“When you’re in the gutter, even the curb looks miles high,” Ethan said, his rough voice drawing her attention. He’d clenched one hand around the iron rail to which it was shackled, while the other twisted in her sheets. His muscles bunched and his face had shuttered. He obviously knew the story wouldn’t end well.
“That’s pretty much the sum of it. Pete’s note asked me to meet him after school in room two fifty-two. Everyone knew about that room. It had a broken lock, so kids met there when the teachers had locked up all the other rooms. One always had to do guard duty while others were using the space. When I arrived that afternoon, Drew Dobbs was standing in front of the door. I should have known right then something was wrong. Even if the note hadn’t tipped me off, I should have realized Pete didn’t have the kind of status required to make Drew stand guard for him.
“But I was stupid. I didn’t pay attention to any of that.”
“For God’s sake, Lucy, you were a fifteen-year-old girl who thought she was going to meet the boy of her dreams. Cut yourself a little slack.”
“I can’t. Those kids made my life miserable. I should have realized immediately things couldn’t change that quickly. But I didn’t. I went on into the room. But Pete wasn’t there. Instead, it was a friend of Drew’s. Another senior.” Lucy could hear her own voice as if from far away. Aside from a faintly hollow echo, it held no inflection, and she found herself obscurely proud of the fact.
“Senior year was American lit at Dobbs Hollow High School, and they’d been reading The Scarlet Letter. I don’t know which of them came up with it, but between them, Drew and Billy conceived the idea that I needed to be marked.”
“Pike?” The bed rocked as Ethan lunged forward and was jerked back by the handcuffs. “Goddammit, Lucy, let me loose. I’m going to kill him.”
“No, you’re not.”
“He hurt you!”
Yanked out of her reverie to the present, Lucy suddenly considered where Ethan’s mind might have gone. “No,” she said, laying a hand on his knee. “No, not the way you’re thinking, and not as badly as you imagine. I swear.” He stared at her, and she met his gaze steadily until the fury began to fade from his eyes.
“Okay, I admit, you were probably right to lock me up. But now I need you to take the cuffs off. I won’t run out on you, but I can’t listen to the rest this way.”
Lucy retrieved the key from the bedside table and twisted it in the lock, releasing Ethan’s wrist. Expecting he would want to rise, she started to back away, but he grabbed her before she was out of reach and hauled her close. He arranged her against him as if she had no will of her own. And perhaps she didn’t, because she let him pull her down, tangle his long legs with hers, and tuck her head into the hollow of his shoulder. His arms came tight around her. The sensation might have been smothering, probably should have been, but it wasn’t. Rather, she felt secure, surrounded by sinew and muscle, heat and skin and breath, as if each of his exhalations infused her with his strength.
Ethan rubbed his stubbled chin on the top of her head. “Ready when you are, sugar.”
She reorganized her scattered thoughts and picked up the story where she’d left off. “Once I was in the room, they pushed me to the floor. Drew sat on my legs and Billy shoved gym socks in my mouth and slapped on a piece duct tape, pulled out a switchblade, and explained the whole Scarlet Letter thing. He always did like to hear himself talk.”
Lucy felt Ethan’s breathing go ragged and his muscles clench, but she couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye. Instead, she focused on a bit of gray lint caught in the seam of his shirt as she continued.
“They’d decided to go with a W rather than an A. I guess “adulterer” was too hard a word for them. Anyway, Billy was sitting on my stomach, so my arms were trapped, but when he’d only managed to make two cuts, the door rattled. Both of them lost their concentration for a sec and Drew jumped up to grab the handle and hold it shut. I got the best leverage I could, dumped Billy on his ass, then kicked him in the nuts and took off. Drew was so shocked, he didn’t even really try to stop me.
“I was bleeding pretty badly, though, and Billy had cut right through my shirt. I couldn’t go home in that condition. I had gym clothes in my locker, so I headed there, figuring they wouldn’t be apt to come after me in the halls. I’d gone into the girls’ bathroom to change and mop up when I ran into Tara Jean. She waited for me, made conversation, and then went all the way home with me.”
“She knew?”
“I didn’t realize that until I came back. I just assumed she thought I wouldn’t be safe walking alone, whereas no one would touch her, not with the wrath of the Dobbs family likely to descend on them. So she walked me home, then called their maid to come get her. I should have known she’d grow up to be a cop; ‘protect and serve’ is evidently in her blood.”
“What happened after that?”
“I couldn’t hide the fact that I’d been injured from my mother, so I told her I’d gotten in a fight. It was close enough to the truth.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone what had really happened?”
“What would have been the point? Billy’s father was the chief of police. Drew’s family was the second richest in Dobbs Hollow next to the Farmers. Making a fuss would have hurt us, not them.
“But even without details, my mother knew the fight had to do with her, and that’s when she told me we could leave town, start over. The next day, she was murdered.” Possibly— probably—because she’d tried to extort money from the wrong man. Money she wanted quickly because her daughter had gotten into trouble.
“Jesus. But you said you knew where Drew and Billy were that afternoon, so they couldn’t have done it themselves.”
