“May I dry your hair?” he asked, a third towel already in his hands.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Not with you around.” He lifted the towel in a questioning gesture.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about the hair-drying thing. She wasn’t used to being touched that way by a man. But this was Leland. “Sure,” she said.
He walked behind her and gently peeled her hair away from where it clung wetly to her shoulders and neck so he could drape it over the back of the lounge. Then he began to wrap the towel around a small section at a time, soaking up the water before moving to the next tress. The gentle tug and shift of his movements sent tingles of delight dancing over her scalp. She gave a little moan of pleasure.
The tugging stopped. “Did I pull too hard?”
“No, it feels so good. Almost as good as pool sex.”
The chuckle sounded again, sending a different kind of tingle through her. She had made him sound this way. “I might be insulted,” he said. “Except I feel too good myself.”
He continued with his drying and she hummed her approval. “I may have to dive back in just to get my hair wet again.”
“Go ahead. I like doing this for you.”
It was a strange thing for a man to offer, and she wondered what had made him think of it. But she wasn’t going to risk stopping him by asking.
When he finished, he stretched out on the lounge chair beside her, reaching across the space between them to take her hand, resting it on his bare chest and idly playing with her fingers.
The golden autumn sunlight poured down through the glass roof. It bathed Leland’s skin and hair in a soft glow so that she felt as though he radiated warmth. He closed his eyes, his face without his glasses looking vulnerable and at peace. A slight smile curled his lips so that he looked like a cat who had just lapped up a bowl of cream.
His touch on her fingers sent little zings of heat through her so she had to kick off the towel tucked over her shins and feet.
For long, blissful minutes, they lay side by side in silence, although she could swear that their bodies exuded a low hum of satisfaction that was nearly audible.
“I want to tell you what happened to me,” she said, surprising herself. But she needed him to know the gift he had given her.
His fingers tightened around hers and he sat up, swinging his legs off the chaise longue to set them on the cement floor so he was at right angles to her. “You don’t need to do that.”
She rolled her head to look at him. The angles of his face were taut, as though he was bracing himself, but his eyes were soft with concern. “Yes, I do. You’ve changed something in me in a good way. You should understand how important that is.”
He sandwiched her hand between his palms and took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m ready.”
“I was a sophomore at Glenn State University. First semester.” She used her free hand to clutch the towel tighter around her shoulders. “It was late on a Saturday afternoon in the fall but I’d been in the library all day because I had a paper due on Monday.” She tossed a wry grimace at him. “I was a real nerd. Studied all the time. Had to make dean’s list every semester.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. You give every job your best.”
Her heart began to pound as she pushed herself to describe what occurred next. “I had left my cell phone in my room and decided to go get it before I met some friends for dinner. So I packed up my stuff and left the library to walk across campus to my dorm.” She closed her eyes, remembering how blue the sky was; how the trees were scarlet, gold, and russet; how crisp and clear the air smelled as she drew it into her lungs after being shut up in the stuffy library. She even remembered thinking how lucky she was to be in this beautiful place. Which made everything worse. “There’d been a football game. I think we won but it doesn’t matter. As I was walking past a building that was under construction, three guys were walking toward me, laughing loudly, yelling cheers for the football team, and chugging from water bottles that it turned out held straight vodka. They asked me if I wanted a drink but I said, ‘No, thank you.’ For some reason, that made them angry. I tried to keep walking but they surrounded me and started yelling insults at me. I pushed by one of them and kept going.”
Terror seeped into her gut, twisting her stomach, as she relived the moment when one of the men had shouted, “Get that stuck-up bitch. We’ll teach her a lesson.” Then the rough seizure, an arm snaked around her waist and lifting her nearly off her feet while a hand slammed over her nose and mouth, making her lips bleed where her teeth cut into them.
“But one of them grabbed me. He put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream. I bit him.” She’d sunk her teeth into the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb, kicked at him with her sneakers, and tried to twist out of his grasp. But back then she didn’t know how to use leverage against a man so much bigger than herself. Now she did. “He was too drunk to care. He just squeezed harder against my nose and mouth.”
She’d thought she was going to suffocate. Now she dragged in a ragged breath.
“Dawn, you don’t have to tell me any more,” Leland said. She felt him ease his hold on her hand. She’d just noticed how tight it was.
“You should know this about me. It’s made me who I am now,” she said. If anything was going to move forward between them, it was important for him to understand fully the event that had damaged her.
“Nothing will change how I feel about you.”
“We’ll see.” She locked her gaze on the sparkling wavelets in the pool. “Anyway, they dragged me behind a dumpster at the construction site. I tried to fight them but there were three of them.” Her vision started to gray out as she remembered the feeling of being utterly helpless. She had vowed never to feel that way again.
“Shit!” Leland hissed. His grasp had gone tight again. It anchored her and somehow pulled her out of the threatening panic attack.
