Forever After (35 page)

“Honey, no.”

“Yes!” Meredith heard her voice going shrill and felt the tears spilling over her lashes, but she couldn’t stop herself. It felt as if a volcano was about to erupt inside her. “The things I did. You have no idea. Horrid things. Degrading things. And I just—” She threw up her hands, a tearing pain going through her abdomen. “I just did them. I was afraid of him. So afraid! If he snapped his fingers and said, ‘Crawl,’ I dropped to my knees. Once when there were
people
there. He was drunk and thought it was funny.”

She held her breath for a moment, trying to regain her self-control. Then she looked at Heath, saw the horror reflected in his eyes, and felt the tears rushing up again. He would never have any respect for her now. After seeing what he had done tonight, she couldn’t imagine his ever giving way to anyone out of fear. He would never bend or break, and he would certainly never crawl. He’d never be able to understand that she had.

But wasn’t it better this way? At least he would know now what kind of person she was. A non-person. A spineless coward who would have done anything, no matter how demoralizing, to keep her skin intact.

“Once,” she managed to say, “when I was crawling, he told me to bark. He had this notion that a wife was—” Her throat closed off, and for a moment, she couldn’t breathe. “He had Dobermans. Very expensive, well-trained Dobermans with German pedigrees. He used to tell me my bloodlines were pathetic by comparison, that I was a mongrel hayseed. So you see, it wasn’t only that he considered me to be no better than his dogs, but
less
than.” The pressure at the back of her throat became almost painful. “And that day when he ordered me to crawl and bark, I knew that he was—that he was right. If he went too far, beating on the Dobies, they fought back. I didn’t.” She looked Heath directly in the eye, even though his dark face looked as if it were swimming. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, saying those last words. “I just—did what he told me to do.”

His hand tightened on her chin. “You barked?”

The disbelief in his voice made her feel so ashamed that she closed her eyes, and as she did, the sob she’d been trying to hold back erupted from her, and it was quickly followed by another. And another. She couldn’t stop them. Horrible, heaving sounds like those of a sick dog.

She wanted to stop. Tried to stop. But she couldn’t.

“Meredith, for God’s sake. Just let it out.” He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her head down to his shoulder. “Don’t, honey. You’re going to break something down in there.”

Feeling his strong arm around her was Meredith’s complete undoing. She was surprised he could even bring himself to touch her. She started to weep then, and once the tears started to come, she couldn’t make them stop either. Not even when Heath startled her half to death by lifting her from the chair and into his arms. Oh, God, he was every bit as strong as she’d always feared.

“That just makes it easier for me to hold you,” he rumbled as he carried her from the kitchen. “Nothing more. I swear it, honey.”

With a sense of horror, she realized she’d spoken the thought aloud.

He jostled her in his arms, then turned sideways to go through a doorway. She saw the bed, a dizzying blur of colorful crazy-quilt patches. Her first thought was to get out of there, away from him, and that only made her cry harder.

“Sweetheart, it’s just a bed. It won’t bite you, and neither will I.”

Oh, God! She was babbling out every thought that went through her mind. She had to shut up. He was going to hate her, and she wouldn’t blame him. She was disgusting, pathetic and paranoid. Why couldn’t she get Dan out of her head? Was she going to let him destroy what remained of her life?

He sat on the mattress with his back against the lodge pole pine headboard. Shifting her on his lap, he clamped
her head to his shoulder with one hand and rubbed her back and her scraped arm with the other. “Sweetheart, I don’t hate you,” he said gruffly. “And I never will. And you’re not disgusting, pathetic,
or
paranoid. You’re sweet and wonderful, and I love you. Do you hear me? And Dan Calendri is
not
going to ruin the rest of your life. You’ve got me now, and we can get past this. I promise you, we will.”

He felt so solid and warm. Meredith couldn’t resist the draw and turned to loop an arm around his strong neck, her face buried against his shirt to hide her tears. She stopped fighting them, and just let them come. Rivers and rivers of them. She cried until she was hoarse. Until she was weak with exhaustion. Until she ran the well dry. And then she just lay against him, shuddering.

In the aftermath, she became aware, measure by measure, of Heath. Of the way his hands moved over her back, kneading away the tension one moment, then lightly caressing. She made fists on his shirt, clinging to him. He felt like a wall of muscle, so hard and invincible, yet wonderfully safe. The masculine smell of him surrounded her, a pleasant blend of cotton and starch, musk aftershave and sweat, leather and gun oil.

She remembered how she had prayed for him to come home earlier that night, how she had wanted to follow Sammy’s example and scream his name when she was afraid. How could she care so much for a man, trusting him so implicitly in so many ways, yet still quake at the thought of his having any sort of power over her?

