by Lora Leigh
It was late. Damned late, he realized, and he knew Amelia hadn’t left their daughter’s room, which was connected to Ethan and Thea’s room.
He had to see her.
He had to reassure himself she was still alive, that she had survived, as illogical as it sounded, even to himself. He had to make certain he hadn’t lost her forever.
CHAPTER 23
She had died, and he hadn’t been with her.
She had suffered. He had nearly lost not just the child he hadn’t known existed, but also the woman.
She had kept him from freezing entirely, Crowe thought as he sat in the small chair at the end of the bed and watched them sleep. To become the man, the agent he’d been, he’d cut himself off from all emotion. Only the most basic loyalties had remained. Those to his cousins, and to the safety of the woman who had risked so much to help them.
It wasn’t loyalty that had kept that small corner of his humanity alive, though. It had been the memory of her touch, of the pure emotion in her eyes each time they met his, and the broken agony he’d heard in her voice the night she had read the letter he’d left her.
Amelia had kept him human. She had kept him from becoming a very different sort of monster, but a monster all the same.
Sprawled in the chair, still, silent, he simply watched them sleep, telling himself he couldn’t wake them. How many nights had Amelia ached to hold her child against her in such a way? How many nights had she cried for the newborn she’d been forced to let go? How many times had Kimmy cried for her mother?
What justice had there been over the years for them?
What consolation had there been for them?
He knew there had been none for him. He’d existed in a void he’d created himself just to survive. A void of emotionless deception that barely held back the raging fury pounding just beneath the surface.
He let his gaze caress Amelia’s profile. The gentle arch of her brow, the little pert nose that could lift to the air with such disdain when she was irritated. Her lips. God, what her lips could do to him. Just the touch of them was more pleasure than he’d ever known in his life.
The delicate line of her graceful throat, so sensitive to his kisses, to the rake of his teeth against the tender flesh.
Tucked beneath the quilt with Kimmy’s arms wrapped around her like clinging vines, she held the girl with a tenderness that had his throat tightening.
As he watched, her lashes flickered restlessly, then seconds later opened, focusing on him immediately.
“Crowe?” she whispered, her voice filled with concern.
Crowe shook his head slowly. “Everything’s okay.”
The world around them was still turning. So far, no one else had suffered at Wayne’s hands, but his own world had changed with such a force that he wondered how he would recoup quickly enough to find his balance.
Kissing their daughter gently on the forehead, she disengaged from the snugly wrapped arms and slid from the bed.
Crowe straightened, moving to the door as Amelia tucked the blankets around their child before following him.
“I didn’t mean to awaken you,” he said softly, closing the door behind them as they stepped into the hall.
“She’s not easy to sleep with,” she said nervously, tucking the long strands of hair that fell over her shoulder behind her ear as they moved to their room. “I usually move in a few hours out of self-preservation. She has sharp elbows and no scruples about using them.”
He remembered his father saying that about him once, Crowe realized. Laughing, his voice would fill with love as he stated that letting the seven-year-old Crowe sleep with him and his wife was like taking his life in his own hands.
He closed the bedroom door behind them moments later, watching as Amelia moved across the room before turning to face him.
She didn’t clasp her hands before her. She stood carefully as though ready to move at any moment, tension radiating through her body.
“I know you’re angry…”
Shaking his head, he turned away from her to pace to the bathroom door, raking his fingers through his hair as he fought to sort out the emotions he did feel.
He wasn’t angry. Not at Amelia.
What he was, was fighting that ice. Fighting the need to go hunting for Wayne by himself, even knowing the risks.
And that he couldn’t do. He couldn’t go back into the cold again without destroying himself in the process.
* * *
Watching Crowe warily, Amelia fought the tears that wanted to fill her eyes, fought the need to sob at the agony resonating through him.
“You talked to Mom and Dad, didn’t you?” she whispered then, knowing her father.
Ethan Roberts hadn’t agreed with Amelia over the years in her refusal to contact Crowe. After a few years, he’d seemed to blame Crowe for it, though, rather than her. As though he had begun to believe that she doubted Crowe would come to her and Kimmy’s sides. No amount of arguing had changed his mind, and no amount of it had changed hers.
“Logan returned for a week the month after I left,” he said quietly as he turned back to her, his gaze predatory, sharp with the anger he held back. “I know he saw you in town. Why didn’t you contact him? Why didn’t you tell him? You went to see Clyde, but you wouldn’t talk to Logan?”
“When I went to see Clyde, I was nearly desperate,” she whispered, remembering that week with a vivid slash of pain. “Before I left he looked at me with that stare he had.” A way of warning a person to say no more than they had to. “As I got into my car he leaned in close and asked me if I cared for you.” Her breath hitched on a sob as Crowe’s gaze sharpened. “I nodded. That look…”
“You didn’t speak, you listened when you saw it,” he finished for her roughly.
“He said if you came back, blood would spill.” She lifted her hand to hide the shaking of her lips for a moment. “Then he said we’d definitely see you in prison, along with your cousins, if you had to kill for me.” The sob she was fighting escaped. “He asked if that was what I wanted. And I knew he wasn’t talking about the Slasher.”
