by Linda Howard
She wasn’t fully aware of him, certainly not with the hyperawareness she normally felt around him. He was just there, like part of the furniture. The grief and pain that filled her blotted out everything except a peripheral acknowledgment of his presence.
“Which do you want?” he asked. “Cereal or bagel?”
He wanted her to decide? What difference did it make what she ate? “Bagel,” she finally said listlessly, because it wouldn’t involve having to deal with a spoon.
He toasted the bagel and even spread the cream cheese on it, then put it on a saucer in front of her. She tore off a piece and chewed. And chewed. The bite kept growing bigger and bigger in her mouth until she thought she was going to choke.
She was sitting here eating just as if she hadn’t given her son away yesterday.
She shoved back from the table, overturning her chair. Catlike, Diaz whirled to face her, balanced to respond to any attack she might level at him. In a sudden burst of blind fury, she grabbed from the dish drainer the pot he’d used to heat the soup the night before, and threw it as hard as she could at the wall. It hit with a clang and crashed back to the floor. She grabbed the spoons and threw them, then the bowls. The bowls broke with a satisfying crash.
Sobbing, she wrenched open the cabinet doors and began grabbing out whatever she could reach: plates, saucers, bowls, cups, and glasses. She threw each one with as much force as she could muster, screaming in wordless agony as she hurled plate after plate, sending shards of glass flying around the room.
Diaz didn’t move except when a thrown missile came flying too close; then he merely ducked a little to the side and stood his ground. Silently he watched her systematically destroy the kitchen, staying out of her way until the enraged burst of energy was abruptly spent and she collapsed to her knees, sobbing.
Then he picked her up and carried her back to her bedroom, placing her on the bed. Milla curled on her side and cried herself to sleep.
When she woke several hours later and stumbled out of the room, the kitchen had been cleaned and swept, and once again Diaz was gone.
He finally returned, carrying a cardboard box containing a mismatched set of dishes, including saucers and coffee cups. He went back outside and returned with another box, from which he unloaded about a dozen drinking glasses and several bowls. Nothing matched. He unpacked everything, then put it all in the dishwasher and turned it on.
Her head pounded with a dull headache, her eyes were sore and swollen, and her throat ached. “I’m sorry,” she croaked.
“No problem.”
She took a breath. “Where did you get the dishes?”
“I found a yard sale. It was either that or drive to Kitty Hawk to a Wal-Mart store.”
Considering how deserted the Outer Banks were this time of year, finding a yard sale was nothing short of a miracle. In a moment of clarity, she had a sudden image of this dark-clothed predator prowling through a yard sale and buying up old dishes. He wouldn’t even notice how out of place he seemed, but anyone else who happened to be there certainly would have.
He made sandwiches and she ate hers, then she put on her sneakers and coat and headed out to the beach. She walked for what felt like hours, with a cool breeze blowing in her face and her mind so numb she could barely think. Not thinking was good. At last she turned around to go back, and when she did she stopped short at the sight of Diaz following her. He had stayed back about thirty or forty yards, giving her privacy but still watching over her.
He stopped and waited. He had his hands stuffed in the pockets of a black jacket, and his dark eyes were narrowed against the breeze as he watched her approach. She knew it was irrational, but his following her made her angry. As she walked by she snapped, “Afraid I’ll drown myself?”
She was being sarcastic, but his quiet “Yes” stung her to silence. She walked on, blinking back tears. She didn’t want to cry. Her eyelids were so puffy and sore that she wanted never to cry again. She remembered thinking the night before about running into the ocean, and though the grief and pain were so agonizing almost any relief would be welcome, she knew she’d never do that. Surrendering wasn’t in her nature. If it had been, she wouldn’t have been able to hold on to her determination all those years.
She’d always been the idealistic dreamer in her family. Who would ever have thought that just beneath her skin was a layer of stubbornness that went all the way to the bone?
By the time they made it back to the house, her steps were dragging, and the sun was sinking low, taking the temperature with it. Exhausted, she lay down for a nap and woke only when Diaz shook her and told her it was time to eat.
The succeeding days passed like that, in a blur of grief and numbness, punctuated by bursts of rage. The sameness blended them all together in her tired mind, so it seemed as if time was merely creeping. She ate, she slept, she cried. The fits of rage would take her unawares, exploding when she least expected it, and afterward she was always ashamed of her lack of control. She screamed, she beat on the wall with her fists, she cursed the fate that had let her find her son, but too late.
She walked long miles on the deserted beaches, trying her best not to think of anything. At some point she realized she hadn’t called in to the office, and mentioned it to Diaz. “I called them,” he said. “When we were on our way here.”
She remembered very little about the trip, except being mired in hellish misery.
Some days she hated Diaz with an intensity that prevented her from even looking at him. Rage seethed through her, and the fact that they had both wanted the same thing for Justin in no way mitigated his actions. Keeping her from Justin hadn’t been his right, his decision. He seemed to know exactly what she was feeling on those days, because he would keep his distance from her, not speaking except for what was necessary when he called her for meals.
