Stupid, so stupid. Half the time, that had been part of her trouble with Dan, saying something to set him off.
“Heath?”
He slapped the semiautomatic’s loaded magazine into its niche, the gunmetal making that unmistakable rasp that always made her skin crawl. She jumped with a start.
“What?”
Dark head bent, his expression stony, he fairly spat out the word. Meredith swallowed, hoping to steady her voice. Fat chance. Being around a furious man made her hair stand on end, and no amount of swallowing and taking deep breaths was going to cure the problem.
“I, um…want to try to explain about what I said in the truck.”
“No need. You made it pretty clear.”
“No, I mean explain why I said it.” She hugged her waist, which was tender from where Delgado had kicked her. “My, um…anxieties. They aren’t—well, they have nothing to do with you, and you shouldn’t take them personally.”
He shot her a frosty look. “Nothing to do with me? And I shouldn’t take it personally? Pardon me all to hell. I think sex is pretty damned personal. Coercing a woman to have sex, in any fashion, is tantamount to rape. At least, in my books. It isn’t in yours?”
“Yes. No! I mean—” She rubbed at her temple. “Of course it is! But—”
“And you’re concerned that sex is my price for helping you. Correct? So, in effect, you think I’m the kind of man who would force a woman? Right?”
“No!”
“Explain it to me. Which part didn’t I get right? My price? Are you saying you weren’t worried about my demanding sex from you?”
“No, I—” Meredith realized she was staring at him through a blur of tears, and for once, she wasn’t weeping for herself or Sammy. She had hurt this man, badly, and he, of all men, didn’t deserve that from her. “Please, will you just be quiet and let me explain?”
He shrugged. “You’ll think I’m a goddamned stump. Talk away.”
“I don’t believe you would ever force me,” she began. “And yet I do.”
He snorted. “I feel better already.”
“You said you’d be a stump.”
He shot her another look, this one as searing as the other had been frosty. “Sorry. It’s just difficult to keep my mouth shut when my character is being denigrated.”
“It’s not about you! Can’t you understand that? It stems from my past. My rational side knows that I’m being absurd. But there’s this little voice at the back of my mind that keeps whispering, ‘Be careful. Don’t trust blindly. Don’t make the same mistake twice.’” She held up her hands and leaned forward in her chair, pleading with her gaze. “Only I can’t be careful. This situation hasn’t given me time to breathe, let alone think. Things are happening so fast! Just like before. I trusted Dan with all my heart, believing him to be everything he pretended to be, and look where it got me!”
The glint in his eyes reminded her of flint sparking off steel. In that moment, he seemed gigantic to her, all hard muscle and raw masculinity. His dark, collar-length hair was wind-tossed, his steely blue eyes contrasting sharply with the burnished cast of his features. Tension knotted the tendons along his jaw and drew his mouth into a thin, uncompromising line.
Setting the loaded gun aside, he pushed up from the chair to pace back and forth for at least a full minute. When he finally stopped, he turned to regard her. Meredith had no idea what to expect when he sauntered toward her, his gait lazy and unhurried. When he reached down to cup her chin, she tensed. To her surprise, he hunkered in front of her. Looking into his eyes, she saw tenderness mixed in with his anger now, the latter disappearing entirely as his sensual mouth tipped into one of those grins that always managed to make her knees feel weak.
“I think I’m the one who should be apologizing,” he told her huskily. “After what you’ve been through, I guess you have every right to be a little gun-shy, and I had no business getting pissed off because you were honest with me about it.”
“I never meant to hurt you,” she said shakily.
“And that’s it, isn’t it? I got my feelings hurt.” His mouth curved up at one corner again. “And instead of admitting that, I got mad.”
“I’m so sorry. You’re the last person on earth I would ever try to hurt.”
“I shouldn’t have let it hurt. In fact, I feel like a jerk. You have a problem, and you wanted me to help you deal with it, and instead, I blew up at you. I wish I hadn’t.”
