by Donna Fasano
Tori decided that it did.
She also decided, chuckling softly to herself, that she was doing all she could to play up Chay’s finer points just so she wouldn’t have to feel remorseful for liking him so much.
The rich aroma of coffee wafted around her, urging her to turn to the cupboards for cups, saucers, and spoons. She poured the coffee and placed the steaming cups on a tray, then reached for the sugar bowl and cream pitcher.
She entered the living room and saw that he’d fallen asleep. Quietly placing the tray on a side table, she spooned sugar into one cup of coffee and stirred.
She sat in the chair adjacent to the couch.
A gorgeous man is asleep on your sofa. A silent voice spoke from somewhere in the back of her brain. Her smile broadened of its own accord.
She sipped at her coffee, letting her eyes travel down the length of him. He was tall and broad. His long, tapered fingers were laced together at his waist. His trousers covered a flat stomach, narrow hips, muscular thighs.
A heady contentment settled over Tori. Owning a B&B, she knew that people often had a difficult time falling asleep in a new place. Did this mean Chay was comfortable here? With her?
Whoa there, her brain warned. Hadn’t he said he’d been having trouble sleeping? That he was suffering from exhaustion?
Still, Tori had to admit that she liked the idea of having Chay around. Sleeping on her couch. Better yet, sleeping in her bed. Better still, not sleeping in her bed. Her mouth pulled into a languorous grin as she conjured up all sorts of deliciously sinful images of her and Chay tangled in cool cotton sheets.
Wow! Now, wouldn’t that cure her loneliness?
However, her smile faded dead away as she thought of the reason behind the seclusion she was forced to suffer. Keeping her shelter a secret was a necessary and awesome task. A task that demanded Tori ignore her own needs and focus solely on the abused women who were desperate for her help.
Then those worrisome doubts recurred. Yes, it was fun to toy with the idea of romantic kisses and longing gazes, but it would be remiss of her not to take the hard facts into full account.
She didn’t know this man. She might feel attracted to him, she might have eaten dinner with him, she might even have shared some childhood stories with him. But he was a stranger, nonetheless. Until she knew more about him, until she discovered the reason behind his peculiar living arrangements, she didn’t dare trust him with the knowledge that she harbored women who were on the run.
It had taken Tori years to assemble the small group of trusted friends and professionals who aided these women who had been let down by law enforcement, by the courts, by the healthcare system. Women who had tried every other means to have happy lives, but had failed.
Tori had gone to visit Grayson Makwa many, many times, trying to get a handle on whether or not he could be trusted to help her. In the end, the noble shaman had proved to have the deep sense of honor and dependability. And after many talks with Tori, Dr. Dakota Makwa had proved himself to be trustworthy, as well.
A tiny knot formed in her stomach as she watched Chay sleep. He’d admitted that he hadn’t been to visit his grandfather—that he hadn’t even let the man know he’d returned to the reservation. That piece of the puzzle confused Tori. It suggested that all was not right between Chay and his family. She set the coffee cup on the table by the chair, the taste having gone suddenly flat.
Chay had told her that he’d left Misty Glen years ago and hadn’t returned. Had he also turned his back on the honorable life of the Kolheek?
Sure, there might be simple and completely plausible answers to all her questions about the man who slept on her couch. However, Tori was forced to come to one definite conclusion: until she knew for certain that Chay was worthy of her trust, she must fight the attraction she felt for him. Placing her faith in a stranger could be dangerous for the women she took in. For the future of her work. For herself.
No sooner had she come to this sad conclusion than Chay emitted a soul-haunting moan that made her heart leap to her throat.
Chapter Three
Why couldn’t he make out the booming voices? Why couldn’t he focus in on the hulking forms moving before him? The haze was too thick for him to be certain of anything. The very air seemed to have turned viscous; a glutinous gunk that muffled sound, blurred vision. And the heat. Scorching. More than he could possibly bear.
