by Sylvie Kurtz
The bitter taste of bile rose to her throat. They’d thought Grace was her.
TYLER REACHED THEM soon after the men scattered. He seemed to take an eternity to hobble back to the castle and bring the Jeep around to the pasture. An ambulance would take too long. Melissa wanted Grace helped now. Together they hefted Grace into the back seat and sped to the hospital. Melissa had been too scared for Grace to notice the confines of the car. And her concern for Grace negated her self-consciousness at her exposed face.
Another millennium seemed to go by before someone came back with the news that Grace was still alive. And at least another century crawled by before Melissa was allowed to see her.
“Ten minutes,” the nurse warned.
Melissa went in and sat beside Grace. She hesitated before she reached for Grace’s hand. Would Grace want her anywhere near her once she found out she was to blame for her condition?
“Do you remember that first day you walked into my studio?” Melissa said, squeezing Grace’s hand, willing her to open her eyes and scowl at her. “You saw the painting I was working on. The one with the cougar attacking the horse. You asked me why. ‘Why you got to draw such a bloody picture, Missy?’” She imitated Grace’s voice. “And I asked you who you thought survived the encounter. I could see on your face that you thought maybe you’d made a mistake, that maybe I was as much of a witch as they said. You were afraid.” Melissa licked her lips. “The truth is, I was the one who was afraid. I thought for sure once you got a good look at that scene, you’d leave and I’d be all alone again.”
Melissa leaned forward on the chair. “Do you remember what I said?”
She stared at Grace’s bandaged face and sniffed back the itch at the back of her throat. “The one who wants to live the most. That’s the one who survives.”
She wanted to hug Grace so fiercely her body shook. “I never chose death, Grace. Neither did you. That’s the easy way out. You and me, we’ve never taken the easy way out.”
But Melissa knew she had chosen the coward’s way. She had chosen not to face the monsters, but rather, cage them in her work. “You have to come back, Grace. You have to get better, you hear.”
Her throat tightened, forcing her to gasp for her next breath. “Grace…”
Melissa felt a hand on her shoulder, and a familiar voice spoke words she didn’t hear. She hung on to the knife-scarred hand of the woman who’d become such a dear friend.
“We have to leave, Melissa.” Tyler’s voice registered somewhere in her brain.
He pulled her out of the chair, and she tried to shrug away his hold. “I have to stay.”
He twisted her around and shook her once. “Listen to me. You can’t. They’ve placed you under house arrest.”
“Me?” She blinked madly. “Why?”
“It’s temporary until Freddy’s lawyer can sort out this mess. The lawyers had to do a lot of fast talking to get that compromise.”
He nudged toward the door. She grasped his arm and held her ground. “Tyler, you’re not making sense.”
“The sheriff believes you’re the one who attacked Grace. That the men in the pasture were just trying to save her from your wrath.”
“That’s crazy.” She shook her head. “How can the sheriff believe such a thing?”
The strain of the evening showed in the deep furrows on Tyler’s forehead. “The rain washed away a lot of evidence. It’s your word against theirs. And you’re not in the sheriff’s favor right now.”
“It still doesn’t explain why they were on my land with baseball bats. Or even how they got there.”
“They say you were the one with the bat, trying to beat the devil into her.”
“That’s ridiculous! Let’s say the sheriff was right and I did want to kill Grace. How could anyone on the road even see into the pasture?” A burning rage spread from deep inside her. “And how come I don’t have a scratch?”
“You’re a witch, Melissa. Everyone knows witches don’t bleed.”
She shot Grace’s unmoving form a glance. “I would never hurt Grace. Never.”
Tyler wrapped an arm around her shoulder and led her out of the room. “I know, sweetheart, but right now we have to go unless you want to spend more time in jail.”
She leaned against him. “It’s not fair.”
“No one promised you fair.”
No, no one had. You’d think she’d have learned that by now.
“WHAT HAPPENED out there?” the contact asked with much too much huff for Ray’s taste.
“A slight miscalculation.” The drunken fools had fed too easily on the preacher’s hatred and started off on their frenzy of justice too early. “But no harm done.” The play was still going his way.
“Lucky for you. He doesn’t want her hurt. Just gone.”
“You can’t have it both ways. Not if you want the whole cake and not just a slice. And we both know you’ve got a healthy appetite.” Ray smiled, satisfied his hit had found its mark. Greed was such an easy sin to feed. “Is the other on board yet?”
A slight hesitation. God, how Ray hated people who thought they could sit on the fence and stay clean. Didn’t they realize straddling doomed them to fall?
“Give me a few more days,” the contact said.
“You’re the one with the deadline, not me.”
Ray cut the connection and let the fool ponder that. One way or another, in less than two weeks the attack was going to move into endgame. And the pawn was going to turn up big—right there on the front page for the world to see.
Ray savored the thought, the power. His. All his.
Chapter Ten
Once back at the castle, Tyler insisted on entering the premises before her, on seeing to the horses with her, on checking every gate and every window while she stayed safely inside.