“It’s all right. Really. It’s a stupid problem.”
“It is not stupid.”
He sounded so emphatic that it emboldened her. “I feel so mixed up inside. It’s like I’ve got two of me running around in there.”
“God forbid. One of you is all I can handle.”
Meredith laughed in spite of herself, and yet she had an awful urge to cry. After what he’d said in the truck, she was terrified she might. “I think maybe I need counseling. My feelings aren’t—right. They’re twisted and sick.” She looked into his eyes. Those wonderful blue-gray eyes, and she remembered her thoughts of him in the Bronco when she’d been afraid he might die for her. “I’m—I’m in love with you, you know.”
He said nothing for an endlessly long moment, rubbing his thumb over her bottom lip. “I’ve been hoping you might be. It’d be a hell of a note if you weren’t. I’ve never loved a woman before, so I don’t have a measuring stick, but I’d say I’m about as far gone as a guy can get.”
Meredith already knew that. He had said it with his actions so many times, most eloquently tonight. Lots of men claimed to love a woman enough to die for her. Heath had never boasted that; he’d just gone out and put his life on the line. That’s why she knew her fears were irrational, the twisted reasoning of an emotionally sick person. She had nothing to fear from this man. Nothing. And yet the thought of his touching her intimately made her quake.
“So you see my problem?” she asked him shakily. “I should want to be with you. I need professional help.”
His eyes went dark and molten. “You need to be loved, Meredith. And I don’t mean sex, so don’t get claustrophobic.” His mouth curved up at the corners. “That will come. Right now, you just need to be loved, with no expectations, by a man who’s willing to listen and help you deal with all these feelings. As it happens, I know a fellow who might volunteer for the job.”
“How can you help me? You’re my problem!”
He narrowed one eye at her. “I am not your problem. Old baggage with Dan Calendri’s name on it is your problem. You need to talk to me about that. Get it out of your head and in the open. I can testify to the fact that it helps. Talking to you about Laney got a lot of the demons off my back.”
“I’m glad. But it won’t work for me. Talking? I can’t talk about Dan. I just can’t! I’m so ashamed. If I told you all of it, you’d never look at me in the same way again.”
“Ashamed? You? Why, for God’s sake? It was Dan’s shame, not yours.”
Meredith felt the tears welling. An awful ache centered in her chest and at the back of her eyes. “I’m sure you’ve read about women like me or heard discussions on talk shows. The victims! Pathetic creatures who stay in abusive situations, who somehow need to feel dominated and be humiliated. Or else they’re so weak and scared, they can’t find the courage to help themselves. The last, that was me. I stayed, Heath. I stayed and let him victimize me! And then I let him victimize Sammy. When I remember, I’m disgusted with myself, and if you knew what I allowed him to do to me, you’d be disgusted, too.”
“Honey, no.”
“Yes!” Meredith heard her voice going shrill and felt the tears spilling over her lashes, but she couldn’t stop herself. It felt as if a volcano was about to erupt inside her. “The things I did. You have no idea. Horrid things. Degrading things. And I just—” She threw up her hands, a tearing pain going through her abdomen. “I just did them. I was afraid of him. So afraid! If he snapped his fingers and said, ‘Crawl,’ I dropped to my knees. Once
when there were people there. He was drunk and thought it was funny.”
She held her breath for a moment, trying to regain her self-control. Then she looked at Heath, saw the horror reflected in his eyes, and felt the tears rushing up again. He would never have any respect for her now. After seeing what he had done tonight, she couldn’t imagine his ever giving way to anyone out of fear. He would never bend or break, and he would certainly never crawl. He’d never be able to understand that she had.
But wasn’t it better this way? At least he would know now what kind of person she was. A non-person. A spineless coward who would have done anything, no matter how demoralizing, to keep her skin intact.
