“Damn clumsy bitch!” Croghan yelled. “Get up!”
Kay rolled onto her side. She didn’t hurry. She knew now that death was inevitable. She would meet it as calmly and bravely as it was in her to do.
His furious face glared down at her as he waved the knife inches from her neck. “Move!”
She raised her head slowly. His sneering mouth made a nasty pink twist within his dark beard as he kicked her viciously in the cheek. “Now!”
The pain erupted in Kay’s face, pain like she had never felt in her life.
“Get up right now or I’ll—” Croghan’s threat began. He never got a chance to finish it before a huge arm came out of nowhere. A fist that sounded like the blast-off of a rocket cracked into the side of Croghan’s jaw. Croghan’s head snapped back just as another fist caught him in the throat. He tumbled backward.
Kay sank back to the ground, swooning from the pain reverberating through her cheek and jaw, the world flapping and waving around her like a white sheet being buffeted by the wind.
She fought to keep consciousness as she squinted into a blurry world. She couldn’t see. Still, she knew he was there.
Logically, he should be in jail. Logically, he couldn’t possibly be here saving her life.
But at the moment her heart and head were operating on wavelengths far above logic, and they both told her firmly that it was Damian’s fists pounding Croghan’s face. With that firm assurance, a new fear burgeoned in her heart.
“Don’t kill him!” she tried to cry, but she could make no sound. The effort of moving her jaw launched an immediate jolt of excruciating agony that sped her toward the blessed relief of unconsciousness.
Kay fought harder against succumbing than she had ever fought against anything in her life. With all her will, her heart, her soul, she resisted the comforting darkness. She had to face the pain, to remain awake until she could reach Damian. She had to.
“Don’t kill him!” her heart cried, because her lips could not.
“I won’t, my love,” his answer came.
Reassured, she smiled as she gave in to oblivion.
* * *
“YOU’VE BEEN IN and out—mostly out—of consciousness for the last two days, Kay. What makes you think you’re getting out of this hospital?” Octavia challenged more than asked as she tried to swing Kay’s legs back onto the bed.
“Octavia, I feel fine.”
“That’s because all the painkillers haven’t worn off.”
“Look, the doctor said I have no broken bones.”
“The doctor said you have a concussion.”
“He also said I was past the worst of it and on the mend.”
“Kay, the operative phrase here is ‘on the mend,’ not ‘mended.’”
“I can’t just lie around.”
Octavia exhaled wearily. “All right. You fall on your face now, it’s your fault. Here, you might as well look your best when they drag you back to the emergency room.”
Kay gazed in amazement at the new blue silk pantsuit and matching lacy underthings that Octavia slipped nonchalantly out of her briefcase. There were also heels to match—high heels. Octavia handed them over with a knowing smile and a cosmetics bag full of essentials.
“You did this for me? Even after all the awful publicity I’ve brought on the firm?”
“What awful publicity?” Octavia asked coolly.
“That business about me and Damian, of course.”
Octavia waved a dismissive hand. “Adam and Marc are just being silly with all their growling and grumbling about crossing ethical lines and upholding the firm’s reputation. Kay, we’re not one of those huge legal corporations with a stodgy clientele. We’re a small group of attorneys, who people come to because they’re in trouble and want someone who will understand and believe in them.”
“Are you saying that all the publicity about my affair with Damian doesn’t matter?”
Octavia’s smile possessed a pure Cheshire-cat quality. “Oh, it matters. It’ll probably increase our client base a hundredfold.”
“Increase? But why—”
“Human beings are born male and female first, and whatever professional suit they subsequently put on, they’re still wearing that naked flesh beneath. That’s why it’s the sinners people love in this society—not the saints. Sinners reassure them that those naked-flesh impulses of their own are perfectly normal.”
Kay smiled as Octavia flicked her chin with a long, lovely manicured nail.
“And speaking of naked flesh, partner, you’d better get yours covered. Damian will be here soon.”
