The Virgin: Redemption (5 page)

There was no sound, but I knew when he came up to stand behind me.

Slowly, I straightened and met his gaze in the mirror. The redness had faded from his face. His voice was a little hoarse as he asked, “How often does this happen?”

“What?” I asked flippantly. “Me elbowing somebody in the throat? Not very.”

His mouth flattened out. “The nightmares, Shan.”

I took my time reaching for a towel and drying my face, formulating half a dozen answers before finally settling on the truth. With a sigh, I turned and faced him, leaning on the edge of the counter. “Now? Not very. A few times a year, I’ll have a really bad one. This time of the year is the worst. The rest of the time, it’s just echoes. Sometimes, I’ll sleep walk, move around a little and try to hide. Other times, it’s just restless sleep. That…” I paused and blew out a breath. “That was a bad one. They used to all be bad ones. I couldn’t sleep without taking a sleeping pill. Sometimes, it helped.”

I shrugged and looked down at the hand towel I still held, twisting it around in my hands. “But other times, the nightmares would still find me. I couldn’t wake up. So I’d be stuck.”

He crossed the distance between us, just a few small steps. One hand lifted, came up to cup my cheek. I held still, barely able to breathe as his eyes searched mine.

“I’ve spent the past two months trying to understand why you ran.” His hand slid down, curved around my neck and then he lowered his head, pressed his brow to mine. His lids drooped lower, shielding his eyes, although I could still see a thin rim of green. “And before that, I came here, every summer, waited on that fucking balcony every night for three weeks, just waiting for you. I thought,
she’ll be here. One day, she’ll be here. She can’t stay away from a place she loves like this
. But you never came back, not that I could see. Now I know why.”

His hand fell away and he straightened, turning away.

“Why did you really come to Gallagher Enterprises, Shan?” he asked softly. “You have every reason in the world to hate me. Every reason to avoid me. Running, I can understand, but why show up in the first place?”

As he pivoted back around to study me, I ducked my head, staring at my bare feet. Curling my toes into the plush, warm rug that spread out over much of the tiled floor, I debated on that answer. I could lie. I knew how to do it, how to look at a person and lie without blinking, without flinching. When you spent years trapped in a pit of depression that seemed unending, lying became almost second nature.

How are you, Shannon?

I’d smile and nod.
I’m getting by. Every day seems to get a little easier
.

Are you holding up?

A shrug, a shake of the head.
Nothing else you can do.
A nervous laugh.
It’s what Dad would have wanted, right? I’ll be okay. Really.

You’re looking so much better! You are so brave. Your father would be so proud of you.

Thank you. It means a lot to hear that
. A smile, a nod…even as I’m screaming inside,
I don’t want to make my father
proud
…I want him here
.

Oh, yes. I could lie. I could look Drake right in the eye and offer glib words that would ease this tension, angry words that would push him away. Or I could offer him more half-truths. I
had
wanted to get him out of my system. It hadn’t worked.

Now he was in my system, in my soul, in my blood. I could taste him on my lips as I slept, feel his body under my hands in my dreams, and when I woke, sometimes I even imagined I could still smell the scent of his skin on mine.

Feeling the weight of his gaze on my head, I slowly raised my head and stared at him.

In the bright, golden lights of the bathroom, I felt exposed and stripped bare.

The small, scared part of me whispered…
Lie. Just lie. It’s so much easier. So much safer
.

But that was the crux of my problem. I’d felt
safe
in Florida, and look what happened. Since then, there was rarely a day when I truly felt safe. What I
felt
was loneliness, anger, guilt and confusion.

I lived in the shadows and I wrapped myself in lies, just to keep people at bay.

In that moment, I realized how very tired of it all I was.

But the lies, and the shadows, would continue unless I pulled myself out of them.

Blood roared in my ears, my heart pounding in my throat. I rubbed my palms together, felt the sweat that had collected there. Clearing my throat, I looked around. Not here. I wasn’t having this talk here. In a bathroom, lush and elegant as it was.