“Can I talk for a minute now?” he whispered near her ear. At her nod, he said, “First of all, you aren’t a victim. You were victimized, yes, but there’s a hell of a difference. I’ve seen the victims, honey. They stay for years. Year after year after year. They never fight back, and they never find the courage to run. Not to save themselves. Not to save their kids.

“You left Dan when Sammy was four days old. Correct?” When she nodded again, he said, “That means you
stayed less than a year. You were in a hell of a mess, much worse and far more dangerous than for most battered women. It wasn’t just Dan, but organized crime you were up against. For Sammy, you found a way out. A rather creative way out. It took intelligence to outwit the bastards at their own game, and it took courage. A lot of courage. They might have killed you, and you knew it. But for Sammy, you ran anyway.” He made a fist in her hair. “I think you’re a very brave lady.”

“Oh, don’t…” She pressed her face harder against his shoulder. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Speak the truth? You’ve got guts, Meredith Kenyon. Or would you rather I started calling you Mary?”

“Mary is gone, and I don’t want to be her anymore. I want to be someone new, and I want to pretend that the other me never existed.”

“She’ll be a hard act to follow,” he whispered. “Mary Calendri was some lady. As for pretending none of it ever happened, you can’t. It’ll stay in your head all your life. You have to deal with it. And the only way to do that is strip it bare. Admit it to yourself. Take it all out and face it. You can’t run fast enough or far enough to get away from it.”

“I can’t tell you any more of it. You have no idea, Heath. I just can’t.”

“You’re right,” he said huskily. “I have no idea. Don’t you think it’s about time I did?”

Heath felt the
rigidity return to Meredith’s body, and by that he knew just how difficult it was for her to talk about Dan. He’d carried his own secret shame, buried deep inside, for years. Lacerating himself with guilt, punishing himself with the memories, hating himself for making a mistake that had cost his sister her life. One bad decision, and he’d paid dearly for it, in his dreams and while he was awake, for almost twenty years. Somehow, talking to Meredith had purged him. Since that evening in her yard when he’d spilled his guts to her, he hadn’t had a single nightmare, and during the day, when the guilt slammed into him like a brass-knuckled fist, he had begun to shove it away, no longer accepting it. It was over. He had grieved. He had been punished enough. Beating up on himself for the rest of his life was not going to bring Laney back.

Like him, Meredith had made only one bad decision, and she had been paying for it ever since. Even worse, she seemed to believe that because her bad decision had thrust her into a life-threatening situation, the things she had done to survive were unforgivable. She had crawled, and for that, she couldn’t forgive herself.

The very thought of Meredith being reduced to that, of her actually getting down on her hands and knees for the bastard, nearly made Heath gag. She was such a sweetheart, this woman. For a man to treat her like that, and for her to
have believed, even for an instant, that she had sunk lower than the bastard’s dogs was almost beyond his comprehension. Even more heartbreaking was his suspicion that she still hadn’t told him the half of it. The knowledge that he would have to force her to tell him weighed on his chest like a boulder.

“Merry,” he said softly, “why are you so afraid of handguns?”

At the question, she stopped breathing. Agonized seconds passed before he felt her chest rise and fall again.

“Out at the table,” he went on. “You turned white when I was cleaning and loading my handguns. Can you tell me why?”

He thought she meant to ignore his question. But then she stirred against him, her silky hair brushing lightly against the underside of his jaw, the strands catching on his day’s growth of beard. “Dan,” she said. “Remember, I told you he liked to frighten me. He was especially fond of doing that at night when we—when he—well, you know.”

Heath pictured himself at sixty, still referring to sexual intercourse as, “you know.” Somehow, right then, it didn’t strike him as being very funny. That awful ache still hung there in his chest. And it kept getting worse, making him wonder if, instead of it being heartbreak, he was about to have a coronary. “When you had sex, you mean? He frightened you then? With a gun?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She made fists on his shirt. “He—he kept a revolver in the nightstand drawer. It had one of those little wheel things with holes for the bullets, and he kept only one in it.”

Christ. He
was
having a coronary. The ache was worse, and it had moved into his throat, the thud of his pulse so hard and loud that he thought he could feel the bed shake. Oh, God, he knew what she was going to say. And he could
not
calmly sit here and
listen
to her say it. He needed to
step outside. Find a tree. Pretend it was Dan Calendri, and pulverize the bastard with his fists.

