Last Chance (Liar Liar #3)

Last Chance

Part Three in the Liar Liar Series

C.A. Mason

Copyright © by C.A. Mason

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Persons, places and other entities represented in this book are deemed to be fictitious. They are not intended to represent actual places or entities currently or previously in existence or any person living or dead. This work is the product of the author’s imagination.

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Last Chance © 2014 C.A. Mason

Chapter One

I hated holding her against her will, immobilizing her with fear, but that was the only way I could make her listen to me. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Maura. It’s up to you to decide.” I despised the steely edge in my voice, but I wouldn’t let her out of that suite until I’d said my piece. The truth was out, so I was going to say all the things I’d wanted to say fourteen years ago. I was going to get my answers, and so was she.

She was still flailing and crying, her nails scraping the door. “Please, just let me go.”

“I will, just as soon as we finish talking,” I whispered. She was afraid, and I wanted to comfort her, not terrorize her. “Promise me you won’t try to run?”

She clenched her hand into a tight fist. “What are you going to do to me?”

“I just want to talk to you, angel.” My voice was soft, soothing.

She leveled another blow when she cringed, but I said nothing before carrying her over to the chair where our breakfast had been abandoned. I pulled on a pair of drawstring athletic shorts I’d tossed on the bed earlier as I tried to steady my erratic breathing with a few deep breaths.

“What do you want from me?” She sat on her hands, looking at the pink-painted toes curling in her flip-flops.

“I want you to look at me.” When she didn’t obey, I said quietly, “Look at me. Now.”

She slowly looked up, gasping when her eyes locked with mine. “How did you change your eyes, your face…? You don’t look the same.”

“I wear colored contacts and found a plastic surgeon who was a master.” I sat on the edge of the bed facing her. If I stood over her or got too close, she would be intimidated. “He specialized in facial reconstruction, fixing people with abnormalities that left them disfigured.” I shrugged. “Compared to that, my case was easy. I just wanted to look… different.”

“You do,” she whispered, scanning my face. “So different. I would never have known it was you, even today, if not for your eyes.” She trembled before wrapping her arms around herself. “Your eyes still haunt me.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t see your eyes that night, because of the ski mask, and it was so dark, but I’d seen them enough times to know how they must have looked. Crazed. Vacant.” Her eyes bore into mine. “Like a mad-man. That’s what you were that night. A psychopath. I’d never witnessed such evil. Why? Was it because you were jealous or—”

“No!” I dropped my head in my hands when she flinched. “I’m sorry.” I took a deep breath, trying to find a breath of calm in this vicious storm. “I just… I can’t believe you really think that was me… that you believe I could do that to you. I fucking loved you. You were my life.”

“Of course it was you!” Her whole body shook as tears flowed down her cheeks, but she was still sitting on her hands. “Don’t you dare try to tell me it wasn’t you! No one else could have known the things we did together. The nipple clamps? The anal? The French ticklers? You sick bastard!” She lunged at me, knocking me back on the bed. “I loved you, you son of a bitch! That’s why I let you talk me into doing those things. Then you called me a depraved fucking whore while you raped me!” She sat on me, slapping me across the face and beating my chest with her fists.

I let her land a few before I gripped her wrists. “I had a big fucking mouth back then, Maura.”

“What?”

“I said things I shouldn’t have to the guys on my crew.”

She stared at me in disbelief. “You told people about the things we did… in the bedroom?”

It was almost funny that she was angry about that in light of what she was accusing me of, but I didn’t dare laugh. I’d betrayed her by engaging in trash talk. She deserved so much better. “They were jealous, and I wanted to rub it in.”

“You’re not making any sense.” She scrambled to get up. “You’re lying. Again. I can’t believe anything you say. You’re a liar and a fraud.”

“You’re right.” I watched her back up and put as much distance between us as possible. “I lied to you, to everyone, but I couldn’t go back to that hellhole. I can’t live the rest of my life branded a rapist. I spent years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, knowing the woman I loved more than life believed I’d tried to take her life. It was hell. I had to find a way to escape.”

She sank down on a chair when it looked as if her legs were about to give out. “None of this makes any sense.”

I continued my story. She needed to hear it even if she wasn’t ready to process it yet. “I made good use of my time in prison, educating myself. I figured out how to make a living doing what I loved when I got out.”

“But you weren’t supposed to get out,” she cried. “You were supposed to spend the rest of your life behind bars. Knowing that was the only thing that helped me sleep at night.”

Hearing that hurt, but it didn’t come as a complete shock. “I didn’t kill those women. I had to believe the truth would come out eventually, and it did.”

“You may not have killed them.” She pulled her legs up to rest her chin on her knees. “But you did rape me. You tried to kill me. You left me to bleed to death.”

“Do you really believe that?” I stared into her eyes, daring her to look away. “Can you really look me in the eye and tell me you believe that I would do that to you after everything we’d shared, after everything we’d been through?”

