The Way Home (16 page)

“My God.” The quiet words were more prayer than profanity.

Bruises marked both cheeks and there was a scrape high on one cheekbone, an angry red streak across the pallor of her skin. Her mouth — the soft lips he’d kissed a few hours before — was puffy and tender looking, traces of blood on her chin telling of a split lip. There was the beginnings of a dark bruise along her jaw, as if she’d been punched. And her left eye was swollen partially shut, blue and purple shadows just starting to show around it.

“Who did this to you?” Rage made his voice thick, and his fingers unconsciously tensed against her chin.

“I’m sorry,” Meg whispered, reacting to his anger, quick, unreasoning fear flaring in her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She twisted her head away from his touch. “I didn’t mean … I shouldn’t have come here.”

“It’s all right, Meg.” Ty made an effort to soften his voice, to tamp down the anger that churned in his gut.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he soothed. “Just tell me what happened.”

But she shook her head, her eyes wide and frightened. “I can’t. Please. I can’t.”

“Okay. It’s okay, Meg.” Ty smoothed her hair back from her face, trying to reassure her with words and touch. “We can talk about it later, okay?”

She nodded uncertainly, leaving Ty to wonder how much she understood of what he was saying. She lowered her head, her hair swinging forward to conceal her bruised face again. Ty stared at her in silence for a moment, feeling completely out of his depth.

“Here, let’s get you out of those wet clothes,” he said finally, trying to sound calm. But when he reached for the front of the sweater, she shook her head violently, her fingers tightening until the knuckles gleamed white under her skin.

“It’s soaked through, Meg.” But she only shook her head again, her whole body tensed for flight. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, wild and frightened, and decided that it wasn’t worth fighting her to get her clothes off.

“Okay. You can keep the sweater for now,” he said soothingly. She couldn’t possibly get any wetter or colder than she already was, he decided.

He stood up and looked around the kitchen, trying to decide what to do next. His gut churned with the need to know who had hurt her; to find whoever it was and kill the son of a bitch. But taking care of Meg came first. Ty thrust his fingers through his wet hair, combing it back from his forehead with a quick, impatient gesture.

Glancing down at Meg, he saw that she still hadn’t moved, unless it was possible that she’d somehow shrunk deeper into the dubious protection of the dripping sweater. Remembering the blood on her mouth, he decided that he could at least clean up her injuries. Maybe after that he’d be able to persuade her to change into something dry.

A few minutes later he pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. A gray graniteware basin sat on the table, full of gently steaming water, and a soft linen towel lay next to it. He slid his hand under Meg’s chin, urging her head up. “Let’s wash some of the dirt off your face. Okay?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded, though her eyes remained lowered, refusing to meet his. Ty moistened the cloth in the warm water and dabbed it gently against the scrape on her cheekbone.

“What happened here?” He kept his tone easy and conversational, wanting to reassure her. She lifted one hand to the scrape as if she needed to touch the injury to identify its source.

“I fell,” she said finally. “I was running and I fell.”

“Did you hurt yourself anywhere else when you fell?” He carefully didn’t ask about the other injuries — the bruises on her cheek, the split lip, the black eye — that were clearly
not
the result of a fall.

“My hands,” she said, after thinking a moment. Her voice was slow and flat. “And my knees. I think I scraped my knees.”

From the looks of her knees and the palms of her hands, Ty guessed she must have fallen, not once but several times. The hem of her dress was tom and muddy, the dirt ground into the fabric, as if she’d been so frantic to get away from something — or someone — that she hadn’t been watching her footing and had tripped repeatedly.

Though he knew he must be hurting her, she said not a word as he cleaned the dirt and tiny bits of rock out of her skin.

By the time he’d washed and bandaged her knees, Ty’s jaw ached with the effort of holding back his rage. He wanted to break something, preferably Harlan Davis’s miserable little neck. Because he knew, on a deep gut level, who had done this to Meg. Unless she’d gone back out after he took her home, who else could it be?

He wanted to shout aloud his anger that anyone could have hurt Meg — his Meg — as she’d been hurt. The idea that someone had dared to lay their hands on her made him feel almost light-headed with rage.

By the time he’d finished cleaning her bruised knees, Meg’s shivering was almost nonstop. Whether it was cold or shock, Ty didn’t know. He did know that he couldn’t let her sit around in sopping wet clothes. But when he reached for the sweater, she grabbed the faded wool and pressed her spine so hard against the back of the chair that Ty suspected she’d have new bruises from the pressure.

“You’re going to catch pneumonia if we don’t get you out of those clothes,” he told her.

She shook her head, her eyes haunted. It hit him suddenly that her refusal was more than an irrational desire to cling to the perceived comfort of the old sweater. There was a reason she didn’t want him to take it from her.

“Let me see, Meg.” He hardly recognized his own voice, made raspy by the anger he couldn’t tamp down. He stopped and closed his eyes, struggling for control. When he opened them again, she was watching him with a wary expression that made his chest ache.

“Whatever it is, it’s all right,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. You know that, don’t you?”

There was a heart-stopping hesitation and then she nodded slowly.

“You can’t keep the sweater, Meg. It’s soaking wet.” He kept his eyes on hers as he put his hand over her fingers and began gently prying them loose.

“No. Please.” The soft plea stabbed straight through him, but he hardened his heart and continued to loosen her hold.

“You need to get warm and dry,” he said, speaking calmly. “It’s all right, Meg. Whatever it is you don’t want me to see, it’s all right.”

She shuddered as he pried her fingers loose, but she didn’t continue to fight him. Instead, she closed her eyes and turned her face to the side as he pushed the sweater back off her shoulders and dragged it away from her. The garment hit the floor with a damp splat.