“Bless you, Octavia,” Kay said as she gave her colleague a warm, quick hug before grabbing the underthings. “Now, tell me how Damian found me at Priscilla’s. I’ve missed so much excitement!”
Octavia laughed that throaty, rich uninhibited laugh of hers. “She’s unconscious for two days and she wakes up complaining about missing the excitement! And to think I once imagined you were just like Adam, all staid and sober.”
“I was,” Kay surprised herself by admitting. “But this case has had some interesting effects on me.”
“Not to mention the client that came with it,” Octavia said with a knowing smile.
“So, how did Adam get Damian out of jail so quickly?”
“Well, as soon as Lee Nye came to in the hospital and explained that it was Croghan who attacked him—”
“Wait a minute.” Kay paused in putting on her stockings. “Lee Nye is alive? Croghan didn’t kill him?”
“Yes, you have missed a bit, haven’t you? Okay, let me start from the beginning. When Croghan hit Lee in the face with that brass bookend, he only knocked him out. Thinking Lee was dead, Croghan dumped his body in a ravine off the highway. A couple of joggers spotted Lee just minutes later. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital.”
“So Lee’s okay?”
“He’ll be fine. But his face was bloody and swollen and he was unconscious for a time, so nobody knew he was the missing man. As soon as he came to and the police heard his story, they released Damian. When Damian learned from your secretary that you’d gotten an urgent call from Dr. Payton and you’d gone off to meet with her at her home, he didn’t like the sound of it. So he rushed over, and...well, you know the rest.”
Kay hoped she did. She really did hear Damian’s assurance, hadn’t she? It hadn’t all been wishful thinking, had it? “Octavia, is Croghan...all right?”
Octavia watched her for a moment silently, her sagacious eyes sparkling. “He’ll live, but they’ll need a wheelchair to roll him into court to stand trial for the murder of Priscilla Payton and the attempted murder of Lee Nye and you. Needless to say, Damian has quite a temper.”
“But a controllable one,” Kay said in a relieved sigh.
She was dressed now and wobbled over to the mirror in her high heels. She frowned at her pale reflection. She quickly ran a brush through her hair and collected it to one side to try to hide the very prominent bruise on her cheek. She dabbed some lipstick on her mouth.
“Has Damian been charged for beating Croghan?”
“It was touch and go there for a while, but Adam got the charges dismissed. And speaking of dismissed charges, Fedora Nye called the office this morning and formally withdrew her suit. She had no idea what Croghan was doing, of course. She was just a pawn Croghan was using to try to make a name for himself.”
“Well he’s made a name for himself, all right, although it’s certainly not the one he was after. I feel sorry for Fedora.”
“Don’t. Word is she’s selling her story to Hollywood for a very respectable six figures.”
Kay smiled. “Well, good for her. I wonder what Judge Ingle is going to do about the competition.”
“He just held a press conference and announced his own six-figure contract with his publishing house,” Damian’s deep voice responded from the direction of the doorway.
Kay swung toward him, her heart beating far too fast. “Damian.
”
He looked absolutely wonderful, particularly the expression on his face and in his eyes as she said his name. He closed the distance between. She sighed as the closeness of him once again sent that wonderful, warm, lovely streak through her body.
Damian gently took her face in his hands and studied the ugly bruise on her cheek. And then, in a manner so tender she felt it might break her heart, he kissed that bruise and she melted into his arms.
* * *
“I WANT TO SHOW you something, Kay.”
She rolled over on her back on his black satin sheets, bare and thoroughly beautiful, and looked up into his face, a mischievous smile on her lips. “You’ve already shown me quite a bit in these last few minutes, Dr. Steele.”
Damian chuckled as he gently planted a kiss on the end of her nose. He jumped off the bed and lifted her into his arms. She wrapped hers around his neck and rested her unbruised cheek against his shoulder. “Where are we going?”
“To the den.”