“Because he knew Wayne was abusing you,” he snarled. It wasn’t a question so much as an indication of knowledge.
“If you came back for me, for our baby, then blood would have spilled,” she whispered. “I knew you’d kill for me, Crowe. If you did, you could have gone to prison. I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“You died! Damn you, Amelia, what would have happened to me if you hadn’t been revived?” He didn’t yell, but that rasp of fury in his voice caused her to flinch. She began trembling with not just the memory of it, but the awareness that Crowe was angrier than she’d suspected.
“Ethan would have contacted you then,” she swore, frowning in confusion. “He would have offered to keep Kimmy until the Slasher was taken care of.” Her heart rate picked up as the glow of gold in his eyes seemed to spark like flames. Her own anger rose then, racing through her senses as she remembered those agonizing weeks after Kimmy’s birth. “What do you want me to say, Crowe?” she cried, reaching out to him before pulling her hands back and wrapping her arms across her breasts defensively. “If I had told you about Kimmy none of us would have been safe and you know it. You were in the military; they wouldn’t have just let you leave. We didn’t know who the Slasher was, or the lengths he would go to. I was terrified for you and Kimmy. Terrified I’d cause you to lose more than you already had.”
“You didn’t trust me to protect you and our child,” he rasped dangerously. “Is that it, Amelia?”
“You know, Crowe, I didn’t trust my father, my uncle, and their team to protect my daughter if anyone learned of her, before we discovered who the Slasher was,” she reminded him painfully. “It had nothing to do with trust and everything to do with the fact that I was terrified for both of you.” She dashed at the tears that escaped her eyes. “I wouldn’t have been able to live if anything happened to either of you, b
ecause of me. I wouldn’t have survived it.”
She couldn’t have drawn another breath had it happened.
Turning away from him, she fought the sobs rising inside her.
“I did my best, Crowe,” she whispered. “I did my best.”
“You died!” he snarled again as he swung her around to face him, the savagely hewn lines of his face filled with such fury, such pain, she lost the battle with the tears.
“And if saving you and our daughter meant never drawing another breath in this life then that was the price I’d pay,” she cried out, her hands fisting in his shirt, jerking at the cloth, desperate to make him understand. “That was all that mattered to me, Crowe. Nothing else. I couldn’t bear losing either of you. I couldn’t live with it.”
Sobs tore from her chest, the desperation that filled her that night a bleak, haunting memory.
“I would have been there.” Naked, burning, the fury that filled him whipped in the air like a brutal wave. “I would have been with you, Amelia. I would have been there for you and you took that choice away from me.”
“And I knew you’d be furious,” she sobbed. “I knew the chance I was taking that you would hate me forever, Crowe, that you would never forgive the choices I had to make. Is that your prerogative only? Is no one but you allowed to make the hard choices to protect those that mean the most to them?”
“I will kill a thousand times over for you. That choice is far different…” His hands tightened at her shoulders, the hold firm. He didn’t hurt her; he would never mark her skin and she knew it. But the brutality of his pain was killing her.
“Crowe, I would die a thousand times over for you,” she whispered. “For you and Kimmy. I’d give my last breath just as easily as you would have given up your freedom if you were caught.”
Except he wouldn’t have been caught.
Crowe knew he wouldn’t have been, but it was a knowledge he knew Amelia didn’t have.
Releasing her slowly, he stepped back.
Distance. He had to find a distance, he thought, forcing back the emotion for the brutal objectivity that had ensured his survival over the years.
“Crowe…” Her tear-filled voice was breaking him.
“I’m not angry with you.” Keeping his voice calm now, pushing back the rage, he moved slowly, tiredly to the door.
“Crowe…” She whispered his name again.
“I have to stop this.” He forced the words past his throat then. “Until Wayne’s dead, neither of you is safe. Until he’s dead, neither of you really belongs to me, do you, Amelia?” He turned back to her then, hating the tears that fell down her face. “Because I won’t let you or our daughter live in this fucking nightmare one second longer than I have to.”
He forced himself from the bedroom and went to the security room, all the while feeling his soul howling.
She had died. And he hadn’t even been there.
CHAPTER 24
It was the sound of Kimmy’s screams, high-pitched and echoing shrilly through the house, that woke Amelia from a sound sleep, two days later.
Before her eyes were fully open she was out of the bed and racing across her bedroom to the door. Throwing it open and running along the hall, she was only dimly aware of the sun spilling weakly through the tall foyer windows to the middle of the curving staircase.
Another full-throated scream was followed by a muted, male growling sound that made very little sense.
It was after noon. Wayne never attacked during the day, it was always at night, she thought hysterically as she began running for the stairs, terror pumping through her senses. Any sense of safety she had felt over the past two days evaporated as though it had never existed.
Pure terror raced through her, blinding and filled with the agonizing certainty that somehow, some way, Wayne had gotten to her baby.
The sound of her daughter’s screams ripped through the silence of the house again.
“God no. Kimmy.”
Gripping the banister desperately, her fingers locked on the heavy wood, Amelia felt her heart pounding from her chest as she paused only a few feet down the stairs to get her bearings. Listening desperately, that muffled male growl rasping across her senses, Amelia searched the foyer as she fought to figure out which direction to run in.
