by Tracy Tappan
Her husband was filling a plastic bag with ice.
“The house is a w-wreck,” she said through chattering teeth. She wasn’t crying anymore, but had a serious case of the shakes.
“Yeah, sorry.” Sedge crossed into the living room. “I’m not so great at picking up after myself in the first place, and the week you were gone everything just sort of went to hell.” He sat down next to her. “Or I did.” Taking her burned hand in his, he gently pressed the bag of ice on it. “That okay?”
Nothing was okay. But she nodded.
“So you did this with hot coffee?”
“Yes. It was an accident.”
“Did someone bump into you?”
“No. I just spilled it.”
“’Cause, yeah….” He cleared his throat. “You came barreling into that hospital conference room looking really upset.” He lifted the ice off for a count of three, then replaced it. “You were really upset.”
“Well, I’d just burned myself.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“C’mon, Kimberly. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid. I mean, you were begging to come back to Ţărână, for God’s sake.” He peeked briefly under the ice bag to check her hand. “You can’t just leave me hanging about what caused that. Something happened.”
She glanced aside, imagining Sedge’s expression if she confessed the details of her relationship with Tim. Humiliation seared her cheeks. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Sedge took the ice pack off her hand and set it on the coffee table. “This burn is going to need some ointment.” He disappeared into the downstairs bathroom, then came back carrying a small tube like toothpaste. “If the roles were reversed, you’d want me to tell you what had happened, wouldn’t you?”
Oh, dirty pool. “Just leave it alone, Sedge. And don’t give me one of your puppy dog looks.”
He unscrewed the top off the tube. “Did you see your parents while you were topside?”
Her eyes followed his movements as he set the cap on the coffee table next to the ice.
“Were they mean to you?” He squeezed white, creamy ointment onto his index finger. “I know they can be sometimes.”
Her upper lip beaded with sweat. The feel of a python wrapping around her throat, slowly strangling her, pushed tears into her eyes.
Sedge gently took her burned hand again. “Did you run into somebody you used to know, some bitch from school, maybe?” He smoothed the ointment onto her burns so carefully that the tears in her eyes gathered along her lower lashes.
Where were you my whole life? She gulped a breath. Why couldn’t I have found you sooner?
“Maybe some guy you used to date? You and he had a bad break up that—”
Her hand jerked so hard the spasm made Sedge smear ointment along her thumb. He whipped his gaze up to her face, his lips parting as he watched tear droplets roll off her lashes and onto her cheeks like an avalanche of crystal pebbles.
“Oh, shit,” he hissed. “It was a guy.”
She wrenched her hand away from him. “Leave me alone, Sedge.” She slammed to her feet and stormed into the kitchen.
He trailed after her.
“I told you I don’t want to talk about it, and I mean it!”
“I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Well, for your information, I don’t need your help.” She skirted around the kitchen island and hauled open a cupboard. “I’m just fine, thank you very much.”
“You and I both know that’s not true.”
She grabbed a water glass and headed for the sink.
“This is about more than just a bad breakup, isn’t it? I can see it on your face.”
Her fingers convulsed. The glass fell and shattered on the kitchen floor. “Fuck!”
“Oh, Jesus. Kimberly—”
She dashed toward the other side of the kitchen island, aiming for the stairs. She was going to bed and wouldn’t get up for a week!
“Damn it, would you quit running away.” Sedge reached out to take her arm, moving with the same swift, aggressive grace he used when bearing down on an Om Rău.
His body heat hit her, tripping panic buttons in her brain. Sedge himself disappeared; she could only see a wide, looming chest coming at her, large flexed biceps. She screamed and flinched away.
Sedge froze with his arm outstretched, her scream echoing away into nothing but the sound of her heavy breathing. Several weighted seconds stalked past. He dropped his hand, very slowly, dawning realization spreading over his face. “The guy hurt you.”
She gave her head a violent shake. “No,” she rasped out. “Don’t make me tell you about this. I can’t.”
