“Okay,” she answered tremulously, feeling that she had somehow failed. Failed her brother and Mel, failed herself.
“Please, put it aside, and I will come.”
“Okay,” she said again. But she didn’t put it aside. She slipped down onto the kitchen floor and sat there against the cabinets in the corner, from where she could see the rest of the kitchen. If anyone came at her, she could shoot him. And then she thought, my God, it’s a good thing David can’t walk! Right now she would shoot anything that moved; she was
wired enough to shoot at nothing and a ricocheted bullet could hurt or even kill the baby! She tried to keep her finger relaxed along the barrel and away from the trigger, repeating in her mind, do
not
act unless you’re sure. Do
not.
Ten minutes is an eternity when you’re afraid. And there is nothing worse than fear, whether or not there is an object. There was a metallic taste in her mouth from the adrenaline and her pulse beat dangerously fast. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, her knuckles white from holding the grip so fiercely, she heard the sound of an engine as a car came into the clearing, then a small toot as he honked the horn to let her know it was him.
She pulled herself to her feet, put the gun on the kitchen counter and unlocked the front door. When she opened it, she saw him standing there in a heavy suede jacket, wearing a sidearm. It somehow made her feel better, him having that gun. It was as though he had taken her seriously. As if her fear, though unfounded, could have had some basis.
“God,” she said, falling against him gratefully. “I’m afraid of
nothing!
”
“Take it easy,” he said, gently touching her back. He held her a bit, very careful not to hold her too tightly. “These things take time.”
“I feel stupid.”
“Well, don’t. It’s so understandable as to be almost predictable.” He pulled back from her, his hands on her upper arms. “Your first night alone?”
“Yes,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t see this coming. I’ve felt so great since I got here. I’ve never slept better.”
“Would you like me to check the house for you?”
“Even though I’ve checked it,” she said, nodding. “And maybe outside.”
“I’d be happy to. Sit down. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax.”
He saw the gun on the counter and touched the grip. It was still warm. She’d been so afraid, she hadn’t been able to put it down.
He walked around the house and up into the loft, turning lights on and off as he went. He took a flashlight from his car to check the grounds outside, where he found everything to be undisturbed—no footprints or mashed grass or shrubs. When he went back into the house, he locked the door behind him, took off his sidearm and holster and put it on the counter next to her gun. He took off his jacket and draped it over a kitchen chair. Then he went to the tiny living room, where he crouched in front of the cold hearth. He stacked a few logs over some starter pine cones, lit them and watched the flames rise. He rubbed his hands together in front of the fire, then went to sit on the sofa beside her.
“Thank you,” she said meekly.
“It’s nothing, Brie. You should feel safe so you can take good care of David. That’s all that matters.”
“But I called you out in the middle of the night. You must be so annoyed.”
He grinned handsomely. “Brie. It isn’t even ten o’clock.”
“Oh, my God! I didn’t even sleep an hour!”
He chuckled and, leaning over to pull off his boots, said, “You’ll get a good night’s sleep now. I’m staying the night.”
“Oh,” she said nervously. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea….”
“Relax,
mija.
Don’t I know everything you’re going through trying to get your life back? You can’t honestly think I’d do one thing to make you feel threatened.”
“Well…”
“Don’t insult me,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of unforgivable things, it’s true, but I’ve never been unkind to a woman. I am a gentleman. And you need sleep.”
She thought about it for less than a second. “I know if you go, I’ll crack up. For God’s sake, when does it end?”
“I’m not sure, but I know it does. It turns out this is just a little too soon for you. There’s no need for you to feel self-conscious about this. We just won’t mention it. No one watches my comings and goings. No one watches this cabin to see whose car is parked outside.”
She gave a sigh and leaned back into the couch cushions. “I hate what this has done to me. I thought I was tougher.”
“Jesus, don’t do that to yourself,” he said. “It’s bad enough what’s been done to you without adding that. It’s not a small thing to get over, Brie.”
She drew her feet up, massaging her temples with her fingers.
“Headache?” he asked her.
“Just a little tension,” she said. “It’ll pass.” Then she laughed a little. “I was looking forward to coming back here for some fun. Before this happened to me, I’d been planning all the many ways I could break your heart.”
