“Please, please don’t walk away from this, Lucky,” he murmured into her ear through the fragrant cloud of her hair. “Please don’t walk away from us.”
She pushed against him, fighting hard. Fighting for everything she was worth.
And he held on just as tightly.
“There is no us,” she said vehemently. “There’s you…and there’s me…and I’m done.”
He grasped her chin and held her face in front of his, wildly searching her face. “You can’t be. Because I won’t let you.”
She stared at him, the tears in her eyes sliding down over her dark lashes and streaking her cheeks.
“I love you, Lucky.”
14
LUCKY WANTED to put her hands over her ears. Block out Colin’s softly spoken words. Close her eyes and deny herself the luxury of seeing his handsome face. So full of warmth…so full of emotion…so full of love.
“No!” she whispered. “No, no, no!”
She pushed at him, battling as much against a primal something emerging from inside her, slashing at her heart, thundering through her veins, as she was struggling against him.
But the harder she fought, the tighter Colin held her in his arms.
“I love you, Lucky. I love you.”
The words were what so many little girls dreamed about hearing from the man they would some day love. But they inspired nothing but darkness inside her. “Stop it! Stop saying that!”
Love you…love you…love you…
“Why, Lucky? Why should I stop saying it?” Colin pressed his lips against her wet cheek, the gentle gesture in sharp contrast to the way he restrained her. “It’s how I feel.”
Her throat was raw and tight. “What do you know about what you feel? What do any of us know about what we feel? Love is…love is just a word. A ridiculous, stupid little word we all pack so much meaning into, but in the end that’s all it is. A word.”
“A word that’s caused you pain.”
She stared at him, filled with the desire to kiss him and battle against him all at once. “Yes,” she breathed, giving brief vent to the conflicting emotions roiling within her.
“Is it your mother, Lucky? Is it her death that hurt you?”
Her muscles tensed further. “My mother loved me. And I knew that, up to, including and even after the day that she died.”
“Then someone else…”
Yes, very definitely someone else…
She continued struggling, but to no avail. Colin merely waited her out until exhaustion settled over her strained muscles like a heavy shadow. She was so tired of fighting. Not only Colin, but the demons she warred with every day. She went still, completely still, in the circle of his arms. But she didn’t draw comfort from his embrace. Instead his arms were a makeshift prison cell de signed to keep her from doing what she most wanted to do. Run.
“You know, I once thought it was written somewhere that parents are supposed to love their children,” she heard a woman’s voice say, a voice that sounded remarkably like hers. “A man, a woman, they get married. They set up house. A loving house in which to bring up a baby, maybe two or three.” She swallowed hard, the thick gulp sounding loud in the quiet night. “And that was my life.”
Silence for a long moment, then, “Until your mother died.”
She stared at him, wishing it were lighter so she could see him better. “You think you know everything, don’t you, Dr. McKenna?” she asked him softly. “You think you know how it feels to live in a house that was a warm and loving home one day, then overnight turned into nothing more than a collection of empty rooms devoid of laughter, of sunshine…of love. Rooms full of fear and unspoken threat.”
“Your father didn’t love you.”
She trapped his gaze with hers, her eyes narrowing. “The problem wasn’t that my father didn’t love me. The problem was that after my mother died, my father loved me the wrong way.”
Her breath hitched in her throat as she dared him to say the words she couldn’t. Dared him to try to take the conversation in another direction.
Instead he said, “Oh, Jesus.”
Lucky had expected any response. Any response but the grief-filled, loving reaction Colin showed her.
He tightened his arms around her.
And she fought him.
Only she was no longer fighting against only him. She was battling against the barrage of acid memories from her past. Memories of coming home after school at fourteen, determined to keep her family together in the wake of her mother’s death, and realizing that her father was looking at her in a different way. Staring at her in a strange, unsettling way that made her skin crawl and made her feel…dirty.
He was watching her in a way that a father shouldn’t watch his own flesh and blood.
But still she plowed forward, hoping beyond hope that she was imagining the cause for the uneasiness she felt with each passing day. With the help of a housekeeper, she made sure dinner was on the table every night by six. That her father’s newspaper was laid out on his home office desk, his slippers and remote by his easy chair.
And every night she’d bid him goodnight from the living-room doorway and hurry off to her room where she would lock herself inside until she would hear the housekeeper come in the following morning.
Still she couldn’t help the foreboding that followed her like a dark shadow. She’d open the shower curtain after taking a shower and find her father standing there. Not offering her a towel and a loving smile as he had so many times when she was a child, but openly staring at her nude body, the expression on his face not one of fatherly love, but of twisted physical need. She’d wake in the middle of the night and hear him knocking on her door begging to talk to her and she would cower under the covers and pretend she didn’t hear him, hot tears scalding her cheeks, waiting for him to go away.
