CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SHAWN WAS PRETTY DAMN close to hysteria himself as he rolled off Rhiannon and fumbled for the lights. He finally managed to switch on the bedside lamp and as his eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, his first good look at her wrecked him.
She was sobbing silently, every part of her shaking with the intensity of her pain and fear. Her mascara made watery black streaks down her cheeks and her entire body was flushed a deep rose that only accentuated the thin white lines that zagged and curled over her arms and shoulders.
She was clutching his sheet to her chest with one hand but she was so upset that it slipped with every harsh sob that wracked her slender body, giving him a view of her breasts and upper abdomen that sent fury rampaging through him even as he wondered if he’d been expecting it. How naive would it have been for him to have seen the damage to her arms and not realized that it covered other, more vulnerable parts of her body?
The knowledge that he had subconsciously known about her other injuries did nothing to soothe his rage—or the horror winding its way through him as he watched Rhiannon struggle to get control of herself.
How could he have not known she was working herself into this state? How could he have been making love to her, letting her make love to him, and not realized just how panic-stricken she had become?
He felt like a heel, like a monster, like a complete and total asshole as he sat there, watching her battle demons he couldn’t even imagine, demons he couldn’t begin to fight.
He wanted to help Rhiannon but he didn’t know how, didn’t know if reaching out to her would calm her down or just make her suffering worse. But not touching her was killing him, so he reached out one hand, making sure to move slowly and give her plenty of time to stop him.
When she didn’t, some of the ice that had formed around his heart began to melt and he softly began to stroke her hair.
“Baby, can you hear me?” He kept his voice calm when what he really wanted to do was rage and curse. “Rhiannon? It’s me, Shawn. Are you with me? You’re safe, sweetheart. I promise, you’re safe. I won’t hurt you. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She didn’t answer, but then he hadn’t expected her to. When Cynthia had lapsed into hysterics, she hadn’t been able to form a coherent sentence for hours. Still, when Rhiannon didn’t pull away, he sank down onto the bed next to her.
“Come on, sweetheart. You’ve got to calm down. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
She didn’t respond and her sobs didn’t abate, but she allowed him to pull her against his chest. Her arms went around his neck and she buried her face in the curve of his shoulder and sobbed like her heart was breaking wide-open.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Rhiannon. I never meant to hurt you.”
His words only made her cry harder.
Because he didn’t know what else to do, he rocked her back and forth, making soothing, unintelligible noises. Murmuring to her, trying to convince her—and himself—that everything was going to be all right.
He’d been down this path before, maybe never quite like this, but he’d seen Cynthia in depressions this bad—maybe even worse. Had learned a million tricks to snap her out of them and he tried them all here, to no avail. Eventually, he just gave up and let Rhiannon cry.
Time passed slowly as his mind whirled through everything that could have happened to her, everything that could have brought her to this state. Each possibility was more unpleasant than the next and he kicked himself again and again for not seeing that he was bringing things back. For not calling a halt to their lovemaking before she’d gotten to this state.
He’d known that something was wrong, damn it, had sensed it almost from the first. But he hadn’t stopped her, hadn’t even tried to stop her after the first few minutes. He’d been too caught up in what she was doing to him, in how she was making him feel. In the thrill of the realization that he would finally be able to hold her and love her like he wanted to.
Love her? What a sad, pathetic joke that thought was. He’d nearly broken her.
Shawn didn’t know how long they sat there, rocking, but when Rhiannon had finally calmed enough to pull away, her eyes were nearly swollen shut.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice lower and more expressionless than he had ever heard it. “God, Shawn, I’m so sorry.”
“Please, Rhiannon, don’t say that to me. Say anything else, call me a bastard, hit me, do whatever you need to do, but please don’t tell me that you’re sorry. I’m the one who—”
“Don’t take this on yourself. It’s all my fault—you had nothing to do with it.”
He wanted to argue—would argue later as he hated how easily she took all the blame on herself—but he was smart enough to figure out that now wasn’t the time. Right now, she needed acceptance, not opposition.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” he asked softly.
“Not really. But I guess I owe you an explanation, don’t I?”
“You don’t owe me anything you don’t want to give me—I thought I’d made that clear before now.” He paused, struggling for the right words. Finally, he settled on the truth. “You don’t need to push yourself. I’m okay with waiting—”
“Aww, Shawn, I keep telling you my little freak-out wasn’t about you, but you’re just not hearing me.”
“It’s pretty hard to believe that when I was the one on top of you when you lost it. If I did anything to hurt you, I’m so very sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything. You were perfect, amazing. I loved touching you.”
But not being touched by him. He noticed the distinction, filed it away to think about later. Right now he needed every ounce of concentration his rattled nerves could muster to negotiate his way through the sudden minefield of their relationship.
“I’ll tell you about it—about him, if you want to know.”
Everything inside of him froze, then tightened to the point of pain. It was like the entire world, or at least his corner of it, had shrunk to fit into that one sentence. He wanted to hear the story so badly he could taste it, needed to know who had hurt her so powerfully that it was like poisoned claws raking away at his insides.