She raised her head to nibble on his ear. “Oh, good. As I recall, it does have a very comfortable couch.”
He laughed. “What a one-track mind. I’ll never understand why nature was so unfair as to give a woman the capacity to experience multiple orgasms while letting a man have only one.”
“Just think of it as our due—like closet space.”
He chuckled in delight as he navigated the hallway.
“Behave, my beauty, or I won’t tell you about the latest in the Lee and Roy saga.”
Her voice rose in immediate interest. “Oh, yes! What with everything else that’s happened, I nearly forgot. So what’s the story? Is Roy back?”
“No. But Lee believed Roy was back because he had begun losing time again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It wasn’t Roy who was competing with Lee for control over his consciousness. Yesterday, I hypnotized Lee and ended up talking to a five-year-old boy named Lyle.”
Kay blinked in surprise. “You mean another personality has developed inside Lee?”
“Not developed,” Damian said as he negotiated the last turn into the den. “I believe Lyle has been there all the time and that he’s the original personality of the child.”
“But I thought you said the original personality disappeared with the creation of Lee and Roy?”
“Originally I thought that the most likely explanation,” Damian said as he rested her gently on the couch and switched on the TV and VCR, slipping a tape into the latter. He joined her on the couch and pushed the play button.
“This is my session with Lyle yesterday. He took me back in time to the point just before the split into Lee and Roy. Watch this,” Damian said as he pressed the button, beginning the tape.
* * *
THE LITTLE BOY huddled in the corner of the icy shed with the stiff tarp drawn over his head as the demon bellowed and banged next door in the garage, searching for him.
He shivered with growing terror because he knew that soon the demon would come to the shed. Soon it would find him hiding inside. Soon, it would—
He shut his eyes as tightly as he could. Please, no.
Behind the deepest darkness of his tightly shut lids, a light as bright as the sun suddenly shone on the little boy. A voice, a woman’s voice, spoke out of the bright white light.
“Hello.”
The little boy was startled. He tried to see who had spoken to him from inside the bright light, but he couldn’t. Still, he was curiously unafraid. The light felt warm. The voice sounded soft and gentle.
“Who are you?” he asked in a tentative tone no bigger than the breath of a sigh.
“Why, your guardian angel, of course.”
There was something faintly familiar about the way the syllables sung together. But the wisp of memory was misty and so far away.
“My guardian angel?” he repeated uncertainly.
“You don’t have to be afraid anymore, little one.”
Little one. The little boy liked the way her voice sounded when she called him that. He liked it very much. “Are you cold?” she asked.
“Yes,” he admitted.
The bright light wrapped more closely around him like a lovely, warm, soft cloak.
The little boy snuggled gratefully into the comforting folds of the bright light and felt himself being given a warm hug.
“Is that better?” she asked.
He sighed. “Oh, yes. Much better.”
“Shall I show you something very special?” she asked in that lovely, soft voice.
“Please.”
“Look there,” she said.
Her long slim finger extended from the bright light to point at a funny-looking, long gray bug with a hundred different feet and a zillion little toes busily scooting across a sunny sidewalk.
The little boy didn’t know where the bug or the sunny sidewalk had come from, any more than he knew where the bright light or the lovely voice had come from. They were just there. And he was glad they were there.
“See how it wobbles?” she asked and laughed, the sound like the soft tinkle of a merry bell.
“Yes!” The little boy giggled in delight to see the funny-looking long bug wobbling along on all those legs and toes.
“Touch it,” she coaxed.
“I don’t want to hurt it,” he said, unsure.
“You won’t hurt it, little one.”
The little boy reached out his finger to gently touch the funny bug on its back. He was startled when it immediately curled into a tiny gray ball and rolled across the sidewalk away from him. He watched in fascination as it disappeared into a deep, dark crack at the very edge of the sunny sidewalk.
“Where did it go?” he asked.
The lady’s lovely voice came out of the bright light that now fully enfolded him.
