Star Bright

by Catherine Anderson

  “Yes.”

  Parker remembered hearing about Lorraina Danning’s disappearance on the radio now. “Peter Danning. He’s under suspicion for murderin’ you.”

  “Yes.”

  Parker pushed up from the chair and stepped to the cupboard for another glass. She wasn’t the only one who needed a drink. When he returned to the table, he saw that Rainie had clasped her hands in her lap, her fingers so tightly clenched that her knuckles were white. He poured her more whiskey and then slopped some in a tumbler for himself. To hell with ice. He would have taken the stuff intravenously if he’d had a hypodermic needle handy.

  “Damn it, Rainie. Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I took you into town. We had lunch in the Romanos’ kitchen. What if Pete or Rosa had recognized you? Or someone in one of the stores? You should have trusted me.”

  “I don’t blame you for being mad at me.”

  Parker felt a lot of things, but anger at her wasn’t one of them. “I’m not mad at you, sweetheart. I just wish you’d come to me sooner.”

  “You truly aren’t mad?”

  “About what? You doin’ what you had to do in order to survive? Besides, I could never hate you.” He studied her pale, tear-streaked face. “You look like her, you know.”

  “Like who?”

  “Julia Roberts in that movie. The clothes, the hair. You did a great job of copyin’ the look.”

  A strange expression flitted across her face, and then she burst into laughter that had an edge of hysteria. Splaying a slender hand at the base of her throat, she grimaced, squeezed her eyes closed, and said, “You’re right. I guess I did copy her style. I needed to look totally different. And the character in that movie was my heroine—a woman who had the guts to plan an escape and then carry it out. I kept looking at myself in the mirror, wondering where I’d come up with this style. I guess I did it subconsciously.” Her laughter vanished as quickly as it had come, and she fixed a frightened gaze on his. “And now the end of the movie is about to happen, Parker. He’s coming for me.” Another blip of hysterical laughter erupted. “Only I won’t have a gun.”

  Parker’s chest felt as if someone had stabbed him with an ice pick. How must she feel? She wasn’t a large woman, and she had the musculature of a desk jockey who mainly exercised only her brain. Not that he was finding fault. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever clapped eyes on. But that didn’t mean she was equipped to do battle with a man.

  “What if you’d gotten caught aboard ship?” The thought scared Parker half to death. “Did you think about the risk you were taking, that you might get arrested and thrown in jail? I think it’s a federal offense to travel with falsified documents nowadays.”

  “Staying with Peter was riskier.” She reached for the glass of whiskey again. “It’s ironic, really. He intended to murder me, I got away from him before he got the chance, and now he’s on the hot seat.”

  “When he started beatin’ you, why didn’t you call the cops?” Parker couldn’t resist asking. “There are laws against spousal abuse.”

  She took another big gulp of whiskey. Parker could tell that the liquor was doing its job. She seemed calmer now. “You don’t know Peter.” She waved her hand. “He’s smart, handsome, rich, and one of the most influential men in Seattle. Some men like that beat their wives, but no one wants to believe that they do. I did call the police once. But what police officer in his right mind wants to buck someone like Peter? He told them I was emotionally distraught and making it all up. He was so calm and collected and believable , and I was everything but. The moment the police left the penthouse, he made me pay. I learned my lesson and never made that mistake again.”

  It bothered Parker to think about how she might have been punished for the infraction. Rainie was such a sweet-natured, harmless soul. What kind of man would brutalize her? But looking into her haunted eyes, Parker had no doubt that it had happened. Even worse, he felt fairly certain that his imaginings were only the tip of the iceberg. He reached for his glass and emptied it with one gulp.

  She gave him a searching look. “Do you think I’m horrible for letting Peter take the heat for something he didn’t do?”

  Parker wanted to plop the bastard’s ass on a griddle and turn the flame up on high. “Horrible? He deserves that and more. I think you’re smart and gutsy, but not horrible. You must have been scared to death when you left that dining room, and then on pins and needles for the rest of the cruise. That whole ship must have been crawlin’ with cops who were flown in. Didn’t they come to your cabin at some point?”

