The Virgin: Redemption (8 page)

The sound of it cut me through. “While he was discussing business, I was out on a date. Right about the time Donovan decided this wasn’t going to work out, I tried to kiss a girl for the first time. I missed her mouth altogether. The second date was one my brother Max set up and that was even worse. It got to the point to where even my mom stopped trying to set me up for dates, and my brothers outright refused to do it no matter how much she pushed them. Everybody knew it would be a disaster. I developed two obsessions—working my ass off, and locking myself in at night so I could jack off while I watched porn. It was the only way I was likely to ever get any action, so it became a fixation. Almost an addiction.”

He tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling, focusing on it. “That’s how it was until around the time I turned twenty. I worked. I went home. I dropped a fortune on the best porn I could get my hands on and I pretended that was enough. I became a fucking expert at getting myself off. Then…” He blew out a breath. “Then I met Brooke.”

Something hot exploded inside me. Jealousy. I recognized it for what it was, although I’d never felt it quite like this.

“I’d been working in Sales. Mom thought I’d do okay there and I did. Brooke came in and started making waves. People loved her or they hated her. I saw her and it was like my brain ceased to exist.” He slid me a look.

My skin went tight as he came toward me, each step slow and steady. “I don’t know if I could say I
liked
her, not looking back at it now. She treated people like shit, but she had a way of looking at people. She asked me out, not once, not twice, but three times. It took me that long to work up the courage. We went out to dinner, she talked me into going back to my place. I wasn’t thinking—she finds every dirty movie I have, because I never put them up. Nobody ever came over to visit, or asked to come over, not anymore. Not even my family because I’d been shutting them out for so long.”

Despite the jealousy burning in my gut over this woman I didn’t know, something stirred inside me. He was staring off at nothing, his expression remote. It didn’t look like this even fazed him, but I hurt for him.

“She’s looking at everything and I’m ready to sink into the floor. The first woman who actually acts like I’m not an amusing little kid, not a freakish idiot—and she sees a hundred high-dollar porn movies stacked in front of a widescreen TV.” He turned his head and looked at me. “Instead of walking out the door, she comes over to me and wraps her arms around my neck and laughs, tells me she’d been thinking I was all straight laced and serious.”

He was straight-laced and serious. He was also amazing, and he was mine. She’d hurt him. This woman, still faceless to me, had hurt him. I wanted to ask how, but he was still talking.

“I was so relieved about it, it takes my brain a while to catch up, then my body a while to slow down. We’d been on the couch and my hands were probably shaking—I think I’m finally going to be able to get this right, and she up and walks out the door, blows me a kiss over her shoulder. Tells me she’ll see me at work. This kept up for weeks. I was too stupid to realize the games she was playing, or just how much she was messing with me. I’d gotten a promotion, moved into my own office…she comes in, tells me she wants to
congratulate
me. My mother walks in while she’s under the fucking desk…” His voice trailed off and he looked at me.

I swallowed and tore my gaze away. Yeah, I could fill in those blanks on my own.

After a moment, he blew out a breath. “I thought I’d die but Mom didn’t even know. When Mom left, she climbs out and hands me a movie…tells me we ought to watch it in there, have us a party.”

“Was she trying to get you fired?” I demanded.

“No.” He shrugged. “She was trying to fuck with the family. After we’d been…dating…or whatever we were doing about two months, my dad calls me into the office, tells me that he had done some looking into her background. Apparently her ex-husband had owned one of the smaller firms we’d bought out. He had bad ethics, cut corners we didn’t like. Most of his team was great, but we wouldn’t work with him so when we came on, he was pushed out. He killed himself a few weeks later and she blamed us.”

Something hot and ugly twisted inside me.

“Just like I did.” Turning away, I planted my hands on the counter. Over the roar of blood crashing on my ears, I couldn’t even hear him say my name and I didn’t hear him move. But he had.

“No. Not like you,” he murmured as he closed his arms around my waist. “Never like you.”

He rubbed his cheek against mine, ignoring me as I tried to pull away.

I couldn’t accept the comfort he offered, but neither could I leave the warmth of his embrace. Woodenly, I stood there. “What happened?”

