Charlotte had told herself to get over it. After all, he was so handsome, so smart, not the kind of boy anyone expected to fall for plain, shy Charlotte Baird. But the worst, the absolute worst thing, was how it had all begun. She might've been inexperienced and painfully lacking in confidence, but she wasn't stupid. She wouldn't have been drawn into his orbit if he'd been mean and cruel from the start. No, Richard's abuse had been slow and insidious, like a spider trapping a helpless insect in its web before the insect ever knew it was in danger.
Jumping at the hard rap of knuckles on her front door, she realized Gabriel had arrived. Shaky all over again at the reminder that she'd promised to tell him everything, she made her way to the door, opened it with hands that trembled. He was wearing jeans, heavy work boots that looked like they'd had a hard life, and a short-sleeved black shirt worn loose over his jeans. The shirt had stud detailing on the pocket flaps and the sleeves, fit perfectly over his wide shoulders.
Sliding off his mirrored sunglasses, he looked her up and down.
Her skin chilled, the memory of Richard's cold recitation of her flaws a loud hum in the back of her skull.
21
The Night the Monster Was Real...
"I do like you in a dress, Ms. Baird," said the man on her doorstep, the man who wasn't Richard. "Gives me all sorts of ideas about easy access."
Charlotte blushed, all thoughts of Richard forgotten. "I thought since it was so nice and sunny out..." She'd worn a sleeveless white sundress, teaming it with a pretty belt of orange patent leather. Instead of a white cardigan, she'd chosen a lime-green one. The outfit was one of the most colorful in her new wardrobe and it made her feel like spring even in winter.
"I have a new appreciation for the sun." Reaching out to cup her jaw, he said, "Shall I kiss you, Charlotte? Lick my tongue over yours, suck on the tip until you whimper?" He accompanied each word with a rub of his thumb over her lower lip. "Open."
Her lips parted almost of their own accord, her heart skittering against her ribcage. Closing her lips over his thumb when he slipped it inside, she sucked... then bit down enough to smart.
Eyes darkening, he drew his thumb out and tapped it against lips that felt kiss swollen already. "Just for that, you have to wait for your kiss." He tugged her outside. "You have everything?"
Not capable of speech just yet, she nodded and, taking her keys out of her handbag, locked up the town house after setting the alarm. Gabriel slid his hand down her back to rest on the curve of her ass as she put away the keys. It made her jump, but he didn't remove his hand, circling gently as he nudged her to the car.
"What do you keep in there?" he said, eyes on her handbag. "It's big enough for not only the kitchen sink but all the appliances."
"Ha-ha," she managed to get out past her awareness of his touch. "Don't ask me next time you need a pen or a piece of sticky tape."
He stroked her again, his cheeks creasing. The heat of him branded her, the mark pulsing even after she was in the passenger seat.
"Where to?" he asked after he was inside, sunglasses back on.
"Albert Park." It had taken her time to get comfortable in the university area again, but these days, she deliberately hopped off the bus a couple of stops early and cut through the adjacent park on her way to work. It meant something to her that Richard hadn't destroyed her pleasure in the beautiful area.
She loved the active quiet of it in the mornings, peopled by early-rising student joggers, and others dressed for work who were taking a shortcut to the central business district. Some people walked briskly, eyes on their smart phones, but most traversed the paths with a leisurely stride, smiling at one another as they passed. Every so often, she'd see a group practicing Tai Chi under the canopy of one of the larger trees and would stop to watch the graceful, slow melody of movement.
Nine thirty on a public holiday, it was busier but not crazy. Gabriel found a parking space only a couple of minutes' walk away, and they were soon entering the park, his hand on her lower back. With Auckland free of snow even in winter, the park usually had flowers of some kind or another even in the coldest season. Now, heading into the tail end of that season, the garden beds boasted a profusion of color.
"I always wonder how they keep it so beautiful no matter the season," she said, the two of them taking the pathway that would lead eventually to the covered band rotunda. Charlotte didn't want to be enclosed even that much. Instead, she turned right, taking them toward an open area populated only by a number of large trees, their limbs curving and winding and creating living sculptures.
