Desperate to the Max (28 page)

“The operative word is want. I make you
want
, Max. Look at your nipples.”

She refused to fall into his trap by looking down. “Why is it so important that I want you?”

He blinked slowly, the smile on his lips just as slow to grow. “I’m merely stating fact. I can smell it on you.” He leaned closer, breathed deeply. “I could hear it in your voice last night when we talked. A soft sigh here, a faint groan there.”

“That was me gagging on your every word.”

“Is that why you kept on playing the game, Max?” he whispered, his breath ruffling her hair. She shivered against the insane warmth of it.

“I did it so they could have enough time to trace you.”

He stepped back, his eyes dark outside the circle of lamplight. “I like the way you fight me, Max, the way you fight yourself. It’s such a challenge. But you know that, don’t you? You know a good challenge is
my
little addiction.” He licked his lips. “Tell me, Max, would you go down on your knees and suck me off right in front of your boyfriend’s mother’s house if you thought it would get you the proof of what happened to my dear, sweet, luscious Bethany?”

The evening’s meal rolled over and threatened to explode back up her esophagus. He’d tried the very same trick on her once before. She hadn’t fallen for it then, she wouldn’t now.

“Slow to answer, aren’t you?” He wagged a finger. “I really don’t expect you to answer at all. But I do know you’ll think about it in your dreams tonight. Think, Max, if you had a one hundred percent guarantee you’d learn the truth.” The smile reached his cheeks, created lines and hollows in his face. “Would you do it?”

Of course not, because he’d lie. It would never be one hundred percent with him.

“Would you do it if you knew I wouldn’t lie, couldn’t lie,” he whispered as if she uttered the words aloud.

Would she? If it meant Bethany could rest, that they all could rest, that she, herself, could go back to her comfortable life before women started dying in her dreams and possessing her body in her waking hours? Blessed freedom again. She yearned for it, dreamed of it, and ached with the need for it.

“Would you, Max? If I answered your
every
question?”

She was terrified the answer might be yes.

Chapter Thirty-Three

She couldn’t remember getting in her car. She couldn’t remember driving home. Couldn’t remember unlocking the front door and scrambling up the stairs, nor getting to the bathroom. She only knew she’d made it to the toilet before she stuck her finger down her throat like an old friend.

She retched until her head pounded and her chest burned, until she’d lost every ounce of food and fear and fury. She lay exhausted on the floor, the cold tile against her hot cheeks. Her eyes wouldn’t stay open. Her limbs felt numb. Her stomach alternately cramped and eased. She felt nothing, no emotion, no thought, no question. She felt only her body, the tenderness with each swallow, the ache behind her eyes, in the back of her neck, the hard tile floor along her right side, the cool air of one shoe off, and the tightness of the other shoe on her toes.

Lastly, the taste of truffles like Bethany’s mother used to make. With raspberry sauce. Despite the spasms in her belly, the imagined scent of chocolate calmed, caressed, and comforted. As it always had.

Cameron’s voice was a faint noise in her drumming ears. Faint, but soothing. Oh so soothing. She imagined she could feel his hands on her arms, feel him pick her up off the floor of the bathroom onto his lap, wipe a warm washcloth over her face and her throat, finally to hold a glass of water to her lips.

She opened her lashes a millimeter and stared into Witt’s blue eyes. “Oh God.”

“No, just me.”

Just Witt. Always Witt. Only Witt. She closed her eyes again. “I don’t think I can handle the phone calls tonight.” It was the closest she’d come to begging for his help.

“Came by to tell you Schulz canceled them. Didn’t figure they’d learn anything new.” Witt smoothed the still warm cloth across her brow, one arm holding her tight against him, his t-shirt soft against her cheek. “Why ya crying, sweetheart?” Only Cameron had ever called her sweetheart. Until now.

“I’m not crying,” she whispered. “They’re puke tears.”

He gently wiped them away. “I know. Max Starr never cries.”

“That’s right.” She had the terrible sense that she wasn’t like other people. She had no feelings. She didn’t hide her tears; she simply wasn’t capable of them.

“Why ya sick?”

“I ate too much.”