“I didn’t believe him,” Drake said, his lips brushing against my skin. “I was obsessed with her. With how I couldn’t stop thinking about her, with how she made me feel. I thought I was in love with her. I told him he was full of bullshit, told him…”

I felt the muscles in his arms tighten and I stroked a hand down his arm, misery rising in me. Misery for both of us. He’d come to me, so battered inside and I hadn’t realized it. Now I was the battered one. Two broken people. How could we make this work?

“I quit. Right then, right there. Told him I was going to ask her to marry me and I’d open my own place. I had money—my grandparents left each of us with chunk of change after their deaths and I
thought
I could do exactly what my dad knew how to do. But when I went to her…she laughed. She just laughed, and I didn’t get it. I told her I wanted to marry her, that we belonged together. That was when she let the mask slip—she stared at me, then started to laugh.
You’re an awkward boy. I had to teach you how to kiss, how to touch me. I’d probably have to teach you how to fuck and you think I’d want to stay with you?
”

He pulled away then, putting distance between us. “Don’t think I don’t know how much I hurt you,” he said, his voice flat. “I know I did, and I
chose
to do it. I could have said I was sorry that night, the next day. I thought I was doing the right thing, keeping my distance. I didn’t deserve you anyway.”

I felt every inch of the distance he put between us, and the words he’d just said were like a scar on my soul. He turned and looked back at me from across the kitchen, his gaze cool and unreadable. “I never loved her. I figured that out soon enough and I got over that. It was my pride, more than anything else, and the humiliation. The words she said hurt the most, but I got over it. I put her behind me, decided I’d lose myself in business, and only business. Sex wasn’t even worth the headache it had cost me. Sex wasn’t worth it, trying to get involved with a woman wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t do it without fucking it up so why bother?”

He shrugged, a casual gesture that said much. “Dad asked me to come back, told me this…” He looked around the cottage, but I suspected he saw something more than the four walls, the golden beams overhead and the warm glow of lights. “I had to make something work. I focused on design—not the architectural part so much, but the hospitality area. I felt a tug there, thought I could make something grow there. I was going to prove myself. I was going to prove I could fit in, make it happen. Just as well as my brothers, and maybe, just as well as he did.”

His tone was cool. His eyes were flat.

Yet I could practically feel the hurt inside him. This time, I didn’t let the distance in his expression stop me. I went to him, sliding my arms around his waist. Pressing my face to his back, I said, “I don’t think they needed you to prove anything, Drake.”

“They didn’t. I had to do it for me.” Some of the tension drained out of him and he reached up, covered my hands with his, his thumb stroking along my skin. “That’s how I ended up here. I’m the one who learned about this place. I’d been looking. It took almost two years to find the right spot. I wanted a project of my own. Something that I could do, a place I could fix up and turn around. This was going to be it, my first big project. I had it all planned out, knew how everything was going to go.”

He turned and looked down at me. “Then I met you.
That
was when I figured out what love felt like. The wrong place. The wrong time. But everything about
you
felt completely right.”

My heart squeezed and I couldn’t take the distance between us anymore. I moved in until bare inches separated us and then I reached up, cupped his face. “If that’s how you felt, then why did you push me away?”

“I just explained that.” He held my wrist, his thumb sweeping along the inside. “How would you have felt if I’d slept with you that night, then you heard about the sale the next day? It was all but final, Shan. Your parents had to sell. You know that by now. The sale was pretty much a done deal. What else was I going to do?”

Staring into his eyes, I opened my mouth, words rising, trying to break free. But…I just didn’t know. Groaning, I dropped my head onto his chest. There were things I wanted to say, things I wanted to do. But I didn’t know where to start, or how.

His free hand slid up my back and he nuzzled the sensitive skin just below my temple. I could feel his breath stirring my hair, stirring all of me. “Are we really just going to walk away from this? From each other?” he asked softly. “What we have, what started that summer is still there. You feel it. I feel it.”

I lifted my face to his.

Reaching up, I touched my fingers to his lips. “I don’t think I can walk away.”