If he felt this way, just from hearing the story, how in the hell did she feel? He wanted to run. She couldn’t get away. It was there, inside her head.
It was never wedded bliss
, she’d told him at the department.
It was a nightmare
. And God forgive him, he had yelled at her in the truck when she’d tried to tell him how nervous she was. What a prince he was. All he’d been able to think about was the insult she’d dealt him, never stopping to consider what the hell had happened to fill her with such dread.

Well, he wasn’t going to let her down again. He would stay, and he would listen, and somehow, he would deal with it and help her to deal with it.

“What did he do with the gun, Meredith?”

“You
know
what he did!” she cried.

He also knew she had to say it. “Tell me.”

Anger was interlaced with the pain in her voice when she cried, “While he was—doing that—he held it to my head! And when he was going to—you know—he pulled the trigger. I never knew if the gun would fire, so every time, I thought I might die. I was so terrified. Sweating. Couldn’t breathe. When you think a bullet is about to explode into your brain, your whole body tenses. He—liked it that way.”

Heath realized he was hugging her so hard he was about to squeeze the life out of her, but he couldn’t unlock his hold. To his surprise, she wrapped both arms around his neck and pressed even closer, clinging to him as if she were about to plunge to her death and he was her only salvation.

“Ah, Merry. I always sensed my weapon made you nervous. Now I know why.” He smoothed her hair, aching for her. “Is it bothering you that I’m wearing it right now? I really shouldn’t take it off, you know. Chances are, no one will come up here, but—”

“It’s all right, Heath. My rational side knows you’d never hurt me with it.”

He wasn’t asking about her rational side. Bless her heart,
no wonder she was skittish. He’d seen war veterans who got the shakes if an explosive sound startled them. He’d seen abused women and kids who ducked or flinched every time a man gestured with his hands. Her fears really weren’t anything personal against him, but instinctive reactions she couldn’t control.
I’ll do my best not to be difficult
. God, he’d been such a jerk, and he was damned lucky she’d forgiven him for it.

“Never is right,” he whispered, his voice throbbing. “I’d rather cut off my arm than hurt you or frighten you, Merry girl. I’m so sorry if I ever have.”

“Oh, Heath, I love you.” She shuddered and clung to him more tightly. “I didn’t want you to know about the gun. Not ever. I was afraid you’d be disgusted.”

He was disgusted, all right, with some of his fellow men. “I think you’re the most wonderful lady I’ve ever met, and nothing you ever tell me will change that.”

The entire story poured from her then. Every nightmarish, sordid detail. For some reason, the point that lingered with the most clarity in Heath’s mind was about the spiders, probably because it was so representative of Dan’s cruelty. The man had to have been insane, his mind diseased. No normal human being would do such things.

Meredith had always been afraid of spiders, the phobia dating back to childhood, and good old Dan loved to torment her with them, putting them under her pillow or between the sheets, perching one on her shoulder when she was preoccupied, sometimes slipping them into her clothing before she dressed. If she did something to displease him, that had been one of the ways he punished her, with spiders.

“To this day, I can’t crawl into a bed without checking it first,” she whispered. “Not even if Sammy’s watching. I’m so ashamed of that. A good mother doesn’t set that kind of example or risk making her child afraid of something silly. But I can’t stop doing it. I’ve tried, and after I get in bed, I think I feel them crawling all over me.”

“Merry, you’re a fantastic mother. Sammy’s not phobic about spiders. I think she understands it’s something you
can’t help. You’ve taught her to be compassionate.” Repositioning his arms around her, Heath buried his face in her hair, not speaking for a while. When he finally did, he asked, “Where the hell did Dan get so many spiders?”

“He bought them by the dozen at a pet supply store. They came in little cardboard containers, sort of like Chinese take-out.” She laughed tremulously. “Needless to say, I never eat Chinese take-out. One look at those white boxes, and I lose my appetite. He used to have—sex with me while spiders crawled over my skin.”

Heath cursed under his breath, the shock in his voice unmistakable. Meredith heard revulsion in his voice as well and tried to move off his lap. His arms tightened around her like steel bands.

“No way,” he whispered.

She pressed her face against his shoulder again. She had no more tears left to cry, so she simply lay there against him, her emotions oddly numb.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” His hands moved over her as lightly as butterfly wings. “I wish I had known you then, that I had been there to help you.”

Meredith could detect no note of disgust in his deep voice, no harsh judgments, only a heartfelt regret that she had faced it all alone. It was the most beautiful feeling. A shimmery, warm glow that moved all the way through her. He loved her. He truly did. A no-matter-what kind of love, the kind that would last a lifetime. It made her feel so incredibly good and safe. His strong arms. The steady thud of his heart. The heat of him surrounding her. She kept her eyes closed and wished she could melt into him, that she would never have to move away, that she could just be absorbed by his strength and never be alone again.

