Broken Justice (Justice Brothers) (12 page)

The groan he let out as he left her lips and peeled her off his body sounded harsh and loud in the silence of the small room. “Do you know what you’re doing, Lacey?” he ground out a bit more harshly than intended. “Do you realize what your kissing like that does to me?”

Lacey got caught completely off guard by the question. She’d been so lost in the sensation of being kissed by Cameron that the last thing she expected was for him to push her away. Embarrassment shot along her nerve endings as she cringed, knowing that her complete lack of experience with the opposite sex had been so obvious to someone who clearly knew his way around seducing a female. She was overcome with feelings of disappointment and self-protection when she realized how close she’d come to making a complete fool of herself.

When she didn’t answer right away, Cam was gripped with frustration, which he could handle, and a sense of protectiveness for the confused female in his presence, which he couldn’t. Protective wasn’t something he did. On the battlefield he looked out for his brothers, and they him, which was expected warrior behavior. However, in his personal life, he’d never felt protective toward a single human being, ever. Lorraine had seen to that. The only person he’d learned to be protective of was himself. The feelings he was forming for Ponytail were unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

Sighing, he tipped her chin up with his fingers so she had to look at him. The sheen of embarrassment and uncertainty lighting up her eyes told Cam a hell of a lot. The pieces started falling into place. “Tell me Lacey, are you a virgin?”

Her blue eyes, which seconds before had been smoky with arousal, turned sharp and defensive at his question. The wary shield she kept around her started to go up until she wavered under his intense perusal. Satisfied that he had her full attention he was flabbergasted when he saw a film of tears appear in her eyes.

“I don’t know,” she whispered lowering head before he saw any deeper than he already had into her tormented soul. Lacey didn’t know why she’d answered him that way because she knew her words invited the inevitable follow-up. She never discussed this part of her life with anyone. Hell, she never discussed anything at all with anybody, but for reasons she couldn’t fathom this dark haired man with the gruff outer shell and
don’t mess with me
persona made her feel safe for the only time in her life.

Keeping her gaze lowered Lacey waited, feeling her heart pounding with anxiety as the silence around them grew. When she finally couldn’t take the suspense any longer she slowly raised her eyes to his, quickly sucking a hiss of air into her lungs at the intense expression on his face. He looked mad, though not at her, which was a relief. She suspected his anger stemmed from having already surmised something of the dark acts that hid in her past.

Cam hadn’t been prepared for the tears or for her answer. He figured the question had a simple yes or no answer. Her shaken response of
I don’t know
hadn’t been on the list of possibilities he’d imagined when he asked the question. Kicking her bags out of the way and pulling her toward the sofa, he sat them down. “Explain,” he grimly countered when the tense silence lingered.

Lacey wished she knew what to say. She hadn’t thrown herself at him, at least she didn’t think she had. They had ended up in each other’s arms when he seemed to give in to something she was just barely starting to understand.

Sitting cross-legged against the arm of the old sofa she snatched up an ugly throw pillow and pulled it protectively against her middle. God, she hated feeling nervous and really hated the sudden jarring loss of self-confidence that she counted on to keep herself together.
Could she tell him about her past? Why in the world would she want to?
He was practically a stranger - one who could vanish from her life as quickly and easily as a puff of smoke.
Why, even though she knew that, did she feel so pulled in his direction? And why, dear God why, was she letting him so far inside her mind?

The answer to her question was looking at her across the small distance that sat between them. Lacey might not know who he really was or where he came from but she did know with every fiber of her being that she could trust him, mystique and all. He had his secrets and so did she. They were strangers, yes, but somehow they were also, quite impossibly, becoming friends.

Cam watched the play of thoughts and emotions on her face, noting each one. She was deciding whether to open herself to him. He felt like a man waiting on the judgment of a jury. His mouth ran dry, then turned to dust when she reached up and yanked the band from her ponytail, letting the brownish gold waves fall softly against her shoulders. The smattering of light freckles across the bridge of her nose taunted him with her innocence and he wondered if it would always be that way even as she aged and matured. She had a natural beauty that left him breathless and made him forget that he didn’t trust women. He suspected she could make him forget a lot of the emotional nonsense he’d been clinging to all his life but right now, he was not the person on the hot seat.

