Dark and Damaged: Eight Tortured Heroes of Paranormal Romance: Paranormal Romance Boxed Set (87 page)

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because there’s something in your eyes telling me that you’re lying to me. Again. Still.”

He sighed and looked at his feet. Avoiding her eyes?

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“Am I, Sam? Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? You think I can’t feel it?”

“What are you talking about?”

Definitely wariness in his voice, now. She wanted to cry. She wanted to shake him until he told her what she wanted to hear.

But that wouldn’t be the truth, would it?

“Yeah, you look like my husband. You even smell like him, God help me. But Sam was never as
considerate
as you are. He would have been knocking on Lexi’s door, demanding a picture even if she was sound asleep.”

“You want me to wake her up?”

“No, I want you to tell me who you really are.”

“You know that, Maggie.” He moved closer, touching her face. “I’m your husband.”

She blinked at the tears blurring her vision. “You are not my husband. You may look like the man I married, but you aren’t my husband.”

“Then you tell me. Who am I?” he demanded.

“I don’t know that either. But you are not my husband.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“How, Maggie?”

“I just do.”

“That’s not good enough. How?”

“I know because ...”

“How, Maggie?”

She looked up. “He never touched me the way you do.”

Sam stared at her, his lips silent over words they formed. Uncertainty glimmered in his eyes before his lashes came down to hide it. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember how we—”

“I don’t want you to remember that,” she said, hindered by the giant lump in her throat that tried to silence her voice. She covered her face, not sure if she wanted to sob or shout. Both, probably.

“Hey,” he said, pulling her hands away. “Talk to me. Please.”

She sucked in a deep breath, tried to find her backbone, settled for a stiff upper lip. Inside, a well of grief and anger had been stewing, waiting for this moment to boil over. Pieces over her childhood floated at the top, alongside of chunks of her dreams and a peppering of her marriage. Now, she didn’t know how to turn down the heat, how to let it all settle again.

She closed her eyes, trying to feel her way through this. Start at the beginning ... that made sense.

“I was raised by ...
distant
parents, Sam. My mother and father didn’t have me because they wanted children or a family. They were complete with just the two of them, but for whatever reason, they felt the need to procreate. I think I must have been a science experiment. Something they grew in a petri dish so they could document its stages.”

She turned her back on him, but he didn’t let her move away. He stood close behind her, wrapping those strong arms around her, sheltering her from the emotional mess inside her. She was too old to still be so devastated by her childhood, especially when hers had been better than most. She hadn’t been used or abused. She’d only been ignored.

“I spent my whole life trying to be noticed. Seriously. Like a five year old at a birthday party. I tried it all. I was the best little girl, the worst teenager. I can relate to Lexi, because I was her. Hurt. Scorned. Lashing out. None of it helped. By the time I got to college, I was so needy that I couldn’t even stand the sight of myself. I kept looking for love in all the wrong places.” She laughed and covered her face again, past humiliations rolling into the moment.

“And then I met you. Successful. So handsome, I could hardly breathe. And interested in me. I realize now that I made you into the perfect man, even when you weren’t. I wanted so badly to be a part of your world, your family, and when you invited me in ... I went. Even when I doubted you ... when I doubted myself. Even when some voice inside me said it was a mistake.”

“You don’t think I loved you?”

“In your own way, maybe. It wasn’t until today when you made love to me, that I truly understood the difference ... It felt so new. It wasn’t just physical, not with you. You
touched
me, Sam,” she said, placing a hand over her heart. “Here. You never did that before, but I never let myself acknowledge it. I guess I didn’t understand my own feelings about you ... about me ... Not until now.”

She pulled away and moved across the room. “In the past year, I’ve learned to be strong. I had to. I’ve learned to make my own way, my own happiness. I won’t go back to seeing what I want to see instead of what’s really there. So I’m asking you now, Sam. Tell me why when I look at you, I see the man I married. But when I looked inside you ...” Her tears spilled over and trailed down her face. “Tell me why I see a different man looking out. One who wants to be known. One worthy of my love.”