He made certain she ate and slept. He did the laundry, because the thought of it never even crossed her mind. She would hear the washing machine or the dryer running, and it meant absolutely nothing to her. It was just background noise. Clean clothes would reappear in her bedroom, and she would wear them. It was no more complicated than that.
One day she asked how long they’d been there, and he said, “Three weeks.”
The answer stunned her, shook her up a little. She stared at him without the dullness in her eyes that had characterized her over these past weeks. “But . . . what about Thanksgiving?” Her comment was stupid, but it was the only thing she could think of.
“They had it without us.”
Three weeks. That meant this was . . . the first week of December. “I don’t have anyone to have Thanksgiving with,” she blurted.
“You have your family.”
“I don’t spend holidays with them, you know that.” Then she fell silent, because she’d found Justin and she hadn’t called her mom, who might expect her to forget and forgive all concerning Ross and Julia, and she just couldn’t. Not yet. Whether she ever could remained to be seen.
Diaz shrugged. “Then you just spent your first Thanksgiving with me.”
Doing what? Screaming? Crying? Beating the wall? She hoped it wasn’t the start of a new tradition.
The days were very short now, and the temperature had dropped even more. Diaz brought her some thicker socks to wear when she was out walking. Being outside helped, even though the sunshine was weak. Staring at the ocean helped. Sometimes it was gray, sometimes it was blue, but it was a constant, immense presence.
The periods of rage became less and less frequent, as did the bouts of horrible, devastating weeping. She was so tired mentally and emotionally that she functioned within a very narrow range. She didn’t know what she would have done if Diaz hadn’t brought her here. She hated being beholden to him, but maybe this was his way of making amends. The thing was, she didn’t know if his efforts made any difference in the way she felt about him. She could only deal with one thing at a time, and right now was not his time.
Sometimes
she tilted her face up to the winter sun in search of its meager warmth, and knew that she had survived.
28
Milla was always aware, on the dimmest edge of her consciousness, that Diaz constantly watched her. She also knew that he was a man who never gave up, who never lost sight of his goal. Exactly what his goal was wasn’t always clear to her, but she had no doubt he was perfectly clear in his own mind what he wanted.
He wanted her. She knew it, and yet she couldn’t imagine how they could ever be together again. The rift between them, to her, was final and absolute. He’d betrayed her in the most wounding way possible, and forgiveness evidently wasn’t her strong suit. She had found that grudges weren’t heavy at all; she could carry them for a very long time.
Diaz wasn’t taking care of her out of the goodness of his heart. He was taking care of her the way a wolf cared for its wounded mate.
She had sensed that claim the first time he made love to her, that bonding of like to like. He wouldn’t willingly relinquish it.
She knew she was in danger from him; she knew it. Not physically. Physically, Diaz wouldn’t harm her. But emotionally he could devastate her, and she didn’t think she could bear any more devastation right now. She knew she should start making a push to leave this little house that had seen the total breakdown of her soul and then the first tentative steps toward healing. Finders needed her. She needed to be doing something, anything, rather than vegetating. She needed to get away from Diaz. But insisting on anything took more mental energy than she could spare; she was so horribly tired of thinking, of feeling. She had her hands full just existing.
One day while Diaz was outside she actually tried to call Finders, just to check in with Joann, but she had evidently left her cell phone on when they came here and the battery was dead. Next she tried the house phone, and discovered that long distance calls were blocked on it. She sat staring at the phone, trying to remember her code for charging a call to her home phone, but the only number that came to mind was her social security number and she knew it wasn’t that.
Diaz came in and noticed her sitting beside the phone. “What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to call the office.”
“Why?” he asked simply.
She stared at him, because the answer seemed obvious to her. “Because it’s been over three weeks and I need to check in.”
“They’re doing okay without you.”
“How do you know?” she asked with a flash of irritation.
“I called.”
“When? Why didn’t you let me talk to Joann?”
“I’ve called a couple of times, once to let them know where we are and another time to say we’d be here a while yet.”
She noticed he had totally ignored her question about talking to Joann. “It’s time to go home.”
He rubbed his neck. “Not yet.”
“Yes, it is!” To her surprise, she began crying. She said, “Damn it,” and went to her bedroom. She hadn’t cried in a couple of days, not even about Justin, so why was she crying now over something so inconsequential? This just proved Diaz right, and she didn’t want him to be right. She wanted to have something to do, to get back into a routine where she would have to think about something besides her own misery.
Did she really want to fly home if a flight attendant asking her if she wanted peanuts might easily reduce her to a sobbing heap?
After an hour of wiping her eyes and blowing her nose, she decided to take a walk before dark. She put on two pairs of socks and her coat; when she emerged from the short hallway, Diaz looked up and said, “Where’re you going?”
“For a walk,” she replied. Wasn’t it obvious? Then she opened the back door and realized why he’d asked. A slow, steady, gray rain was falling. She checked the clock on the wall and discovered the time wasn’t as late as she’d thought; it was the low cloud cover that made the day so dark. “Or not,” she said with a sigh.