  “Yes, but I was wearing the disguise and had proper identification. They asked if I’d seen Lorraina Danning, and I told them no.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I was so afraid you’d hate me. Everything I’ve told you about myself has been a lie. You detest liars, and I’m the biggest liar you’ve ever met.”

  Parker studied her for a long, searching moment. “That’s not true. You were honest about all the things that matter, Rainie.” He offered her a slight smile. “I know you love animals—all kinds, large and small. After seein’ you with Mojo, I know that you have incredible patience. I know you’re kind, because you started bringin’ Montana little treats when his limp returned. You couldn’t go past his stall without stoppin’ to comfort him with a scratch behind the ears, even though he sort of scares you. I know that you’re terrified of your feelin’s for me, that you find it difficult to trust your instincts. I know that you miss your dad horribly and wonder sometimes if that isn’t why you married an older man in the first place, and if that isn’t why you’re startin’ to love me, because I remind you of him. I know you like sausage pizza, Italian food, and sweet wine. I know you’ll ignore the ants and watch the clouds drift by with me, and also that you’ve got a great eye for images. I know a lot of things—the true things, the things that make you the person you are. Do you really think I give a damn about the rest?”

  Her eyes swam with tears again. “You really don’t?”

  Parker poured himself more whiskey and took a belt. “From the first instant I clapped eyes on you, I thought you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and except for that one little glitch when I got pissed at you for lyin’ to me, you’ve never done one damned thing to change my mind. Remember that conversation we had in your car? You said, ‘In my other life, my name was Rainie.’ I knew then that everything about you—everything you’d told me—was a lie. So in a way, none of what you told me was a lie because you let me know, right up front, not to believe any of it.”

  She laughed wetly. “I guess I did, didn’t I?”

  “You did. And here’s another thing. I’ve dated a lot of good-lookin’ women, and once I started to get to know ’em, I didn’t think they were pretty anymore. As I got to know you, you just seemed more and more beautiful to me.”

  “Oh, Parker.”

  “It’s true. I know you’re not ready to grab my hand and jump off a cliff with me yet.”

  “A cliff?”

  “Fallin’ in love is like that. You have to hang on to each other and just go for it. No guarantees, no safety net. You have to believe in the other person enough to take the leap.”

  She nodded. “I did it once, remember. I’m terrified to do it again.”

  “I understand, and I’m okay with that. After all you’ve been through, I don’t blame you, and I’m willin’ to wait. We’ll get there.”

  “Will we?” she asked tremulously. “I’m not sure I even want to try.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “That’s why I promised you I’ll never push you to do anything you’re not ready for. Just understand my side. You’re the only woman I’ve ever cared about. I can’t believe that God would bring you into my life and then not let it happen for us. We’ll get there. You just need to take each moment as it comes, Rainie, and stop tryin’ to analyze every damned thing. Way deep inside where nobody can see, you’ve been badly wounded, and you need time to heal.”

  Her mou
th started to quiver again, and he wanted to move around the table to take her into his arms. But he knew she wasn’t ready for that yet.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever heal,” she whispered. “He did terrible things to me, Parker, things you can’t even imagine. Even worse, I did things I don’t want to remember, just so he wouldn’t hit me.”

  Parker felt as if a large hand had clamped around his throat. He swallowed hard. A part of him shied away from hearing about the things Peter had done to her, but another part of him understood that Rainie probably needed to talk about them. “Well, darlin’, when you’re ready to get it off your chest, I’ll be here.”

  She shook her head, her eyes still bruised and aching with memories. “I’ll never be able to talk about it.”

  She already was talking about it. Talking around it, anyway. But he didn’t think it was a smart idea to point that out to her just now. “If you never want to talk about it, that’ll be okay, too,” he told her, even though he knew she might never heal until she mustered the courage to share her memories. “Like I said, I’ll never push for you to do or say anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

  She tightened her slender fingers around the tumbler with such force that her knuckles went white again. “Peter did.”