The cloth was gone, now his fingers traced her eyebrows, the line of her nose, then her lips. “So much you got sick?”

Lying snug and safe in his arms, she debated telling him the truth, deciding in favor of it. Food had not been a problem for only Bethany and Jada. Perhaps it was her own history that allowed her to understand the two of them. “When I was a high school kid, I kinda used to do a little bingeing and purging stuff. I guess having Bethany hanging around got to me a little more than I expected.”

“Bingeing and purging?”

“Technical terms. You stuff yourself, then you puke it all back out.” She skipped the laxative alternative. Too much information he didn’t need.

“Lovely.” She heard his grimace.

She raised her lids only enough to see him through the slits. “So what do you think of me now, Detective?”

He was silent so long, she had to close her eyes again.

“Remember I told you there were things I’d seen and things I’d done?”

“Bad things.” Very bad things. She didn’t want to hear and didn’t want to share. Not that. Not the bad things. She could never return the trust enough to tell him hers. Not the worst stuff. Never.

“Was a beat cop in San Francisco. Shitty neighborhood. Drugs and guns and whores and fathers who beat their kids and wives black and blue.” The band of his arm across her back stiffened, his fingers stilled on her face. Then she felt him relax again. “I watched this girl grow up. Sweet little black thing with pigtails and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. Gave me a Jolly Rancher whenever she saw me. Never saw her when she wasn’t smiling. One day it all changed. Just like that, night and day. She musta been thirteen or so. Got a call one night, her apartment. Father had beaten the living crap out of her. He said she was a whore, and she was pregnant.”

Taking a deep breath, Witt held it, then let it out, the warmth of it cascading across her face and chest. “She told me it was his.”

Max shuddered, couldn’t find her breath. The pain in her gut lasted only a second, then she snuggled closer, putting her arms around his waist to hug him close, offering something back in the only way she could.

“I wanted to kill him, had my hand on my gun.” A pause. She tightened her grip on him. “I really wanted to,” he murmured. “You can’t possibly know how much.”

She rubbed her face against his chest. “You didn’t.”

“What I did was worse.”

He held her, rocked her, rocked himself. Then he told her worse. “I went back after I locked him up. I brought her home with me for the night, and the next day I took her to a place.” He laughed, a broken sound. “A place.” She felt the difficulty he had dragging in a breath. “I gave her money, and I waited outside while ...”

She opened her eyes to the tears on his cheeks, put a hand up to touch them, but stopped. “You don’t have to say it.”

“Yeah, I do.”

She knew, with those words, that he’d never told another living soul. The idea that he was going to tell her filled her with dread. Yet she couldn’t find the words to stop him.

“I waited outside while they aborted it.”

Max squeezed her eyes shut, pulled her hands into her chest and her emotions back deep into her belly. The words that came out of her mouth seemed like someone else’s, someone she’d never known. “That’s okay. The thing was an abomination anyway.”

He sucked in air. She heard him swallow and didn’t dare look at him because she couldn’t say where the hell those words had come from. She sure as hell didn’t
want
to know. The shock or censure in his gaze would have been way more than she could handle.

He started talking again, a hint of unsteadiness in his voice. “Three days later I found out she’d lied. Her boyfriend got her pregnant. I didn’t even know she had one. And I gave her the money to kill that baby.”

She thought of his wife, how he’d left her when he found out she’d killed their baby. Left her without a backward glance.

Oh Jesus. Oh God. She was so cold inside, so cold outside. Her limbs started to shake, and she wanted to throw up again. This time she wouldn’t even need her finger.

“So what do you think of me now, Max?” He threw her own words back at her.

DeWitt Quentin Long knew nothing about the really bad things a person was capable of. He didn’t even have a clue. He was a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue. It had killed something in him to find out his little princess was tarnished. What would it do to him to hear the truly bad things Max had done? What would it do to her to testify to her crimes aloud?

He was a fixer. Maybe that’s what attracted him. She was the little lost girl he thought he could fix. Men got off on that. But he couldn’t fix what she’d done. He couldn’t fix
her
.

Max sat up, pulled away.

