No Regrets
“Anyway, he found Miss Puss. He pulled her out of the bed, and Molly tried to stop him. He knocked her away and she hit her head on the corner of the metal bed frame. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget that sound.
“She still has the scar on her temple. It’s faint, but if you know it’s there, you can see it. There was so much blood, I thought she was going to die. But of course she didn’t....
“Then he strangled Miss Puss with his big hairy hands. And threatened to do the same to us if we ever brought another animal into his house.”
As an ER doctor, Reece thought he’d seen all the evils humans could do to one another. But never had such horror hit so close to home.
“My God, Lena—”
“No.” She held up a hand. “Please, just let me get this all out. Because it’s taken me years to get up the nerve to say it out loud, and if I stop, I may never be able to do it again.”
Reece tamped down his building fury and nodded.
“I think he raped our mother that night. I didn’t understand the sounds coming through the wall from their bedroom at the time. But now I believe that’s what happened. Then he left the house to go out drinking.
“Molly and I tried to see if Mama was all right—we could hear her crying—but she wouldn’t open her bedroom door. She told us to go to bed and everything would be all right in the morning.... She always said that. But of course it never was.”
Lena shook her head and dragged her hand through her hair. In the moonlight streaming in through the window, the diamonds in her wedding band glistened like ice.
“Molly put a Band-Aid on her head to stop the bleeding, which it really didn’t do, but it finally slowed down. At least it wasn’t streaming down her face anymore.
“Once Mama seemed to be all right, Molly wrapped Miss Puss in a clean nightgown. Then, when we knew he wasn’t coming back that night, when it was safe, she got a flashlight and we went out in the backyard and Molly dug a hole and we buried Miss Puss.
“Our house was by Dodger Stadium and Molly had just finished saying a prayer, when the game ended and suddenly the sky lit up with the most wonderful fireworks.”
She closed her eyes. “I can still see them today. They were so beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And Molly told me they were in celebration of Miss Puss’s arrival in heaven, where all the angels would love her and she’d have all the cream and kibble she’d ever want.”
Reece had always known what a special person Molly was, but for the first time he was getting a sense of the burden she’d had put on her young shoulders, and he finally began to understand her seemingly limitless capacity for caring.
As if in a trance, Lena continued to relate the story of the lives and times of Lena and Molly McBride. Reece had been sickened by the saga of Miss Puss, but he was horrified by his wife’s tale of the murder/suicide of her parents.
When she was finally finished, when she’d unburdened her heart and her soul, including the self-
destructive sexual behavior that may have left her unable to have children, she turned to him, her eyes wide and dark in her too-pale face.
“So now you know the truth. And I’ll understand if you decide you can’t love me any longer.”
A complicated rage burned through Reece. He wanted to beat her dead father to a pulp for having inflicted such terrible pain on his family. His feelings for Lena’s mother wavered somewhere between fury and pity.
But since there was nothing he could do to correct past sins, at this moment Reece’s overriding urge was to shake his wife. To shout at her. To ask her what the hell kind of man she thought he was that he could ever hold her responsible for any of those horrors she’d described. But understanding that his anger was directed toward the injustice of what had been done to her, he managed, just barely, to hold his tongue.
“I told you—” He had to force the words past the massive lump of anguished fury that had taken up residence in his throat. “I love you, Lena.” Needing to touch her, to hold her, he crossed the room and drew her into his arms. “More than life itself.”
“But…”
“Shh.” He pressed a finger against her trembling lips. She was like a block of ice in his arms. “You’ve had your say. Now it’s my turn, okay?”
She nodded, her shimmering wet eyes on his.
“If I could go back in time and erase all those things that happened, I would. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way, so I can’t change the past. But the one thing I can do is to vow to spend the rest of my life helping you to feel happy. And safe.”
Relief flooded through Lena, like a cool crystal river.
“You’ve already done that,” she said on a deep, shuddering breath. “I realize I don’t say it enough, but I’ve been happier since meeting you than I ever thought possible. And I’ve never felt so safe.” Wrapping her arms around his waist, Lena hung on for dear life.
Reece kissed her then. A deep, heartfelt kiss filled with love and promise. And then he carried her into the bedroom, where he made love to her with a tenderness that made her cry all over again.
But this time, Lena’s tears were not born of sorrow, but joy.
Chapter Seven
“You’re very good,” Miles said with apparent surprise as he led Tessa through a sophisticated tango.
She tilted her head back and gave him a coolly dismissive look that fit the style of the dance to perfection. “For a ‘chipmunk-cheeked farmer’s daughter’?”