“They decided that they wanted me naked. Since they were drunk, it took them a while to get all my clothes off. Jeans don’t rip easily.” She coughed as the smell of their vodka-laden breath seemed to fill her nostrils again. “That’s what saved me, because a campus security guard heard all the noise they were making as they yelled directions at each other. So the first one had just gotten on top of me when the guard found us.”
She panted a couple of times to stave off the wave of nausea. She’d fought them with everything she had in her, but one had held her arms while the other wrenched her ankles apart so that his buddy could settle between her open thighs. The nurse who’d treated her afterward had picked pieces of gravel and even a small nail out of her back from where she’d been pushed into the ground by his stifling weight. Thank God, he’d decided to grope her breasts before he raped her. The guard had pulled him off her just in time.
“Dawn!” Leland dropped his forehead onto their clasped hands. “I can’t imagine . . .” His voice held so much anguish that she almost wished she hadn’t started this.
“It’s okay.” She forced her fingers open from her convulsive grip on the towel to reach over and stroke his hair. “You’ve helped me heal.”
He lifted his head enough to look at her. “I hate that I made you . . . feel that way again when we were together.”
“Do not take that on yourself. I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you. Not right away.”
“I understand that one hundred percent, but I . . .” She could hear the pain she was causing him.
“No guilt! You’ve been good for me.” She waved toward the pool. “That was good for me.”
He nodded although she could see that he was still beating himself up. “I hope to God they went to jail.”
This part was almost as hard as the attack. “No. They got suspended for the rest of the semester.”
“What the hell?! They attacked you! They tried to . . .” He looked away, as though he couldn’t finish the thought.
“For obvious reasons, the university adminis
tration didn’t want it made public. They pressured me not to file charges. They had the nerve to say that since I wasn’t actually raped, it wasn’t that bad.” Tears burned in her eyes. Angry tears because the administrators should have protected her, not her scumbag attackers. Sad tears because she had been so young and naive. “I didn’t want to tell my parents because I knew they’d go ballistic. I thought I wanted to stay at the university so I figured I should go along with the plan. I kept my mouth shut and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.”
Leland let out a string of curses.
“Yeah, that was stupid on my part. They offered me counseling but I believed them when they said without the actual rape, it wasn’t so terrible. So I didn’t go.”
Leland groaned. “And I’m guessing that you didn’t tell your parents.”
“I didn’t want to upset them. My father would have . . .” She shrugged. “I thought I was okay.”
“But you weren’t.”
“Not even close. I couldn’t walk anywhere unless I had someone with me. My roommates got pretty sick of me always tagging along with them. So I missed classes. I couldn’t go to the library. My grades began to deteriorate. Finally, I gave up and withdrew. I think the administrators heaved a sigh of relief.” She shook her head to stop the memories. “I moved back here and got a job at the gym.”
“And you became an expert at self-defense because that’s how strong you are. If I’d known . . .” He shook his head before he lifted her hand to his lips and brushed on a kiss so light and tender it made her want to cry. “Thank you for your courage in sharing this with me. I’m humbled.”
“You deserved to know.”
“May I hug you?”
Her gut twisted that he would feel he had to ask her permission. She scrambled off the lounge, her towel falling away, and curled herself onto his lap.
He kissed the top of her head and said her name over and over again as he held her ever so gently. Then he reached down to snag her towel and drape it over her shoulders and back. That broke her and she felt hot, salty tears roll down her cheeks.
“I’d tell you not to cry but I think you deserve the privilege,” he said, his arms cocooning her. “Cry as long as you need to.”
“I hate it. It makes me feel weak.”
His splayed fingers pressed against her back. “A weak woman wouldn’t have turned a terrible experience into a mission to help other women be strong.”
She lifted her head and swiped at the tear streaks. “It was Ramón who got me into self-defense. He gave me the gym space to teach my classes for free. Then he sponsored me for certification as a personal trainer.” She locked her gaze with Leland’s. “He pulled me out of my paranoia and allowed me to feel safe enough to go out in the world again. That’s why I can’t believe he’s doing something illegal at the gym. I can’t reconcile the compassion with the criminal.”
He let out a long breath. “I’m afraid I have bad news about that. But maybe now is not the time to discuss it.”
“I can handle it. Tell me.” She sat up straight on his lap.
“You can handle anything but you might not want to hear this.” He tightened his arms around her the tiniest bit before he said, “I found what I think is the reason for the dark web traffic at the gym.”
Chapter 13
Dawn pulled her towel tighter around her shoulders. She could tell by his expression that she needed to brace herself. “What is it?”
“A large, professional-looking website selling weapons of various descriptions, mostly guns. All untraceable, as they boast.” His lips were a grim line.
“Guns?! Who at the gym would do that?” She shook her head but the sight of Ramón’s gun case flashed through her mind. “I can’t imagine anyone there being an arms dealer at that level.”
“Then why would they route traffic through the gym’s deep web node? There must be a connection.” His face was tight with resolution. “You have to step away from this. It’s too damned dangerous. Especially after what you’ve been through.”