If she’d asked in any other way, he might have been able to resist, maintain the lie, stick with the plan. But as he stared at Maggie, his heart was so full that he thought it might break into a million pieces. So much for thinking he didn’t have one.

She was right. He did want to be known. He’d thought he could live the lie, so long as it meant keeping Maggie and the kids safe. Making love to her had opened a new facet of life that he’d never even imagined. Now, it lay in front of him, a magical road he could only follow if he left the lies behind.

What she asked for though, would destroy her. Leave him alone on this path, watching the road to happiness wash away.

“You’ve asked me to trust you when everything that’s happened tells me to turn away,” she said in a low voice, her anguish tangible. “It’s only fair that I ask you for the same thing.”

The moment of truth had come and gone, leaving him on this jagged edge of reckoning. She’d never forgive what he’d done, what he’d taken without asking.

He’d had no choice when he’d been sucked into this world against his will, yet his desire to touch her had been the catalyst. And once here, once he’d experienced what it really meant to touch, to hold ... He’d selfishly let the charade play on.

He stared into her tearful face, and saw the punishment he deserved. She would banish him from this outlawed life and he would have no ground on which to take a stand. All he could hope for was a chance to eliminate the danger that surrounded her before he ended what he should never have begun.

“Sam died, Maggie,” he said, his voice a broken thing that made him wince. “You know that.”

She frowned at the way he said
Sam
instead of
I,
but nodded woodenly.

“And in death, there comes a way to the afterlife,” he went on.

Her brows came together, puckering the skin between. She didn’t understand. How could she?

“That way has a guide. Humans call it a Reaper.”

“Humans?” she said and sudden anger sparked in her gaze. “I ask you for honesty and this is what—”

“Look in my eyes, Maggie. Tell me I’m lying.”

She stared at him with those blue-green eyes, a hurricane of confusion and rage and hurt ... and hope swirling inside them. Death must feel like this moment of knowing he would crush that hope.

“I came to take Sam’s soul to the afterlife, wherever that might have been for him.”

Her lips moved, but nothing came out.

“I was in the room when you told him that you were sad, but not grieving. That you’d wanted the fairy tale. That he broke your heart.”

Her gaze was riveted and now he saw her remembering.

“You were so sad and so beautiful, but my eyes weren’t like yours. What I saw was your essence, not the you I see now. And I couldn’t leave until I had more. I wanted to touch you.”

Still, only disbelief showed in her expression. Suspicion tightened her lips, and he knew she thought he was crazy. Just like his ex-wife. Just like the real Sam had been in the end.

“You felt me there, Maggie,” he said, frustration and anger hardening voice. He dared her to deny it. “You kept looking at the corner where I stood.”

Her eyes rounded, still suspicious but no longer outraged.

“When I moved to stand beside you, I thought if I touched Sam at the moment of reaping, I could hold a piece of him and use it ... to touch you.”

She stepped back and his heart missed a beat.

“So I did. But the doctors shocked his heart at the same and I was sucked inside with Sam’s soul. I was trapped—”

“I felt you,” she breathed and her expression cleared.

Confused, he paused, knowing that acceptance hadn’t brought that wondrous gleam to her eyes. Somewhere his confession had gone awry.

“I thought I imagined it, but I remember that moment and thinking ... Dear God, Sam, are you telling me there’s an ... you’re an
angel
?”

Despite his misgivings, hope had risen. Now, it crashed to his feet. “No, Maggie. You don’t know how much I wish I could say it was true. But no, I’m not an angel. I’m a Reaper. A messenger of death.”

Her face paled and she steadied herself against the wall.

“Sam’s memories are dead and his soul is so damaged that I know something was done to him. I don’t know what or how. At first, I thought I’d figure that out and move on.”

“Move on? You said you were trapped.”

“Death would free me.”

“Oh my God ...”

“I know you must think I’m either crazy or dangerous. Or both. Maybe in the beginning, I was. But not to you—not to the children. Being in this body, being with
you
... I was changed from the moment I was trapped, but you have made me something new, Maggie. I
am
what you see when you look into my eyes. I’m no longer a Reaper. I’m no longer human. I don’t know what that makes me. Both? Neither? The only thing I know for certain is that I
am
the man you see inside.”

