That proof that she was not alone in this wanting seared her to the core.
And then he was kissing her, hungrily, deeply, as if he’d longed for it as much as she had. She opened for him, wanting to taste him, to trace the even ridge of his teeth with her tongue, even as every nerve in her body blazed to life as they never had before this man.
She moved, pressing against him. Never breaking the kiss, they slid down until they were lying on the couch. She was practically on top of him, but he was holding her, so tight, so close she was barely aware of it. The shaft of moonlight that had poured over him fell across them here, and he seemed more beautiful to her than ever. More everything. Yes, more, she wanted more, she needed more. She needed all of him, in every way she could think of and a few she couldn’t—yet. She wanted to—
He broke the kiss. She heard him suck in a breath as if he’d forgotten how until now. She knew the feeling.
“We’ve got to stop, Ashley. You don’t want this.”
She didn’t like him going back to her full name. Wondered if it was his way of putting a barrier between them. But then the sense of what he’d said registered. And reality slammed back into her. A bitter reality. “Oh, I want it. But I see why you don’t.”
“Stop it,” he said, rather fiercely. “I want it, want you, more than I’ve ever wanted…anything. But it’s not right. Not now.”
“How can this—” she reached up to trail a finger over his mouth, felt with satisfaction that he shuddered slightly under the touch “—be not right?”
“Your life’s in chaos right now, and it’s not right, not fair to you to…go where we were going.”
“But you said it will be okay.”
He grimaced. “Hoist with my own petard,” he muttered, and despite herself, despite everything, she laughed. It startled him—she could feel it. That quickly the mood changed. The fire was banked. Far from out, but banked. She was afraid that he would get up, that he would leave.
“All right, we’ll wait,” she whispered. “But please. Stay.”
“You have a lot of faith in my restraint.”
“I have a lot of faith in you, Brady Crenshaw.”
She felt his arms tighten around her. He shifted them until they were spooned together and pulled her into the curve of his body. She’d never felt safer, more protected.
And after a few minutes of simply savoring his closeness, she slipped into a blissfully dreamless sleep.
* * *
“You’re up early,” Brady said, glad he’d gotten up from the couch and headed in here to start coffee. Otherwise Quinn would have found him draped all over their client, half-naked.
And hard as a rock, don’t forget that.
He was glad the kitchen island was masking him from the waist down. But all thought of anything else fled when he saw the expression on Quinn’s face. It was grim.
“I got the report from the lab.”
Brady glanced at the clock on the microwave. “At 6:00 a.m.?”
“What is it?” Ash asked as she joined them. Her long hair was tousled, her eyes still a little sleepy. She had slept, at least, and he was grateful for that. Even if lying there awake, holding her in his arms for hours without pursuing the impossible heat that flared between them, had been more exhausting than his highest-level workout.
“I think we’ll all need coffee for this,” Quinn said. “Hayley’ll be here in—”
“Two seconds” came Hayley’s voice from behind him, the promised two seconds before she came into the room.
Quinn got mugs, and Hayley poured, as if they were truly welcome guests and not people in trouble who had been foisted upon them by chance.
Or chance and a dog.
He nearly laughed at his own thought, especially when he glanced at the animal and found him…smiling back at him. Which was impossible, he realized, but that’s what the dog’s satisfied expression looked like.
When they were all seated around the dining table, Quinn set down his laptop, which was already on. He glanced at Brady, but when he started to speak, his gaze was fixed on Ash, as was Hayley’s.
“These—” he gestured at the document showing on the screen “—are the test results on the pill. There are two things of crucial importance. First, it was a combination of drugs not commercially available.”
Ash’s brow furrowed, and Brady frowned. “You mean…what? This was some kind of custom-brewed thing?”
Quinn nodded. “The shape and size aren’t unusual for an illicit pill factory.”
Ash’s eyes widened. “Illicit…you mean they were what, some kind of homemade thing? He gave me some crazy drug he made up?”
Her voice started to rise a little, and Brady reached out to put a hand over hers. “Let’s hear it all, then I’ll blow up with you.”
She sucked in an audible breath, but nodded.
“The second thing, and the most important,” Quinn said, looking at Ash steadily, “is that this combination of drugs, in a healthy person, would likely cause every one of your supposed symptoms.”
* * *
“You’re not crazy. You never were.”
Ashley sat, still feeling stunned. She was back on the couch, Hayley beside her. Brady was up and pacing, but he had stopped in front of her to declare the words once more. And all she could manage to do was look up at him.
He began pacing again. “I knew it. Deep down I knew it all along. Because the woman I saw that day at the accident was no way on the edge the way you thought you were.”
How had he seen past the surface others saw, the craziness others saw? Because when it came down to it, she had sensed from the beginning he doubted she was truly mentally ill. He had doubted it even when she had been convinced. He had always had that expression of puzzlement when the subject came up, as if he just couldn’t accept it. She’d recognized it because in the beginning, she’d worn the same expression all too often.