He cocked his head and smiled at her. “Had you, now? That sounds interesting. Now I have something to look forward to.”
“I was thinking you’d be devastated. Wiped out,” she told him.
“Ah. Are you willing to share any details?”
“Not a chance.”
“I’m already devastated.” He stood up and went into the kitchen, dug around in the refrigerator and came out with two bottles of beer. He popped the tops and handed her one,
keeping one for himself, and took his corner of the couch again. He hoped it didn’t show on his face that just looking at her in the dim firelight was a treat, a delight. Her hair all mussed from bed, her feet bare, her cheeks pinked up from anxiety, she almost took his breath away. He knew she was skittish around men to the point that she couldn’t even go to a coed gym to work out, and he didn’t delude himself that he was exempt from that category, not even after all the time they’d had together. Oh, perhaps at the moment, as they shared a couch with a couple of feet separating them. But if he tried to get too close right now, she would freak. Bolt. Melt down.
“Maybe you should think about going back to work,” he said.
“I’ve thought about it, but I’ve lost interest in prosecuting felons. I haven’t lost interest in the law, but I don’t know in what field. My experience is all criminal, and I just don’t feel like going back into any kind of criminal law.”
“How about working with rape victims?”
She sighed deeply. “I’m trying not to be a rape victim anymore. I’m trying to move on from that, even though I realize some of it will be with me forever.” She shook her head and said, “I’ve been prepping rape victims for years, and now I am one. I just don’t want to stay in that cycle. God, I want to move past that if I can!”
“That’s reasonable. Maybe there’s some way you can use your prosecutorial expertise on the defense side.”
Her expression was shocked. “I can never defend a criminal against prosecution. Especially now.”
“There has to be something,” he said. “Human rights? Discrimination cases? EEOC? Women’s rights? ACLU?”
She shrugged.
“You’re used to having a mission, some injustice that needs you. You’ve always worked hard. I’m not sure all this time to think is such a good thing.”
She stretched out her legs and put her feet on the coffee table to warm them from the glowing fire, and he put his up as well, not touching. And she found herself wondering, not for the first time, if all the women he had so greatly wronged had been his friend like this at first. Had he spent long hours, months, talking to them in sensitive, nonthreatening ways before having sex with them, marrying them and then betraying them? It would have taken such a lot of time. Such an investment. She further wondered if she could be tricked the way they were. She took a pull on her beer.
“After Mel and Jack return, if you’re not in a hurry to get back to Sacramento, how about if we take a day and go over to the coast. I don’t know if we’ll catch the whales, but there’s a lot of stuff over there. Art galleries, wine-tasting rooms, trails to the headlands and beach, nice restaurants. We could just be tourists for a day.”
“Would you be thinking of that as a…date?”
He grinned. “I would,” he admitted.
A smile tilted her lips. “I could do that,” she said. “Were you good friends with your wives before you married them?”
“I shouldn’t really answer any more questions about that. About them,” he said.
She sat up a little. “Why not?”
“It could give you an unfair advantage in staging my heartbreak. I want to level the playing field.”
It made her laugh. Or the beer made her laugh. But this was one of the things that was working on her—he didn’t take her too seriously, and yet he took her very seriously. And she trusted him, which both reassured and worried her. She pulled
her feet back, tucking them under her, and turned toward him. “Were you?” she demanded.
“Nah. I told you—I was always hunting.”
“There’s more to the story,” she said.
“Not very much more,” he said.
“I’m trying to figure out some things,” she said. “The rape—that’s not hard. Impossible to believe, but completely understandable. It was revenge.”
“An ambush,” he supplied.
“Ambush,” she repeated thoughtfully.
“That’s what happened to me,” he added. “The one thing you really can’t protect yourself against.”
“Of course,” she said, leaning back. “Of course.”
“That was the hardest part of the equation for me to reason out—that there wasn’t really anything I could have done differently. Or smarter. Have you struggled with that?”
She thought for a moment, holding her bottom lip between her teeth. “I’ve struggled with every part of that. But the thing that still gnaws at me is how I screwed up with Brad. For some reason, since the rape, it’s like the pain of the divorce is fresh.”