“Let’s go out to the balcony,” I said softly.

He looked away, his shoulders rising, falling on a rough breath. “It’s cold.”

“I grew up on these beaches. I know the weather.”

He just nodded.

* * * * *

Cold, maybe.

But the built-in fire pit, powered by a gas line, chased away most of the chill. Drake wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and I drew my feet up on the cushion, tucking them under me. Between the fire and the blanket, I barely felt the chill in the air.

Not physically.

Inside, I felt chilled to the bone. And sick at heart.

Drake sat across from me, his hands folded, his gaze on the dancing flames. There was no delaying this. Not anymore.

“I hated you,” I said softly.

His shoulders tightened, his body going rigid as though he was preparing for a blow. But when he spoke, his voice was cool, the way it might be if he was addressing some of the hotshots back at Gallagher Enterprises. “I can understand why. I just want to understand what’s happened the past few months.”

He didn’t understand.

But then again, neither did I. Not really.

“For the past ten years, I fixated on you. Blaming you.” I shrugged and looked away. “I had to delay college until I was nineteen. Mom wishes I’d put it off another year, but I was going crazy. She…” I paused, wondering if there was a way to say this without coming off as cruel. “She blamed herself. For a long time. It was their job, she said. To protect me. When I was hurt, it was a failing of hers.”

Drake swore, shoving upright. He started to pace, tension coming off him in waves. “None of you were to blame. A couple of sick bastards wanted to hurt you, exploit you, steal from you and your family. The blame lies with them.”

“I know.”

He paused and looked back at me.

I focused on the fire, stunned by how much lighter I felt, just by saying those words out loud. I’d never been able to do it before, even though I’d told myself I accepted that fact years before. Over the past month especially, I’d been coming to realize just how blind I’d been in my rage toward Drake. Closing my eyes, I pressed my head to the pillowed side of the chair. “It took me a very long time to be able to see that. I blamed myself. I blamed you. I blamed your family.”

His gaze cut toward me and I laughed. “Please, Drake. It was
Gallagher Enterprises
that authorized the project…not just you.” Sighing, I tipped my head back and stared up at the endless expanse of sky overhead. “I blamed my mother. I blamed the cops for not finding us, not realizing those guys were out there. I blamed the security guards for not realizing what I was saying sooner. And I
did
blame the men who grabbed me. But it took a long time for me to stop blaming everybody else around me, everybody who’d been in my life around that time.” I plucked at a loose thread on the blanket, forcing the last of the words out. “Including my father.”

The boards under his feet creaked and I looked up, watched as he settled across from me.

“Your father.”

“Yes.” Tears stung my eyes. Impatient, I dashed them away. “He was the reason we went to Florida. He talked about the money. He trusted too many people and that was the reason he ended up in a bad way to begin with, why we had to sell out anyway. Yes, I blamed him. I blamed you. I blamed everybody.”

Clutching the blanket, I stood up and went to the railing and stared out over the water, watching as it crashed into the beach. “Most of all, I blamed myself.”

He joined me at the railing, his eyes on the rolling surf. “Why?”

“I lived. He didn’t. They battered him. I had bruised ribs and a bruised kidney. Oh…and skinned knees from where I fell. You couldn’t even recognize him when they were done with him.” Turning my head, I stared at him, swallowing so I could speak around the knot in my throat. “It’s been ten years. And the clearest image I have in my head of my dad is the way he looked that last day, his face bruised and his mouth busted open. Most of those came from the times when I couldn’t stop myself from screaming. I can’t
see
my father the way I want to. Those are the clearest memories I have of him, no matter what I do. I can’t cut those images out of my head.”

He moved then, so fast I couldn’t even prepare for it. His hands plunged into my hair, tugging my head back until all I could see was his face. “And is that what he’d want? Would he want that to be how you remember him?”

