tears gathering in the corners of her mesmerizing green eyes. “Come here, beautiful.” Feeling a sense of compassion he’d never experienced with another woman, he pulled her naked body on top of his, and wrapped her in his embrace.
She lowered her head and sniffled against his chest, and he felt her tears mingle with his body hair, until her muffled voice came back at him. “Here’s a crazy one for you, boss. Maybe you think I’m some emotionally unstable woman and did it to myself. Self-harmers are a dime a dozen these days.”
He rolled over so she lay beneath him. “Never. You wouldn’t do that.” She was coming up with some disturbing scenarios, making him believe that the real reason for her distress was even worse than he could imagine.
“You’re right. It’s none of those things. Maybe I… Oh, fuck it, I don’t know any more. I just don’t know anything anymore.” He sensed frustration was creeping into her thoughts, and she suddenly seemed bewildered by it all.
Realizing she stood balanced on the vulnerable precipice between telling him what happened or suddenly changing the subject, he seized the fleeting opportunity.
He rolled onto his back again, taking her with him. Holding her gaze, he then cupped her beautiful elfin face in his hands and soothed, “Tell me, Paige. Tell me everything. You’ll feel so much better when you do. I promise.”
“I…I…oh God, I want to, Leon. I want to be rid of these frightening thoughts that run through my mind day and night. I don’t sleep well, and—”
“Shhh.” He saw her distress, because her eyes were unable to hide the hurt she so clearly felt. “Take as long as you want, baby. I’m right here beside you. Whatever it is, I promise I will never leave you.”
Trying to compose herself, she took several deep breaths. Unfortunately, she only partially succeeded, because her hands still trembled, and her lower lip quivered. “Nolan, he did this to me, the bastard. Fucking bastard.” The way she spat out the words left him in no doubt that Nolan, whoever the prick was, had harmed the lady he loved, and he felt anger seethe within him, boiling his blood as it bubbled to the surface.
“Nolan?”
She shook her head. “Don’t get angry, Leon. That won’t help me right now.”
He took a deep breath of his own. She was right, and in an attempt to relax, he placed his hands behind his head and lay back on the bed, staring at the ornate four-poster canopy above them. “Go on, little one. I’m listening.”
Obviously upset, she placed a shaking hand over her mouth. “He was…he was my boyfriend, and my Dom.”
“I see. I understand. Go on.” Actually, he didn’t understand a goddamn thing, but not wanting to spook her, he kept his voice barely a whisper.
“We were in a relationship for a year, and for the first nine months everything was fine. We’d discussed and agreed where my hard limits lay, and he was happy to respect them. Then…”
He watched her hand flutter nervously to her throat, and he knew he needed to be careful how he handled the situation. “Go on, baby, go on. I’m right here.”
“And then, over the period of a few weeks his personality slowly started to change. At first I thought it was just my imagination playing tricks, but as time went on, I realized that Nolan wasn’t the man I first thought him to be.”
He pulled her closer still, protecting her. “Do you want to explain?”
“Well, from early on in our relationship, I had a safeword, which I’d insisted upon.” He briefly saw embarrassment tinge her porcelain cheeks with a fetching red glow. “I would often use it during our more adventurous sex sessions, and for quite a long time, Nolan would immediately respect my wishes. At this point in our relationship, I didn’t feel unduly concerned for my safety, although the way he was wired up, he was naturally drawn to the darker side of the BDSM world.”
Leon saw it all unfolding before him. A Dom starts off with good intentions, but somewhere along the line loses the fucking plot and turns into an out-and-out sadist. Shithead. That was not what being a dominant was all about. Consensual sex, adhering to the limits set down by the sub, and a mutual respect for one another were the mark of a true dominant. He needed to hear the rest, but he guessed this Nolan guy had turned psycho.
She took a deep breath, and he knew she was preparing herself to say more. “We can never second-guess how life is gonna treat us, can we, Leon?”
He smiled and playfully tapped a finger to the end of her nose. “You got that right, Paige.”
She sighed out loud. “I suppose the tipping point came one beautiful, warm, sunny day in August. LA is a great place to live, and I was feeling happy and good about my life. Nolan seemed happy, too, although there was something about the look in his eyes that kind of scared me a little. I’ll spare you the details about the actual scene, Leon, because I find it embarrassing. You’re the man I love, and the last thing I want to do is talk about sex with a man who wasn’t fit to lick your boots. He’s a sick animal who is now history, and I’m not going to empower him.”
