Authors: Nora Roberts
“You damn well are.”
“I’m not—” She broke off, searched for calm, for sense. “It’s not what I meant to do. I apologize.”
“Screw apologize. Don’t ever use what I feel as a hammer.”
“You’re so angry with me. I didn’t mean to use your feelings. I didn’t. I’m clumsy in this kind of situation. I’ve never been in this kind of situation. I don’t know what to do, what to say or how to say it. I just don’t want you to feel particular responsibility for me. I don’t know how to explain how uneasy it would make me if you did.”
“Why don’t you try?”
“You’re angry and tired, and your dinner’s gone cold.” It appalled her to feel tears running down her cheeks. “I never meant for any of this to happen. I never thought you’d be so upset about Blake. I’m not doing the right thing, but I don’t know what is. I don’t mean to cry. I know tears are another weapon, and I don’t mean them as one.”
“I know you don’t.”
“I’ll—warm up the food.”
“It’s fine.” He rose, got a fork from the drawer, then sat again. “Fine,” he repeated after he’d scooped some up, sampled.
“You should use the chopsticks.”
“Never got the hang of them.”
“I could teach you.”
“I’ll take you up on that some other time. Sit down and eat.”
“I— You’re still angry. You’re pushing it down because I cried. So the tears are a weapon.”
“Yeah, I’m angry, and pushing it down some because you’re crying and obviously torn up about things you won’t tell me, or feel you can’t. I’m pushing it down some because I’m in love with you.”
The tears she’d nearly had under control flooded back, hot and fast as the panic. On a sob she stumbled to the door, fought the locks open, rushed out.
“Abigail.”
“Don’t. Don’t. I don’t know what to do. I need to think, to find some
composure.
You should go until I can speak rationally.”
“Do you think I’d leave you alone when you’re twisted up like this? I tell you I love you, and it feels like I broke your heart.”
She turned, her hand fisted over her heart, her eyes drenched with tears and emotion. “No one ever said that to me. In my life, no one’s ever said those words to me.”
“I’m making you a promise right here that you’ll hear them from me every day.”
“No—no, don’t promise. Don’t. I don’t know what I’m feeling. How do I know it’s not just hearing those words? It’s overwhelming to hear them, to look at you, and to see you mean them. Or it seems you do. How do I know?”
“You can’t know everything. Sometimes you have to trust. Sometimes you have to just feel.”
“I want it.” She kept her hand clutched over her heart, as if opening her fingers would allow it all to fly away. “I want it more than I can stand.”
“Then take it. It’s right here.”
“It’s not right. It’s not fair to you. You don’t understand; you can’t.”
“Abigail.”
“That’s not even my name!”
She slapped a hand over her mouth, sobbed against it. He only stepped to her, brushed tears from her cheek.
“I know.”
Every ounce of color draining, she stumbled back, gripped the porch rail. “How could you know?”
“You’re running or hiding from something, or someone. Maybe some of both. You’re too damn smart to run and hide under your real name. I like Abigail, but I’ve known it’s not who you are right along. The name’s not the issue. Your trusting me enough to tell me is. And it looks like we’re getting there.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“Scares the hell out of you. I don’t like that. I don’t see why anyone else would know, or care. Have you let anyone else get as close as you’ve let me?”
“No. Never.”
“Look at me now.” He spoke quietly as he moved to her. “Listen to me.”
“I am.”
“I’m going to tell you I won’t let you down. You’re going to come to believe that, and we’ll go from there. Let’s try this part again. I’m in love with you.” He eased her into a kiss, kept it soft until she’d stopped trembling. “There, that wasn’t so hard. You’re in love with me. I can see it, and I can feel it. Why don’t you try the words?”
“I don’t know. I want to know.”
“Just try them out, see how it feels. I won’t hold you to it.”
“I … I’m in love with you. Oh, God.” She closed her eyes. “It feels real.”
“Say it again, and kiss me.”
“I’m in love with you.” She didn’t ease in, but flung herself. Starving for that knowledge, the gift, the light of it. Love. Being loved, giving it.
She hadn’t believed in love. She hadn’t believed in miracles.