“It doesn’t
matter
. I can’t get it out of my head! I did that to him. For weeks
before
that happened, I didn’t want to talk to him. Not to him, to Mom. I hid in my room, or in the hotel and stared outside, feeling sorry for myself. Because they had done what they could to make sure I’d be taken care of.” I curled my lip, glaring at him. “Poor little Shan. Her parents were in the hole so bad. Then a rich guy comes and buys up their hotel. Now we’ve got lots of money and what am I’m twisted up over?
You
.”

I jerked away from him, ignoring the nauseating way my head pitched and rolled.

Stumbling away, I curled my hands over the railing, tried to steady my knees. “I hated
everybody
.”

“You had a right to hate me,” he said, his voice hard as stone.

“No.” I had to get this out. The poison inside me had festered for too long. “A right to be angry…maybe. I still don’t understand why you wasted your time with me, but that’s neither here nor there. I didn’t need to hate your family, my parents, the cops…or myself. I’ve been trapped for ten years and I’m tired of it.”

Unable to stand there any more, I turned away.

He didn’t follow me.

I can’t decide if I was happy about that or not.

Morning came. Too bright, and as far as I was concerned, too early.

Squinting against the light shining through my window, I groaned as the pounding continued inside my head and tried to think about the fact that I had to go out there. Face Drake. Figure out how to get out of this place, figure out what to do next.

At some point in the next few days, I had to make it down to Florida.

Thinking was so hard, though, and the ache in my skull only made it worse.

What do you want to do
? That small voice inside my head murmured to me and I closed my eyes.

What did I want?

Slowly, I rolled to an upright position and stared outside, gazing out over the rolling waters. They called to me. The ocean always had. Even the beaches of Florida had beckoned to me, but nothing like it did here.

Home
.

What I wanted?

That was easy.

It was this.

This place.

On the rare occasion I had happier dreams, it was of this. On the rare occasion I let myself think about
what-if
? I imagined myself here. Building something here, making something that mattered. All I’d ever wanted.

I wanted this. I wanted
home
.

And…

An ache settled in my throat.

Drake.

Still.

Always.

It was what you wanted
.

This beautiful place, like he’d reached inside me and captured my dreams, brought them to life; he’d done it because I’d wanted it. He’d come back here, hoping to find me. That meant something, didn’t it?

Was it foolishness to hope we still had a chance?

Just the thought of it was enough to make my heart race. Enough to make my palms go damp while the yearning swamped me. Every time I’d woken up alone over the years, some part of me had wished for…something. No. Not something. That empty void inside me had a name and only he could fill it.

They say youthful infatuations are fleeting, that they never last.

But mine turned into an obsession…a love that haunted me even now.

A chance.

Sliding off the bed, I moved to stand in front of the mirror, studying my reflection. It hadn’t been all that long ago that I had stood in Philly, staring at my reflection critically, wondering if he’d see the girl I’d been under the layers of sophistication I’d developed over the years.

I’d been fooling myself to think that he wouldn’t see that girl.

She was still there. Under a thick layer of bitterness, anger and hurt, she was still there. I could see her clearer now. I could even
feel
her. Maybe it was because something had pierced that layer of bitterness.

I could see her—see
me
. Nothing had ever been more clear in that moment, standing in the dark, wearing Drake’s button-up shirt and a pair of his boxers that bagged around my waist. Scowling, I looked down at myself, realizing I’d been wearing the same clothes since I’d arrived here—how long had it been? Thirty six hours, maybe?

It seemed about right.

I needed to think. I needed to clear my head. And I really, really needed a shower.

I spent a good twenty minutes under the hot, pounding spray. I came to one conclusion.

It was time. Time to start over. Time to reach for a second chance. Here, back where
everything
had started. Here, with Drake.

Although the water was hot, goosebumps raced across my flesh while my belly clenched. There was a tight, hot knot there and I groaned, leaning back against the tiles. They were heated by the water and their warmth seeped into me, turning my already loose muscles into putty. My breath hitched in my chest and my heartbeat raced.