Read A Bride For Abel Greene Online
Authors: Cindy Gerard
A Bride For Abel Greene (15 page)
He lifted her in his arms. Cradled her against his chest. Pressing his lips to her hair, he sat down on the sofa, holding her on his lap because he couldn’t bear to let her go.
The firelight danced into the darkness. His heartbeat pounded into the silence, as he held her not knowing where to start—yet knowing where it would end.
Her small hand on his jaw brought his head down.
“I know you don’t want to hear this. I know it may be too soon for you. But I can’t hold it in any longer. I love you, Abel Greene.”
He pinched his eyes shut against the suddenness and the sharpness of the sting.
“I love you,” she repeated, the throaty rasp in her voice a reminder of the pain he’d caused. “You have to trust me enough to believe that. What you’ve done, where you’ve been, what you’ve endured—it’s all a part of you. But it’s all a part of your past. The future is what’s important now. The future and what we can make it.
“But—” she swallowed past the soreness “—but if it’s your past that’s standing in the way of that future, then I need you to share it with me. I need to understand what I’m up against.”
He covered her hand with his and pressed it against his lips. Like the feel of her skin, she was soft and pure and clean—everything he wasn’t and never had been.
“And what if you can’t handle what I tell you? What if you find it’s so ugly and repulsive you—”
She silenced him with the press of her fingers to his lips. “What if you just trust me?”
The openness of her entreaty touched him in places he’d never allowed anyone close to. And the truth of her words allowed her access to his secrets. Secrets he’d locked inside for so long that when they broke free in his nightmares, the one person who least deserved it had gotten hurt.
He couldn’t let it happen again. One way or another, he had to protect her. And he knew that by revealing his past to her, he would. With confession, came absolution. If he let the demons out of the dark, they were less likely to bother him again. The question was, would Mackenzie follow them out the door?
He didn’t want to lose her. But he couldn’t live with himself if he hurt her again.
“When I left here,” he began, “it was with no prospects, no idea of what I was going to do with my life. And with an ultimatum to get the hell out of Dodge.” He brought his hand to his jaw, ran his fingers along the scar in a kneejerk reaction the memory that night always prompted.
“Grunewald,” she whispered, her insight no longer surprising him. “He did that to you.”
“Yeah. And then he made damn sure I wasn’t around to tell the tale.” He ran a hand along her back. She snuggled closer as he told her about how Grunewald and his pack had cornered him, leaving out the details of how bad the beating they’d given him was. Reluctantly he told her about his involvement with the woman who was now Grunewald’s wife and her attempt to pick up where they’d left off when he’d come back to the lake.
“Even back then, he had the power. He wanted me gone and made it clear that if I didn’t disappear, he’d convince Trisha to file rape charges against me. With the reputation I’d so carefully cultivated, there was no doubt in my mind that they’d make them stick.”
“It’s so unfair.”
“It’s life,” he stated flatly. “And it was my wake-up call. I’d always known money talked. I decided then and there that I wanted to have a voice. To make money, I needed skills. So I joined the Marines and surprised myself and the brass by being a good one. It was the first time in my life I’d felt like I was being judged for what I could do, instead of what I was or wasn’t or where I’d come from.”
He felt her smile form against his chest, close to where her small hand rested.
“What...?” he asked.
“I’m trying to picture you without your hair.”
He covered her hand with his and held it here, savored the warmth of it seeping through his skin. “The hair came later.”
He worked his jaw, remembering the catalyst that had spurred his decision to let it grow. “I opted out of the Marines after my four years and joined the D.C. Police Force. Yeah,” he said when she pulled away and with furrowed brows, looked up at him. “Me. A cop. Only I’d had enough of uniforms and regiments by then. When the opportunity came to go undercover, I took it.”
And that’s when his downward spiral had begun.
“Dangerous,” she murmured and raised her hand to his neck and hung on tight.
He closed his eyes. Let out a deep breath. “Yeah. Dangerous. In more ways than you can imagine. I became addicted to it. Not the drugs—the danger. The deeper the cover, the better I liked it, the more reckless I got. Before long it wasn’t enough. I wanted more action—more than even the D.C. Police Force could offer. So I joined the company.”
“The company?”
“CIA.”
He felt her body tense.
“It’s everything you’ve ever heard about it, comprising both the best and the worst elements imaginable. The ideal is that everyone plays by the rules. The reality is that no matter how diligently they try to police it, there will always be a segment of the agency that is morally corrupt—loose cannons who make their own rules and draw their own lines when the bureaucratic process impedes results. It doesn’t take long before some of the good guys become little better than the bad guys. And I became one of the best.”
He clenched his jaw, remembering. “The day I crossed over was the day I lost my partner because the powers-that-be had been too mired in their by-the-book game plan to act. When they finally decided to move, it was too late and Carson was dead.
“I killed.” The two words crashed into the tension like breaking glass. Abrupt. Brutal. Chilling. Her silence scared the hell out of him—just like his confession frightened her. He’d shocked her. But he wouldn’t let himself stop. He owed her the truth. If he gave her nothing else, he’d give her that.
“I killed and I called it self-defense. I used and called it justice. I witnessed brutality I could have stopped and told myself it was for the common good. When Carson died, I accepted that I was dispensable to a government that honored me to my face for my fight against the drug war, then sent me to the wolves without conscience or care.
“A year later I got out—and went into business on my own. If I was going to put my neck on the line, I decided it might just as well be for my own gain.
“The American government wasn’t the only one with an interest in curtailing the drug traffic. Many lesser powers were in need of my services, although their motives may not have been as humanitarian.
“I didn’t care about their motives. I only cared about mine. Money. I contracted with anyone who was willing to meet my price—and I delivered on every dollar they paid me, earned each one twice over.”
