To entertain herself while she waited, she drank in visuals—the sheen of his black hair in the dim light, the shadows that delineated his chiseled facial features, the sweep of thick eyelashes that feathered his lean cheeks, and the shimmer of his firm lips. Though she knew he would detest the adjective,
beautiful
was the word that sprang to her mind. She loved everything about him. The tendons that corded each side of his arched neck were purely masculine. She yearned to trace the bump of his larynx and feel it bob when he swallowed. A tuft of jet-black chest hair peeked out at her through his open collar, also tempting her fingertips. He made her think of a priceless painting, crafted by one of the masters. The longer she stared at him, the more in awe she felt. She would never grow tired of looking at him.
His lashes fluttered up, and his strong white teeth flashed in a lazy grin. “What?”
Emotion welled at the base of Rainie’s throat. She wanted so badly to tell him how much she loved him, but somehow mere words couldn’t express her feelings. “I was just wondering if you ate dinner.”
He stirred as if he were coming out of a stupor. “No, actually. Monte Carlo went down with the colic. Once I felt sure she’d be all right, I came straight here.”
Rainie scrambled to her feet and flipped on the overhead light. “I’ll fix you a couple of sandwiches and some soup. I had my favorite combo tonight, grilled cheese and tomato. My comfort foods. I eat them until they’re coming out my ears. Does that sound good?”
“It sounds awesome.”
As she opened the fridge and bent to get cheese out of the dairy compartment, she felt the tail of her shirt lift in back and reached to splay her hand over the cloth. When she glanced over her shoulder, Parker was watching her with a dazed look on his burnished face. She smiled to herself and went up on her tiptoes to get the bread from a cupboard shelf, well aware that she was displaying a lot of leg in the process. For weeks during her training, Parker’s mantra to her had been,
Have no mercy.
Now he was her victim, and she intended to take those words to heart, giving him no quarter.
Parker was a gentleman to the marrow of his bones, and he would probably never consider pushing her for sex twice in one evening, especially not when she’d so recently shuddered at the thought. Not that she was finding fault with him in any way. She would always be grateful for his patience with her and his willingness to wait to make love until she felt ready. But that time in her life was behind her now.
She wasn’t precisely sure what had changed within her, or why it had occurred so suddenly. She knew only that something wonderful had happened. Maybe she’d been moving toward this for weeks, inch by slow inch, and her astounding progress in self-defense training, culminating that morning in a takedown kick, had been the catalyst that took her the rest of the way. She felt free, absolutely and gloriously
free
. Peter no longer had a hold on her.
With giddy relief, she turned the chrome toaster wide side out so she could see herself in the reflective surface. The distorted image no longer made her break out into a cold sweat or called to mind her nightmare about being lost in the mirror maze.
“Rainie, are you all right?”
Parker’s deep voice jerked Rainie back to reality. For a very long moment, she stared down at her reflection without really seeing it, but then she focused on her elongated, distorted image and smiled at herself. Fear of Peter Danning no longer ruled her life, and it never would again. She felt as light and buoyant as a falcon with the wind under its wings.
“I’m wonderful,” she said over her shoulder, meaning it with all her heart as she resumed the task of making his meal.
A few minutes later, the kitchen was redolent with the smell of grilled cheese, melted butter, and hot tomato soup. When Rainie set the food on the table, Parker pushed up from where he sat with his back to the wall and approached the chair she’d pulled out for him. Concern filled his eyes as he sank onto the seat. “Are you
sure
you’re okay? I’m sorry I went after you that way. I should’ve—”
“I’m
fine
, Parker.”
Searching his worried gaze, Rainie felt her heart give a painful little twist. From the first, he’d been so careful of her feelings. Now she’d totally changed the rules on him. No wonder he was confused. As recently as last night, she would have recoiled at the thought of making love with him. Now she was parading around in a shirt without buttons or a stitch of underwear on underneath. She owed him an explanation. He clearly thought that her rapid turnaround might be the result of emotional yo-yoing and was afraid she might bottom out at any moment.
She sat down across from him. “Remember how you kept telling me that I only needed time to heal?”
He took a bite of sandwich and nodded as he flicked a bit of melted cheese from the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. “Of course I remember.”
“Well, you were wrong. It wasn’t time that I needed, Parker. It was you.”
His throat convulsed as he swallowed without chewing. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
He tossed down the sandwich. “You spaced out over there while you were workin’. That worries me.”
“I only spaced out because I’d turned the toaster so I could see my reflection in the side of it, and I was thinking how good it was not to feel panicky.”
His bewilderment obvious in his expression, he said, “Panicky?”
“I haven’t been able to look at myself in the side of the toaster since I moved in here,” she explained. “I kept it turned with the end out so I’d never accidentally see my reflection in the chrome. My image was always distorted and reminded me of my recurring dream about the mirrors.”
“So why’d you turn it around and look at yourself a few minutes ago?”
A bubble of happiness formed in Rainie’s chest. “Because I finally can.” She tried to think how to explain. “I don’t feel lost anymore, Parker. When I have the dream about the maze of mirrors, it’s me that I see in the glass, and Peter isn’t laughing anymore.”
His eyes went suspiciously bright. “Ah, honey, that’s awesome.”
It touched Rainie that he had come close to getting tears in his eyes. Parker Harrigan was, hands down, the strongest man she’d ever known, both physically and mentally, but his emotions ran deep, especially when it came to her. Knowing how much he loved her was the most precious gift that he’d given her, and she doubted he even realized it.
Rainie lowered her gaze. What she needed to say wouldn’t be easy, but she had to explain the sudden changes that she was undergoing. In order to do that, she had to journey back in time to her marriage. The only good part about that was her knowledge that nothing she ever told Parker would diminish his feelings for her. Through thick and thin, this man would always stand beside her, as solid and dependable as an immovable boulder.