Emotion simmered off him. “I’m your husband, Kimberly. This is something I need to know.”
A lump grew in her throat like a malignancy. “You won’t l-love me anymore.” There it was! Out loud! “You’ll think I was weak for letting it happen.” She was weak!
“No way,” Sedge came back instantly. “No fucking way. That’s impossible.”
She just stood there, acid in her throat.
“Tell me.” Sedge stepped up to her.
“Don’t—” Her chest clutched painfully, memories smashing through her mind like falling boulders.
“I promise I won’t—”
“Stop it!” she cried. “Stop talking to me! Don’t…don’t even look at me!” She smashed her eyes shut and turned aside. “I don’t want you to, do you hear!”
“Okay.” She heard him back off. “Okay.”
Tears seeped out from under her lashes. Her lungs compressed and her heart was beating so fast it felt like it might fly out of her chest. After a long moment, she heard Sedge pull out a kitchen chair. She opened her eyes to see what he was doing
He met her gaze somberly. “I’m going to sit at this table and not move, all right.” He sat. “See? And”—he transferred the salt shaker from the middle of the table to a spot right in front of him—“I’m going to stare at this the whole time you talk. I won’t look at you, like you asked.” He settled his hands on either side of the salt shaker and gazed steadily at it. He waited, but when she didn’t say anything, he asked quietly, “So will you tell me what happened?”
She swiped at her eyes with her fist and drew in a fractured breath. Her stomach was in a macramé of knots and the hot taste of vomit sat at the back of her tongue, but somehow she had to force her way through this. Because Sedge was right; he was her husband and deserved to know this.
“I saw an ex-boyfriend in the ER tonight at Scripps,” she admitted miserably.
“All right.” A ripple of tension passed through Sedge, but he did a pretty good job of not letting much of it show. “And he…he was the one who used to hurt you?”
“It didn’t start out like that,” she came back defensively. “He was very charming and charismatic, you know, and I was…so young. I was still in college when we first met and easily swept off my feet by his good looks and stardom.” She hesitated, and Sedge nodded, encouraging her. “The bad stuff began as only these…little things, like he’d take my dessert away from me in a restaurant and laughingly say he was saving my poor hips from becoming battleships. Or he’d make me change clothes before we went out, saying I’d be thanking him later for saving me from that near disaster.”
Emotions pressed in on her chest, that familiar hateful sense of worthlessness. “And then one night we were at this frat party and I made some remark, a joke, I guess…I don’t even remember what I said. Everyone laughed, and, well…. He must’ve thought they were laughing at him because when we got back to his apartment afterwards….” Her throat swelled and narrowed, trying to shut off her next words. “He slapped me across the face, hard enough to knock me to the floor, and told me if I ever said anything like that again he’d beat me until I bled from every fucking pore.”
Sedge stiffened, his nostrils flaring.
“I…Jesus, I was stunned. I’d never been struck before in my life, and I didn’t know what
to do. I thought about breaking up with him, of course, but the next morning, he was so apologetic. He brought me flowers and a diamond tennis bracelet and swore he’d never do it again.” Her voice faded to a whisper. “And I believed him.”
She swallowed, trying to bring moisture into her mouth. “He did hit me again, and again, but, God, he was always so regretful afterwards and so nice to me for a while that I…. I was so confused, and somehow I just ended up staying with him.” Her hands started to tremble. She flexed them into fists, then stretched her fingers open. “But then his apologies stopped altogether and the real nightmare began: his joking comments turned into outright insults and his slaps became punches.”
Sedge’s fingertips dug into the top of the table.
“Over the two years we were together, he told me I was fat, stupid, lazy, and accused me of being a whore any time another man looked at me, no matter that I never provoked it. He bloodied my nose countless times, blackened my eyes, knocked out one of my molars, cracked my ribs, broke my wrist, mutilated two of my toes under the heel of his boot, and bruised my body in too many places to count.”
Sedge was sitting rigid as steel at the table now, his chest jerking up and down.