He drew a deep, unsteady breath, reliving a hundred ugly encounters, abhorring the mercenary he’d become.
“There’s a village in Colombia.” On this cold winter night he could still feel the suffocating heat, smell the putrid stench, see the squalor of that hell on earth thousands of miles and five years away. “It was seething with decay and ruled by the king pin of an international drug cartel. I tracked him there. Stalked him, cornered him—then made a near-fatal mistake.
“She was twelve years old.” He remembered her like it was yesterday. “Her eyes were a liquid, brimming brown that spoke of innocence and invited trust. A trust I accepted. She was my source.” He closed his eyes, disgusted. “A kid...and I used her to get information. Talk about justice. It turned out she was using me. She had a family to feed. So she led me into a trap. Straight into Gutierrez’s den.”
He was vaguely aware of the shudder rippling through him, distantly cognizant of Mackenzie’s heart thudding heavily against his own—but he was vividly mired in that part of his past.
“The only reason he didn’t kill me was because he was bored. I provided a diversion. When the beatings lost entertainment value for him, he experimented with electricity.”
Sweat broke out on his forehead and oozed like blood down his face, into his eyes. “Then the drugs became his favorite game, his greatest source of amusement. And my living hell.”
He shook himself back to the present, made himself focus on the fire and its pure, steady flame. He wrapped Mackenzie tighter in his arms, holding on to her like she was his link to the here and now.
“Every day he promised me he’d kill me. After a month of promises, I begged him to do it.”
“How did you get away from him?” Her voice was small and fearful.
A grim smile twisted one corner of his mouth. “I didn’t. He got away from me. The ruling political faction of the province was taking a lot of heat from the Drug Enforcement Agency. Their token gesture was to storm Gutierrez’s stronghold and run him out of the country. I was the prize they found in his wine cellar. They turned me over to the American Consulate figuring they’d score major points.” He laughed, a harsh, cynical sound that held a trace of the madness he’d felt when they’d dragged him out of that dark hole.
“The suits at the consulate were not happy to see me. They’d known I was down there somewhere, but didn’t want to know what I was doing. I was a renegade. An embarrassment—but I’d been one of them once, so they hustled me quietly back to the states and tucked me neatly away in a VA hospital in Virgina. I stayed until I was strong enough to walk out on my own steam. Then after holing up for a month in a seedy little motel on the outskirts of D.C., I came back here.”
The breath he let out felt symbolic of letting go of that part of his life.
“I bought a small camper, I parked it on the land. My body healed physically. I endured the withdrawal, I lived through the nightmares. Gradually I got my strength back. As therapy, more than anything, I started building the cabin. It took me two and a half years. It took another two before I quit sleeping with a loaded glock under my pillow and a steel bar wedged across each door.”
“And you still have the nightmares,” she said, the scratchiness of her half whisper a stark testimony to that fact.
“I still have the nightmares.”
She pulled away from him. Touched a hand to his face and met his eyes. He didn’t see revulsion. He didn’t see hatred. He saw only that she was hurting. Hurting for him. A tear slipped out, trickled down her cheek, as she pressed her face to his and whispered, “You don’t have to deal with them alone anymore.”
He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath. He hadn’t realized his heart had stopped beating and his mind was set to lock back into that place where the pain couldn’t reach him. He hadn’t realized he could still feel such stark, consuming fear.
Her softly spoken words both destroyed and resurrected him with their purity and power. His own eyes burned. His throat ached as he held her, rocked her and thanked the Fates for their generosity in sending her to him.
“Did you like the person you were back then?”
He hadn’t expected the question. It showed in his response. “Did I give you any indication that I did?”
She pulled back, her smile gentle. “No. None. I just wanted to make sure you realized it. You didn’t like him. You didn’t approve of what he did. Neither do I.” She framed his face in her hands. “But I understand him...I understand what drove him to do the things he did. And I forgive him.
“You—the man you’ve become—need to forgive him, too. You need to forgive the man you once were. He was a victim, Abel. And until you realize that, you’ll continue to be a victim, too.”
She kissed him then. A forgiving kiss. A healing kiss.
Humbled, he covered her hands with his own. “I’ve done nothing to deserve you,” he whispered, and had never felt anything so deeply in his life.
“What you deserve has nothing to do with me. What you deserve is a chance to see that you’ve made yourself into the kind of man circumstances were determined to keep you from becoming.”
He brought her hands to his mouth, pressed a deep kiss to her open palms. “And what you deserve is a damn sight better than me. How did you get this way? So totally accepting? So uncategorically selfless?”
Mackenzie gazed into the eyes of the man she loved. She understood the haunted looks now. She understood his pain. And she lived with a corresponding guilt.
“Not selfless,” she amended. “Selfish.”
His dark brows furrowed in denial.
“Yes,” she insisted, then confessed to a secret of her own. “Mark, and the danger he was in, wasn’t my only motive for coming here. And I’m not as strong as you give me credit for being.”
She rose and walked to the fire. Crossing her arms under her breasts, she stared into the crackling flames, aware of his puzzled gaze tracking her.
“I was tired,” she said in a weary voice. “Tired of being there for Mark. Of being the
only
one there for him. I wanted a life. I wanted to come and go as I pleased. I wanted to do all those things a woman my age was supposed to do but couldn’t because I was—in the most literal sense of the word—my brother’s keeper.”
only
one there for him. I wanted a life. I wanted to come and go as I pleased. I wanted to do all those things a woman my age was supposed to do but couldn’t because I was—in the most literal sense of the word—my brother’s keeper.”
She blinked back tears of shame. “I resented Mark because my life wasn’t what I’d been promised by the purveyors of the American Dream. It took every dime I made to keep a roof over our heads—such as it was. I gave up my dream of completing my education so I could make something of myself. So I could
be
somebody.”
be
somebody.”
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