“What makes you think you screwed up?”
“I had no idea he was the kind of man who could do what he did. I never saw it coming. I’ve thought back to the beginning—to the first date. To every day of the marriage. Maybe I worked too hard—my hours were so long. I could have paid closer attention. Maybe my commitment to my career was stronger than my commitment to Brad. I never—”
Mike took his feet off the trunk, planted them on the floor and said, “Brie, it might’ve been his screwup, not yours. When I met you for the first time, years ago, what I saw shining in your eyes was trust and commitment. And love. God, you
were so in love with him. And on top of that you were a brilliant achiever, a woman of strength and power and courage. And you couldn’t get close enough to him, giving him all your attention. If that wasn’t enough for Brad, you can’t blame yourself.”
“Tell me about them. Tell me why you married them, why your marriages failed.”
He cautiously reached out a hand to gently touch her hair. “Honey, it’s not that interesting. It won’t help you understand Brad. The only thing I have in common with Brad is we were both idiots.”
“Tell me,” she demanded softly.
He took a breath. “Carmel was nineteen years old when she went to work for my father as a novice bookkeeper and secretary, and we met while I was on leave. We wrote letters—lonely, sweet letters that became more romantic. Six months later when I was again on leave, we made love, and after that she needed to be married. So that’s what we did—married, and then I was sent to Iraq. When I came home, she was ready to move on. She broke my heart and saved my life all at the same time, because I wouldn’t have left her, and I would have continued to be a terrible husband to her. I lived in the moment. I was too easily distracted. Always thinking of myself.”
“And the next one?” she asked.
He shrugged. “We married out of guilt. She was with another man when I began to see her and she broke it off with him to be with me. That was her choice—I didn’t ask her to do that. But like Carmel, she needed to be married after that. Maybe neither of us could handle what we’d done—I have some pretty large Catholic guilt. So we married. We tried to turn a sexual fling into true love and it didn’t work. Within
six months she was gone. It was a mistake from the beginning, but I didn’t learn my lesson about that kind of thing for quite a while. If a woman was warm and willing… I was still living in the moment, thinking of myself. There’s no defense for what I did to either of them, but I was only twenty-six years old when my second marriage was over and still a young fool.
“And the other thing was, I didn’t take marriage seriously. I thought I’d just find a wife automatically. I’d just aim, fire and bang—I’d be married and have a bunch of kids.” He shrugged. “That’s what my brothers did. And my sisters. They dated someone, married ’em, the rest is history. They’re all happy. It never occurred to me they knew what they were doing.”
“You wanted kids?”
“Certainly. Thank God that didn’t happen. I’d hate to have kids caught up in my miscalculations. Before the shooting, I had no patience, hardly any scruples. I might’ve hit on you four years ago if you hadn’t been obviously in love with your husband.”
“What about that shooting changed you?”
“You’re kidding, right? I almost died. I had a lot of time—down time—to think about how I’d misspent my life. About all the people I must have disappointed—not the least of whom was myself. I wasn’t unlike Brad—the kind of guy who’d take too many chances, risk things a person with a brain would never risk. And it cost him everything. Cost me everything.” He took a drink from his beer. “My ex-wives—they might not have been perfect, but I can’t blame anyone but myself.”
“You see?” she said, sitting straighter. “Your heart has to be broken!”
“Yeah. I’m sure it will be.”
“But what I can’t get past,” she said, “is what if I face that again? What if I’m in love with some man, want to have a life with him and it seems everything is okay. Wonderful. Perfect. And then…?”
“Aw, Brie, there aren’t any guarantees in this life—you know that better than anyone. After you take your time, know as much about him as you can and use your best judgment, it might be
you
who has a change of heart.” His dark eyes glowed in the firelight. “Or maybe you’re right about everything—about your feelings and his—and it’s destined to last forever, to be perfect forever, and something you couldn’t have foreseen happens. He slips off the mountain or falls off a boat.” He touched her nose. “If you find yourself in that wonderful temptation, believing in someone enough to take that kind of chance, the person you’ll have to trust most is yourself.”