But was the heat emanating off the massive angry forms? Or was it radiating from the place itself? Had he descended into the very bowels of Mother Earth, where rock melted into rivers of lava? Fear oozed from his pores. He felt small. Helpless. Cowering against the heat. Against the anger. Against the terror.
Something horrifying was about to happen. Something he couldn’t stop.
His skin crawled and instinct had him flinching… cringing into an even smaller ball when icy claws grabbed at his arm. Chay’s eyes opened wide and he inhaled sharply, his heart raging.
The dream. He’d gotten sucked into it again.
When his eyes finally focused, he saw that the claws were not claws at all, but fingers, a gentle touch on his forearm as Tori had reached out to wake him. He must have called out or murmured or thrashed about. There was deep concern in her gem-blue eyes.
“Are you okay?”
The distress in her tone warmed him, made his tense muscles relax.
“I’m fine,” he assured her. “I haven’t had that dream since—”
Chay stopped short. He’d nearly revealed that he hadn’t been plagued by the nightmare since the night he’d met her… since the night he’d first kissed her… since the night he’d begun being tormented by agonizingly sweet dreams… of her.
He inhaled deeply, giving himself time to shake off the fuzziness of sleep. Time to clear his mind of the bone-numbing fear that the nightmare never failed to elicit. Chay straightened himself on the couch.
“I’m fine,” he repeated, dry-washing his face with both hands. “Just fine. Now that I’m awake.”
The couch cushion depressed as Tori eased herself down beside him.
“You want to talk about it?” she offered. “The nightmare, I mean.”
He tried to shrug it off. “It’s the accident, I’m sure. The stress of it triggered a recurrence of the bad dreams I had as a child, years and years ago.”
Tori’s brow knitted and she said, “I did read in the paper some time ago that there had been some kind of a problem on one of your work sites. That a worker had gotten hurt.”
“Paralyzed,” he corrected. “One of my men got his legs crushed beneath a forklift.” His body was tense. “Toby was young, foolish. He’d come back from lunch one Friday afternoon with liquor on his breath. I gave him hell right in front of everyone. Told him to go home and sleep it off. But he didn’t listen to me. In fact, he defied my orders. The minute my back was turned, he went right on working. He misjudged the space behind the forklift he was driving and rolled the whole contraption over an embankment.”
Commiseration filled Tori’s expression.
“He sued, of course,” he continued. “I felt guilty. I still feel horrible. And the man worked for me. But because his blood alcohol content was so high and many witnesses heard me tell him to go home, my company was cleared of any wrongdoing, but—” he shook his head “—it was an awful ordeal. Not something I want to go through ever again.”
“I can imagine.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “The strain of it prompted these dreams to return. I’ve been suffering with them for months.”
Funny, he hadn’t been able to confide in anyone the devastating anxiety he’d experienced while in that courtroom, the all-consuming guilt over knowing a man he’d hired would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, yet here he was confessing his soul to Tori.
“You said you had the dreams as a child.” She shifted her weight on the cushion, her knee only a hairsbreadth from his. “If you don’t mind my asking, what happ
ens in the dream?”
He sighed, his shoulder muscles rock-hard. “The funny thing is, I can’t really see what’s happening. There’s a fog, or a cloak of some kind that’s blurring my sight. But I can sense that there are two big—” he paused, groping for descriptive words “—shapes. One of them is very animated. Furious. Looming. A huge, angry bear, maybe. The other form is just as angry, but it’s very still.” No, he thought. That wasn’t quite right. “Immovable. Like a giant oak. So much bigger than me. More frightening than hell itself.”
Confusion made him frown. “But why should I fear an oak tree? It makes no sense. All I know is that I have this sense that something terrible is about to happen. Something that will change my life forever. And I want to scream. I want to make the muddled shapes stop fighting. But I’m totally paralyzed.” He let his gaze settle on hers. “With fear.”
Compassion deepened the color of her eyes to a clear sapphire. “Did you ever talk about this with anyone?”