She was still wearing the same dress she’d worn to the movies — God, was that only a few hours ago? But the soft blue and white print was splattered with mud from where she’d fallen and the pretty white lace collar was torn away, hanging by a few threads. One shoulder seam was ripped completely open and the sleeve had slipped down to expose her upper arm, revealing a set of blue bruises that were obviously the result of someone grabbing her.

She’d lifted her hand to hold the tom bodice in place but Ty closed his fingers around hers, dragging her hand gently but inexorably down. She shuddered but didn’t fight him.

There was a plain white slip beneath her dress, but both straps were broken and the soft, damp cotton barely clung to the curves of her breasts. There were bruises on her shoulders faint blue marks that would be purple by morning. A pair of ugly red scratches traced across her pale skin, starting at her collarbone and ending just above her breast, as if someone’s nails had scraped across her skin as the dress was tom away. But it wasn’t the bruises or the scratches that drove the color from Ty’s face and made his hand tremble as he reached up to brush aside the tom lace at the top of her slip.

On the upper swell of her right breast, plainly visible and absolutely unmistakable, was a set of sharp little bruises. Ty hadn’t seen bruises like that since he’d been a boy and the neighbor’s toddler had sunk her set of shiny new teeth into his arm. But there was no mistaking that distinctive circular mark for anything else.

Someone had bitten Meg. The same someone who’d hit her, who’d left bruises on her arms, who’d tom her dress. Who’d … Ty swallowed against the bile that rose in his throat, threatening to choke him. He felt as if he’d just stepped off the top of a staircase only to find nothing but air under his foot.

“Who did this to you?” The voice that issued from his throat was one he’d never heard, a harsh, angry growl, more animal than human. He felt Meg wince away from him, trembling. Ty closed his eyes and rubbed one hand over his face, aware that his fingers were trembling, aware that he hovered on the knife edge of losing control and frightening her even more than she already was. He drew a deep breath, gathering all the threads of his self-control.

“It’s all right, Meg.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Just tell me who did this to you,” he said gently.

Her teeth worried her swollen lower lip and she shook her head slightly, whether in denial of his question or of what had happened, Ty could only guess. And what the hell
had
happened? She started to pull her tom dress back into place, but Ty caught her hands in his, holding them until her eyes met his.

“Meg, you’ve got to tell me what happened. Did he … did he rape you?” The ugly word scraped his throat.

Her eyes dropped to where their hands were linked and color rushed into her face, but to Ty’s infinite relief, she shook her head.

“Are you sure? You can tell me the truth.”

“I’m sure,” she whispered. “He … I think he would have but she stopped him.”

“Who stopped him, Meg?” She didn’t answer and Ty drew a deep breath before probing further. “Was it your mother?”

She shook her head uncertainly, less in answer than in denial of everything that had happened. She couldn’t seem to lift her eyes to his face, though her fingers clung to his. Ty freed one hand and brought it up to cup her chin, tilting her face to his, searching her eyes.

“Tel me, Meg. Tell me who did this.” When she didn’t say anything, he asked, “Was it your stepfather? Is he the one who hurt you?”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The answer was in the tears that suddenly filled her eyes, in the trembling of her mouth. Though he’d already known what the answer would be, Ty still felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.

“Oh, Meg.” Afterward he didn’t remember scooping her up off her chair and settling her on his lap. The move was bom of a deep instinctive knowledge that what she needed more than anything else right now was to be held and soothed.

For a moment only, she was stiff in his hold. Then a long shudder shook her slender body, and she curled into his embrace as tears broke past the control she’d fought so hard to maintain and she began to cry.

“It’s going to be all right,” Ty told her, hoping it was true.

He stroked her damp hair back from her forehead and held her while the cleansing tears shook her body. He’d thought that he couldn’t get any angrier, but listening to Meg cry, he found his rage shifting from white hot to something hard and cold and dangerous. If Harlan Davis had been standing in front of him at that moment, Ty could have killed him without feeling a second’s remorse.

Meg cried until she had no more tears left to shed. She cried until her breath was ragged with hiccoughs, until she was drained of fear and incapable of movement. She was aware of Ty holding her, of the soothing murmur of his voice, the rumble of it beneath her cheek.

When the last of the tears had finally been cried, she lay against him like a tired child, drained and exhausted. She let him dry her cheeks with a towel and then took it from him and obeyed his order to blow her nose. It had been a long time since someone had held her and cared for her.

She could remember Patsy soothing her bruises when she was a little girl, telling her that Daddy didn’t really mean to hurt them, that everything was going to be all right in the morning. Meg hadn’t believed her but she’d been comforted by the love in her sister’s eyes, by the awkward gentleness of her childish hands as she dried Meg’s tears and tried to make everything all right again.

But this wasn’t one of her father’s whippings and Ty wasn’t Patsy. She shouldn’t have come here, Meg thought tiredly. She should have gone somewhere else. Only, when she’d stumbled out of the little house into the rainy darkness, all she’d been able to think about was getting to Ty, that she’d be safe with him. She closed her eyes, afraid to see the contempt that must be in his eyes, the disgust he must feel.

“I’m sorry.” Tears had left her voice little more than a husky whisper.

“For what?For crying? I think you’ve earned that.”

He was being kind, of course, pretending he didn’t know what she meant, pretending that he wasn’t disgusted. Ty had always been kind, she thought. Even when he was a boy, he’d been kind.

“You were nice about Mary,” she said fuzzily, fighting the urge to close her eyes and sleep.

“Mary?” Ty dampened one comer of the linen towel in the basin of water and stroked it over her flushed cheeks, his touch so gentle it would have made her cry again if only she’d had any tears left.

“My doll,” she mumbled. “You said a prayer.”

“The only one I could remember,” he said, his voice laced with amusement. “And then I wondered if I’d go to hell for praying over a doll.”