Irresistible Force (20 page)

“Does Eric know about this?”

“He guessed something. I have nightmares sometimes. Like the night you were here.”

James nodded. “I remember. Go on.”

Shay rocked her head in the negative against her palm. She really
really
didn’t want to say more. But James was getting close to her very fast. If he was going to bolt, he needed to do it before she started counting on him to always be there for her.

He shifted closer and raised a hand to cup her cheek. “Just say words, Shay. Whatever you’re thinking. Just say that.”

“I don’t remember it. No, I do. Some of it. But then it gets all weird and crazy.” She strung the last word out as if it caused her pain.

“Where were you?”

“We lived over a Chinese restaurant in Raleigh.” She swallowed. “I’ve hated Chinese food ever since. Dad had been in the army, a lifer, died in 2000. Nothing heroic. Service copter went down on practice maneuvers out in Arizona.”

James let out a rough sound. It caught and perfectly reflected her feelings.

“Mom was an LPN. She brought us back home to live but work wasn’t easy to find. She took double shifts at a nursing home. At first, she didn’t date much. Then she met Andrew. He was nice to us for a while. But after he moved in, to help with the rent, he would sometimes get drunk and break things. And he looked at me in a way that made me feel funny.”

“Yeah.”

“Mom said that I was just not used to having a man around the place. But she put a lock on my bedroom door when I asked her to. When she worked night shifts I would lock it and never get out of bed in the middle of the night. Only one night I woke up and had to pee really bad.”

Shay swallowed. Things were getting confusing. She could feel a pressure building like two hands clutching her heart. She was opening the door to a horror-movie basement that everyone knew never to go down into. Only, for her, the horror had been all too real.

“I was on the toilet, in the dark, when I heard…”

James’s arm tightened around her. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

But she did.

The words spilled out over themselves.

The footsteps. Heavy. Andrew’s. The shadow of his feet under the bathroom door from the light he’d turned on in the hallway.

She was washing her hands when the doorknob began to turn.

She’d yelled she was inside. But he only shouted back for her to open up. He was drunk. Nowhere to hide.

That’s when she remembered the scissors in the drawer, the long narrow-bladed pair her mother used to trim her bangs. She grabbed them and hid them behind her back.

The door opened.

Then she was on the floor, his breath in her face as he groped her under her pajamas.

Shay sat forward suddenly, gasping for breath.

“I can’t remember! I can’t remember!”

James touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Shay?”

She jerked away from his touch. “Don’t touch me! Just don’t.”

He twisted away and reached for the lamp beside the sofa. It flared to life.

Shay sat hunched over, gasping as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

He leaned close but didn’t touch her again. “You need something? Water?”

She shook her head tightly. “The scissors just missed his heart. They said I could have killed him.”

“Serves the asshole right.” James didn’t sound in the least bit doubtful about that opinion.

She turned her head toward him, a deep crease between her brows.

“You were being attacked. You defended yourself. Should have been an airtight legal defense.”

Shay shook her head, years of therapy unspooling in her thoughts. “No. It wasn’t like that. Andrew admitted he was drunk when he went to take a leak. He said he didn’t know I was in there. I just went berserk when he opened the door.”

James frowned. “People who are afraid sometimes overreact but you were defending yourself, Shay.”

“Not everybody would have stabbed someone.”

Shay turned away from him. It was easier than watching his expression of sympathy. “Mom said the police found me in the middle of the street screaming and screaming, with blood all over me. They thought I was injured. By the time the EMTs got there, I’d shut down. Everything. Couldn’t even speak. They took me to emergency and then checked me into a psych ward. The doctor said the traumatic event of the stabbing caused me to have a nervous breakdown.”

“Christ!” James made a fist to keep from touching her. “How long were you there?”

“Thirty days. Court ordered. I was evaluated with a dissociative anxiety disorder and as a possible endangerment to myself and others.”

“None of that has anything to do with attempted rape. The authorities would still have to take into account your statement of what happened.”