Yet here was love. Here was her miracle.
“I don’t know what to do now.”
“We’re doing fine.”
She breathed in, out. Even that felt different. Freer. Fuller. “I want to heat up the food. I want to teach you how to use chopsticks, and have dinner with you. Can we do that? Can we just be for a while?”
“Sure, we can.” If she needed a little time, he could give it. “But I’m not promising anything on the chopsticks.”
“You changed everything.”
“Good or bad?”
She held on another minute. “I don’t know. But you changed it.”
D
EALING WITH THE MEAL SETTLED HER DOWN—THE SIM
plicity and routine. He didn’t pressure her for more. That, she understood, was his skill and his weapon. He knew how to wait. And he knew how to change the tone, to give her room, to help her relax so her thoughts weren’t tied up in knots of tension.
His clumsiness with the chopsticks, though she suspected at least some of it was deliberate, made her laugh.
She’d laughed more since he’d come into her life than she had in the whole of it before him.
That alone might be worth the risk.
She could refuse it, ask for more time. He would give it to her, and she could use it to research another location, another identity, make plans to run again.
And if she ran again, she’d never know what might have been. She’d never feel what she felt now, with him. She’d never again allow herself to try.
She could—would—find contentment, security. She had before. But she’d never know love.
Her choice was to take the rational route—leave, stay safe. Or to risk it all, that safety, her freedom, even her life, for love.
“Can we walk?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
“I know you’re tired,” she began, as they stepped outside. “We should wait to talk about … everything.”
“Tomorrow’s as good as today.”
“I don’t know if I’ll have the courage tomorrow.”
“Then tell me what you’re afraid of.”
“So many things. But now, most of all? That if I tell you everything, you won’t feel the same about me—and for me.”
Brooks reached down, picked up a stick, threw it. Bert looked at Abigail, got her signal and chased after it. “Love doesn’t turn on and off like a light switch.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been in love. I’m afraid to lose it, and you. And this. All of this. You have a duty, but more, you have a code. I knew a man like you, more like you than I realized at first. He died protecting me.”
“From whom?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Okay. Did he love you?”
“Not the way I think you mean. It wasn’t romantic or sexual. It was duty. But he cared about me, beyond that. He was the first person who cared for me.” She pressed a hand to her heart. “Not for what I represented or what I accomplished, or what I was expected to be. But who I was.”
“You said you don’t know who your father was, so not your father. A cop? Duty. Were you in witness protection, Abigail?”
Her hand trembled. Did he see it or just sense it? she wondered. But he took it in his, warmed and stilled it.
“I was being protected. I would have been given a new identity, a new life, but … it all went very wrong.”
“How long ago?”
“I was sixteen.”
“Sixteen?”
“I turned seventeen on the day …” John’s blood on her hands. “I’m not telling you the way I should. I never even imagined telling anyone.”
“Why don’t you tell me the beginning?”
“I’m not sure where it is. Maybe it was when I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, and I knew that for certain in my first semester of pre-med.”
“After things went very wrong?”
“No. I’d completed pre-med, the requirement for medical school, by then. If I’d continued, per my mother’s agenda, I’d have continued into medical school the next fall.”
“You said you were sixteen.”
“Yes. I’m very smart. I took accelerated courses throughout my education. My first term at Harvard I lived with a family she selected. They were very strict. She paid them to be. Then I had one term on my own, in a dorm, but carefully supervised. I think my rebellion started the day I bought my first pair of jeans and a hoodie. It was thrilling.”
“Back up. You were, at sixteen, in Harvard, in pre-med, and bought your first pair of jeans?”
“My mother bought or supervised the acquiring of my wardrobe.” Because it still seemed huge to her, she smiled. “It was horrible. You wouldn’t have looked at me. I wanted, so much, to be like the other girls. I wanted to talk on the phone and text about boys. I wanted to look the way the girls my age looked. And God, God, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to apply to the FBI, to work in their cyber-crimes unit.”
“I should’ve figured,” he murmured.
“I monitored courses, studied online. If she’d known … I don’t know what she would have done.”
She stopped at the view where she’d wanted a bench, and wondered if she’d ever have reason to buy one now. Now that it was too late to stop in the telling.