“But…” Oddly, she felt more at sea now than she ever had when she’d believed it. Her processing speed seemed to have slowed to a crawl.
“I always thought the haze, that layer between me and the word, was…me. That it was just made worse by the meds, because I’d read where that wasn’t unusual.”
“But it’s been gone since you quit?” Hayley asked.
She nodded. “I was worse for a while, when I was on the pain pills from the accident, but since I never started up the…whatever this was again, yes, the fog is gone.”
“What you thought was the effect of the pain pills could also have been withdrawal from the others,” Brady said.
Even as she acknowledged the sense of what he said, her mind was spinning. This was—She cut off her own thought when she realized she’d been about say it was crazy. She doubted she would ever use the word casually again. Wondered if that was how people who truly had mental health problems felt when they heard people toss the word around so easily.
People who truly had problems.
She was not one of them.
It still seemed impossible. She was reeling nearly as much as the first time she’d had to believe she was one of them.
“I don’t understand,” she said, almost desperately. “Why? Why would he do this?”
“Right now I don’t give a damn why,” Brady snapped.
“There’s a word for this,” Hayley said, and she sounded furious.
Brady nodded, then turned around to look directly at Ashley. And when he spoke, his voice was flat, yet fierce. “You’re being gaslighted.”
CHAPTER 28
“That’s impossible.” Ashley looked more stunned than ever. Brady hated to see that look on her face, but he understood. And he was, inwardly, feeling a tiny, growing kernel of relief.
She wasn’t mentally ill.
It rang over and over in his head, like some cacophony of
mountain squirrel chatter. But this was not the time to even think about the fact that what had been holding him back with her had just vanished. Right now she was even less ready for that than before. He resumed his pacing, needing to burn off at least some of this pulsing, raging anger.
“Why would he do such a thing?” She sounded bewildered.
“Because the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist?” Brady suggested sourly.
“But…why?” She shook her head. “Maybe it’s just some drug he was trying, thinking it might help.”
“Using you as a guinea pig?” Brady’s jaw clenched, and he had to consciously relax it. “That wouldn’t move him up much in my book.”
“But why else would he do this?”
“For one thing, it kept you coming to him,” Hayley said.
“Because you trusted him.” Brady practically spat it out, the thought of how that trust had been abused made him so livid.
“I know.” She said it as if he’d accused her.
He stopped in his tracks, his gaze locking on her. “Ash, don’t. This is not your fault. None of it.”
“He’s right,” Hayley said, gently. “You had no reason not to trust him.”
“But…he has a lot of patients. And all that money you said he has. Why would he need to make sure I kept coming?”
“Now that’s an interesting question,” Quinn said.
Brady was glad the other man sounded calm and collected, because he knew he himself was not. Not by any stretch. Pacing wasn’t enough to keep his growing anger in check. What he needed was about a five-mile run. Uphill. Through the snow. But as he turned to stride back across the great room, he risked another look at Ash. And stopped dead again.
She was sitting there, looking dazed, and…shivering. Tiny little shudders were visibly rippling through her. In that moment Cutter, who had been quietly on his bed in front of the fireplace, watching intently, got to his feet. He walked over to Ashley, sat at her feet and, as he did whenever he apparently sensed she was on the edge, rested his chin on her knee. She automatically lifted a hand to stroke the dog’s head, and the shivers subsided.
Nice trick, dog.
Except it should have been him. He should be the one offering support, comforting her.
His gut knotted. It was true, the main thing that had held him back was gone now, but that didn’t mean everything was magically resolved. He told himself he didn’t even know who she really was, who she would be without this cloud hanging over her. Neither did she.
Cutter shifted then, turning his head to look directly at Brady. Then he got up and walked to him, gave his right hand a rather adamant nudge with his nose and then continued over to sit politely by the back door, at first staring at Brady, then shifting his gaze to Ashley, then back again.
Brady was moving again before he even thought about the absurdity of taking directions from a dog. And when he did think it, he quickly jettisoned the thought; he’d seen enough police K-9s work to know some dogs had extraordinary skills, both mental and physical. Maybe that was it—he just needed to start thinking of Cutter like one of them.
He walked over to her and held out a hand. “Come with me. We’ll take him outside. Just for a little while, until your mind slows down.”
She looked up at him, then glanced at Cutter, as if despite her turmoil she’d understood what the dog was doing.
“Good idea,” Hayley said.
He saw Ash glance at the other woman, who was giving her an oddly amused smile. And even more oddly, Ash was…blushing? His brow furrowed. Women, he thought, were sometimes impossible to understand.
But she took his hand.
* * *
“Don’t think about it, just for a few minutes. Just look at the snow and try and picture what it’s like here in spring, when everything’s coming back to life.”