“What would you have done?” she asked. “Tell me, like in a story, and after this, whenever I remember, I’ll pretend it happened just that way, that you came and made it all stop.”

His chest rumbled as he spoke, the vibration moving through her body, the deep, gravelly timber of his voice
soothing her like a healing balm. He spun a tale, much like the ones she told Sammy, of him coming to New York and walking the streets until he found Dan’s house where she was imprisoned. Of him kicking down the front door, storming in to find her, and encountering Dan as he searched the rooms.

Meredith thought that was going to be her favorite part of the story because Heath kicked Dan’s butt. Pummeled him, and made him crawl. She really, really
liked
that part.

“And then what?” she caught herself asking, just as Sammy did when she paused for breath while telling her a story.

Heath sighed. “Well, then, I went up the stairs.” He looked down. “Were there stairs?” At her nod, he continued. “And I searched all the rooms until finally I opened a door, and there you were, so beautiful and sweet that I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared.”

She giggled.

“Hair the color of honey shot through with sunlight. Skin like fresh cream. Lips the faint pink of new strawberries on the vine. And the most gorgeous brown eyes I had ever seen, the color of chocolate caramels.”

Meredith pinched him. “Blue! My eyes are blue.”

“Shit.” He tucked in his chin to scowl down at her upturned face. “They
are
blue, aren’t they? Those damned contacts go. Right now. A man’s got a right to see his woman with her real eyes on.”

She pushed up, using her elbow against his chest for leverage, which made him grunt. After she popped out the contacts, he took them from her palm and tossed them on the floor. Then he framed her face in his big hands and gazed at her for an endless moment. “Gorgeous blue, rimmed in red.”

She gasped. “That’s not romantic!”

“Neither is a red nose, but I still think you’re pretty damned cute.” He patted his shoulder. “Back down here. I’m just getting to the good part.”

She snuggled against him again, keeping her head tipped
back so she might watch his dark face and the changing expressions that flitted over his features. He got a distant, tender look in his eyes and a half smile played upon his lips.

“Anyway, there I stood, frozen to the spot. She was so beautiful, I couldn’t stop staring. A little lady, the biggest thing about her these gigantic blue eyes and a belly that stuck out like a twenty pound watermelon.”

“Heath!” She pressed a hand to her waist. “It
doesn’t
!”

“It did
then
! You had to have been pregnant most of the time you were with the asshole. We’re in the happy ever after part of the story now.”

“You’re going to make me pregnant?”

He glanced down at her and raised his eyebrows. “Can I?”

She made a face.

“Anyway, I just stood there, totally hypnotized by this beautiful little lady with a great big whopper of a belly.” She giggled. “Once I recovered from my initial disbelief, I stepped closer. And with every step, I got a stronger feeling that there’d never be any turning back, because I loved her. So I swept her up into my arms and carried her down the stairs to the—”

“On the way out, let me stop and punch Dan,” she inserted.

“—living room,” he continued, barely missing a beat, “to let my lady fair punch Dan Calendri’s lights out.”

“I want to kick him, too.”

He threw her a startled glance.

“Well? If I’m going to refer back to this story, I want to remember myself getting even!”

He grinned. “After she punched his lights out, she kicked him, over and over again, from his head to his shoulders, until he was lying there on the floor, a bloody pulp. And then I gave her my knife and she whacked off his—”

“Ear!” she injected.

He chuckled. “Ah, come on. I want some satisfaction,
too.” When he saw her expression, he grinned. “Oh, all right, his ear, then. She whacked off
both
his ears and fed them to the Dobermans. Before we left, I belted him one more time, just for good measure, and then made him crawl over to my lady fair and beg her forgiveness for every mean thing he’d ever done to her.”

“And she refused.”

“And she refused. She was a very bitter lady, and a little bloodthirsty, too. But I didn’t care because she was so gorgeous. So I swept her back into my arms and carried her off into the Oregon sunset, where we had a baby girl who looked just like her, and we named her Samantha, which she never learned to spell.”

Meredith laughed and sighed, thinking that was the end. But Heath looked down at her, his eyes a dark, intense blue gray, his expression one of absolute tenderness. “And I loved them both for the rest of my life,” he said huskily, “keeping my vow to protect them from any kind of harm and doing everything in my power to make them happy.”

Meredith touched her hand to his lean cheek. “I know you will, Heath.” As he had done to her, she moved her thumb lightly over his lips. “That’s a beautiful story. Like my own little fairy tale. Whenever I start to remember, I’ll think of that instead.”