“Once,” she managed to say, “when I was crawling, he told me to bark. He had this notion that a wife was—” Her throat closed off, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. “He had Dobermans. Very expensive, well-trained Dobermans with German pedigrees. He used to tell me my bloodlines were pathetic by comparison, that I was a mongrel hayseed. So you see, it wasn’t only that he considered me to be no better than his dogs, but less than.” The pressure at the back of her throat became almost painful. “And that day when he ordered me to crawl and bark, I knew that he was—that he was right. If he went too far, beating on the Dobies, they fought back. I didn’t.” She looked Heath directly in the eye, even though his dark face looked as if it were swimming. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, saying those last words. “I just—did what he told me to do.”
His hand tightened on her chin. “You barked?”
The disbelief in his voice made her feel so ashamed that she closed her eyes, and as she did, the sob she’d been trying to hold back erupted from her, and it was quickly followed by another. And another. She couldn’t stop them. Horrible, heaving sounds like those of a sick dog.
She wanted to stop. Tried to stop. But she couldn’t.
“Meredith, for God’s sake. Just let it out.” He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her head down to his shoulder. “Don’t, honey. You’re going to break something down in there.”
Feeling his strong arm around her was Meredith’s complete undoing. She was surprised he could even bring himself to touch her. She started to weep then, and once the tears started to come, she couldn’t make them stop either. Not even when Heath startled her half to death by lifting her from the chair and into his arms. Oh, God, he was every bit as strong as she’d always feared.
“That just makes it easier for me to hold you,” he rumbled as he carried her from the kitchen. “Nothing more. I swear it, honey.”
With a sense of horror, she realized she’d spoken the thought aloud.
He jostled her in his arms, then turned sideways to go through a doorway. She saw the bed, a dizzying blur of colorful crazy-quilt patches. Her first thought was to get out of there, away from him, and that only made her cry harder.
“Sweetheart, it’s just a bed. It won’t bite you, and neither will I.”
Oh, God! She was babbling out every thought that went through her mind. She had to shut up. He was going to hate her, and she wouldn’t blame him. She was disgusting, pathetic and paranoid. Why couldn’t she get Dan out of her head? Was she going to let him destroy what remained of her life?
He sat on the mattress with his back against the lodge pole pine headboard. Shifting her on his lap, he clamped her head to his shoulder with one hand and rubbed her back and her scraped arm with the other. “Sweetheart, I don’t hate you,” he said gruffly. “And I never will. And you’re not disgusting, pathetic, or paranoid. You’re sweet and wonderful, and I love you. Do you hear me? And Dan Calendri is not going to ruin the rest of your life. You’ve got me now, and we can get past this. I promise you, we will.”
He felt so solid and warm. Meredith couldn’t resist the draw and turned to loop an arm around his strong neck, her face buried against his shirt to hide her tears. She stopped fighting them, and just let them come. Rivers and rivers of them. She cried until she was hoarse. Until she was weak with exhaustion. Until she ran the well dry. And then she just lay against him, shuddering.
In the aftermath, she became aware, measure by measure, of Heath. Of the way his hands moved over her back, kneading away the tension one moment, then lightly caressing. She made fists on his shirt, clinging to him. He felt like a wall of muscle, so hard and invincible, yet wonderfully safe. The masculine smell of him surrounded her, a pleasant blend of cotton and starch, musk aftershave and sweat, leather and gun oil.
She remembered how she had prayed for him to come home earlier that night, how she had wanted to follow Sammy’s example and scream his name when she was afraid. How could she care so much for a man, trusting him so implicitly in so many ways, yet still quake at the thought of his having any sort of power over her?
“Can I talk for a minute now?” he whispered near her ear. At her nod, he said, “First of all, you aren’t a victim. You were victimized, yes, but there’s a hell of a difference. I’ve seen the victims, honey. They stay for years. Year after year after year. They never fight back, and they never find the courage to run. Not to save themselves. Not to save their kids.