"You should ask Sailor about the garden stuff," Gabriel said. "He's like a plant encyclopedia."
"How did he end up in landscaping and gardening rather than sports?"
"He's the nerd in the family--always was more interested in science and plants." A grin that took the sting out of the words, his pride in his brother clear. "He does play club rugby on the weekends for fun, so we haven't disowned him."
Charlotte sighed. "There's no hope for me then. I love sports, but I'm not coordinated enough to actually be any good at them."
He shifted his hand to her hip, squeezed. "What are you talking about?" he said as things went all melty and hot low in her body. "You wrangle T-Rexes, don't you?"
Scrunching up her nose at him, she fought a smile. "Only one."
"Good, because this T-Rex is possessive as hell and does not share well." He ran his hand over her hip again. "How about here?"
Charlotte looked at the natural seat formed by a spreading limb, and the bubbles of delight went flat. It was time. No more delays. She had to tell him every bit of the ugliness. "Yes," she whispered and sucked in a breath when he put both hands on her waist and lifted her up onto the tree. Instead of sitting beside her, he leaned against the branch, his arm braced behind her.
"I thought you liked crowding me," she murmured, heart bruising at the sign that he might already be pulling away.
"I love crowding you. But since you didn't want to talk in the car, I thought I'd behave and give you some space." Eyes of steel gray pierced hers. "I'm right here if you need me, and I'm more than big enough to help you fight your demons. Just say the word."
Her heart ached. She shifted closer to the reassuring bulk of him without a word. Expression softening, he cuddled her by curving his arm around her without blocking her in.
"I don't know how to start," she said, watching a girl spin around in the arms of a boy before they both raced away toward the white spire of the university's clock tower.
"Did it happen here?"
"Yes." At least it had begun here.
"Then start here. Tell me about your wild college days."
Charlotte wanted to smile, couldn't. The past was too heavy, too horrible; the malevolent shadow of it crushed any lightness inside her. "I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but since I enjoyed reading the business pages, I decided to do a commerce degree, majoring in accounting." She laughed softly, but the sound held no humor. "It sounds like such a stupid reason to make that big a decision, but I wasn't thinking on all cylinders."
"Was your mom sick when you had to decide?"
Charlotte nodded, the memory of loss heavy on her heart. "My mom told me to live my life, to not let her death weigh me down, and I was determined to do that--even after I lost my father too."
Her throat grew thick despite the distance of years between that moment and this. "It happened just weeks before the start of the semester. At first, I was a zombie sleepwalking through lectures, but after I survived that first burn of grief, I wanted to make Mom and Dad proud."
Gabriel stroked his hand over her hip. "Did you have anyone to lean on?"
"Molly." She cuddled even closer to him. "I wouldn't have made it without her." Her best friend had all but carried her through the weeks directly after her father's shock passing. "I'd turned eighteen a couple of weeks earlier, so I was technically an adult when my father died, but I was so lost. Molly's the one
who organized my dad's funeral, who talked to the lawyers to make sure I was given access to the family accounts so I could pay for things."
Charlotte had been numb with shock, unable to forget the chill of her father's hand that day she'd gone to fetch him down for breakfast. She'd found him with a faint smile on his face, his expression peaceful.
Swallowing past the knot of old grief, she said, "I just couldn't get my mind around the fact that they were both gone." It had been one blow too many.
"What about your parents' families?" Gabriel scowled. "They should've been there for you."
"My parents were both only children, and their parents died when I was little." Charlotte had never known a rambunctious extended family like Gabriel's. "They had a circle of good friends though, and Molly later told me those friends had stepped in to help her figure things out. But she was the one who held it all together."
Gabriel touched the fingers of his free hand to her jaw, tilting her face toward him. "I'm guessing you did the same for her when the scandal tore her family apart."
"It wasn't the same." Then, as now, Molly had been tough.
