“It’s beautiful.”
She took it from me and turned it over in her hands, admiring the intricate engravings on the barrel and grip. I wanted to kiss her, but she was so lost in looking at my collection that she probably wouldn’t have appreciated it. I went back to packing, answering her questions as she asked them. I had to drag her away when it was time to go.
I knew she was the girl for me. But this only underscored that fact.
Chapter 12
Sam
I watched him as the light of the flames danced on his skin. He was asleep, his face relaxed. I didn’t think it was possible for him to be any more handsome, but he was so handsome now. His lips were slightly parted, and his hand was tucked under his cheek. I could almost see what he’d looked like as a child as he slept.
I would be perfectly happy to lie here all night and just watch him.
We spent the entire two hours of the flight to Aspen curled up in our seats, whispering to each other. We talked about everything from the weather to skiing to politics. He wanted to know everything about me, but he never asked about the argument I’d had with my mother in front of him—much to my horror—or the things she’d said. Anyone else would have begun questioning me the moment we walked out the door, but he didn’t. He never said a word.
I loved him for that.
And then we fell into bed, both of us exhausted emotionally and physically from the evening we’d had. When I awoke, he brought me breakfast on a tray—pancakes and fruit and toast—apologizing for his lack of culinary skills. But he was an awesome cook. I just picked around the burnt pieces and the slivers of seeds in the cantaloupe.
Skiing was going to be a challenge for me. He was patient—incredibly patient—but I simply couldn’t keep my legs together—yes, Mother, I admit it—and I fell so many times that my tailbone would probably never heal. But he picked me up each time with a smile on his full lips and a hug and words of encouragement always there at the ready. He was so kind, so gentle. So perfect.
And when he held me here, in the light of the fire, I couldn’t imagine anything better.
I should be sleeping, but insomnia was a side effect of several of my medications. I got up and slipped on the t-shirt he’d been wearing earlier. I climbed the stairs, finding the pills that were supposed to counteract the side effects. I had a bag that I kept all my medicines in, tucked in the back of my carry-on bag so that Hayden wouldn’t see them. They were still there, the whole collection, enough pills to put a whole village of dwarves in their graves. I dug through them, searching for the ones I needed.
I hated these pills; I hated that I was so dependent on them. I knew what would happen if I just quit taking them. It wasn’t an option right now. I was enjoying my life too much right now. But…the time would eventually come when I’d have to make a choice or two. And I hated knowing that. I was twenty-six. I should have so much life ahead of me, but lupus was a burden I’d carried around since just after I joined the Marines. It was a civilian doctor who’d diagnosed me, and I was able to keep it under wraps for the first few years. Then Megan was injured and ready to leave, so I followed. They would have found out eventually, anyway.
Eight years I’d had lupus. I never cried in my beer about it. It was just another burden I would carry. I had plenty of them already, what was one more? I mean, come on, I was the child of rape. How could anything be more of a burden than that? I hated to know it was violence that brought me into this world, but if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here. And my mother…I think it was her choice to turn to the church in the aftermath of the rape that saved her life. So how could I complain about that? How could I begrudge her that?
It was easy to hate her for the way she treated me. But knowing what she went through…I couldn’t really hate her. That’s why I tried not to fight with her. The other day was just an anomaly.
I think Megan always sort of felt sorry for me because of my mom. Maybe that was why I was relieved that Hayden didn’t.
I found the pills I needed and popped two in my mouth, storing my pills back where they were before going to the bathroom for a glass of water. As I slipped back downstairs, I could hear Hayden’s phone ringing. He’d gotten several calls through the day. He ignored each and every one of them.
I slipped his phone from his pocket, wondering if it might be Megan. I hadn’t bothered to call her yet to let her know we wouldn’t be in the office on Monday. She’d understand, I think.
But it wasn’t Megan calling. His phone told me it was the Department of Corrections.
Hayden reached over and snatched the phone out of my hand, silencing it with one quick movement of his thumb.
“Sorry. I thought it might be Megan.”
He laid the phone on the fireplace hearth before reaching for me and pulling me down on the blanket beside him.
“Where’d you go?”
“Forgot to take my vitamins.”
“Yeah?” He brushed the loose hair from my face. “Didn’t I explain to you that I don’t like waking alone?”
“You did. But sometimes a girl just has to do what she has to do.”
He groaned, but his eyes were laughing. He bent down and kissed my throat. I ran my hands over the top of his head, dragging him further down, against my breasts. I loved the way it felt when he drew a nipple into his mouth, and he seemed to know it because he often ignored them now in favor of tasting some other part of my body. Not that I minded, but my nipples were awfully eager for his attention.
“You make me so hard,” he whispered against my ear when he came back up, his hand tangled in my hair now as his other made its way under the hem of the shirt I wore.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Now?” There was a little whine in his voice, but he pulled back, his eyes moving over my face. He must have seen something there because he slowly untangled himself from me, falling back against the pillows. “You want to know why they keep calling me.”