“Yes. It seemed as if everywhere I turned the next day, one or the other was passing me in the hall, chatting outside my classroom, whatever. Maybe it had always been that way and I’d never noticed, but I don’t think so. I think it was terrorism, plain and simple. But either way, they weren’t playing hooky.
“My mother had given me cab fare to get to the babysitter’s from school. Usually, I’d walk, but she knew I wasn’t feeling well. She might even have known I was afraid, though she didn’t say so.”
Ethan’s hand stroked her hair, his touch soothing. “What about Al Pike or Mayor Dobbs? Maybe their kids told them what happened and one of them decided to keep your mother quiet.”
“Dobbs should have been in Austin. The legislature was in session, and he usually stayed away as much as possible while that was going on. It’s possible he came home for the day, though. I haven’t been able to find out. Al Pike . . . I’d love to find a way to hang my mother’s murder on him, especially after hearing they had an affair, but I doubt he did it. He was in the station all day, according to everything I’ve managed to get my hands on. It’s not much, just what the local papers said at the time.”
“I’ll look at the logs.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“I can’t help wondering whether Drew and Pike are worried about you coming forward with this now. What with all the scandals in politics lately, your arrival at the very moment Drew was getting ready to move his career forward must have horrified him. No wonder he wanted to discredit you.”
“I have no evidence. I never did. I mean, when it first happened I could show that someone attacked me, but now I can’t even really prove that.” Lucy shrugged.
“And you’ve never mentioned this to anyone?”
“No. I knew where my mother kept her emergency cash. When I found her that afternoon . . .” Her throat dried up, and she swallowed several times. Ethan’s fingers slid to the back of her neck and made small, soothing circles.
“When I saw her, all I could think about was getting out before whoever had done it came back to finish the job. I took the five hundred dollars from the box inside the chimney, grabbed Timm
y, and headed back to the babysitter’s. I told her my mother wasn’t home and asked her to drive us to town so we could wait for her at the library. Once she’d driven off, I headed for the bus station and got tickets on that night’s bus to Houston. After two nights there, we took another bus, this time to Dallas.”
“Where you met Caldwell.” Ethan’s fingers had moved from her neck to her spine, slowly slipping up and down, pressing here and there to release the knots of tension.
“Todd knew I’d been hurt because by then infection had taken hold. I had been afraid to go to a hospital, and Timmy and I weren’t exactly living clean. He assumed I’d been attacked on the streets, though, and I let him believe it. It was almost three years before I trusted him enough to tell him the truth about my mother.
“He and Karen had been nothing but good to us. It must have hurt them to know I’d kept such a big secret, but he never blamed me for it. He asked whether I wanted him to investigate the murder, and I said no.”
“You were afraid whoever did it would find it curious that a Dallas cop would ask about a small-town prostitute’s murder and come looking for you?”
“Me? No, by then I could take care of myself. But Timmy was just a toddler, and Karen was already sick. We needed Todd to be safe much more than my mother needed justice.”
“And you decided to pursue this now because you figure Tim’s finally old enough to take care of himself.”
His surety astounded her. She doubted even Tim realized she’d been waiting until he could survive without her before venturing back to Dobbs Hollow.
“But sugar, the W, the fact that they wanted to cut you that particular way . . . why didn’t you say anything sooner? That damned word is all over every incident that’s happened since you got here.”
“I know.” She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her. There was no anger in his hold, but his arms flexed ever so slightly to keep her in place.
“I get that you didn’t trust me at first. Really, I do. Now I even understand why. But this is important.”
Lucy sighed. “The thing is, Drew was at a fundraiser the night Renee was killed. And when you gave TJ the ViCAP list, she checked Billy’s alibis and told me he’s solid for some of them, so I had to put it aside, to admit that what they did to me might make me jump to conclusions about their guilt in other instances.”
“So that’s why she happened to know about her brother’s alibis.”
“Yes.”
Ethan set her slightly away from him and tipped his head down to stare directly into her eyes.
“What if we take Renee out of the equation? Have you considered that? Considered that Pike might be behind everything that’s happened since you got here?”
“I did. But when you told me about the pattern, about the fact that the rapist always calls the women whores, it seemed so much more likely that it was all one person . . . and Billy has alibis.”
Ethan shook his head. “Not good enough. As a high school senior, he was a criminal. You told me so yourself. People don’t change that much.”
“At fifteen, I was a coward, so I guess you’re right.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were right. I should have spoken up. I should have confronted them. But I didn’t. I went home to my alcoholic mother who I knew was incapable of doing anything rational, and I told her just enough about what had happened to get her killed.”
“Christ, Lucy, you can’t possibly blame yourself for that.”
“Why not? It was the next day, Ethan. Not even twenty-four hours later. You tell me that’s a coincidence.” She could feel tears pressing against the back of her eyes, and she blinked furiously.
“Lucy, sweetheart, you don’t know what it is. Your mom, she lived on the fringe and that’s not a safe place. You know that.”
“I can’t help it, Ethan. Logic doesn’t help the way I feel.”
He pulled her close again and tucked her against him. His heart beating beneath her ear was comforting, and she felt the tears slowly recede.