  Parker released a pent-up breath, not entirely sure he was ready for this, but the stricken look in her eyes told him that she’d been holding everything in for far too long. “Made you do things you weren’t comfortable with, you mean?”

  “I never knew when it might happen. No matter how good I was, or how hard I tried to do everything right, he’d still get mad.” She fixed him with a shimmering stare, and he knew in that moment that she no longer really saw him. “Remember I told you that he bought expensive wine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hated some of it. It tasted like alum to me, this awful, dry, nasty stuff that I could barely swallow. I always pretended to like it because Peter insisted that I become sophisticated in my tastes. But this one night, the wine was so awful that I made a face. He drew back his arm and slapped me. From clear across the table, bang, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, my goblet broken, the wine pooled all around me.”

  Parker sat frozen on the tipped-back chair, not wanting to hear this, yet hanging on her every word.

  “He grabbed me by the hair, smashed my face against the tile, and told me to lick up the mess, that he’d teach me to appreciate fine wine or kill me trying.”

  Parker closed his eyes. The picture taking shape in his mind made him feel physically sick. Damn Peter Danning straight to hell. Parker no longer wanted only ten minutes alone with the son of a bitch. He needed at least an hour so he could make the bastard suffer as badly as he’d made Rainie suffer.

  “So I did,” she whispered.

  He jerked back to the moment. “What?”

  Her small face contorted, her skin so white and drawn that she looked skeletal, her eyes huge spheres of haunted darkness above her jutting cheekbones. “I licked it up,” she said in a choked voice. “Only I got some glass on my tongue, and he got mad when I gagged. So he shoved my face in it—and I thought—” She broke off, closed her eyes, and gulped for air like a hooked fish. “I thought I was going to drown. I couldn’t turn my head. My nose was in the wine. I tried not to breathe it in, but I did anyway, and then I choked. I choked so bad that I vomited. He thought I did it on purpose, to show him how awful the wine was. He said I was an unsophisticated hick who would embarrass him in front of his colleagues, that I had no taste in wine, furnishings, clothes, makeup, nothing. So he started kicking me. In the ribs so the bruises wouldn’t show.” She grabbed for air again and then held her breath in a valiant attempt not to start sobbing. She went without breathing for so long that Parker could see the blood vessels in her forehead popping up, and he started to worry that she might pass out. Then she suddenly sputtered on an exhalation of breath. “It was always important for him to hit me where the bruises wouldn’t show.” She touched her cheek. “He only forgot once, when I accidentally dropped one of his crystal goblets.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Parker’s resolve not to go to her weakened, but still he held himself in check. “Come here,” he said, patting his knee.

  She held her breath again, so long that her beautiful, tear-filled eyes bulged a bit, and then on the release, she said, thinly and tautly, “I can’t.”

  And in that moment, Parker knew she really couldn’t come to him. He also knew he was a damned fool for just sitting there. One of them had to cross the chasm, and Rainie didn’t have the courage to take the first step.

  He pushed up. “If you can’t come to me, honey, I’ll come to you.” In one fluid motion, he scooped her up off the chair and sat down, cradling her close against his chest. He wasn’t surprised to discover how perfectly her body fit against his. They had been made for each other. He truly believed that. “No funny business, I promise. Just friends. Okay?”

  She turned in to him and hooked an arm around his neck, her face buried against his shoulder. “He broke my ribs that night. It hurt so bad I couldn’t breathe, but I was afraid to go see a doctor. He would have beaten me up again if he had found out. So instead I wrapped a torn sheet around myself, fastened it tight with safety pins, and took aspirin for the pain.”