“I do. And why you ignore their calls.”
“I ignore them because I already know what they have to say, but there’s this part of me that’s hoping it won’t happen if I don’t hear it from them. You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
He rolled onto his side, propping himself up on his elbow. He ran a finger slowly over my bottom lip and my chin. “Wouldn’t you rather do something else? Do we have to talk about this now?”
“We can do whatever you want.” I leaned over and kissed him. “We don’t ever have to talk about it.”
“Sure we do.” He studied my face for a long moment. “It’s something that makes me who I am. And you should know about it. I want you to know. I just haven’t talked about it in a very long time.”
“You don’t have to—”
He touched two fingers to my lips. “I want you to know, Sam. I want to share everything about myself with you.”
This overwhelming affection built in my chest. I felt this need to just curl up in his arms and hold him close to me. But, at the same time, a fear that was just as overwhelming filled me.
I didn’t want this man to love me. But I wanted him to love me more than anything else in the world.
I didn’t want him to feel this comfortable with me. I didn’t want him to miss me when I was gone. I didn’t want to hurt him.
But I wanted him to love me. And I wanted so desperately to love him.
I did love him.
“You have a friend in prison.” I shook my head. “If you think that makes you a bad person, it doesn’t. Not really.”
“No.” He dropped his fingers, his eyes falling to the blanket below us. “There are two men in prison because of me. I was the star witness at their trial.”
“Why? What did they do to you?”
“Not me.” He brushed his fingers against my cheek. “To my parents.”
He lay back then, staring up at the ceiling. Then he stood and pulled on his pants, clearly feeling as though this was a convers
ation that had to be had with clothes on. I sat up and watched him, my heart breaking for him. He was clearly agitated. I wanted to go to him, but I was afraid that was the last thing he wanted. I couldn’t stand the idea of him brushing me aside, so I stayed where I was, watching him pace.
“I know you did the background check on me. I know you know I was raised by my grandmother, Isabelle Dubois.”
“I do.”
“But I don’t suppose the check went back any further than that.”
I shrugged. “Luke vouched for you, and Megan was already pretty set on hiring you. All I really did was search what was in your military records. Your credit rating. That sort of thing.”
“You didn’t do a newspaper search on my family name?”
“No. It didn’t seem necessary.”
“You would have found a whole treasure trove.”
“Hayden—”
“I think sometimes my grandmother looks at me and wonders why I was the one to survive. I think she wishes my parents hadn’t let the nanny have the night off, and that they hadn’t had to wait for the hotel to send up a sitter. If they hadn’t had to wait, they would have been long gone by the time of the break-in.”
My heart sank. I was afraid that my imagination was filling in holes that he was purposely leaving open. I closed my eyes and dragged my fingers through my hair, lifting it off my neck and shifting it, needing to do something with my hands. When I opened my eyes again, he was watching me.
“Hayden, I’m sure your grandmother loves you.”
“She loves me. But she’d rather it was my father who survived.” He sat on the couch, leaned forward for a moment, and then stood again. “We were visiting New York. My father was an architect, and this big company wanted to use his designs to build a new office building there in the city. He was excited. His designs were used all over the country, but this was New York. This was a building that would go up in the middle of Manhattan, not far from Madison Square Garden. He was so happy that he insisted that the entire family go along on the trip. He wanted us all to see where his building would be built.”
He smiled with the memory, happy memories of his parents. He dragged his fingers through his hair before turning to look at me, but there were shadows in his eyes. He wasn’t seeing me. He was seeing his mother, his father, and his childhood memories.
“I sat on the bed while my mother got dressed. She rarely got to dress up. I remembered her saying that over and over, ‘I never get to dress up. I never get to do something like this.’ And she was right. My father was a wealthy man before he began his career, but his career had made him something of a celebrity back in Louisiana. But his work was his true passion, so he was constantly at his drawing board and always turning down invitations out. Momma, though, she loved to dress up and go out. And the idea of a Broadway play? She was over the moon!”
He sat again, clearly agitated. He rubbed his hands together, then rubbed them on the front of his pants.
“They were laughing and teasing each other. Momma told Daddy that now that he had a building in Manhattan he’d have to bring her there more often. And he joked that she would spend all his money if he brought her too often because we’d spent the day shopping. She’d taken me to FAO Schwartz and I bought a dozen things, all things I didn’t need, but she’d insisted I get anyway. I was six, so it was a dream going into a place like that.
“Then they put me to bed and made me promise to go right to sleep. We had another day planned of museums and more shopping, and maybe even a trip out to Liberty Island. I was so excited about it that I couldn’t sleep. I could hear music out in the sitting room of our suite. I snuck out there and watched my parents dancing, still laughing and teasing each other. They were so happy!” His eyes filled with tears. He looked away, blinking quickly to make the tears go away before they could spill. He glanced at me. “Sorry.”