“So I guess this is more of that emotional stuff you’re not so good at processing,” he said at last.
“’Fraid so.”
“But surely the men you’ve dated have asked about the scars. What did you tell them?”
“How do you know I have scars at all? Maybe I had plastic surgery. Got rid of them.”
“Not a chance.”
Like his understanding of her reasons for waiting to investigate her mother’s murder, his recognition that she would never remove the scars touched her deeply. Todd had offered to pay for surgery, and her first lover, Sean, had even found her a doctor, so certain had he been that she’d go along with his plan for her to have the scars removed. But they were part of her. They marked her for who and what she was, a survivor and a crusader, and kept her on track. At times, she even found herself fingering the welts as if for luck when she needed direction.
“So what did you tell them?”
“That I’d been injured in an accident.”
Ethan’s fingers wrapped into her hair and tugged, so she tilted her head back to look him in the face. “That’s it? An accident? For crying out loud, Lucy. I’ve seen knife scars. I have a couple myself. They’re not exactly inconspicuous. None of these bozos asked for more details?”
“It’s not like there have been all that many. One accepted the explanation because he much preferred talking about himself to talking about me. The other didn’t want details because he was a trifle squeamish.”
Ethan chuckled, the sound a deep rumble beneath her ear.
“Sweetheart, you’ve been dating the wrong men.” The words whispered across her skin as he lifted her and twisted slightly so they lay face to face on the bed. She started to reply, to protest, to say anything at all, and he took immediate advantage, covering her lips with his own. His tongue tangled with hers in a muscled velvet dance and her whole body caught fire.
Reason cried a faint protest in the back of her mind, but passion silenced it. He knew the truth now, had seen her faults and failings, and still wanted her. Nothing was as seductive as that. His hand slid up and down her side, molding her curves, setting her nerves to tingling and chasing all thought from her head.
He sat up suddenly and reached for the buttons of his shirt. Lucy sat, frozen, unable to take her eyes from the movement of his fingers. He yanked the material from his jeans and pulled it off entirely, exposing a smooth, muscled chest liberally sprinkled with coarse black hairs. But it was his left shoulder that drew her attention, and involuntarily she reached out to touch it.
“Switchblade,” he said when her fingers ran over the knot of scar tissue. “Addict didn’t feel like turning over his stash. He and a couple of his pals were real vehement about it. I bet yours is a lot prettier.”
He slid long, calloused fingers beneath her T-shirt and fluttered them across the skin of her stomach, her sides, her back, assiduously avoiding her breasts, which ached for his touch.
But he didn’t pull the tee off immediately. Instead, he bunched the cloth in one hand and pulled her forward to kiss her again. This time, he began with her lips but moved on, brushing his lips across the tip of her nose, across each cheek, across her chin, across her neck. He tasted her there, in the hollow of her clavicle, where sweat had begun to gather, and she shivered.
With a quick yank, he had the tee over her head and off. In the soft, stormy afternoon light, he examined her, the touch of his gaze a tangible thing, creating goose bumps on her skin. With two fingers he traced the lines of her scar to the point at which they intersected, then leaned forward and pressed his mouth against the spot.
“V is for victory,” he said.
“No.”
“Oh, yeah. Sugar, you won that day. You kicked ass, along with other parts of Billy’s anatomy, and don’t you forget it.
You are amazing.”
She felt a blush creeping up her face and leaned forward to kiss him rather than responding verbally. Their lips met and his hands slid over her, still avoiding her breasts. She bit his lip, and he laughed. When at last his thumbs slid across her pebbled nipples, shocks ran straight through her body, and she almost sobbed aloud. She reached for the button on his jeans, and within moments they were both naked on the bed, all humor abandoned, exploring with eyes, hands, mouths.
And still, he took his time, even when she would have rushed. His erection jutted up, rock hard, and she traced it with the tips of her fingers, loving the feel of silky skin stretched over steel. So much of his body was like that, taut muscle lying under satin, lightly dusted here and there with crisp, prickling hair.
His own hands had covered every inch of her, and now his long fingers darted into the curls at the apex of her thighs. This time she did cry out, overtaken by sensation. Damp heat flooded her, but it brought no shame, none of the awkwardness she usually experienced at the evidence of her own desire. She arched closer to him, simultaneously tightening her grip until he, too, let out a guttural moan.
He pulled away just long enough to dig his wallet from his jeans pocket and extract a packet from inside it. In seconds, he had the condom out and on, and he was inside her, filling her senses as he filled her body. His scent, his taste, set her heart pounding. And yet . . .
And yet, there was the part of her that always remained separate, that dreaded the coming minutes, the race to the finish, the inability to reach the same peak everyone else seemed to find so effortlessly. Her body met his rhythm, and she tried to shut away the worries, but—as always—the more she tried to suppress them, the more present they became.
And the worst of it was that Ethan noticed. He slowed, then rolled until she was atop him. She tried to take charge of their movements, but he held her still, big hands tightening on her hips.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” But she couldn’t meet his eyes. “I . . . this isn’t my favorite position.”
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