  Parker’s feet felt as if they’d turned to water inside his boots. He pressed his face against her hair and clenched his teeth. He was definitely his father’s son, he decided. He wanted to rant and rave and kick the walls. It wasn’t easy for him just to sit there, holding her and doing nothing. She’d been hurt, hurt so badly, and he had a horrible feeling that this one incident she’d told him about was just that: only one moment during a hellish eternity. His heart hurt for her as it had never hurt for anyone. He wanted to soothe her with the brush of his hands and kisses on her cheeks. He wanted to tell her with his body what he couldn’t say with words.

  He settled for tightening his arms around her, trying to tell her with the urgency of his embrace that he was bleeding inside for her.

  “He’ll never touch you again,” he whispered. “I swear it, Rainie. Never again.”

  Her wet lips parted, her breath hot and moist against his neck. “What if Loni’s right, and he finds me?”

  “He’ll have to go through me to get to you, and I guarantee that won’t happen.”

  “He’s big.”

  Parker smiled sadly against her curls. To Rainie, the man probably seemed huge. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” he whispered. “If I hit a man and he doesn’t go down, I’ll be circlin’ behind him to see what the hell’s prop-pin’ him up.”

  “He shoved my head in the toilet once.”

  He closed his eyes. Clenched his teeth again.

  “I said shit, and that was how he punished me for my filthy mouth, by shoving my head in the toilet bowl.”

  Parker didn’t know when he started to rock. He registered the fact that he was swaying back and forth on the chair with a strange separateness, as if some man he didn’t know had taken over—some guy who had better instincts than he did. Rocking was good. She was so young to have endured so much. A sweet, innocent, injured thing that needed to be rocked and comforted. So he rocked back and forth, back and forth, his chest feeling as if it might rupture from the pressure of his pent-up rage, which he wanted to spew out in a wall-rattling roar.

  Instead, he rocked her, stroked her glorious hair, and tried to absorb her pain. She would fall quiet sometimes, and then suddenly she’d tell him something more, each story as horrible as the last. Parker didn’t know how she had survived. He just thanked God that she had.

  “He never once hit me until he got control of my inheritance. I was so gullible, Parker. He pretended to accidentally open one of my bank statements, and then he told me it was insane to let that much money sit in an account, drawing so little interest. He said he would invest it for me and triple the amount in a year.”

  Her voice had gone
soft and drowsy, but she kept talking.

  “I wanted us to get a house in the suburbs, maybe with a little land so we could have kids and a dog. He kept putting that off, saying the market was in a slump and it wasn’t a good time to sell the penthouse. If he invested my money and tripled it, I hoped we could get a house sooner. I never dreamed he meant to invest all the funds under only his name so I couldn’t get my hands on any of it.”

  Parker breathed deeply of her scent, which always made him think of warm apple pie. “I’m so sorry, Rainie.”

  “They say love is blind, and I definitely was. I look back on it now and wonder how I failed to see what he was up to, but by the time I figured it out, it was too late. The only money he gave me was a household allowance. I tried to cut corners so I could save to get away from him, but he figured out what I’d need right down to almost the exact cent. For a while, instead of sending his shirts to the cleaner’s, I tried to do them at home, but eventually he found out.”

  She fell quiet, which told Parker that she’d gotten another beating for that transgression.

  “He was jealous because he was older than me and thought I might be attracted to younger men. When I wanted to get another internship at a different company, he flew into a rage. When I volunteered at the hospital, he beat the hell out of me. When I joined the gym, he had a fit and turned one of the bedrooms into a workout center. He never wanted me to leave the house without him, and even when we went out together, he imagined that I was looking at other guys.” She sighed shakily. “My chronology sucks. I’m telling everything out of order.”

  It didn’t matter. Parker now had a clear picture of what she’d been through. He suspected that she’d neglected to tell him some of the more private things—the sexual things. It was difficult for him to imagine anything worse than what she’d already shared, but, like it or not, her unflagging dread of physical intimacy erected a red flag in his mind. She’d told him nothing about what had gone on in the bedroom. He suspected that her memories of those encounters were so horrible that she simply couldn’t put them into words.