I crawled to him on my knees. “Don’t apologize.”
He touched my face. “I hate that sharing my life with you puts an added burden on your shoulders. You already have so much to carry on your thin, little shoulders, what with your mom and the weight you carry for Megan.”
I shook my head. “Don’t you know that you lighten my burden in the things you do for me? Do you know that you’ve already given me more confidence than I ever thought I was capable of? You’ve given me so much that I could never begin to repay you.”
He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. It was probably the saddest smile I’d ever seen.
“But you don’t know who I really am.”
“Tell me.”
He bit his lip, clearly struggling whatever demons he had in his past.
“I let them down,” he whispered softly. “I let my parents down.”
“How?”
He pulled back, standing again. He paced for a long time, not really saying anything. He made little noises, like he was trying to let the words out but they were getting swallowed up.
“I let everyone down, Sam. I promised Luke I’d watch over Megan, but I stood back and let her get involved with that Dante. And my parents…I let them say that I was gone from that hotel room, and I was with the nanny on her night out. I let them lie in order to save my own life, and then I just watched as those men broke into our hotel suite and tortured and murdered them.”
“Hayden?” I reached out for him as he paced near me, but I missed. “Hayden…?”
He didn’t hear me say his name. He didn’t hear me pleading for him to come back to me. He was lost in the past and in his failures. The failures of a six-year-old boy…
He was watching from behind the couch as his father whispered something in his mother’s ear as he held her close to him and he ran his hand slowly down the length of her bare back. He couldn’t hear what his father said, but it must have been funny because his mother threw her head back, her long, blond hair flowing down her back, covering his hand as laughter flowed from her lips like music. They were beautiful, his parents. He found himself wishing he was older so that he could go to the play with them, and he could dance with his mother like that.
The boy didn’t even realize what was happening at first. The beep of the door should have alerted him. It alerted his father. He had already pulled mother behind him by the time the two men came around the corner.
“What are you doing in here?”
The men paused, clearly surprised to find them there. The boy recognized one of them. He was the creepy man who’d brought their bags to their room the day before.
“We came to check out what you left in the safe. It’s a pity you didn’t leave when you said you would.”
“Get out!”
The man just laughed. “We were hoping to find the nanny up here. Maybe the boy.” He gestured to his companion. “Willard here likes little boys. But I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see your missus still here. And all dressed up for me, too.”
The boy saw the panic on his mother’s face and on his father’s, too. He saw his father turn and whisper something to his mother that didn’t make her laugh. That made her whisper “no” in a voice that frightened the boy. Then he saw his father spin on his heel, but he hadn’t seen the man come up behind him. The bad man. And he had a gun.
The bad man hit the boy’s father over the head with the butt of the gun. The father fell hard to the floor; his eyes closed and blood seeped from his hair onto his forehead. His mother screamed as the bad man grabbed her arms and slammed her down onto the couch right in front of the boy. She saw him, her eyes widening in fear. She nodded subtly, gesturing with her head toward the cupboard behind him that he’d played earlier. He’d hidden inside it during a riotous game of hide-and-seek the day before. His father had taken a long time to find him there. The boy thought it was hilarious that he’d fooled his father so easily.
He slipped in there then, while the bad man ripped at his mother’s clothes, ruining her pretty new dress. The boy didn’t understand what was happening or the noises he wa
s hearing, but he hid with his head buried against his knees.
He heard the bad man asking about him. And he heard the lie leave his mother’s lips. She told him it was important to always tell the truth, so he didn’t understand. But he was afraid to call her out on it—to come out of the cupboard and prove her a liar.
There were lots of noises that night. He sat there for a long time, just listening. He didn’t know what to do. He knew this was bad, but his mother told him to hide. So he hid until it was quiet for a very long time. When he finally came out of the cupboard and he crawled around the couch to where his mother lay, he pulled her dress up over her bare breasts, aware that it wasn’t proper for her to be like that. Then he lay his head against her chest, waiting for the sound of her heartbeat to soothe the fear in his chest. But it didn’t because it wasn’t there.
“The nanny came back in the early morning hours, using her key to let herself in. She screamed when she saw me, and I didn’t understand. Then there were police everywhere and people wanted to take my parents away and ask me questions. I was confused. I didn’t understand why my mother…”
He choked on the words. I got up and grabbed his hands and pulled him back to the couch. The dying embers of the fire barely offered enough light for me to see his face, and maybe that was better. Perhaps it was better not to see the darkness that still haunted him.
“I told them who I saw in the hotel suite that night. I picked them out of several line ups. But when it came time to put on a suit and testify against them in court, I couldn’t separate what I knew to be true and the things I’d heard from my grandparents, from the nanny, or from the cops. Even from the prosecutor himself. So my testimony was confusing and inaccurate.”
“You were six.”
“I was eight when they finally went to trial.”
“But you were six when it happened. They never should have put you on the stand.”
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