“Where are you, baby?” she whimpered, fighting to remain quiet, to figure out where her daughter was before wasting time by rushing in the wrong direction.
A deep-throated male roar suddenly erupted in the silence, followed immediately by—girlish giggles?
Kimmy tore across the foyer from the family room, running hell for leather into the formal living room as she laughed uproariously in joy. Behind her, shrouded by one of the checkered blankets Amelia kept thrown over the couch, the tall, broad form of an obviously chuckling male followed her.
Amelia sank quickly to the stairs, sitting on one of the wide steps as weakness flooded her limbs. Tears fell from her eyes as relief rushed through her. She felt suddenly dizzy with the realization that Kimmy wasn’t in danger after all.
Another of those deep “dying bear” growls rasped from the living room—was it Crowe shrouded in that blanket, playing with their daughter? Was he the one causing those high girlish giggles that were music to her ears as he pretended to growl at her? The thought of it had a smile beginning to tremble on her lips.
At that moment Kimmy tore from the living room again, releasing another laughing scream and racing into the foyer. Rounding the wide, curving steps, her giggles echoed through the high-ceilinged foyer and traveled through the house.
“Dammit, Logan, how many times do I have to tell you that Amelia’s still sleeping?” Crowe’s voice snapped from the library doorway as both Kimmy and Logan came to a hard stop.
Looking through the narrow gap between the wide spindles Amelia could see her daughter’s expression instantly transform from childish joy to wariness.
Kimmy stood perfectly still, just staring at her father’s expression for long moments, her gaze narrowed on him.
That wasn’t a good sign.
Oh God, please don’t let her—
“That’s a bad word.”
Amelia winced at the disapproval in Kimmy’s voice and the narrow-eyed glare the little girl was directing at the man standing in front of her.
Then her stance shifted. Placing her little hand on her hip, she stuck out her chin stubbornly as her lips drew into a thin line.
The stance and her expression were identical to Crowe’s. The only difference, Amelia noticed, was the way Kimmy lifted that little chin into the air. Though Amelia feared that had more to do with the fact that Crowe was looking down at his daughter rather than head-on.
The two faced off, father and daughter, each sizing the other up like two boxers would before beginning to dance around each other.
“I’ll be sure to watch out for that in the future.” His jaw clenched as he obviously fought against some tightly held emotion.
Or anger.
“But, as I said,” he continued, “your mother is sleeping—”
“You just don’t like me!” Kimmy’s skinny little arms crossed over her chest as her sweet voice held an unfamiliar note of anger. “I thought you just didn’t like kids, but you spent all morning playing with Logan’s little baby instead and wouldn’t play with me at all.”
Her anger was fierce. An indication of how deep that anger glowed.
“Now you don’t even want me to play with my uncle Logan?” Outraged incredulity filled her voice.
Crowe wiped a hand over his face before reaching back to rub at the back of his neck, staring beseechingly at Logan.
“You made your bed, sleep in it.” It was more than obvious that his cousin was upset with him, and now Crowe knew it as well.
He breathed out wearily, the look he directed to Logan hinting at retribution.
“Kimmy.” He spoke with the air of man forced to push the words past his lips. “I do not dislike you—”
“You are not my daddy.” A small finger jabbed in his direction before Kimmy placed both hands on her hips, obviously out of patience where her father was concerned.
Amelia’s eyes widened with shock even as pride began to fill her broken heart.
“The hell I’m not, little girl.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he glared back at her. “Sucks to be you, but you look just like me.”
For the briefest second he seemed to have surprised himself with the response.
“You said a bad word again. Don’t you know daddies don’t do that in front of their little girls?” Her tone was scathing, her little face flushing with hurt and anger. “I know you’re not my daddy because my mommy says my daddy is a hero and everyone knows heroes do not say bad words in front of their little girls.”
Sweet heaven, where had Kimmy heard that? Were her parents allowing her to watch too much television again?
“Kimberly.” Crowe’s tone indicated his intent to berate her.
“My name is Kimmy, just like my grandma who went to heaven to be my guardian angel after that bad man killed her,” she informed him imperiously as Crowe’s expression reflected his shock. “My mommy said my daddy fights bad men and wins. She says he likes to fish and he knows how to play really cool games.” Her chin lifted a notch in a surfeit of pride. “She said my daddy will love me more than a kid loves ice cream. My mommy doesn’t lie to me, so you lied to her when you told her you were my daddy. You are not my daddy!” She screamed the final declaration to him, dry-eyed and filled with childish fury.
Turning, Kimmy raced back to the family room, passing Logan and ignoring his attempt to stop her.
Amelia watched, filled with anger for her daughter’s sake and a pain-ridden sense of loss as she watched Crowe’s expression change the minute Kimmy was no longer facing him.
“Geez, Crowe.” Logan stared back at his cousin in complete astonishment. “Until now, I never believed you were actually stupid. Too much pride maybe, but not stupid.”
“Shut up, Logan,” Crowe snapped, glaring at the doorway his daughter had disappeared through.