“I want to know.”
She nodded, then hitched the sheet up higher around herself, as if it would protect her from what she was about to do. As if she needed whatever armor she could find.
“Do you want to get dressed first?” he asked.
“I just want to get it over with. If I wait too long, I’ll completely lose my nerve.”
The need for revenge ripped through him and his anger swelled until it was all he could do to sit still. He wanted to hit something, wanted to hurt someone as badly as Rhiannon was hurting. As badly as he was hurting. It was an odd feeling for a man who had always considered himself a pacifist, and that much more powerful because of its complete and utter strangeness.
Cursing under his breath, he bent down and retrieved his beloved Led Zeppelin shirt from where it had landed beside the bed, then pulled it down over her head before she even realized his intentions. It wasn’t much, but surely it was better than her sitting there, naked and vulnerable, before him.
Yet as he looked at her, he could have sworn he saw a new flicker of hurt in her eyes, one he could distinguish from the others by the depths of its intensity. He wanted to ask her about it, to demand to know what he had done to cause it, but just then she began to speak in a voice so low, so haunted, that it sent shivers down his spine.
“I used to be a journalist. In fact, I spent all of my adolescence and most of my adult life working for a newspaper.”
“Did you like it?”
“I loved it, loved everything about it, from the scent of a lead to the smell of the ink as it hit the newsprint.” She sighed. “And I was good at it—really, really good at it.
“Within two years of graduating from college I’d worked my way up from a small biweekly to the Austin American-Statesman. Within
another three, I’d moved from covering the social beat to being in charge of the crime beat.
“Most days it was so much damn fun I could hardly believe it—like a game that no one knew how to win, but that everyone wanted to master. By the end of my time there, I was the paper’s number one investigative reporter. I was chasing down leads all day, every day—real leads, bogus ones. It didn’t matter, I got them. And I ran them all down, even the ones that were obviously false. Better to check a story out than to miss something big.”
From his research, he knew some of this already—a lot of it, actually—but it was different hearing it from her. It made everything more real, including what he was deathly afraid was coming next.
“Anyway, when I was thirty-four, the AP came calling and I couldn’t say no. They wanted me to move to a bigger bureau, to Dallas or Philadelphia or Phoenix, but my husband’s job was here. Our life was here. So I cut a deal—I’d spend most of my time working out of the Austin office, but if anything big happened in Dallas or Houston, I would be there, the same day.
“It worked for a while, but then I was spending more and more time in Dallas, because that’s where the stories were. In a lot of ways, Austin is still a small town, with a small town’s problems—which is great, if you live here. Not so great if the AP wants you to make a name for yourself covering murder and mayhem.”
The bad part was coming, he could feel it from the way she had begun to tremble once again, and from the look in her eyes. When she’d been talking about reporting, they’d been a clear, bright copper but now they were muddy and shadowed as she took one shuddering breath after another.
“Anyway, the AP wanted me to cover the big news stories, but I’m—or at least I was—an investigative reporter at heart. So when I got wind of a major cover-up that a U.S. senator from Dallas was involved in, I couldn’t let it go. Richard told me not to get involved, he told me I was playing with both of our lives, but I was on the scent. The people have a right to know what their elected officials are up to.” She snorted. “I was still naive enough to believe that credo back then.”
He waited long seconds for her to continue, but she didn’t. She had gone somewhere in her head that he couldn’t follow and it took a while before she remembered that she was in the middle of a story that had him on tenterhooks—in the most horrible way imaginable.
“I was staying in Dallas to research the story—at this crappy motel my bureau chief always put me up in. Richard always hated that, said that we could afford better and to hell with what the AP wanted. After the—” Her voice faltered, broke and she cleared her throat before trying again. “After the rape, he used to tell me that he’d told me so. That it never would have happened if I’d been staying at a decent place.”
She shook her head, picked at imaginary lint on his sheet. “I don’t know. Maybe he was right.”
Shawn was still reeling from having his suspicions confirmed, his brain replaying her words over and over again. Rhiannon had been raped. Brutally, horribly raped if the scars on her body were any indication. Anger churned inside him as he thought of her bastard of an ex-husband leaning over her battered body and saying some version of “I told you so.”
“What happened?” He grated the words out between clenched teeth. He didn’t sound anywhere near as sympathetic as he wanted to, but at that moment there was no sympathy in his body. No empathy. All he wanted to know was who had hurt Rhiannon—and where to find them.
“It’s not exactly an original story, which somehow makes it worse, you know? I was stupid, arrogant, thought I could handle anything that came my way with my forty hours of self-defense training. What a joke. I never even saw it coming.
“I’d worked late at the office, trying to track down a source who had given me information and then completely disappeared from sight. I found out later that they had killed him—he wasn’t the kind of guy anyone would notice going missing—but at that point, I just wanted to find him. I needed him to help put together the pieces of my huge story.” Her voice turned mocking. “It seems so ridiculous saying that now, knowing how things turned out.”