The way she spoke so stoically made Leon admire and respect her more than he already did. If that were possible. She’d suffered badly at the hands of some piece of crap nutjob, and although she clearly found it difficult to speak, he saw in her eyes a steely determination that told him she wasn’t about to let this sick fuck rule her life.
“In a nutshell, Leon, I used my safeword, and he ignored it. I used it again, and he ignored it for a second time. I then screamed, shouted, and begged him with my safeword, but the more I feared for my life, the more he looked down at me with a smile of pure malevolence. I know now what the face of evil lo
oks like.” She shivered in response to the image her mind had conjured up, and he wrapped his arms around her more tightly.
“Oh, baby, baby, baby. If only I’d been there, I could have saved you, and done the world a favor by killing the sadistic prick with my bare hands.”
She stroked her fingers through his hair and gazed lovingly into his eyes. “Oh, Leon, I know you would. Believe me, I know you would, and I’ll love you until my dying day for that.
“When he finally let me go, he tried to laugh the whole thing off, saying it was nothing more than rough sex.” She shook her head. “But it wasn’t. It was…what he did to me was…sadistic. His personality had flipped, and I immediately knew that I had to end our relationship right away.”
“How did he take it?”
“Huh, can you believe this. He started crying like a baby, and told me he was sorry, and that he didn’t know what had come over him. He then dropped to his knees and told me it would never happen again, begging me not to finish with him. Covered in bruises, and with blood pouring from my nose and down my chin, I felt sick to the stomach, and I threw him out of my apartment, making sure he gave me the key first. I thought that would be the last I’d ever see of him. I was wrong. There was worse to come. Far worse.”
“I’m guessing he wouldn’t leave you alone.”
“You guess right. As I went about my day as best I could, he would always be there in the background. Every bar I visited with friends, he’d be there. Every ball game, every shopping mall, every restaurant. Get the picture?”
“You got yourself a stalker.”
“And to show I wouldn’t be intimidated, I ignored him, dismissed him as a person of no significance whatsoever. Looking back, perhaps this was a mistake. He’d make a point of seeking me out when I was alone. He’d often raise his fingers in the shape of a gun and point them at me, execution style.” She laughed nervously. “Sometimes he’d draw his fingers across his own throat, letting me know I wasn’t out of his reach. This scared me, and that was when I decided I couldn’t do it on my own and called the cops.”
“The cops? How did that work out?”
She sighed again. “Sadly about how you’d expect. They told me LA was full of stalkers and nutjobs, and they simply didn’t have the manpower to check out every last one of them. They took my details, and his, and told me to get back to them if he escalated matters. With things as they stood, it was my word against his. He was invading my life. I couldn’t sleep well, and when I did, he was always in my dreams, forcing me to relive what he’d done to me.”
Leon saw distress and relief in her features. He figured that if she continued and got everything off her chest, the relief would finally outweigh the distress. That was the plan anyway. “Do you want to continue? You don’t have to.”
“The bastard did escalate things, too. I’d arrive home from work and find that my possessions had been moved around the apartment. A chair wasn’t where I left it, or the bed which I distinctly remembered making before I went out would be crumpled and in disarray. On more than one occasion I’d come home, only to find the TV blaring at full volume, and a hoard of angry neighbors waiting for me. This really scared me, and I went to the cops again. This time I was more insistent, and refused to leave until they told me they would put a stop to all this.”
“And what was their response this time?”
“Better. They paid him a visit and warned him off. The officer assigned the case told me they couldn’t do more than that, because they had no evidence to prove he’d been harassing me. Deputy Pearce even told me that Nolan came across as a real nice guy. He fooled a lot of people that way. Me included. Bastard.”
He held her more tightly in his arms. “That doesn’t surprise me, baby. In some ways this country was better when a man sorted out his own problems, rather than involve the cops.”
Paige studied him intensely. “Yeah, I can just see you with a six-shooter hanging low on your hip, taking out anyone who pissed you off. A man like you was made for the Wild West. I reckon you’d have been known as the Caparelli Kid.”
Leon laughed. “It might not be such a bad idea to return to the old days after all. Anyway, I take it the intervention by the cops amounted to jack shit.” He felt his blood pressure rising again as he spoke. If the LAPD had done something when Paige first contacted them, then she wouldn’t have been forced to go through the living hell that followed.
She snuggled closer. “Things went quiet for a week or two, and he stopped stalking me. That short respite away from the stress and strain of it all was the tonic I needed, and I felt like I was returning to my old self. Until…” She suddenly broke off in midsentence, and he watched her beautiful face mirror the abhorrent memories forming in her brain. “Oh, Leon.”