“By this time, I was desperate to get away from him,” she choked out, “I swear I was, but I was terrified. He’d threatened to kill me if I ever left him, and I knew he would. I didn’t think I could manage it alone, either.” Shame settled over her, as leaden and dark as despair. “I felt so dumb and useless and oafish by that point. I couldn’t do anything without him. And…and then….” A strangled sound escaped her lips. She couldn’t say this part! The memory was still a jagged piece of glass in her heart. “Oh, Sedge,” she cried softly.
He shot out of his chair in a heartbeat, his chocolate brown eyes ravaged with pain for her.
But she held out a trembling hand to hold him off, the terrible words falling one after the other from her mouth. “One night he came home to our apartment drunk, and attacked me in bed, rough and impatient, and I…. I couldn’t say no to him, for the love of God. I wasn’t able to get my diaphragm in and I ended up…getting pregnant.”
Sedge stood riveted by the kitchen island, his face a tight, grim mask.
“I was so scared to tell him about that, but then he was ... okay with it. Surprised at first, yes, and I thought maybe…maybe….” An hysterical noise bubbled out of her. “But no, stupid me. A couple of nights later he came home drunk again, raging that the baby wasn’t his, screaming that no way with a whore like me the baby was his. He—” Her lungs strained, ached. “He took me by the throat, rammed me against the wall, and started punching me, over and over.” She exhaled raggedly. “Right in the stomach.”
“No,” Sedge moaned.
Anguish ballooned in her chest, the remembered pain, the feel of warm blood gushing down her thighs as the baby inside her died. “You can’t blame him, though, Sedge.” Silent tears rolled steadily down her face, drenching the front of her shirt.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sedge croaked. “Don’t say that.”
“I should’ve left him!” she cried out, wildness stirring behind her breastbone.
“Kimberly, no—” Sedge stepped forward, reaching for her again.
She shoved his hands away. “If I hadn’t been too weak to leave him, then…then my baby would be….” Alive. The balloon burst: all the pain, the sorrow, the guilt, the self-hatred. Everything. She threw her head back and screamed, long and loud and throbbing, her throat searing raw.
Sedge stumbled forward and pulled her into a fierce embrace, his arms trembling as they wrapped around her.
She pounded her fists against his muscled body, still screaming as guilt tore her insides to ribbons. “No! No! No!” She tangled her fingers into the front of his shirt, pulling and jerking at the material, driving herself into a coughing fit. She started to gasp and wheeze.
Sedge hurried her over to the kitchen sink, scattering through the broken glass on the floor.
That was good thinking. She bent over the basin and threw up.
When she was done, he pulled her against the protective strength of his chest again.
She sagged boneless against him, her eyes sore, her throat like sandpaper.
“Don’t you dare,” his voice vibrated around the word, “blame yourself for anything that bastard did to you, Kimberly. Do you hear me?” He smoothed a palm over her short hair, the gesture comforting, even though his hand was shaking.
“That prick systematically destroyed you. He started out with those little jabs at your self-esteem, right? Small shit you would’ve felt ridiculous calling him on, but that picked away at your confidence, all the same. And once he had your defenses knocked down, the fucker terrorized you with violence, knowing he’d made you helpless.” He pressed his cheek to the side of her head. “He broke you, honey. How can you even remotely think you could’ve left him under circumstances like that? Any woman would’ve had a tough time with that.”
She blinked rapidly and chewed her bottom lip, trying just to let her husband’s words wash over her like a balm. He wasn’t…judging her.
“You’re not weak,” he went on. “There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for anybody, Berly. I’ve seen that with my own eyes. Like rallying the Dragons into mutiny—and don’t try to tell me you weren’t the genius behind that. You knew the community would be pissed as hell about it, but you did it anyway, to right a wrong.” His voice lowered. “And it was the same with your baby, I bet. Right? It’s one thing for your asshole ex-boyfriend to beat the crap out of you, but let him harm your child….” He trailed off.