She’d felt so terribly, utterly alone. The happy life and memories she’d once had crumbled in her hands the tighter she tried to hold on to them. The only person she had left in the world was the only one she couldn’t turn to. One desperate afternoon she’d tried talking to the one person she thought she could trust, the only one who might be able to help. She reached out to her mother’s sister, her aunt. And she’d received a stinging slap across the face for her efforts that still branded her heart. Her father was an important surgeon. He’d just lost his wife. How dare she utter such vile lies about him, her aunt had told her.
Devastated, she’d had little other choice but to go back and continue living in fear of her own father. And she had. For three long years. Keeping busy with school activities during the day, and hiding in the prison cell that was her bedroom at night, counting off the days until she left for college…and praying that tonight would be the night that he wouldn’t come to her door and plead for her to let him in.
Then came the day where she was seventeen and she’d arrived home from school and found the locks removed from her bedroom door.
“Love,” she whispered now, her heart pounding so hard against her ribcage she was afraid it might punch straight through. “My father said he loved me. Kept saying he loved me. Especially when he…he violated me in my childhood bed…across the hall from the room he used to share with my mother…in the house that had once been a beautiful home.”
She stared at Colin.
“So don’t you ever talk to me about love again, do you hear me? Because it doesn’t exist. Not in any way that matters.”
COLIN GAZED into Lucky’s tear-streaked, pain-filled face, feeling as if she’d just told him night was day. That the moon had just been ripped from the sky.
He pulled her closer and she fought him, al though not half as hard as she had earlier. Telling him what she had, baring herself so completely, had drained her.
And had spilled a permanent stain across his own heart.
He pressed his chin against the side of her head and said fervently, “What your father did to you, that was not love, Lucky.”
A
bitter, black fury filled him to overflowing toward the man who had hurt this unique and stunning creature. He knew a desire to inflict physical pain in a way he had never felt before.
To do damage, to lash out on Lucky’s behalf, to right what was so horribly, terribly wrong.
As he sat there holding her tightly, he felt so overwhelmingly helpless in the face of such pain that he didn’t know what to say. What to do. Was incapable of doing anything more than merely hold her.
“I left the next day and I never went back,” Lucky whispered, continuing with a story he no longer wanted to hear. That he wanted to block out as surely as she had tried to block it out for so many years.
Maybe she was right. Maybe talking about bad things sometimes only made them worse.
Fourteen years old. Still a child in so many ways. A girl who had lost her mother. Who needed the support of her father.
Professionally he’d dealt with countless cases similar to Lucky’s. Heard the stories from the girls and guys at Crossroads. Knew the cold hard facts: one out of three girls and one out of five boys would not reach eighteen without being sexually molested in some way by a relative, neighbor or family friend.
But knowing about it and hearing about it from others was far different from learning it had happened to the one you loved.
His kneejerk reaction was visceral. All-encompassing. Vicious.
“Where is he now?” he asked, his jaw clenched so tight he heard it pop.
He tried to keep his expression neutral as Lucky searched his face.
“Why, Colin? So you can track him down? Make him pay for what he did to me?” She looked into his eyes then tried to free herself. Not in a jerky, overly emotional way as she had before. No, she seemed to have regained control over her emotions somewhat.
So he released her.
She got up and carefully stepped well to the left of the broken glass and to the wrought-iron railing.
“He’s dead.”
Colin stared at her back.
“He died almost a year to the day after I left. Suicide.”
He felt as if he’d been physically slapped. All that anger. That pain. And no outlet for it. No closure. Because the man who could have given her that had taken it with him to his grave.
“I don’t know how many times when I was out there by myself, working crappy part-time jobs and living in flophouses that I…that I wished him dead. Then just like that…he was.”
“That’s not your fault, Lucky.” Neither was her father’s twisted need for her.
She turned to face him, looking so somber, so serious, so injured that he had a hard time reconciling her with the fun-loving woman he’d first met. The devil-may-care woman who had so easily destroyed all of his barriers while keeping her own carefully intact.
“I know that,” she whispered. “But that doesn’t make living with myself any easier.” He noticed the way she tightly gripped the iron railing with her hands. “Despite everything, for the fourteen years before my mother died, he was my father. And I loved him.”
He heard the grief in her voice. Grief for the mother she had lost. The father who had betrayed himself and her. Grief for the little girl who’d had to grow up too fast.
“There’s that damn word again. Love.”
“Lucky, I…”
When he fell silent and didn’t finish his sentence, she looked up at him. “You what?”
“I’m…I’m sorry.”
Those horribly inadequate words again.
“I’m sorry that the solid, loving foundation that had formed so much of your early life was jerked out from underneath you. I’m sorry that you were denied the love and the security that every child born on this earth deserves.” He got up and went to stand in front of her, not continuing until he knew she was looking at him. Really looking at him. “I’m sorry that you’ve never known what real love is. Real adult love between a man and a woman.”
She moved to pass him.
One last time he grasped her wrist. She stopped and he forced himself to release her, no matter the risk of flight.