“I’ve told you about a lot of stuff that went on while I was with Peter,” she managed to say, “but never anything about the sexual aspects of it.”
“You don’t have to now,” he assured her.
“Yes.” She met his gaze dead-on. “I do need to tell you. It’s the final step for me, Parker. The memories are like bits of rotten garbage inside my head, and now, thanks to you, I have all of them shoved into a plastic bag, ready to be tossed.”
He touched a finger to his lips, stood, and stepped over to remove the kitchen microphone from its hiding place atop a door casing. It struck Rainie then that they’d just had wild sex about three feet from the bug.
Oops
. While preparing to seduce him, she’d thought to move the bedroom receiver into the guest room. Somehow she hadn’t anticipated the explosiveness of their first joining—or that it would occur on her table. Heat inched up her neck. Then she shook her embarrassment off. What had happened between them had been so beautiful. Nothing, not even the knowledge that they’d been overheard, was going to make her regret a single second.
After the bug was relocated to the living room, Parker returned to the kitchen and resumed his seat. He straightened a leg under the table to hook the toe of his boot around her ankle. The contact helped to center her, and she knew that was his intention. He was sending her that message again:
I’m here, Rainie mine, and I always will be.
“You can talk now,” he said softly. “They won’t be able to hear you clearly.”
She took a long, bracing breath. There was no way to describe the darkest side of her marriage in polite terms, no way to pretty it up. She decided the easiest path was simply to tell him about it in a bald, straightforward manner. “Peter didn’t enjoy ordinary sex. Early on, before he got control of my money, he pretended to, but our times together always seemed . . . I don’t know . . . flat, somehow, sort of like taking a sip of a soft drink that’s gone warm and lost its carbonation. It wasn’t horrible, but it fell far short of what I had expected prior to our marriage.”
“I’m sorry it was that way for you,” he said huskily.
Rainie let her head fall back and closed her eyes. It was easier to go on if she didn’t look at him. “Yes, well, in the end, flat soda pop would have been delightful compared to the way it became later, when he no longer felt it necessary to put up a front. I’m just going to say it, Parker. He had an insatiable sexual appetite, but he couldn’t achieve gratification in a normal way. He was into perverted stuff, and simply engaging in those acts wasn’t enough. He needed the double whammy of watching in a mirror while we—” She broke off and swallowed hard. Her throat was so dry she felt as if she were gulping down a wad of sandpaper. “I won’t call it ‘making love.’ Even the term ‘having sex’ is too bland to describe what went on.” She opened her eyes and lowered her chin to look across the table at him. “I think those incidents are what caused my recurring nightmare about being lost in the maze of mirrors. He used to make a fist in my hair, pulling so hard that it brought tears to my eyes, and make me watch in the mirror, too. I wasn’t allowed to close my eyes. If I dared, he punished me in creative ways that somehow aroused him. Inflicting pain was a form of foreplay for him. Afterward, he would drag me back to the mirror and make me perform for him again, watching the entire while.”
“Oh, sweetheart.”
Rainie fiddled with the wicker napkin holder at the center of the table. She noticed that her fingers were quivering. “During those encounters, the person I saw in the mirror wasn’t me. I can remember staring at my reflection and thinking that the woman I saw in the glass couldn’t possibly be Rainie Hall, Marcus Hall’s willful and intelligent daughter who’d once had the world at her fingertips. That girl would never have allowed a man to demean her that way. That girl would have fought back and possibly even died before she stooped that low. So inside my head, while I watched in the mirror, I separated myself from that person and told myself it wasn’t really me.
“When I got away from Peter, the dream about the mirror maze started. In the dream, I’d race frantically from mirror to mirror, and my reflection was always of someone I didn’t know. I think my mind was trying to make me face what had happened to me and come to grips with the fact that it really had been me who did those things. Only it was too horrible for me to accept, even in a dream, so I kept seeing strangers instead of myself.
“Then you found me on the swing that night and told me the story about your mother’s star—and how you believed we all had a bright place within us that could never be touched, not by anything, not even death. That struck such a chord within me, Parker. When I went upstairs to my room, I knelt at the window and stared at the North Star, only for me it wasn’t your mother’s light, but my own. Does that make any sense?”
“It makes perfect sense,” he said, his voice gone gravelly and thick.
Rainie pressed a knotted fist to the center of her chest. “I
do
have a bright place inside of me—a part of me that Peter and all the ugliness could never touch. It was that part of me that remained separate, that part of me that looked into the mirror and didn’t recognize the person I had become. And that part of me is what finally gave me the courage and strength to get away from him.”
“We’re more than just flesh and bone,” he said softly. “And that separate part of us is what defines who we really are. It doesn’t matter what happens to our bodies. If I were in a terrible accident and lost all my limbs, that separate part of me would still be the same.”
“Exactly.” She looked deeply into his eyes, and in them she saw the love that had helped her to reclaim her sense of identity. “I was trapped in an impossible situation, a very dangerous situation, and my survival instinct kicked in. I did what I had to do. Staying alive became my whole focus. But those actions never defined me as a person. You helped me to see that, first of all by loving me when I could no longer love myself, then by teaching me to trust again, and finally by helping me rebuild my self-esteem. When I first started training, I didn’t believe you could actually teach me how to defend myself against someone like Peter. Now I not only believe I can defend myself against him, I
know
I can. And in some weird way I don’t understand and can’t begin to explain, that knowledge has set me free. Peter Danning no longer has a hold on me.”
This time when Parker’s eyes went bright, Rainie actually saw tears gathering on his lower lashes. “I didn’t do much, darlin’. You did it for yourself.”