"What does Molly say?"
"That she wouldn't have made it without me," Charlotte confessed.
"You were my oak tree," Molly had said once. "Enduring and protective and with a loyalty so deeply rooted, I knew no storm would wash you away. I would've drowned without you."
"I think she knows what she's talking about." Gabriel tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. "I bet your parents wanted her to live with you after the car accident that took her folks."
Charlotte nodded jerkily. "Except the doctors had already found the new cancers in Mom's body. The social workers wouldn't approve Molly living with us." They'd said Pippa Baird didn't need the stress, but Charlotte's mom had worried constantly over Molly. "She had to go live with strangers, but mostly, she just slept there." Molly's foster parents hadn't been bad people; they just hadn't had the tools to handle a teenage girl who'd lost everything.
"It was a no-brainer to share living space when we began university." Neither she nor Molly had anyone else they trusted enough to live with. "At the start, we lived in my parents' home, but I sold it a month later--they had very good insurance, so there were no bills, but I couldn't bear to live there anymore." The silence had been crushing. Her father's laughter would never again light up the room. Her mother's voice would never again rise in a silly song as she worked.
Charlotte hadn't been able to stand it.
"My father always told me I should never waste money on rent if I was in a position to invest it in a property instead," she said, her voice raw, "so I bought the town house." Going from a family home to a smaller town house had left her with enough money to put herself through university.
"Molly and I had the biggest argument because she wanted to pay me rent. I finally used guilt to win." She laughed and it was real, if a little wet. "I asked her if she wanted my mom and dad to haunt me. After all, they'd always treated her as another daughter."
"Devious." His lips brushed her temple, his hand warm and protective on her hip. "No wonder you two are close. You've been through a lot together."
Feeling safe in a way she hadn't since before Richard, she nodded. However, the warmth that came with talking about her parents and her best friend faded into a shivering chill as she looked into the darkness. "I met Richard two months into my first semester." His name was like broken glass in her throat. Hard and cutting and bloodying her from the inside out. "He was smart, good-looking, and he liked me. At least that's what he made me believe."
Pressed as she was to Gabriel's body, she felt the thrumming tension in him, his muscles bunched up. "It's all right, Gabriel. He's in prison."
"Jesus, Charlotte." His arm tightened around her. "What the fuck did he do to you?"
Charlotte knew she just had to get it out--Gabriel had to know. "Four months of being in a relationship with him and I finally started to understand he was bad for me. He made me doubt everything about myself, made me think I was worthless." Looking back, Charlotte couldn't believe she hadn't seen through him sooner. "I wish I could go back and shake myself."
Gabriel scowled. "You were hurt and grieving. He took advantage of that."
Intellectually, Charlotte knew she'd been in a vulnerable place at the time Richard came into her life, but it was so hard not to look back and wish she could change the past. Still, that insecure, shy girl hadn't totally let herself down. "One day, while we were talking about a paper for a shared class, he hit me," she said past her thundering heart, conscious of Gabriel's muscles going hard as rock against her. "Said I was giving him lip."
Shocked and in pain, her lip bleeding, Charlotte had headed for the door. "I broke up with him then and there. Or I tried to." It had taken all her courage; she'd kept waiting for him to haul her back, hit her again. Richard's arrogance was what had allowed her to escape. "He refused to believe it. At first he laughed, said I'd come crawling back since he was the only one who'd have me."
A growl rumbled out of Gabriel's chest. "Tell me you reported the motherfucking piece of shit."
Patting his chest in a soothing gesture, she snuggled even closer to the furnace of his body in an effort to get warm. "Yes, but it was my word against his." And Richard was a master manipulator skilled at creating illusions that appeared real. "In the end, nothing came of it."
Gabriel's jaw was granite. "It didn't end there, did it?"