“You left Dan when Sammy was four days old. Correct?” When she nodded again, he said, “That means you stayed less than a year. You were in a hell of a mess, much worse and far more dangerous than for most battered women. It wasn’t just Dan, but organized crime you were up against. For Sammy, you found a way out. A rather creative way out. It took intelligence to outwit the bastards at their own game, and it took courage. A lot of courage. They might have killed you, and you knew it. But for Sammy, you ran anyway.” He made a fist in her hair. “I think you’re a very brave lady.”
“Oh, don’t…” She pressed her face harder against his shoulder. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Speak the truth? You’ve got guts, Meredith Kenyon. Or would you rather I started calling you Mary?”
“Mary is gone, and I don’t want to be her anymore. I want to be someone new, and I want to pretend that the other me never existed.”
“She’ll be a hard act to follow,” he whispered. “Mary Calendri was some lady. As for pretending none of it ever happened, you can’t. It’ll stay in your head all your life. You have to deal with it. And the only way to do that is strip it bare. Admit it to yourself. Take it all out and face it. You can’t run fast enough or far enough to get away from it.”
“I can’t tell you any more of it. You have no idea, Heath. I just can’t.”
“You’re right,” he said huskily. “I have no idea. Don’t you think it’s about time I did?”
Chapter 23
Heath felt the rigidity return to Meredith’s body, and by that he knew just how difficult it was for her to talk about Dan. He’d carried his own secret shame, buried deep inside, for years. Lacerating himself with guilt, punishing himself with the memories, hating himself for making a mistake that had cost his sister her life. One bad decision, and he’d paid dearly for it, in his dreams and while he was awake, for almost twenty years. Somehow, talking to Meredith had purged him. Since that evening in her yard when he’d spilled his guts to her, he hadn’t had a single nightmare, and during the day, when the guilt slammed into him like a brass-knuckled fist, he had begun to shove it away, no longer accepting it. It was over. He had grieved. He had been punished enough. Beating up on himself for the rest of his life was not going to bring Laney back.
Like him, Meredith had made only one bad decision, and she had been paying for it ever since. Even worse, she seemed to believe that because her bad decision had thrust her into a life-threatening situation, the things she had done to survive were unforgivable. She had crawled, and for that, she couldn’t forgive herself.
The very thought of Meredith being reduced to that, of her actually getting down on her hands and knees for the bastard, nearly made Heath gag. She was such a sweetheart, this woman. For a man to treat her like that, and for her to have believed, even for an instant, that she had sunk lower than the bast
ard’s dogs was almost beyond his comprehension. Even more heartbreaking was his suspicion that she still hadn’t told him the half of it. The knowledge that he would have to force her to tell him weighed on his chest like a boulder.
“Merry,” he said softly, “why are you so afraid of handguns?”
At the question, she stopped breathing. Agonized seconds passed before he felt her chest rise and fall again.
“Out at the table,” he went on. “You turned white when I was cleaning and loading my handguns. Can you tell me why?”
He thought she meant to ignore his question. But then she stirred against him, her silky hair brushing lightly against the underside of his jaw, the strands catching on his day’s growth of beard. “Dan,” she said. “Remember, I told you he liked to frighten me. He was especially fond of doing that at night when we—when he—well, you know.”
Heath pictured himself at sixty, still referring to sexual intercourse as, “you know.” Somehow, right then, it didn’t strike him as being very funny. That awful ache still hung there in his chest. And it kept getting worse, making him wonder if, instead of it being heartbreak, he was about to have a coronary. “When you had sex, you mean? He frightened you then? With a gun?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
She made fists on his shirt. “He—he kept a revolver in the nightstand drawer. It had one of those little wheel things with holes for the bullets, and he kept only one in it.”
Christ. He was having a coronary. The ache was worse, and it had moved into his throat, the thud of his pulse so hard and loud that he thought he could feel the bed shake. Oh, God, he knew what she was going to say. And he could not calmly sit here and listen to her say it. He needed to step outside. Find a tree. Pretend it was Dan Calendri, and pulverize the bastard with his fists.