Now that Melissa was on familiar ground in her own quarters, the surge of adrenaline that had carried her through the ordeal with Grace was fading fast, leaving a bone-deep tiredness in its wake. But her mind still reeled, and she couldn’t seem to stop pacing.
Tyler walked through the rooms of her tower, checking, she assumed, for hidden gnomes carrying bats. She didn’t complain once about his overprotective behavior.
“Everything looks okay.” He stood at the door, those sharp dark eyes watching her. How much did he see? And though his gaze was intrusive, she couldn’t bear the thought of shutting the door on it and being left all alone.
“Don’t leave.” She rubbed her arms to keep the cold from eating her alive. Even in the smothering heat and humidity brought by the storm, she could not stop shivering. “Please.”
He nodded. “Do you mind if I use your computer?”
She shook her head. He sat at the small desk that held the unit and turned on the machine. Reaching across his shoulders, she typed in her password, allowing him access to the programs. The brief contact of forearms on shoulder, of cheek against cheek, sparked a sudden hunger that had her skittering away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, resuming her pacing.
“What for?” His fingers sped across the keyboard.
“For locking you in the dungeon.” She’d done it out of anger, but that was no excuse. Grace had tried to warn her, but she hadn’t listened, and now the guilt was eating at her.
“I forgive you.” His smile warmed her, but it did nothing to lighten the burden that weighed down her spirit.
“Do you know why I let you stay after your accident?” she asked, trying to center herself. Maybe confession was good for the soul.
“Why?”
He was staring at her again. The intensity of his gaze increased her pace. “I wanted to hurt you just like I thought you wanted to hurt me.”
“That was never my intention.”
“Then I wanted you to see me. The real me. Not the witch.” She gave a short sharp laugh. “The only problem is, I don’t know what the real me is.” She cursed the croak in her voice. She didn’t want him to feel sorry for her; she j
ust wanted him to understand.
“I never saw you as a witch.”
“The irony is that for years, that’s exactly what I was. I went around blaming everyone for what happened. My mother. My father. Sable. Even Tia.”
“You were angry.”
And she’d felt trapped by the force of that anger, by the dueling Melissas who’d lived inside her—the one who needed to lash out and the one who needed to be held. “I took it out on everyone around me. Especially Dee and Grace.”
She stopped pacing and looked at him, rubbing her cold arms, shaking her head. She was as close to tears as she’d been in a long time and hated their weight. Don’t break down and cry like a baby. “I don’t want Grace to die. If she dies…”
“The prognosis is good.”
“Yes.” Once Grace came out of her coma, the doctors would be able to assess the damage. But when would she? Would she be the same Grace? How long would they keep her in the hospital? Without Grace, how would she survive? There was no place for her outside, and now that Dee had a family, her existence inside these walls depended mostly on Grace. Outside. Just the thought made her shiver. Slowly she turned to face Tyler. He was still watching her with that keen gaze.
“Tyler, when you look at me, what do you see?” Once the question was out, she held her breath, not quite sure she wanted a response.
He took so long to answer she thought her heart would jump right out of her chest. Then in the cozy light, his gaze softened and filled with compassion. He moved to stand in front of her, tilted his head and studied her as an artist might a subject. He raised a finger to her face. She fought the instinct to flinch and gave in to the warmth of his finger trailing the zigzag course of scars on her cheek. “I see pain. I see courage. I see strength.”
Emptiness, yearning, whistled through her, making her sway. “Do you see a woman?”
“Yes.” He placed his hand over her heart. Something in her sighed. “I see a woman with a generous heart.”
“I want to know…” She licked dry lips. “Make love to me, Tyler.”
Shaking his head, he took a step back. “Sex isn’t going to stop the hurt.”
Brashly she stepped forward and pressed her lips to his, lingering, absorbing the long slow shiver that rattled through her. Her fingers curled into the material of his shirt as she felt her blood heat. “I want to know…” she murmured against his lips. “I need—”
“Melissa…”
She placed a finger against his lips. “I need—”
“Not from me.”
Anger, swift and cutting, razored through her. It always came down to the curse of her accident. “Because I’m ugly.”
“No,” he said, then tenderly brushed her lips with his. “Because I am.”
If she were a generous person as he claimed, she would let him go. She would turn around and walk away. She would be happy that he saw through the scars to the deeper layers, that he was chivalrous enough to want to protect her. But she wasn’t generous. She was selfish—needed to be to survive. With Grace hurt, and Dee busy with her own family, Melissa feared for her very existence. If he left her, she would be alone. And she couldn’t be alone. Not tonight.
Eventually he would leave. She knew that. Once the danger was past, once he’d kept his promise, he would leave. But if she let him step away now, she would shrivel up. The darkness that lived inside her would suffocate her. That he cared for her, that she cared for him, made their union a sacred one. It felt right. It was right.
As she’d seen in so many of Dee’s movies, she reached up and framed his head with her hands. She kissed him long and deep. So caught up was she in the swell of sensation that she lost track of the small voice buzzing a warning in her mind.
She touched by instinct, learning the hard lines of him as if he were a sculpture, reveling in the warmth of his chest, savoring his musky male scent, the heady taste of him.