“You had this wild look in your eyes right before I left you. You were acting crazy, jealous, possessive, like if you couldn’t have me, no one could.” Her voice sounded shaky, breathless. “You even said that when you were cutting my clothes off—that if you couldn’t have me, no one else was going to.”

I processed her words. If it was one of the guys on my crew, someone who’d been obsessed with her from afar, that made sense. “What else did he say to you?”

“What?”

“What else did he say to you when he was raping you?”

“You’re so fucking sick,” she said, her upper lip curling into a snarl. “You wanna take a little trip down memory lane? Will you get hard reliving every gruesome thing you said and did to me that night? Is that what gets you off?”

“No. Jesus, Maura.” I felt bile rise in my throat, tasting like poison. “You got it all wrong. I’m just trying to put the pieces together, to figure out who did this to you.”

“I know who did this to me. You!” She looked stricken when she glanced over my shoulder at the rumpled bedding. “I let you tie me up. I even asked you to. You could have killed me. I was defenseless. You could have—”

“The fact that I didn’t hurt you, that I only gave you pleasure, should prove I’m not the prick who did those things to you.”

As though she didn’t hear me, she lowered her head to her knees. “God, I can’t believe I let you touch me again. Without a condom. I let you fuck me without a condom.” Her expression seemed haunted when she looked up. “Oh God, is that part of your plan? Do you have something, something that could kill—”

“Stop it!” I held up my hand. “My God, would you listen to yourself? This is crazy. You know me. You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

“I know you?” Her shock and disbelief was evident in her breathy tone. She could barely get the words out. “You must be joking. I don’t know you. I know the man you pretended to be.”

“I’ve changed,” I said as though that would somehow make a difference. “I’m not the same stupid, insecure kid I was when we dated.” Though at the moment, I felt like it. My stomach was quivering, and I could barely breathe. Not because I was afraid she would turn me in, which was a very real possibility, but because I was still deathly afraid of losing her.

Her face crumpled as she shook her head back and forth. “Of course you’re not the same person. You’re even worse. You’re this uber-successful tyrant who thinks his billions give him the right to play with people’s lives. You treat them like pawns in your twisted game. That’s what I was to you, wasn’t I—a pawn?”

“No.”

“You can’t tell me it was a coincidence that I got a job working for your company.”

I shook my head slowly, knowing I was only digging myself a deeper hole with the truth. “No, it wasn’t a coincidence. I had to see you again.”

“Why?” Tears flowed down her face unchecked. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone? Hadn’t you taken enough from me already?”

Her words cut like razor blades, opening wounds I thought had healed years ago. “I had to talk to you, to find out what happened that night.”

Her eyes narrowed, her hatred for me obvious. “And you knew you couldn’t just walk up to me and ask. You had to get me to trust you so I’d open up, right?”

I couldn’t deny her claim, but hearing the words come out of her mouth made me feel violently ill. She made it sound as though I’d used her, and I couldn’t even pretend that hadn’t been my intent.

“Since you’re not denying it, I know I’m right. So you had to get me into bed, to lower my guard, so I’d talk. Did you think seeing the scars you left would be the perfect segue?” Disgust dripped from her voice. “You could ask what happened and I would tell you about the monster who tore my life apart?” She covered her mouth when a sob escaped. “And I played right into your hands, didn’t I?”

I wanted to tell her she had it all wrong, that she misunderstood my intentions, but she’d nailed it. She was right. I was a pretty vile human being, using her pain to try to clear my name. But that was before… before I fell in love with her all over again. Now the only thing that mattered was getting justice for her.

“I guess it didn’t matter to you that I was engaged to someone else, did it?” She clenched her hands in her lap. “Of course it wouldn’t. Sociopaths don’t have a conscience, do they? You thought you could walk into my life and charm the pants off me, literally, because lord knows girls like me don’t get propositioned by filthy rich celebrities every day, right?”

I’d let her call me every despicable name she could think of as long as she stayed, talking and listening. I just needed to plant a seed of doubt in her mind and hope that time and distance would help it grow. But I couldn’t sit there staring at her without incensing her more, so I said the only thing I could. “Was my intent to seduce you? Yes. Did I care that you had a fiancé? No.”

“That’s what I thought.” She stood. “Am I free to go now, or is this the part where you tie me to the bed and make me beg for my life again?”

I dropped my head. Acid scorched my stomach, her caustic words intensifying the relentless burn. “You’ve always been free to leave. But I’m begging you for just a few more minutes.”

“Why should I listen to anything you have to say? You’re a filthy liar who twists facts to get what you want. Did you set Jeff up? Did you pay that stripper to lure him in so I could walk in and find him in a compromising position? Was that part of your plan?”

“What?” I was too stunned to respond at first, but when I thought of her judging me while deducing he was innocent, fury ripped through me. “That dirtbag was fucking anybody who’d let him stick his dick—”