Brady’s voice was soothing, and she felt more of the tension drain away, just as it did when she petted Cutter. She gave an inward laugh, wondering how he’d feel about her comparing him to a dog.
“What?” he asked, and she realized something must have shown outwardly.
“Just thinking how…calming you and Cutter are.”
She saw him glance at the dog, and for a moment she wondered if he really would take offense. But then he was looking back at her and said, with a crooked grin she found endearing, “I’ve been compared to worse.”
She laughed. And his expression changed.
“Damn, that sounds good, Ash.”
She knew what he meant. It was the first time she’d laughed and not felt that sense of confusion afterward, that sense that she had no business laughing, or that people would think her even crazier for laughing in her condition.
“It feels good,” she admitted. And it felt even better with him right here, on her side, as he’d essentially been since he’d pulled her out of the car on the side of the mountain. She just hadn’t known it. “It’s strange, though. All your pacing, the finger tapping—you shouldn’t be calming. Are you always wound so tight?”
“Only when something really matters.”
She studied him for a moment. “Would you tell me…about Liz?”
He frowned. Then shrugged. “Not my favorite subject. She was my fiancée, but she hated my job and, eventually, me.”
“She couldn’t handle your work?” She could understand that, Brady risking his life for a job few would.
“She was…fragile, I guess.” He grimaced. “Although my mother said manipulative. Among other things.”
“She didn’t like her?”
He let out a long breath. “She said she didn’t want a partner, or even protection. She wanted a servant.” His mouth twisted wryly. “And she was right.”
And looking out for her child, no matter how old he was. Like a mother should. Her mind wanted to veer back into the chaos that had descended on her, so she was grateful when Cutter came back from his ramble through the snow, his nose and muzzle decorated with the white stuff.
“Find something interesting out there?” she crooned to him, gently brushing the snow away. Then she leaned down and kissed the top of the dog’s head.
“If I go roll in the snow, will you do that for me?” Brady asked. Startled, her gaze shot to his face. “With the kiss somewhere other than the top of my head,” he elaborated.
“I…” She couldn’t get out another word, because the images that shot through her mind had stolen all her breath. And then it hit her, amid all the roiling of her emotions, that perhaps, just perhaps, her imagination wasn’t out of control. Because maybe now, she had a chance to truly grab at that gold ring. Because if she truly wasn’t going mad…
Joy at even that chance shot through her, and she said recklessly, “I would kiss you…anywhere.”
Shock registered on his face, his usual somber expression vanishing, but then it was replaced with something she couldn’t put a name to except…hunger. It took away the breath she’d momentarily regained, and she felt her heartbeat in a way she never had before as it kicked up and began to hammer in her chest.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Quinn’s voice called from the doorway, “but Ashley, there’s something you need to hear.”
“Well, I’m sure that’ll be good news,” Brady muttered with more than a touch of sarcasm. When she looked at him rather sharply, he shrugged. “Nothing that interrupted what you just said could be good enough news.”
She felt her cheeks heat, and her worry about his tone vanished. “Hold that thought,” she whispered.
When they were back inside, Quinn wasted no time in niceties, for which Ashley was grateful.
“Dr. Sebastian has gone over your father’s records.”
Ashley opened her mouth to ask how they’d gotten them so quickly, even after she’d given permission—which she had been sure would clash with her mother, who had o
nce said she never wanted the world to know how bad her father had been—then shut it again, remembering Brady telling her something about not asking too much about how they got things done.
“According to those records, he was prescribed the same medication you were supposedly on.”
“I remember he was taking something. Mom was always reminding him to take his—” Belatedly it hit her. “You think it was the same fake stuff?”
“Don’t suppose you remember what it looked like?” Quinn asked.
She shook her head slowly. “No.”
“Twenty years ago,” Brady said briskly. “And you were only eight.”
“And scared to death for my daddy,” she whispered. “My God, he did it to him, too, didn’t he?”
“Can’t be sure, but it’s very possible,” Hayley said. “And if he succeeded once, he’d likely be more willing to try again.”
“With me.”
She turned around, rather wildly looking for someplace to sit down before she fell down. Before she could decide, Brady was there, wrapping his arms around her, holding her, enveloping her in his strength and warmth. She trembled, feeling as if she would like to burrow into this safe haven and stay forever.
“My father wasn’t mentally ill,” she whispered.
“And neither are you,” Brady said roughly. His tone was underlaid with something else it took her a moment to recognize. Anger. Again. For her.
He was angry again, on her behalf. And that stopped the reeling of her mind. Then her head came up, as the inevitable conclusion hit her. “If this is right…then he…that bastard is responsible for my father’s death.”
Brady’s arms tightened around her. When he spoke, his voice was grim. “As responsible as if he’d pulled the trigger himself.”
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 66