He turned on the gas-log fireplace in the living room, and the coziness of it drew her. She didn’t want to sit in there with him, but the alternative was to return to her bedroom and stare at the four walls. The television was on satellite, which meant there was a multitude of channels available. To her surprise, Diaz was watching a decorating show on the Home and Garden Television channel with all the puzzlement of someone from another planet, as if he couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to glue tasseled fringe to a lamp shade.
“Are you thinking of taking up interior decorating as an alternate career?” she asked, surprising both of them by initiating the conversation.
“Only if someone holds a gun to my head.”
Milla surprised herself again by smiling. It was just a tiny smile, and it vanished immediately when she realized with astonishment what she’d done.
A smile, when she’d thought she would never smile or laugh again. He hadn’t noticed, but she had. She curled in a chair and watched the rest of the program with him, but the rain made her sleepy and she dozed on and off for the rest of the afternoon.
They ate an early supper; then Milla showered while Diaz took a last turn around the property. There was no threat for him to guard against, but watchfulness was ingrained in his nature, and every night he walked around checking to make certain the Jeep was locked up and no strangers were lurking around. They were the only strangers on the Outer Banks at this time of year, but that made no difference to him.
Milla had just pulled on her nightgown when the bathroom door opened without warning and Diaz said, “Put your coat and shoes on and come outside.”
Without question, spurred by the urgency in his tone, Milla hurried to put on her coat over her nightgown and slip her bare feet into her shoes. She stepped out onto the back porch with him and said, “Oh!” in hushed delight.
The rain had changed over to snow flurries. There was no chance of having an accumulation; the temperature, cold as it was, was still above freezing and the ground was still too warm and too wet. But the snow looked magical, swirling down out of a black sky.
Diaz looked down at her sockless feet, shook his head, then simply swung her up in his arms and went down the steps with her. Milla automatically clutched his shoulders for support. “Where are we going?”
“To the beach.”
He carried her over the low dunes to the beach, right to the ocean’s edge, and stood there in the darkness, the silence broken only by the rhythmic rush of the waves. Tiny snowflakes swirled around them and disappeared as soon as they touched down. She had grown up accustomed to seeing snow every winter, but since moving to El Paso snow was generally something she saw only if she was traveling. She certainly hadn’t expected to see it here, on a southern beach. She started shivering almost immediately, but she didn’t want to go inside and miss a minute of this.
The snow shower was of short duration, and after it ended she spent several minutes staring up at the black sky waiting for more, without success. “I guess that’s it,” she said, and sighed.
Diaz’s arms tightened around her, and he carried her back into the house.
Milla went to bed soon afterward and went right to sleep. Since coming here she had slept twice as much as she normally did, as if her body was trying to make up for years and years of erratic hours and unending stress, and also to give her battered mind a rest. Her dreams were slowly becoming more normal, so she didn’t wake up crying every night. She wasn’t dreaming at all that night when she started abruptly awake to find a dark shadow looming over her, and a naked, heavy weight pressing down on her.
“Shh,” Diaz said as he pulled her nightgown up to her waist and spread her legs. “Don’t think.”
“What—” she began, then inhaled sharply as he rubbed the head of his penis around her opening to moisten it, and pushed inside. Her nails dug into his biceps. She was moist, yes, but not ready; she felt every inch of him as he stretched her soft tissues and settled deep.
Don’t think? How could she not think? But her mind was s
o tired, so bruised from the long weeks of grieving, and with intense relief she felt herself sinking into purely physical sensation. She should tell him no, but she didn’t. When he kissed her, she tilted her head and kissed him in return. She needed this escape from herself, and he had known it.
She moved her hands to his shoulders and clutched them as he settled into a slow rhythm. Because she wasn’t already aroused, her body only gradually responded to his hands on her breasts, his kisses, the back and forth motion inside her. She felt tension grow in him as he fought the rise of his own climax; sweat gleamed on his hard shoulders and along his back, making her palms slippery, but he didn’t falter in the rhythm. There was just enough hallway light coming through her open bedroom door for her to see the glitter in his eyes as he watched her, waiting for and reading each tiny response in the quickening of her breath and heartbeat, the way her legs climbed to hug his hips. Her body began lifting to his to meet each slow thrust, and her arms slid around his neck.
She didn’t want this to end. She knew it had to, knew he couldn’t last forever, but as long as he was inside her the world was held at bay. What he was giving her, besides pleasure, was surcease. He had watched her for weeks, waiting, and tonight he had acted. She’d known he would, eventually. The only wonder was that he’d waited so long.
She felt both relaxed and protected with him, at least from outside forces. Nothing, it seemed, could protect her from him, and tonight she wasn’t even certain she wanted to be. Claimed, and mated. She was his, but was he hers? And if he was, what in hell did they do about it?
“I don’t even know what you want,” she said fretfully, beginning to lose herself in rising sensation.
“This,” he muttered in a dark, rough tone. “You. Everything.”
Her head tilted back, her spine arched, and she began climaxing. He cradled her close and kept up his slow rhythm until her unconscious cries had faded, her fingers had stopped digging into his back, and her legs loosened around his hips. Milla relaxed against the pillows, her eyes closing, her muscles limp and her body replete.