He wanted to ask what she meant, but he had a sick feeling he knew. One of the U.S. senators was from Dallas, and had been in the Senate for over fifteen years—which meant Rhiannon’s story had never gone to print. Everything she’d done, everything she had sacrificed, everything that had been taken from her, had been for nothing.
The unfairness of it made his skin burn and his blood boil.
“Anyway, on my way back to the motel, I noticed that someone was following me in a black SUV—or at least, I thought they were following me. It was hard to tell because the road was dark and still relatively crowded, despite the fact that it was close to midnight.
“I stopped at a busy convenience store, filled up with gas. Tried to find him, you know, to get a plate number, but he was gone.
“He got me, twenty minutes later, walking from my car to my room. I thought I’d lost him—actually, I had convinced myself that the idea of anyone following me was nothing but childish fear.”
She laughed, but the sound held no humor. “Boy, when I get it wrong. He was one of my sources on a story—one of the big sources who had been feeding me bits and pieces for weeks. Stringing me along, I realize now, but at the time, he’d been so sincere, so earnest. I’d believed him when he said he couldn’t live with what the senator was doing, his conscience wouldn’t let him sleep. It turned out he’d been sniffing around, trying to figure out how much I knew—how much I’d passed on—before he shut me up.
“He hit me on the head and dragged me into my room when I was still too confused from the head injury to fight. Then he tied me to the bed, which—lucky me—had a very accommodating headboard with slats in it. He had to get creative with the legs as there was no footboard, but he managed.”
Her eyes were far away again and he knew she had gone back to that time, to that moment, and he couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand knowing that she was sitting next to him, that he was holding her, but she was completely out of his reach. In those moments she belonged to a sadistic monster more than she had ever belonged to him and he wanted nothing in the world so much as to bring her back to the present. To get her as far away from the torturous pain of her past as he could manage.
“Rhiannon, that’s enough.” He barely recognized his voice. It had gone deeper, turned feral, and the only thing he wanted more than to bring Rhiannon back to him was to spend ten minutes alone with the man who had totally and utterly destroyed the woman she had been.
She didn’t respond, so lost in the past that he doubted if she’d even heard him. “I’m sure you can guess the rest, right? He gagged me, cut me—” she held out her arms so he could see the cuts, as if he didn’t already have each and every one of them memorized “—told me that I was digging into things that I had no business being involved in.
“He said he’d been sent to teach me a lesson—and boy, did he ever. When he was done—when he was done, he stabbed me in the abdomen and the side. Not deep enough to kill me but deep enough to make me bleed like a stuck pig. One more punishment for sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. And then he left me and I lay there, for ten hours, bleeding and covered in his filth, praying. To this day, I don’t know if I was praying to live—or to die.
“For a while, I tried to attract attention. I rocked the bed, banged it against the wall, but it was my bad luck that the rooms on either side of me were empty. So no one found me until the maid came in to clean at eleven o’clock. She didn’t take it well.”
He didn’t need to ask how Rhiannon had taken it. She was no longer a journalist, no longer married, no longer able to see herself as the beautiful woman she was. How much of her blindness was due to the scars, he wondered, and how much because of the brutality of the attack?
And he had rolled her over, pinned her beneath him, held her wrists in his hand as he all but ripped the clothes from her body. Was it any wonder she had
freaked out? If he could reach it, he would kick his own ass.
But he couldn’t, so he had to settle for a totally lame, completely ineffectual apology. “I’m so sorry, Rhiannon.”
She looked surprised. “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything to hurt me.”
No, but he hadn’t done anything to heal her, either, even knowing how hurt she was. Before tonight he might not have known the extent of the atrocities she’d endured, but he’d guessed that she’d been attacked and still he had brought her up to his room.
“The only reason I even told you was because I freaked out like that. I wanted you to understand that it wasn’t anything you’d done. That it was me. All me.” She closed her eyes and he hated the fact that he’d lost that window into her thoughts. Into her state of mind.
“You know, I wasn’t always like this. I used to be brave and put-together, really adventurous, you know. Even after the rape, I tried to hold it together—for Richard, for work, for myself. But when he was acquitted—”
“The bastard who hurt you isn’t in jail.” It was a statement, not a question.
She shook her head. “No. Like I told you, I’d worked the crime beat for years, so I knew a lot of cops, had a pretty good relationship with them. After the details of what had happened to me circulated, they went out of their way to find a way to charge him. He had an airtight alibi for the night, plus plenty of reasons to explain the trace evidence that placed him in my hotel room. After all, he’d been there before, discussing the case with me. He was sorry about what had happened to me, but the trauma had obviously pushed me around the bend. He was well-respected, a senator’s aide. He would never—” Her voice broke, but she continued.
“He would never do anything like that. It became a case of his word against mine, and though the police believed me, they couldn’t nail him. They grew frustrated, were overzealous and he got off on a chain-of-evidence technicality. Not to mention the fact that there were allegations of police brutality.