She wasn’t sure if she liked being told what to do. However, she drummed into her self-defense classes that a gun changed the whole equation. “Are you stepping away?”
“I’m getting Tully involved. He’s former FBI. He knows how to deal with this kind of situation and he can bring in the right people.”
“You didn’t answer the question.” She laid her palm against his cheek. “I don’t want your body that I’ve worked so hard on training to end up riddled with bullets.” She’d been trying to joke but an image of him bleeding as he lay on the gym floor seared itself into her brain.
“I have a bulletproof vest. Tully insists.” His expression gentled. “I have training in self-defense, kidnap avoidance, and a bunch of other things that people don’t realize I need.” He made a wry face. “Hell, I didn’t realize I needed them until Tully pointed out that founding partners in a highly visible international firm are targets, especially when they’re traveling. So I’m used to some level of threat.”
Natalie’s warning about Leland’s success making him different from a normal person echoed through Dawn’s mind. No one else she knew—except Leland’s other partners—needed to be adept at kidnap avoidance. Certainly, no one owned their own personal bulletproof vest. That was the dark side of rising to the top of a prominent profession, something she hadn’t had even the faintest clue about. His revelation underlined the vast gulf between their lifestyles in a way that made any hope she’d had of a real relationship seem distant. The incredible sense of intimacy she’d felt when she’d told him her story began to waver.
“I like Tully more and more all the time.” She wiggled off his lap and onto her lounge, as though that would help distance her feelings for him too. “I think arms dealers are even worse than kidnappers. Kidnappers want to keep you alive. Arms dealers not so much. Not to mention that they probably know how to use what they sell. And they have a lot of inventory to choose from.”
“I don’t intend to get shot,” he said. “It would prevent me from making love to you in the pool again. And that would be a terrible thing.”
A strange nostalgia jabbed at her chest. She hoped they would return to the pool but she wasn’t convinced it would happen. “I assume there’s no harm in me looking at the website. I might spot something that ties it to the gym,” she said.
“I was going to suggest that, but only if you feel up to it.” Leland scanned her face, his jaw tight with concern.
“Do you really think I’m going to have a problem looking at a website, even one with guns?” But his hesitation touched her.
It took him a moment but he shook his head. “I’m the one who’s still processing your experience.”
She smoothed a lock of his hair back from his forehead. “It was a lot to have dumped on you. I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad you told me but I just want to . . .” He made a slashing gesture of frustration. “Those men should have been punished far more severely.”
“That can’t be changed. My goal is to forget them so completely that they don’t exist for me.”
He nodded somberly before he stood up, drawing her with him. “Let’s get dressed and catch some present-day bad guys.”
“One problem,” she said. “My clothes are soaking wet, thanks to you yanking me into the pool.”
Guilt threw a shadow over his face. “I don’t know what got into me. I apologize for that.”
“Hey, I’m kidding. It’s no big deal. I just don’t know what I’m going to wear.”
“How about a bathrobe while I call my concierge service to pick you up some dry clothes? They have robes in the locker room here.”
“Your concierge service? What does that mean?”
“When I need something, they get it. Simple as that.”
Dawn shook her head in wonder. “You truly don’t live in the real world.”
“I am very familiar with the real world.” His face and tone were rough-edged.
“Sorry!” She held up her hand, remembering Alice’s revelations about his upbringing and his mother’s recent death. “I don’t know you well enough to say that.”
“I forget that it sounds impressive to have a concierge when really it just allows me to work without interruption.” He started toward the hallway where the elevator had delivered her. “Let’s get you into the bathrobe while I make the call.”
In an astonishingly short time, the concierge service had delivered three pairs of designer jeans, three blouses in various styles, and three pairs of shoes, all far more stylish and expensive than anything she owned. Leland stood outside the locker room, talking on his cell phone about something incomprehensibly techie, while she pulled on a pair of jeans and chose a rose-colored blouse that made her sigh at the drape of the exquisite silk. She’d balked at having Leland order her lingerie and used the time before the delivery to blow-dry her bra and panties. Since Leland had already dried her hair, she just used one of the locker room combs to smooth it out.
Then she picked up one of the shoeboxes and gasped at the label. Christian Louboutin. She opened it to find a pair of block-heeled black ankle boots accented with a red sole. She ran a finger over the butter-soft leather with a longing that she hadn’t known she could feel about a pair of shoes. She closed the box and checked out the next one. Saint Laurent. Inside were black-and-silver-striped ankle boots with narrow tapered heels. Utterly gorgeous. The third box claimed to be sneakers but the label said Balenciaga. She didn’t know they even made sneakers. She opened the top to find what looked like normal running shoes, albeit in an ultra-stylish combination of taupe, gray, and white with the designer’s name embroidered along the sides.
She tried to gauge which of the shoes was the least expensive because once she wore them, there was no taking them back. She had tried on her own boots, but they squished out water with every step she took, so she had to pick one of these exorbitantly expensive offerings.
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