“No.” One corner of his mouth pulled back into a humorless grin. “Like I said, I was just a kid. In my mind, telling someone would have been made me look—” he shrugged “—weak. I couldn’t reveal what was surely a vulnerability. My cousins would have reveled in calling me a wimp. No, I couldn’t tell anyone about it.”
That’s exactly how he’d felt as a kid.
“Anyway,” he continued, “the nightmare went away. I don’t remember when. It just faded away. It didn’t bother me again.”
“Until the accident,” Tori slowly finished for him.
He gave a small nod.
“I was certain,” he said, “that once the trial was over that the stress I was feeling would lessen and the nightmare would go away again. But that hasn’t happened.” He paused a moment. “That’s why I came home to the rez. To rest up. To try to find… some peace.”
Some answers, really, but explaining the Kolheek belief that dreams were messages from the subconscious—from the soul—wasn’t something Chay was prepared to do right now. He looked into Tori Landing’s beautiful face, her compassionate gaze. He swallowed. Yes, just a moment before he’d felt it quite harmless to confide in her the secret of his persistent nightmare. But he suddenly felt uncomfortably exposed. What if she kept him talking and analyzing until his every thought, his every deed, had been laid bare?
Cold, clammy trepidation snaked its way through him.
But wasn’t that what he wanted? Wasn’t that why he’d returned to the rez? To figure out, once and for all, what was causing the nightmare?
Suddenly, though, he wasn’t sure he was ready.
Of course you’re ready, silent logic argued. You’ve been haunting those woods for weeks looking for answers.
Feeling totally confused, he rose from the couch in one fluid motion. “Listen, Tori, I should get going. I’ve proved myself to be unfit company by falling asleep on your sofa. I apologize for that.”
“It’s all right,” she told him as she stood.
She meant it. He could tell. He had no idea why, but she was making it easy for him to make a quick and effortless exit.
“You need to go home and get some rest.” She walked him to the door and opened it for him. “But Chay…”
He turned to face her.
“If you need to talk—” her voice was soft, inviting “—you know where I am.”
~oOo~
Hours later Tori sat out on the deck wrapped in a thick wool sweater, marveling at how the moonlight and clouds worked together to cast shifting shadows over the thickly forested mountainside and valley.
So Chay had returned to Misty Glen Reservation to heal from the trauma of the accident she’d read about in the newspaper, from the pressure of the court case, from his own sense of guilt about what had happened to the young man on the work site. Chay hadn’t actually used the word heal. He’d said he came to rest. To find peace. But emotional mending was what he needed.
Tori had a sneaking suspicion that there was more to his return than all of that.
Those dreams. Those recurring nightmares.
What caused them to beleaguer him so? The death of his mother? Yet Chay had told her his mother had died so young that he had no memory of her. His father’s death, maybe? The shock a six-year-old child would suffer when dealing with the loss of a parent could easily manifest itself into nightmares.
Fear. Anger. The feeling of impending doom. Those emotions were normal reactions for a child facing a future without his father. But why the two shapes? Shapes that seemed angry. That seemed larger than life.
Tori was no psychologist, that was certain, but it didn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out how an accident that had paralyzed a man could rekindle a nightmare in which Chay felt paralyzed. She pulled her feet up into the seat of the chair, hugged her shins to her chest, rested her chin on her knees.
Were the nightmares somehow tied in to the fact that Chay had returned to Misty Glen weeks ago without telling his grandfather? His avoiding Grayson could very well be completely innocent and unrelated to the dream, but she just didn’t think so.
Tori’s mind churned. There was a connection somewhere. There had to be.
The phone rang, jarring the quiet night, and she went into the living room to answer it.
As she listened to the voice on the other end of the line, she let go of her thoughts of Chay and automatically slipped into her emotional armor: strength, dependability, calm, and sound reason. She would need all these things.
Another woman in need was coming.