She shook her head. "When he realized I was serious about breaking up, he began to bombard me with flowers and chocolates, was suddenly the charming boy who'd first made me believe he loved me." Panic pulsed in her, causing her lungs to struggle, the air suddenly too thin. "But when I wouldn't budge, he started to get mean." Shallow breaths, her heart beating too fast. "He spread rumors about me on campus and through the online campus forums, but that didn't matter so much to me."
She'd never been a social butterfly, hadn't cared about the opinions of the popular cliques. "Molly knew the truth, and that was all that mattered." During their relationship, Richard had tried to manipulate her into dropping Molly as a friend, but that was the one thing on which Charlotte had never given an inch. "The fact that I was a nobody on campus actually helped me--no one cared enough to spread the rumors."
"Breathe, Charlotte."
"I can't. I have to get this out." Almost panting now, she slid her hand around to his back and fisted it in his shirt. "I thought that would be the end of it, but he started sitting in on my lectures, just smirking at me. And I could feel him following me around campus, but I could never catch him at it."
Fear licked at her, a memory of how hunted she'd felt, never knowing when he might confront her, hurt her. "Then I started getting anonymous e-mails full of pictures of women being degraded. No messages, just the vilest pictures with my head Photoshopped on the women's bodies. The phone calls started soon afterward, all from untraceable numbers." Nausea had swamped her each time she heard the ringtone. "Over and over and over and over at night and during finals, until I had to change the home line and my cell."
Gabriel's voice was hard when he spoke. "He was stalking you."
"Yes, but he was so good at covering his tracks that though the police were sympathetic, they couldn't stop him. They did give him a warning though--it enraged him. He stewed and stewed on it, and he watched me."
She shivered, continued to push the words out because she was afraid that if she paused, she'd never start again. "I didn't know that then. The incidents stopped after the warning, and when they didn't reoccur over the next two months, I felt safe again. Safe enough to insist Molly go out of town for a special seminar her lecturer had recommended. I told her I'd be fine."
Dread swallowed her in a dark cloud. "It was what he'd been waiting for. He knew I'd be alone from Friday night to Sunday afternoon when she came back." Seeing spots in front of her eyes, she tried to draw more air into her lungs, failed.
"Enough." Gab
riel gripped her chin, made her meet his gaze. "I can guess the rest."
"No." She shook her head. "Please, I have to finish." He had to know exactly what he was fighting--because Charlotte didn't want him to fail, wanted a life that had Gabriel in it. "Let me finish."
Fury masked his features, but he nodded. "Go on."
22
Bad Things Happen... But Then Good Things Happen
"He got in using a key he'd duplicated while we'd been together." Charlotte hadn't had an alarm then, hadn't even considered it, her neighborhood was so safe. "I never worried he might have a key because I'd never brought him to my place; we'd always gone to his."
After that horrifying weekend, she'd excoriated herself for her mistake in not thinking to change the locks, until Molly had finally shaken her and said that she hadn't either. Neither one of them had expected the depth and psychopathic patience of Richard's rage, having had no experience with his kind of a twisted mind.
"I came in after a late Friday class. It was winter, dark. And he was waiting inside." Feeling her entire body shake, she held on to Gabriel in an effort to find solid ground. "He waited for me to lock the door behind myself before he came at me." Her memories of the ensuing minutes were fuzzy at best.
"I came to, gagged and tied to a chair in the kitchen." Nausea threatened as it had then, her aching head and bruised face the least of her concerns. "He'd brought ropes, and he was wearing gloves and overalls with a hood. So they wouldn't find forensic evidence." Charlotte had known then that she was in the presence of a total psychopath.
"At first he just talked to me, told me everything he intended to do." The mental torture had been excruciating. "In the hours that followed, he'd occasionally come around to the back of the chair, pull back my head with a grip in my hair, and run a knife across my throat just enough to make me bleed."
Sometimes she still woke to the feel of phantom blood dripping down her neck, ice-cold metal across her throat. "Then he'd leave for a few minutes, walk around the town house and come back to show me things he'd found in my bedroom, things he was going to keep for souvenirs." Her panties, a ring, a picture of her parents. "Every so often, he'd hit me again."