“Melissa…”
And then the heat cooled when she realized she had no idea what came next. Clothes came off, and in Dee’s movies, the screen always went dark right about then, cutting to later and the afterglow of lovemaking. The space in between was simply imagination. A pang of fear gripped her.
Without clothes, he would see that the melting of skin went beyond her face, that the fire had licked her left arm and left leg. He would see the rectangular scars on her right thigh and back where skin had been harvested for grafts. He would know then that there was nothing beautiful about her. Hot tears squeezed between her closed lids, wet the cotton of his shirt.
“Melissa…”
He kissed the line of tears, making them gush faster.
“Please, Tyler…” She wasn’t sure if she was asking him to stop or to continue.
Rain tapped the windows, drumming as furiously as her heart.
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her against him. She felt the strong pulse at his neck beat beneath her cheek, the rapid hammer of his heart pound beneath her hand, the hard line of his body fusing intimately with hers. She no longer cared that he would find her ugly. In the dark he couldn’t see the unappealing discoloration of skin or the distorted map of her scars.
And maybe in the dark she would be enough.
“I don’t have anything to protect you,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“What?”
“Birth control.”
The thought of fertility was a kick in the gut, a possibility, a miracle. A baby? Oh, please, yes. “The timing’s not right,” she lied. She would deal with the consequences later.
“I promised Freddy not to hurt you.”
“It’s too late.” Had been too late since the first day.
His touch against her skin was alive with the same electric energy swirling in the air outside. As he bared her left shoulder and kissed the mottled skin, colors seemed to fly off the canvasses propped against the wall and whirl around her. When his thumb caressed her breast, the rainbow vortex spun into a blinding white light that electrified every atom of her body. The drugging kisses made her weak. The liquid heat pooling low in her belly made her bold. She pressed herself closer to him, twined her arms around his neck, dug her fingers into his soft hair. She wanted him to slow down. She wanted him to hurry up. She had no idea what she wanted, what she needed, only that he had it.
He lifted her off the floor and into his arms, then headed toward her bedroom down the hall. The sure strength of his arms around her made her feel feminine in a way she never had before.
When he placed her in the middle of her bed, he winced.
“Your ribs,” she said, her hand hovering above the bruise beneath the shirt. The heat of him pulsed against her palm.
“I’m fine.”
Bracing his elbows by her face, resting his body along-side hers, he gazed into her eyes. The look on his face was one some deep part of her had yearned for since the day her mother had died.
But falling in love wasn’t part of the plan.
Lightning sparked against the night sky. Thunder drummed low and deep. Rain tap-danced across the windows. He was waiting, she realized, for permission.
The night was alive.
And so was she.
“Yes,” she said. She brought his face to meet hers and kissed him. For all she’d gone through, she was entitled to a scrap of joy. Tomorrow would be soon enough for regrets.
HE SHOULD BE running and fast. If he had any brains left at all, he would get up and leave. But she had him so stirred up he wasn’t sure he had any logical capabilities left in his brain. As those green eyes darkened under his scrutiny, his useless gray matter was skipping ahead to imagining himself deep inside her.
Her innocent desire, her sweet kisses, were putting him in an awkward position. The responsibility of it scared the hell out of him. Then there was his promise to Freddy. He’d sworn not to hurt her. All this would get her was a straight shot to heartache.
She had no idea what she was asking. And he didn’t have the guts to ref
use her. Not after watching her with Grace tonight. Not when she would take it as a rejection of her face and not protection for her heart. She had no idea how much he wanted to touch her, to take her. And there was no way she could handle the fervor of that hunger.
Breathing heavily, he curled his hands into fists, hoping to gain an ounce of control. His voice just short of a croak, he said, “Melissa.” God, where had his vocabulary gone?
Holding on to the collar of his shirt, she frowned. “Tyler? Not out of pity.”
Pity? Where had she gotten that notion? This had nothing to do with pity and everything to do with lust. Slowly he rose. Deliberately he clicked on the small lamp at her bedside. Methodically he toed off his boots, peeled off his shirt and jeans, shucked off his shorts and socks. He stood naked before her, drinking in the fluid reactions flitting across her face. “Does this look like pity?”
She swallowed hard. “Oh, my, no.”
“Your turn,” he said, reaching for her hand.
She let him lift her to her feet. “What?”
He let go of her hand and jerked his chin toward her attire. “Take off your clothes.”
Instinctively her shoulders rounded. “The light—”
“Stays on.” He captured her chin in his hand and forced her to look deep into his eyes. “Either you trust me or you don’t. The choice is yours, Melissa. We can stop now.”
She shook her head. “No. I want… I need…”
“I won’t let you hide.”
She nodded again and sat primly on the edge of the bed. Her gaze latched on to his as she lifted the long-sleeved T-shirt off her body. The ghost-white skin on the right made a sharp contrast to the swirl of darker pink and purply-brown dapples on her left.
He saw the small shake of her hands as she watched him watching her. “Go on.”
She reached back and unclasped her bra. His breath quickened as her lovely white breasts spilled out of their satiny cups. He couldn’t help himself and reached for them. Her skin was as soft as the rose petals in her garden. “Beautiful.”