He had the grace to laugh at that. “Thanks to my brother’s expert eye, no one would ever know you weren’t born with a fistful of gilt-edged stock certificates in your lily-white hands.”
He slipped his fingers beneath her hair, brushing at the suddenly ultrasensitive skin at the back of her neck in a way that created little tremors. “I think you should pose for me.”
“Really?” Her pulse quickened. The photographs lining the trophy wall in his Bel Air home looked like a promo for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
“You’re a gorgeous woman, Tessa. With the right photographs you could end up owning this town.”
“Right now I’d settle for a part in a feminine hygiene product commercial,” she muttered.
Although Jason had told her that it would be almost impossible to make an appointment with an agent during the holidays, she was admittedly impatient. And there was also the salient fact that her traveler’s checks were disappearing a great deal faster than expected.
His hand warmed her back as he bent her into a low dip. Tessa could feel each of his long fingers against the pale flesh bared by the halter-style dress. “Oh, I think we can do a great deal better than that.”
There was something in his eyes—something that promised more than a photography sitting—that caused a frisson of fear to skim up her spine. But before she could dwell on it, the music stopped.
“You can let me up now,” she suggested.
“I suppose you’re right.” His smile was slow and unnervingly intimate as he kept her bent backward over his arm. If he suddenly let go of her, she’d fall to the floor.
“Miles—” Her heart was hammering in her throat. From fear. And something else. An emotion darker and more dangerous than she’d ever felt before. And strangely, more enticing.
They’d become frozen in some sort of strange tableau, Miles’s hooded eyes looking down at her, while she stared back up at him, when a familiar deep voice shattered the spell.
“Dammit, Miles,” Jason complained, “quit playing your cat-and-mouse games with Tessa. She’s not one of your usual women. She’s a nice girl.”
“So you keep telling me.” His eyes not moving from hers, Miles lifted her back to an upright position. But as he did so, his fingers dipped even lower beneath the black silk, creating a flare of sparks. “Such a pity,” he murmured as he trailed the back of his other hand down the side of her face. Tessa could feel the heat, the bane of a true redhead, rising in her cheeks.
“Don’t pay any attention to my brother.” Jason knocked Miles’s hand from her face in a fraternal, nonaggressive way that suggested this was not the first time he’d had to come to the rescue of one of his dates. “Anyone in town can tell you that Miles is the evil twin.”
“It’s a dirty job.” Miles’s insolent eyes settled on her lips in a way that made Tessa’s mouth go dry. “But someone’s got to do it.... So, when are we going to do it?”
“Do it?” she echoed blankly.
“Your photos. As it happens, I have some time next Wednesday afternoon about five.”
Tessa couldn’t help glancing over at Jason, who laughed in response. “You’ve gotten her spooked, Miles.” He put his arm around her waist and drew her against his side in a possessive gesture that made Tessa feel immediately safe. “I’ll go with you and stand guard to make certain my evil twin doesn’t get any kinky ideas, then afterward we’ll go out on the town.”
“That sounds wonderful.” There was one more thing to be considered. She didn’t want to be obligated in any way to Miles. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your fitting me into your busy schedule, but I’m not certain I can afford—”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that,” Jason broke in smoothly.
“But you’ve already done so much.”
“And had a dandy time, too.” His smile, in contrast to his brother’s, was warm and absolutely harmless. “Why hoard money when you can use it to make people feel good?”
He was such a good man. Such a generous one. Tessa was instantly reassured. “I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
He winked in a sexy, seductive way she suspected very few women could resist. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something. If we put our heads together.”
He then turned to Miles. “Five o’clock it is. And don’t forget, my partner, Dan Kovaleski, just got transferred to the vice squad. You try to use my girl for any of those dirty pictures you like to take, and I’ll turn you in.”
“The kid always was the family snitch,” Miles told Tessa in a light, easygoing way that almost made her think she’d imagined his earlier dark edge. “I suppose that’s why he became a cop.”
As the twin brothers shared a laugh, Tessa’s mind was not on a joke she suspected they’d shared before, but on what Jason had called her.
My girl.
As the words warmed her, thrilled her, Tessa decided that they were the sweetest she’d ever heard.
* * *
While Lena slept in Reece’s arms and Tessa rang in the New Year on the dance floor, Molly was tangling the sheets of the queen-size bed in the Longworth guest room.
Caught up in the grips of a nightmare, she tossed and turned, tortured by images that shifted in and out of focus like a fun-house mirror, tossing back reflections that altered reality.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Вы ознакомились с фрагментом книги.
Для бесплатного чтения открыта только часть текста.
Приобретайте полный текст книги у нашего партнера:
Полная версия книги