“It’s gone to a warm, dark, safe place where it can sleep undisturbed and wiggle all its toes whenever it wants.”
The little boy sighed from the deepest chambers of his small heart. “I wish I could do that.”
“You can,” the gentle voice assured. And although the boy could not see her face, he knew that she was smiling.
“When?” he asked eagerly.
“Now,” she answered, reaching out her hand to gently touch him on the back.
The demon’s pounding boots vibrated the ground as he charged toward the door to the shed. He grabbed the latch, threw open the door, spied the tarp in the farthermost corner with the little boy hiding beneath it and bellowed in vicious triumph.
Only the little boy wasn’t there anymore.
Like the funny-looking bug with a hundred little legs, he had curled into a ball and rolled away and disappeared into a deep, dark, safe crack where he could sleep undisturbed and wiggle all his toes whenever he wanted.
* * *
“DAMIAN, a guardian angel rescued the little boy from his abuser? These memories can’t be real!”
“They are real to the little boy named Lyle. Very real.”
“I don’t see how—”
“Kay, think about it. You’re a little boy who has known a couple of wonderful years with adoptive parents who have shown you love and talked to you about devils and angels. Then you are snatched away from them one night, and you meet a devil in the flesh and are forced to endure its terrible abuse and even accept the blame for that abuse.”
Kay nodded. “A devil so real that you end up recreating it in your own mind.”
“Yes, Roy was the personification of the devil. And if this child could create a devil with his mind, why not an angel?”
“An angel alter to counteract the devil alter,” Kay said, trying out the idea. “Maybe there is a kind of logic to this multiple-personality thing, after all. But if the small child was put to sleep by this angel alter at age two, why is Lyle now five?”
“Lyle’s ‘guardian angel’ woke him up four years ago to tell him that Roy was gone and he could come out if he wanted to. Lyle was hesitant, so he only
peeked out occasionally. It wasn’t until lately that Lyle has actually come forward and taken over the consciousness at various times.”
“Making Lee lose time again.”
“Yes.”
“Does Lyle understand about Lee?”
“He said his guardian angel explained Lee to him.”
“Damian, have you talked to this personality that thinks it’s a guardian angel?”
“No. Lyle’s guardian angel told him last night that inasmuch as he was going to be just fine now, there was a little girl in Los Angeles who needed her and that she must leave him and go to that little girl.”
“Wait a minute. A little girl in Los Angeles needs Lyle’s guardian angel? But how could a part of Lyle’s mind leave to...Damian, you don’t suppose that...I mean, this guardian angel couldn’t really be...?”
“A real guardian angel?” Damian finished for her.
Kay put her head in her hands. “And to think for a moment there I was beginning to think this multiple-personality phenomenon was almost starting to make some sense!”
He laughed as he hugged her to him. “My poor logical lawyer lost in a free-fall through the miracles of the mind. Hang on, sweetheart. I have you.”
“Great. What are you holding on to?”
“The wonder of it all, Kay. The absolute wonder of knowing there’s as much lovely illusion in this world of ours as there is logic.”
She sighed as she wrapped her arms around him. “Are all you psychologists so wonderfully mad?”
He grinned at all that delightful chagrin in her eyes. “Are all you lawyers so irritatingly sane?” he said just before he kissed her parted lips. She sighed into his kiss and lingered in its warmth for several delicious seconds before pulling back.
“Will you tell me now what was on those tapes of Roy that you didn’t want me to see?”
He touched her bruised cheek gently. “Suffice it to say that when Fedora and Larry Nye testified about Roy beating them, you heard not even the smallest tip of that iceberg of horrendous abuse that Roy inflicted on his wife, his son and, most particularly, his daughter.”
“So that’s why Croghan couldn’t get the daughter to testify. Damian, I hate to admit it, but maybe it’s best I didn’t see what was on those tapes.”
Beauty vs. the Beast Page 24