“She’d promised me the summer off from studies. A trip, a week in New York, then the beach. She’d promised, and that had gotten me through the last term. But she’d made arrangements for me to participate in one of her associate’s summer programs. Intense study, lab work. It would have looked well on my record, accelerated my degree. And I—for the first time in my life—defied her.”
“About damn time.”
“Maybe, but it started a terrible chain of events. She was packing. She was covering for another associate, and keynoting at a conference. She’d be gone a week. And we argued. No, not accurate.” Annoyed with herself, Abigail shook her head.
At such times, accuracy was vital.
“She didn’t argue. There was simply her way, and she had no doubt I’d fall in line. She concluded my behavior, my demands, my attitude, was a normal phase. I’m sure she noted it down for my files. And she left me. The cook had been given two weeks off, so I was alone in the house. She left without a word while I was sulking in my room. I don’t know why I was so shocked she’d leave that way, but I was, sincerely shocked. Then I was angry, and maybe exhilarated. I took her car keys, and I drove to the mall.”
“To the mall?”
“It sounds so silly, doesn’t it? My first real taste of freedom, and I went to the mall. But I had a fantasy about roaming the mall with a pack of girlfriends, giggling about boys, helping each other try on clothes. And I ran into Julie. We’d gone to school together for a while. She was a year or so older, and so popular, so pretty. I think she spoke to me that day because she’d broken up with her boyfriend and was at loose ends. Everything just happened from there.”
She told him about shopping, how it made her feel. About the hair dye, the plans to make fake IDs and go to the club.
“That’s a lot of teenage rebellion in one day.”
“I think it was stored up.”
“I bet. You could make passable IDs at sixteen?”
“Excellent ones. I was very interested in identity theft and cyber crimes. I believed I’d have a career as an investigator.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“It’s flattering you’d say so. It mattered so much once. That day, in the mall, I took Julie’s picture, and I took my own later. I cut my hair, and I dyed it black. Very black, and I bought makeup, used it the way Julie showed me. And I’d studied the other girls in college, so I knew how to apply it.”
“Hold on a minute, I’m trying to picture you with short, black hair.” He studied her, narrowed his eyes. “A little Goth, a little funky.”
“I’m not sure, but I looked very different from the way my mother wanted me to look. I suppose that was the point.”
“Sure it was, and the other point is you were entitled to it. Every kid is.”
“Maybe that’s true. I should’ve stopped there. It should’ve been enough. The clothes, the hair and makeup. And the program she’d assigned me to started that Monday, and I’d made up my mind not to go. She would have been furious, and that should’ve been enough. But I didn’t stop there.”
“You were on a roll,” he commented. “You created the fake IDs and got into a club.”
“Yes. Julie picked the club. I didn’t know anything about them, but I looked up the one she wanted, so I knew it was owned by a family rumored—known, really—to be Russian Mafia. The Volkovs.”
“Rings a dim bell. We didn’t deal with the Russians as a rule in Little Rock. Some Irish, some Italian Mob types.”
“Sergei Volkov was—is—the
pakhan,
the boss of the Volkov
bratva.
He and his brother owned the club. I learned later it was run primarily by Sergei’s son, Ilya. His cousin Alexi worked there—ostensibly. Primarily,
again, I learned later, Alexi drank there, did drugs and women there. I didn’t know or understand any of that when we met him.
“We drank Cosmopolitans, Julie and I. They were popular because of the television show
Sex and the City.
We drank and danced, and it was the most exciting night of my life. And Alexi Gurevich came to our table.”
She told him everything, how the club had looked to her, sounded. How Ilya had come, how he’d looked at her, talked to her. How she’d been kissed for the first time in her life, and by a Russian gangster.
“We were so young, and so foolish,” she continued. “I didn’t want to go to Alexi’s house, but I didn’t know how
not
to go. I felt ill, and when Ilya had to stay back, promising to meet us later, it was worse. Alexi’s house wasn’t far from my mother’s, really. I imagined just going home, lying down. I’d never been drunk before. It had stopped being pleasant.”
“It’ll do that.”