“I’ll be ready,” she promised. Then she replaced the receiver into its cradle and went about getting herself prepared.
~oOo~
In the wee hours of the morning she let the woman and child into her home through the back door. The boy looked to be about ten, his body dragging with fatigue. He refused to be separated from his mother, so Tori quickly fixed a makeshift bed on the couch. He fell asleep almost instantly.
Her name was Brenda. She was missing an eye-tooth. Knocked out in a beating she took from her husband a week ago, Tori learned. The fists that had struck her tonight had blackened both her eyes, broken her nose, cut a deep gash in her temple, and sent her running for her life.
“He gonna kill me. He gonna kill me for sure.”
The woman quaked with a bone-shattering fear that Tori had seen before. In other women just like Brenda.
“He’s not going to kill anyone,” Tori asserted firmly. “You did the right thing. You got out of a bad situation. You got your son out. I’m going to help you. Don’t worry.”
Her eyes were glazed over with terror that went soul deep. “I took Scotty. If he finds me, he’ll kill me.”
He, Tori discovered, was a semipro boxer who went by the name Tommie Boy. The man’s coach and manager felt that Tommie Boy was talented enough to make it on the pro circuit. However, over the past eighteen months Tommie Boy had lost every pro match that had been scheduled for him. It was only natural, Brenda told Tori, for her Tommie to be frustrated, wasn’t it?
“I love him,” Brenda whispered through tears that fell silently down her pale cheeks. “But I can’t take it no more. I’m scared to death he’s gonna start in on Scotty.”
Tori felt compelled to ask, “Tommie’s never hit your son?”
Brenda’s guilt-ridden gaze slid from Tori’s revealing the honest truth. When the woman finally lifted her chin, her tone was desperate as she explained, “It’s not a regular thing. And not nothin’ like what I get.” Then her shoulders sagged. “But it’s gettin’ worse. I know Tommie don’t mean it. But he’s gonna end up killing me. And then who would watch over Scotty?”
Tori suppressed the flare of anger that ignited when Brenda excused her husband’s behavior with “Tommie don’t mean it. He jus’ cain’t help it.” Tori knew that what Brenda felt for Tommie wasn’t love. It was a kind of psychological dependence, a sickness, just as Tommie Boy’s physical abuse was a sickness… or plain old rattlesnake meanness.
She could sympathize with Brenda’s dependence. The woman measured zero on the self-esteem scale. And she had little in the way of formal education. Brenda felt stuck, hopeless, vulnerable. Tori had seen it, time and again. She would do everything she could to help the woman heal physically and emotionally.
But Tori felt nothing but contempt for the woman’s husband.
She listened to Brenda talk until the sun peeked over the Green Mountain range to the east. She’d heard the same story countless times before. For one reason or another, law enforcement officers, the court system, social and health care agencies could do little to protect some women. Tori had learned over the years that abused women could be found in every socioeconomic class. Some were highly educated. Some were not. Most had no family support system to speak of. And it wasn’t uncommon for these women to have grown up in abusive homes, to have survived a succession of violent relationships. Brutality was a way of life for them. It had been the only world Brenda had ever known.
Tori’s hands had balled into white-knuckled fists when Brenda had told her that one family court judge had taken her into his private chambers and encouraged her not to press charges against her husband. The judge had claimed that Tommie Boy was the town’s only chance of “getting on the map,” and that it would be a shame for Brenda to do anything to thwart that. This same judge had then asked Brenda if she’d be embarrassed to be pronounced an unfit mother, her son taken from her home, from her care.
“So I dropped all the charges,” Brenda whispered. “Tommie knocked out my tooth as soon as the coast was clear. Said I needed to be punished. I look a fright, I know. But when I finally got up enough courage to ask if I could get my mouth fixed, Tommie said I looked fine to him, that I needed a reminder not to call the police again.” She winced, seeming to remember the humiliation of it all. “But I never called the police, Tori. The neighbor always did.” Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “And them dominoes would just start falling.”