He drew his legs up and draped his hands over his knees. Leaning his head against the tile wall, he looked at her, lids at half mast.

Ghostly fingers touched her nape. Cameron whispered in her ear.
Tell him, Max. Tell him what happened
.

She could only stare at Witt, her stomach rolling and tumbling.

Tell him. Tell me. Tell yourself, Max
.

Her breath came and went, so fast she couldn’t fill her lungs, couldn’t use the air. She was suffocating. “What do expect me to say?”

“Nothing.” Witt’s eyes were a bleak gray.

He didn’t even know she wasn’t talking to him.

She went up on her knees, put her hands on the floor and tried to stand. Her legs wouldn’t support her.

“I didn’t want to know that,” she told him.

He put a hand out to her, and she shuffled away on her knees, closer to the toilet, the lid still open, ready.

“I knew you wouldn’t.”

That wasn’t true. Not at all. He’d believed she was the one person to whom he could bare his soul. Anything else, maybe. Not this. She covered her ears and closed her eyes. Hear no evil, see no evil ... remember no evil.

She couldn’t shut out Cameron’s voice. It bled through her spread fingers, amplified inside her head.
Say it, Max
.

“Shut up,” through clenched teeth.

Tell him now
.

“Get out.” The cry ravaged her damaged throat.

Witt didn’t make a sound. She simply had to look at him in that utter quiet. The silence compelled her. His face bore an unearthly stillness, his eyes a deepness that mirrored his pain. If she said one more word, she was sure he’d shatter, broken, irreparable. She’d never be able to pick up all the pieces. Knowing she was the cause was almost more than she could bear.

As quickly as it had come, the look was gone, masked, buried once more, though remnants of it leaked into his voice as he spoke. “I’ve always known loving you would be like this. Like a ten-inch serrated blade shoved up beneath my sternum.” He jabbed a fist into his chest. “You don’t even mean to do it. And you’re so sorry about it. I can see that all over you. That’s the worst. Knowing how fucking sorry you are. Because I’ll have to keep on forgiving you. Over and over. Every time you do it.” He closed his eyes, his nostrils flared, his lips flattened, the expression rolling down his features like a wave.

Watching, she wanted to die, wanted to hold him, wanted to tell him she was sorry. It was beyond her to acknowledge those desires aloud, or to even face the love word that he’d used. “You’ve only known me two months.”

When he looked at her, his eyes were the flat gray of the ocean on a cloudy day. The emotion was no longer in the soft tone of his voice or the lines of his face. It lived only in the words themselves, the sharp, harsh breath through his nose. “It feels like forever.”

He punctuated with another tense silence. She couldn’t meet his gaze.

Witt’s bones cracked as he rose.

She wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t even want to tell him it was Cameron she’d screamed at, Cameron she’d told to get out.

Because Witt had to go. Words she could never take back might come out of her mouth if she let him stay.
She
was the one who didn’t want to hear them.

“Where’s my cell phone?” he asked, quiet, emotionless.

“My purse.”

She heard him rummage, then his footsteps across the bare floor. She felt him hunker down beside her, and he held out the phone. “My number’s in memory. Call it when you’re ready.” Again, the cracking of his knees, like the breaking of her heart, then that same flat voice. “If you’re ever ready.”

His boots on the stairs, the closing of the door, sounds of finality.

He was gone.

It was a good thing. She shouldn’t have fucked him the other night, shouldn’t have let him touch her last night. Sex between them complicated the whole situation. She was bad news. She’d ruin him. She’d be the death of him. She was his worst nightmare.

You’ll have to face your shit some day, Max. You should have done it when he gave you his worst.

She hugged the toilet and drowned out Cameron’s voice with the sound of her retching.

* * * * *

Max stood in a large, snow-laden clearing, and she was herself.

The snow was pristine, unmarked by footprints either human or animal. She didn’t how she’d gotten there; perhaps she’d been there since the snow began falling. It came lightly now, dusting the evergreens surrounding the meadow, dusting her eyelashes, her cheeks.

She wore a long, cream-colored dress, one Cameron had bought on their overdue honeymoon in Greece. Her feet bare, she did not feel the cold.