When she’d gasped at his question and answered that she didn’t know, a piece of his heart squeezed in painful contraction. He’d tasted her innocence and been enthralled by it but her full reaction suggested a darker truth that made his insides churn in anger. The agonizing suspicion that she’d been assaulted or abused became very real as the silence lingered. He wanted to hurt somebody in a powerfully aggressive way. Fearing that this lovely young woman had been harmed for someone else’s perverse satisfaction ripped open a wound in his soul. If his suspicions were correct, he was going to kill the motherfucker who had harmed her.

“Just let it out. Some things aren’t meant to stay hidden forever.”

Lacey nodded at his choice of words, sensing he realized some portion of what she might be about to say. She wanted to be brave and fearless, and most of all she wanted this secret to be behind her once and for all. With a deep sigh, she filled her lungs one last time, blowing away years of anger and fear as she simply dove right in and went for it.

“My mom died when I was only a baby. I don’t really remember her but I do know she loved me. For a while after she was gone, my grandmother was in my life and I remember more of her. Dad was not around very much; he seemed to always be working so Gran did the day-to-day stuff. When I was eight we moved to Oklahoma where dad had gotten a job. We lived in a trailer and all I really remember of that time was being alone and how isolated everything felt. I cried for my Gran but she was far away and after a while she just faded into memory.”

“Right after my fourteenth birthday, Dad signed on as a pipeline foreman in Alaska. It wasn’t a job that allowed him to bring his teenage daughter tagging along so without any warning I was dumped on an uncle’s doorstep in Florida that I’d never met or known about.”

The silence lengthened as she struggled to keep a firm grip on her emotions. Lacey had hated the man on sight and while it was apparent from the way the two brothers interacted that they weren’t exactly fond of one another, that hadn’t stopped her father from walking away from his only child without a backward glance, leaving her in the hands of an evil psychopath. Some things can never be forgiven. Her father’s desertion was a perfect example.

“I won’t bore you with the gory details except to say that this so-called uncle was a Bible thumping jerk with a deep hatred of women. His wife had taken their son and fled to God knows where years before I arrived on the scene. He liked to use words like
Jezebel
and
harlot
. Mostly I tried to stay off his radar but that was hard to do when you live in a swamp. Oh, did I mention he ran gator tours for a living? Yeah, that’s right,” she bit out. “My darling daddy left me with a gator nut who spent his days taunting vicious reptiles for paying customers. At night, he drank and quoted the good Book. Being of the female persuasion meant I had to be cleansed of my inherently wicked ways. I guess Eve really was a naughty girl because in his mind, all women were dirty and suspect.”

Cam stayed silent as she clutched the pillow a bit tighter and her words became softer, like a whisper. He was imagining all sorts of disgusting scenarios and was having trouble remaining passive while she spoke. The idea of seriously harming the gator taunting dickhead was already forming in his mind.

“By the time I was sixteen, he was locking me in my room each month when I got my cycle because I was unclean and shouldn’t be around people.” She snorted in derision. “I was completely cut off from other people and totally at his mercy. I had no family and no friends. We were in the middle of a disgusting swamp and I was part of a home-school network so there were no teachers to see what was going on. Basically, my life was f-u-c-k-e-d.”

Cam grimaced at her spelling of the inelegant word and wished he could change her life so she never had to use that expression ever again. It didn’t take a surveillance expert to see that she avoided swearing and crude language when she spoke. He who had never given a shit about anybody was suddenly and without warning, wanting to be some kind of white knight swooping in to rescue this freckle-faced beauty.