Her breath came out in a soft hiss, but she still didn’t move. There were so many emotions churning in her eyes that he couldn’t begin to guess what they meant. Instead, he tried to close the distance between them, but she held out her hand, stopping him.

“I don’t ... I can’t ...” She shook her head, tried again. “I ... I need to think, away from you. Please ... go back downstairs. Let me ... be.”

He wanted to refuse—more than anything he wanted to make demands. But survival instincts had come with the skin and he understood that if he pressed, she would leave. She would cast him out her life forever.

So with a nod, he reluctantly left the room, stopping at the door to say, “Real can be a lot of things, Maggie. I’m only just learning that now. But this thing between us ... it’s more real than anything I’ve ever known. I think it is for you, too.”

Feeling like a steel band had clamped around his chest, Sam closed the door behind him.

He’d hoped she’d come to him that night. He’d stayed awake, praying for the light to go on at the top of the stairs. It never did until dawn stretched its golden fingers through the shutter slats.

When Maggie finally came downstairs, she was quiet and withdrawn. She got the kids ready for school, sharing only a few words with Sam before she left, too, dressed in a pretty blouse, skirt and high heels. She had a showing in Scottsdale, she said in a wooden voice. She’d be back in time to meet Justin at the bus stop.

Each hour of her absence made him antsy, anxious for her return. When the front door finally opened, he looked up hopefully, but it wasn’t Maggie. Lexi entered, with a sullen expression and dark circles of blue drawn around her pretty eyes. He didn’t know why she put makeup on when she was already so heartbreakingly beautiful, but those survival instincts he had learned to depend on warned him to keep quiet about it. She shot him a quick glance and started up the stairs.

“You’re home early,” he said, glancing at the clock in the kitchen. He knew to the minute what time both children came and went.

“Half day,” she mumbled.

“Does Justin have one, too?” he asked, worried that no one had met the little boy at the bus stop, then astonished by his own concern. If he’d had any doubts that his integration into humanity was complete, they vanished in that instant.

“He goes to the afterschool program,” she said.

He nodded like that meant something and Lexi took another step. “Wait,” he said.

The girl paused stiffly.

“I want to talk to you.”

She looked down at him from her lofty vantage, anger and confusion vibrating off her in waves he could almost see. Those tentative overtures of trust he’d felt last night had already dissipated.

“Why?” she demanded.

“I need your help,” he said honestly. “I don’t remember why you hate me. What I did to Maggie. None of it.”

She made a disgusted sound. “That’s convenient.”

“It’s the truth. It would make things easier if I knew what I’d done.”

“You fucked up,” she said, so much rage and hurt in her voice that it cracked.

“Are you supposed to say words like that?”

She shrugged, but a flush stained her cheeks.

“So will you help me?”

Her chin came up, eyes glittering brightly. “What do I get out of it?”

“I won’t tell Maggie you’re binge watching Sons of the Arc.”

“Anarchy. And she already knows.”

“Justin said you weren’t supposed to be doing it.”

“He’s a tattletale.”

Sam cocked his head, waiting. “So, will you?”

With a beleaguered sigh, she came down the stairs and flopped on the couch across from him. “What you do want to know?”

“Start at the beginning. Your mother—”

“Egg donor. She was never my mother.”

“You hate her more than me,” he said, slightly mollified.

She gave him a hard look. “It’s a toss-up. But what happened with
her
wasn’t your fault. At least, I don’t think it was. She’s a whack-job. You don’t remember any of that?”

He shook his head. “I met her at a funeral. That’s the extent of my memory.”

“Aunt Celia’s funeral,” Lexi agreed. “I never knew her, but you used to cry sometimes when you were drinking.”

The words sparked a feeling deep inside him. Grief. He chased it into the dark hole where it hid, but lost it before he could put a face and name to it. Evidently, Sam had cared about his sister.