“Then we need to figure out where all of this leaves us.”

With a knot in my throat, I nodded.

Some of those words I had trapped inside finally broke free. I
knew
what I wanted.
Who
I wanted. I could tell him. Give him that, at least.

Except, when I braced myself, opened my mouth to speak, the phone rang, the sounds of something rich and melodic drifting through the air. Old style jazz. My father had loved it.

“Mom…oh. Dad. Hey…what…?”

His hands fell away from me, a hard, heavy tension slamming into him. I backed away, dread curdling inside me as he paced along the floor, listening. He made a few soft murmurs, stopped once and lifted his face to the sky. Then, stopping near a glass-fronted cabinet, he stopped.

I jumped as he slammed a fist into the glass, shards breaking, the cracks splintering up through it. “No. It’s nothing. I’m fine. How bad?”

There was an odd, strained silence, and then he nodded. “I...yes. I’ll be there.”

He turned to look at me but my gaze was locked on his hand, the rivulets of blood dripping down. It held me mesmerized. Frozen.

Blood. Slick and red.

My belly started to churn.

I’d seen a fist, streaked red with blood, driving into my father’s face. My mother’s belly. Mine.

The blood, the sight of it, tried to push me back into a place I couldn’t go and this time, I fought against it. As black dots edged in around my vision, I forced it back. I moved into the kitchen and pulled some paper towels off the roll. Thinly, I said, “You’re bleeding.”

Drake looked down at his hand, his gaze puzzled like he hadn’t even noticed.

Maybe he hadn’t.

I moved back over to him and caught his hand, pressing the paper towel to it and stopping the flow of blood. Over it, he looked at me. “I have to go to Chicago. My mom is in the hospital.”

“Is…” Unable to stop myself, I looked back at his bloody hand, felt time spinning away again. Voices rose in the back of my head while blood splattered across the veil of my memories.

Hands tangling in my hair. A voice in my ear—
scream, little girl
. The tire iron raised.

My lungs burned, aching for another breath. I pushed the memories out at the same time I expelled the air trapped in my lungs.

Instead of letting myself see the red, see the
blood
, I looked at his sweater instead, at his wrists, at his chest, at my own hand. “Is she okay?”

“I don’t know.” He looked for me, caught my chin. His hand was icy against my skin.

“Come with me. Please.”

Scream, little girl
—

I wanted to. It was trapped inside me.

But I didn’t. Go with Drake. To Chicago. I wanted to say yes. I could handle going to Chicago, even if I had to walk through the doors of a hospital, relive the nightmare that crowded my head every time those familiar scents assaulted me. I could do it. I wanted to, wanted to be there for him.

One thing, so small as to be insignificant, stopped me. It was just a piece of paper. I could tear it up and forget I’d seen it. The mail lost it, the cat ate it—no, I didn’t have a cat, but nobody needed to know.

But those details had the name, the date, the time. I’d face him again, the man who’d fisted his hand in my hair and told me to scream, just so he could beat my father, my mother. Face the man who’d dragged me off the street and forced me into a dirty, stinking trunk. I’d been trapped in there for hours while he drove around, convinced I was going to die. I had to face the man who’d told his partner to do it, to kill my parents.

I opened my mouth, tried to force the words out. They caught in my throat and I just couldn’t
speak
.

I can’t.
That was all I had to say.

Five days.

I only had five days.

Swallowing, I asked, “How long will it take?”

“It could take a few days.”

Turning away, I gripped the counter. “I can’t come until Monday evening.”

A humorless laugh filled the air. “Wow. Thanks.”

“Drake, I…”

“No. It’s okay.” Just like that, he turned his back on me. The action cut me to the very bottom of my soul. “Well…fuck. Here I go thinking we’re trying to make this work. But yeah. Monday.”

“Drake,
wait
,” I said, shoving myself toward him on stiff, awkward legs.

“No. My mom, my family needs me.”

My mom
needs
me
. And beyond that, I had to do this…for
me
. Every time I faced him, I tried to pretend I’d get stronger, be less afraid. It never happened, I was always afraid. But I had to try.