“They didn’t get my statement.” Shay swallowed, the rest of the story coming a little easier. “I couldn’t defend myself. When I could talk again, after twenty-four hours or so, I couldn’t remember what happened. I didn’t for weeks. By then Andrew had pressed charges. He was out of the hospital and said I needed to pay for what I’d done.”

“Screw that! You had every right to defend yourself.”

This time James reached out for her and tried to draw her back against him but she resisted. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Try to make me sound … normal.”

“You were normal. It’s the situation that was bat-shit crazy. Andrew tried to molest you. You did finally remember that.”

She flinched as if his compassion were just another burden. “Not soon enough. My mother had pushed me to accept a plea bargain of temporary insanity. I was tried as a juvenile. I didn’t have to do jail time. But there was court-ordered therapy.”

“Aw shit, Shay.” Her words grabbed him by the throat, choking off the life’s blood of his professional detachment until he was just a man aching over the pain of someone he cared about deeply.

Shay sat with her fingers twisted together, gulping in uneven breaths. Shouldering the unfamiliar feeling of helplessness, he watched her silently wrestle with her old demons. He knew that he couldn’t simply talk or argue her out of her feelings. She’d lived too long with this for him to change years of thinking in a single conversation. But the story made him want to break a few heads, specifically ones belonging to Andrew and Eric. Andrew’s vicious actions had screwed up her sense of self and of justice at a tender age. Eric, though he did not know why, had taken advantage of her need to keep all aspects of her life secret. Yet, somehow, she had survived. That grit had to be admired. “What happened next?”

“By the time I remembered enough details for my doctors to believe my story, the courts said it was too late to change the plea bargain. But my records would be sealed after five years if there were no additional misconduct charges.”

“Anything else?” There was always more in cases like this.

She heaved in a big breath. “The story made the papers. ‘Fourteen-year-old Stabs Mother’s Boyfriend.’ It was big news. I was famous.”

“That shouldn’t have happened. Juveniles are not named in reports.”

Shay’s mouth jerked but it was not in a smile. “There were enough people who saw me that night to tell their friends, who told their friends, that the girl without a name in the news was me.”

He tried to absorb the implications. None of them good.

She glanced at him from under her bangs. “Yeah. Who wants a homicidal loony, fresh-sprung from the nuthouse, in the classroom with their precious children?”

James sighed. “What did you do?”

“My mother left her jobs and took me up to the lake cabin. It belongs to my dad’s uncle and wife. We lived there a year while she did homeschooling, as best she could. Waitressing and cleaning other cabins to make ends meet.” Her voice began to wobble. “I was a total burden. I ruined her life.” Shay slumped into an even tighter huddle.

James reached in and found a calm tone completely at odds with his emotions. “Did your mom think so?”

She twisted the hem of her skirt in her hands, not speaking for several seconds. When she did there was a new bitter tone in her emotion-ravaged voice. “She felt guilty about bringing Andrew into our lives. Now she had a freak for a daughter. She was stuck.”

Mistakes. Guilt. Being trapped. A triple whammy of emotional disaster.

He had heard tougher stories, and ones with sadder endings. Some survivors didn’t make it through the trauma. Others were human husks, or living like bombed-out buildings that were still standing but damaged beyond repair. It was a wonder she wasn’t strung out on drugs, or worse. Yet here Shay sat, in her own place, with a job, whole but hurting.

Some of his thoughts must have been playing across his features because when she looked over at him a little of her temper flared through the haunted shadows in her eyes. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.”

“I was thinking about how strong you are. It wasn’t your fault. None of it. The courts and society got it wrong.”

She stared at him, looking strained and vulnerable after her confession.

“What did you and your mother do after a year?”

“We moved to Durham. She got a job, a good one, and I went to public school.”

“So, things got better?”

She shrugged. “There were records the school required. Things got leaked. Teachers. Counselors. They were always looking for signs that I would freak out again. When I didn’t, some kids started … doing things.”

To make her react.
Damn. He did feel sorry for her.