Lacey sighed again and let the worst part of the tale tumble out without embellishment and with very little show of emotion. “He started abusing me then. Not in the classic way, but in a much more vicious way that spoke to how evil and twisted he truly was. His best friend was named Jack Daniels. Good ol’ Jack made his presence known almost every night. More often than not, he’d get snarling drunk and wind up in my room late in the evening. He liked to wrap his hands around my throat and whisper vile taunts while he threatened to choke the evil out of me. His favorite demand was that I touch him while he slowly cut off my air supply. If I made a move to comply, he would beat me senseless and scream about what a whore I was. Some nights he was buck-naked and would yell at me to get on my knees and pray to release him from my wanton spell. It went on like that for more than a year. Besides smacking me around and occasionally beating the snot out of me, he never touched me physically.”

She threw the pillow on the floor and abruptly straightened her shoulders. He suspected the worst was yet to come and he could not have been more right. “One night he forced me to drink a bottle of beer that appeared out of nowhere. He wasn’t a beer guy. When I hesitated, he pushed me down on the floor and held me there as he poured the entire bottle down my throat. I choked and gagged while he screeched insanely about damnation. Afterwards he paced the room like a crazy man peeling off his clothes while he preached about women’s subservience to man and my head got fuzzier and fuzzier. The evil jerk had put something in the beer and I was lucid enough to realize it was probably a rape drug. I went nuts and started screaming and hitting him. The last thing I remember was of him ripping my clothes as he punched me over and over until I lost consciousness.” The tight shrug she ended with made him sick to his stomach. The bastard had drugged his own niece and assaulted her while she was unconscious and all she could do was shrug.

“A couple of hours later I came to and found him naked, covered in blood and out cold on the bedroom floor. My clothes were destroyed and there wasn’t an inch of my body that didn’t hurt or have marks. Judging by how we both looked, one could presume I put up quite a fight. Something inside me snapped and less than an hour later, I had packed what I could and gone through all of his ridiculous hiding places until I’d cleaned him out of any money he had squirreled away. I was barely seventeen years old. Six weeks later, I was alone, trying to survive in a big city and pretending I was older and wiser. That was five years ago. Most of the time I’ve been in youth hostels, campgrounds during the summer, or living in rundown motels while I work odd jobs and get an education any way I can. Sooner or later I figured my luck would turn around and I’d have enough money to get an apartment someplace and a proper job so I could live like a real person.”

Her bright eyes and the determination in her voice confirmed how important it was for her to make it on her own after having lost her mother, been abandoned by her father, and abused by an uncle.

“So to answer your question, my only response can be that I don’t know. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” She stood up, wiping imaginary dirt from her butt before forcefully pushing up the arms of her shirt. With her hand held up to say stop, a grim set to her mouth and a deep frown, her body language screamed her resilience. “You’re not allowed to feel sorry for me. I can’t have pity or sympathy. Other people have real problems. That’s who you can feel sorry for. Not me. I’m not a victim. Just because things have been tough does not mean I haven’t made loads of progress.” Her voice steadily rose while this emphatic declaration of independence burbled out.

“I didn’t need your help to figure it out. Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for your rescue during the mugging, but if you hadn’t happened along, if that situation hadn’t occurred, I would have found a way to move things along to a more positive place.”

“I don’t doubt it for a second, Ponytail. Those freckles don’t fool me. You kick ass just by being so determined.”

“Thanks, I think, and I’m sorry for getting carried away before. You’re good at that.” His quirked eyebrow asked the question that she answered, “The kissing I mean. Ummm, you’re quite, uh….,”

“Good at it, am I?” Sighing, he reached for her, running his hands up and down her arms once again, this time to warm her up and chase away the chill of her confession. “We both got carried away and for good reason. The chemistry between us is powerful and even without experience you sensed it. But I’m definitely the one in the older and wiser category and I shouldn’t have crossed the line just now. Men like me don’t have relationships, we get our needs met in other ways. Sweetness, you in no way come off as the type of woman who would settle for an arrangement like that. I can’t start something that would only end with you getting hurt.”

After that little speech, no one was more surprised than Cam when he gathered her in his arms for a tender hug. When she wrapped her arms around his waist and leaned in to him, he felt a powerful sense of inevitability. His face buried in her hair and her head against his chest, they swayed back and forth in a tightening embrace that went beyond mere friendship.