He gazed at her, feeling love warm him to the core…and wishing he could pass it on to her like some sort of virus. “I can’t erase your past, Lucky. I can’t wave a magic wand and make it all go away, as much as I’d like to try.” His heart pounded. “And I can’t make you stay.”
She didn’t move.
“But I do want you to stay. If just for tonight. If just so I can hold you one more time.”
She looked up at him, gratitude and, yes, love shining from her eyes, even if she didn’t realize that’s what she felt.
This time it was she who did the touching. She reached out and slid her fingers into his, then she kissed him, saying with her actions what her words denied.
LUCKY LAY against the soft sheets of Colin’s bed, watching him as he gazed at her. The only sounds were the thick beating of her heart and the rustle of bedclothes as Colin moved. His touch as he stroked her body was so gentle, so tender, she felt tears collect in the back of her throat all over again.
He’d been wrong when he’d said he couldn’t wave a magic wand and make it all go away. Because being with him made her think of nothing else but him. Of this. Of the thought of their bodies connecting in a way she’d never experienced with another man. Oh, sure, she might have been able to forget for a few precious moments before. And the pursuit of those diversions might have engaged her mind for brief periods.
But no one had ever touched her heart before.
And as Colin ran his hands slowly, almost reverently, down the sides of her arms and waist and thighs, he made her feel as if he was stroking her heart.
By design, she liked her sex fast and hard and spontaneous so she wouldn’t have the chance to think about what she was doing. So she couldn’t consider who she was, where she’d come from and where she was going from there. The moment of release was what she sought single-mindedly.
But as Colin set a slow, leisurely pace now, she found that while a restless energy filled her, it neither frightened her nor compelled her to speed things up. She was content to lie there, concentrate on her breathing, and process the ways his touch affected her.
His fingertips skimmed over her right nipple and shooting stars of sensation arced toward her sex. His light stubble rasped against her belly and she melted against the mattress, trembling with sweet awareness. He kissed her and she no longer felt like one individual person but rather a part of a union that not only felt right, but felt natural.
Something bigger than her. Bigger than both of them.
He’d said he loved her. And while shadowy demons had crept out of the dark places in her heart to deny that love, now she allowed herself to feel it as surely as if the sentiment were a thick, velvety cloak that he’d gently tucked around her.
Something tangible. Something that refused to be denied.
When his fingers would have touched the damp curls between her thighs, he hesitated, then pulled away, instead curving her body against his from behind and holding her. Merely holding her.
Lucky opened her mouth to protest, but he made a soft shushing sound.
“Lie still,” he murmured. “Tonight I just want to hold you.”
Unreleased sexual energy seemed to fill her to overflowing, but rather than act on it, she lay still, listening to the beat of her heart, his heart, and reveling in the feel of his skin against hers.
And before she knew it she was asleep.
15
THREE DAYS LATER, Colin sat at a stool at his kitchen island, alone, sipping coffee and pretending to read the paper. He’d gone for his morning run. He’d showered and changed. He’d eaten breakfast. And it was still only 7:00 a.m., the minutes on his watch seeming to pass with torturous slowness, a good hour to go before he had to be at the office.
He’d known when Lucky had left his apartment Tuesday morning that he might not see her again. But knowing that and living it were two completely different things. He’d w
orked on automatic pilot for the past few days, consulting clients, meeting with his attorney and running until his feet ached from pounding relentlessly against the cement walkway rimming the Maumee River, then in through the city, running not until he ran out of road, but until he couldn’t physically take another step.
Despite his best efforts, still Lucky was with him, the secret she had revealed clinging to him to like an unshakable shadow that refused to retreat even in the brightest light. He needed to see her, but held to the promise he’d made when she’d sweetly kissed him goodbye.
“Please,” she’d said, searching his face.
“Please give me some time alone to work through all this.”
He’d wanted to tell her no. To try to convince her that he could help her. But he was afraid that the harder he tried to make things work, the more they wouldn’t.
So he’d promised to give her the space that she needed.
If only he wasn’t afraid that space would take her away from him forever.
Throughout his entire career he’d worked at helping others solve their problems, but with a great deal of remorse in the days since Lucky had shared her secret, he realized he’d never been dedicated to those same patients. Had never gone beyond the approaches he’d been taught, had never tried to implement new treatments or strategies. He’d gone with the flow, no more than a nine-to-five worker who looked forward to the end of the day, and planned what he would do outside work when he received his paycheck. Even when it came to the kids at Crossroads, the runaways who needed the most help, he never visited more than once a month. He’d convinced himself that his being there, free of charge, every thirty days was enough. Patted himself on the back for being such a caring person, a humanitarian, not merely a therapist. But when all was said and done, his actions were small, merely a single cinder block against the overwhelming tide of need that would swell toward him if he reached out and unlocked the flood gates.
Of course now that he saw that, understood that, now that he was inspired to do more, do better, he couldn’t help the person he wanted to help most in the world: He couldn’t help Lucky.
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