She nodded, her eyes moistening again. “Yes,” she whispered. “As soon as I could get out of bed after the miscarriage, I called a shelter. After that, I ran away to the Peace Corps to hide from him.”
He inhaled-exhaled. “So much about your unhappiness makes sense to me now, honey. You’ve always got this huge, invisible weight on your shoulders. Or in your heart. You’re just not satisfied unless you’re saving the whole world, and it’s not right. You’re too frantic about it. I think…it’s because you’re so relentlessly punishing yourself for what happened to your baby, feeling like you should’ve somehow been able to save your kid. You run around saving everybody else to make up for it, keeping yourself so crazy-busy that you never take the time to just…live for yourself. To be happy.” He kissed her hair. “Our whole marriage I’ve been killing myself trying to figure out how to make you happy, but now I see you’ve been refusing to let me.”
That was probably partially true. She pulled back a little and looked up at him. “Let’s not discount the kidnapping thing, either, Sedge.”
His lips lifted in a rueful smile. “I think you know I’ve never done that.”
“And don’t forget that I’ve been deprived of the work that I love.”
“That’s going to change, too, I promise. If Toni doesn’t see to it, I will.” He brushed a tendril of hair from her eyes. “You missed the big face-off in the conference room. Everyone’s listening to you Dragons now. No more kidnappings and Toni’s going to be co-leader of Ţărână. You won, Kimberly.”
She blinked once. “I won? really?”
“Yep.” He chuckled. “Now come on, I’m going to take you upstairs and remind you how a man is supposed to treat a woman. A hot bath, a cup of tea, those smelly candles you like, maybe a little massage action.”
“Oh, boy.” She gazed into his eyes, taking in all of the love and safety he had to offer her, letting it wrap around her. “Believe me when I tell you that I’m all yours, hubby.”
He swept her into his arms and headed up the stairs.
Chapter Thirty-three
Toni kicked off her slingback pumps and crossed to the lamp on her bedside table, turning the brightness down to something more romantic. Her blood sang with anticipation, that special kind of giddy excitement a girl only felt when she knew she was about to get laid by a super sexy guy. Maybe later she’d do a victory
moon walk.
Nearly chuckling, she scooped up the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape sitting next to the Contessa phone on her nightstand. What would Dev say if he knew she was about to use his gift of one of his finest French reds to seduce another man out of his clothes?
“Hey, Jaċken, why don’t you grab a couple of wine—” She cut herself off.
The object of her lust was standing with his back pressed flat against her locked bedroom door, his eyes unblinking, his lips parted around short, shallow breaths.
Here was a new sight: Jaċken on the verge of an all-out panic.
She held up the bottle, slowly, carefully. No sudden movements around the virgin, ladies and gentlemen, we don’t want to scare him off. “I thought we could enjoy a glass of wine first.”
“No.” He cleared a scratch from his voice. “I mean, no, uh…thank you. I’m good.”
Politeness? Oh, this was worse than she’d thought. “Are you sure?” She couldn’t help a small smile. “You look a little nervous.”
“Yeah, I’m…feeling a bit boggled.”
“Boggled?” She laughed as she set down the bottle. “That doesn’t sound like a word you’d use.”
“Fucking boggled, then.”
She rolled her eyes, even though she laughed again. “Our children are going to be such potty mouths, Jaċken, I swear to God.”
The shell-shocked expression returned to his face. “Children,” he repeated hoarsely. “Jesus, Toni, I can’t believe…this just can’t be real.” He shoved both hands back through his hair, then stood with his fingers gripping the base of his neck, his elbows spread wide. The stance served to display and augment the magnificent bulk of his body to perfection, his biceps curled up thick, the massive range of his shoulders and lats tapering down to a flat, board-like belly and narrow hips, his solidly muscled legs planted apart in his typical posture of confidence and power.
The sight sent a bolt of pure lust shooting straight through her. “You’ve got such a great body. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to see you naked.”
His arms fell back to his sides. He blinked, then snorted. “Yeah, well, I might have a clue about that on my own end.”