“How bad did it get?”’

She stared at him in that familiar walled-off way. He understood now how her defiance had sustained her. “They pushed. I fought back. A lot.”

It didn’t require much imagination to guess what her high school years must have been like. But he sensed a change in her tone. She wasn’t asking for understanding any longer. She was now fighting back, testing him.

He gave her a sly look. “You never went all ‘Carrie’ on them, did you?”

She almost smiled. “I thought about it. Especially after they nicknamed me ‘Psycho Shay.’ But then if I’d done something really badass I’d have been put back in that hospital.”

Jesus.
Her world had been too full of assholes, creeps, and failures.

Yet she had rejected his sympathy so he wasn’t about to dish any more up. “Smart thinking. You didn’t want your past to follow you. Is that why you changed your name at eighteen?”

Shay stilled and then her gaze went supernova. “You knew!” She sprang from the sofa. “You son of a bitch! You already knew all this.”

He wasn’t going to lie to her but he spoke slowly and calmly, trying not to accelerate her anger. “When I got back to Charlotte, I realized I didn’t even have your address or phone number, or have any way to get in touch with you. I needed to file a report about Bogart’s abduction. So I did some investigating.”

“You put a tail on me?” She sounded horrified.

“No. Nothing like that. It’s the age of digital pursuit.”

“I don’t have much of a digital imprint.”

“Tell me about it. I had to put a department professional on it. He’s better and has more resources. He discovered what I needed, and other things.”

“Other things.” He clocked every emotion as Shay’s face reflected her thinking processes. The final result of hurt and outrage was tough to take. “If you already knew everything, why did you make me tell you?”

“I didn’t know jack, Shay. I had only a few scattered facts. Your juvie record is sealed, as you said. Now that I understand what you’ve been through I’m totally on your side. If this is what’s been keeping you from filing charges against Eric you can stop worrying. I’ll help see to it that the system works for you this time.”

She jerked as if he had slapped her. “Don’t you understand anything? If I filed charges Eric would hire an expensive attorney who would dig into my past to try to discredit me. That’s the last thing I want. I have a record for violence. I cried rape and was institutionalized.” She waved her hands around, as if trying to chase away her thoughts. “It would be all over the news. No jury would believe anything I have to say. And everyone who knows me would learn about my past. I won’t allow that. Nothing can make me go through that again!”

Then she looked at him. Her face went slack. “Get out!”

It was a raw moment. He had torn open old wounds and she was suffering. He hurt for her. But this wasn’t about him. James knew he couldn’t make another mistake or she would rip him out of her life as she had tried to do earlier. Not this time. He couldn’t just leave a card and walk away.

He stood up. “Just hear me out, Shay.”

“Are you deaf? You can’t be here. Not after you lied to me. I trusted you!”

She came at him so unexpectedly, for once, he was caught off guard. She struck, hard. His lip burst where it was ground against his teeth by her slap and he tasted blood.

At the corner of his vision he saw Bogart rise, two concerned eyes shining with clearer vision than his own. His partner had just been attacked, and Bogart was trained to take sides.

James reacted quickly.
“Nein! Geh raus!”

Bogart hovered a moment, made a whining sound of disapproval through his nose, then settled back.

James watched him a moment longer, noticing his tail swooshing in agitation. He needed to calm Shay down, fast.

It turned out not to be necessary. She was gasping for breath and began to sob as she collapsed like a rag doll onto the carpet.

James knelt down beside her, as close as he could get without actually touching her. She had covered her face with both hands. Choking sobs lifted her shoulders with every breath. “I’m so sorry. I hate violence! I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, Shay. I think I’ll survive.”

When she didn’t respond, he placed a hand on her shoulder.

Her hands fell away from her face. Her eyes were an angry red, her mouth wet and blurred. He saw pain served up raw and unfiltered in her expression. Her eyes widened suddenly.

“You’re bleeding!”

James put a hand to his mouth. It came away with a bright smear of blood. He smirked. “I’ve had worse.”