“Shhh, it’s all right. He’s never gonna hurt you while I’m around. I can promise you that. Go on, baby. Until?”
“Until the phone calls started.”
Jesus Christ, this guy was unrelenting. If he could only have fifteen minutes alone in a room with this fuck head, he’d break every bone in his worthless body, before sending him into the next world.
“Phone calls?”
She shook her head. “The first dozen or so he never spoke, but I knew it was him. For some crazy reason he wanted to punish me, so the calls would come at all times of the day and night. He’d often ring me at three, four, or five o’clock in the morning in an attempt to undermine and intimidate me.”
“Sick prick.”
“But that was his big mistake, because when my back is against the wall, Leon, I’m able to rise to the challenge and come out fighting, and this time I was one step ahead of him. When he finally decided to speak, which I knew he eventually would, I taped the conversations before changing my number and handing over the evidence to the cops.”
“Clever girl.”
“It was a turning point of sorts, because the evidence against him was irrefutable. Even hardened cops were sickened by what he said to me in those calls. What he wanted to do to me.” Her lower lip quivered, and her words were halting and shaky. “I don’t want to go into details right now, if that’s okay with you.”
She’d opened up to him about almost everything now, but the fact that she wouldn’t reveal the contents of the calls meant they were particularly abhorrent. Wanting to kill this guy, he clenched his hands into fists. He’d hurt him real bad first as payback for Paige. Then he’d kill him—slowly.
She wiped away a tear. “I’m sorry for being such a girl, but anyway, this meant the cops could charge him with harassment. I was there at the court hearing, and had to give evidence, much of it of a very personal nature. Standing up in front of strangers and baring my soul is not something I’d want to go through ever again.
“When it came to the summing up, the judge described Nolan as a particularly sick and depraved individual who showed a complete lack of empathy for his victim. Me. He then placed a restraining injunction on him, banning him from coming within one mile of me or contacting me in any way. Judge Butler also said that any breach of these conditions would result in a lengthy custodial sentence. I felt like jumping to my feet and cheering when he passed judgment, but instead, I found myself quietly weeping with relief. Crazy things, emotions.
“I thought the threat of going to prison had finally scared him off and brought him to his senses, because for the next three months I heard nothing from him. I can’t tell you how relieved I felt at the time. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.” She shrugged resignedly. “But of course we both know it didn’t end there.”
Leon sensed the main event was about to begin, because this ex-boyfriend of hers had continued to torment her. Even the threat of a spell behind bars with the murderers and sodomites as his cellmates hadn’t stopped him from coming back to terrorize Paige further.
He looked at her expectantly, and she sensed his expectation. “Leon, I’m not sure I can do this.”
He stroked her hair and
softly cooed. “You can. Believe me, you can.”
Paige shifted uneasily on the bed. “Memory is such a double-edged sword. We all love to recall and relive happy memories from our past. Our first bike. Our first boyfriend. Our first car. But remembering can sometimes bring back painful realities that we’d like to forget.” She lowered her head and in a whisper said, “This is one of those times.”
“I know, baby.”
“But you don’t, Leon. You don’t.”
“Tell me. Let me share your pain and despair.”
He heard her draw in a huge gulp of air before releasing a heart-wrenching sob.
“He branded me, Leon, like a steer, he branded me.”
Leon felt a cold chill run the length of his body as he visualized what Paige had gone through. His emotions were as fucked up as hers. He so wanted to soothe and protect her, and erase the painful memory from her mind as he cradled her in his arms. Instead, almost like an out-of-body experience, he watched himself rise from the bed, then pace up and down like a caged tiger before repeatedly smashing his fist into the solid stone wall of the villa. The blood ran unchecked down his hand and arm before dripping onto the floor. He guessed it was broken, but he didn’t feel a fucking thing.
Chapter Eleven
Stunned, Paige watched horrified as Leon smashed his fist against the wall once more. The sound it made was sickening, and she heard the unmistakable crack of breaking bones. It made her want to heave, but she managed to force the rising bile back down. He felt her pain, because he loved her so much. That was the biggest gift a man could ever give to a woman. Leon was a passionate guy, so she’d seen him angry before, but never so consumed with rage as he was now. His cheeks were flushed, his breathing fast, and despite his physical strength and fitness, she feared he could keel over with a coronary at any moment. For his own good, she needed to calm him down. It was obvious from his aggressive body language that his thoughts were focused on Nolan, because he repeatedly clenched and unclenched his fists, as though he wanted to beat the living shit out of him.
