Lover Avenged (45 page)

Rehv’s breath sucked in on a hiss and his hand shot to the plastic Baggie full of penicillin he’d been keeping in his suit’s breast pocket. “Why?”

“That I will not disclose to you no matter what you do.”

There was a click as she hung up on him.

Ehlena sat upstairs at the crappy kitchen table, her father’s manuscript in front of her. She’d read it twice at his desk, then put him to bed and come up here, where she’d gone through it again.

The title was In the Rain Forest of the Monkey Mind.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, if she’d thought she had sympathy for the male before, now she had empathy for him. The three hundred handwritten pages were a guided tour through his mental illness, a vivid, walk-a-mile-in-his-shoes study of when the disease had started and where it had taken him.

She glanced over at the aluminum foil that covered the windows. The voices in his mind that tortured him came from a variety of sources, and one way was through radio waves beamed down from satellites orbiting the earth.

She knew all this.

But in the book, her father described the Reynolds Wrap as a tangible representation of the psychosis: Both the foil and the schizophrenia kept the real world away, both insulated him…and with both in place he was safer than if they weren’t around. The truth was, he loved his illness as much as he feared it.

Many, many years ago, after family had double-crossed him in business and ruined him in the eyes of the glymera, he no longer trusted his ability to read the intentions and motivations of others. He had put his faith in the wrong people and…it had cost him his shellan.

The thing was, Ehlena had figured her mother’s death wrong. Right after the great fall, her mother had turned to laudanum to help her cope, and the temporary relief had bloomed into a crutch as life as she’d known it had crumbled…money, position, homes, possessions leaving her like lovely doves scattering from a field, going somewhere safer.

And then Ehlena’s engagement had failed, the male distancing himself before publicly declaring that he was ending the relationship-because Ehlena had seduced him into her bed and taken advantage of him.

That had been her mother’s last straw.

What had been a joint decision between Ehlena and the male had been spun into Ehlena’s being a female without worth, a harlot hell-bent on corrupting a male who had had only the most honorable of intentions. With that known in the glymera, Ehlena would never marry, even if her family had had the station they’d lost.

The night the scandal had broken, Ehlena’s mother had gone into her bedroom and they’d found her dead hours later. Ehlena had always assumed it had been a laudanum overdose, but no. According to the manuscript, she had slit her wrists and bled out on the sheets.

Her father had started hearing voices as soon as he saw his female deceased on their mated bed, her pale body framed by a halo of dark red spilled life.

As his mental disease had progressed, he had retreated farther and farther into paranoia, but in a strange way he felt more secure there. Real life was fraught, in his mind, with people who might or might not betray him. The voices in his head, however, were all out to get him. With those crazy monkeys that flipped and tripped among the branches of the sickness’s forest, raining sticks and hard nubs of fruit at him in the form of thoughts, he knew his enemies. He could see and feel and know them for what they were, and his weapons to combat them were a well-ordered refrigerator and tin over the windows and rituals of words and his writings.

Out in the real world? He was helpless and lost, at the mercy of others, with no defenses to judge what was dangerous and what wasn’t. The illness, on the other hand, was where he wanted to be, because he knew, as he put it, the confines of the forest and the trails around the trunks and the tribulations of the monkeys.

There his compass held a true north.

To Ehlena’s surprise? It wasn’t all suffering for him. Before he had fallen ill, he’d been a litigator in matters of the Old Law, a male well-known for his affection for debate and his lust for strong opponents. In his illness, he found just the kind of conflict he had enjoyed while sane. The voices in his own head, as he put it with self-actualized irony, were every bit as intelligent and facile at debate as he was. To him, his violent episodes were nothing more than the mental equivalent of a good boxing match, and since he always came out of them eventually, he always felt victorious.

He was also aware he was never leaving the forest. It was, as he said in the final line of the book, his last address before he went unto the Fade. And his only regret was that there was room for just one inhabitant in there-that his sojourn among the monkeys meant he could not be with her, his daughter.

He was saddened by the separation and the burden he was on her.

He knew he was a lot to handle. He was aware of the sacrifices. He mourned her loneliness.

It was everything she had wanted to hear him say, and as she held the pages, it didn’t matter that it was all written and not voiced. If anything it was better this way because she could read it over and over again.

Her father knew so much more than she thought.

And he was far more content than she ever could have guessed.

She smoothed her palm over the first page. The handwriting, which was in blue, because a properly trained attorney never wrote in black, was as neat and orderly as the recitation of the past, and as elegant and graceful as the larger conclusions he drew and the insights he offered.

God…for so long, she had lived around him, but now she knew what he lived in.

And all people were like him, weren’t they. Each in their own rain forests, alone no matter how many folk walked beside them.

Was mental health just a matter of having fewer monkeys? Maybe the same number, only nice ones?

The muffled sound of a cell phone going off brought her head up. Reaching across to her coat, she took the thing out of her pocket and answered it.

“Hello?” She knew in the silence who it was. “Rehvenge?”

“You got fired.”

Ehlena put her elbow on the table and covered her forehead with her hand. “I’m fine. About to go to sleep. And you?”

“It was because of the pills you brought me, wasn’t it.”

“Dinner was really good. Cottage cheese and carrot sticks-”

“Stop it,” he barked.

She dropped her arm and frowned. “I beg your pardon.”

“Why did you do it, Ehlena? Why the hell-”

“Okay, you’re going to rethink your tone or this conversation’s getting the end button.”

“Ehlena, you need that job.”

“Don’t tell me what I need.”

He cursed some. Cursed some more.

“You know,” she muttered, “if I add a sound track and some machine guns to this, we’d have a Die Hard movie. How did you find out, anyway?”

“My mother passed.”

Ehlena gasped. “Wha…? Oh, my God, when? I mean, I’m sorry-”

“About a half hour ago.”

She slowly shook her head. “Rehvenge, I’m so sorry.”

“I called the clinic to…make arrangements.” He exhaled with the kind of exhaustion she was feeling. “Anyway…yeah. You never texted me that you’d gotten to the clinic safely. So I asked, and there it was.”

“Damn it, I meant to but…” Well, she was busy getting fired.

“But that wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to call now.”

“No?”

“I just…I needed to hear your voice.”

Ehlena took a deep breath, her eyes locking on the lines of her father’s handwriting. She thought of all she had learned, good and bad, in those pages.

“Funny,” she said, “I feel the same way tonight.”

“Really? Like…for real?”

“Absolutely, positively…yes.”

Wrath was in a bad mood, and he knew this because the sound of the doggen waxing the wooden balustrade at the top of the main staircase was making him want to light the whole fucking mansion on fire.

Beth was on his mind. Which explained why as he sat behind his desk his chest was killing him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand why she’d gotten upset with him. And it wasn’t that he didn’t think he deserved some kind of punishment. He just hated the fact that Beth wasn’t sleeping at home and he had to text his shellan for permission to call her.

The fact that he hadn’t slept in days had to be part of the pissed-off as well.

And he probably needed to feed. But like sex, it had been so long since he’d done it, he could barely remember what it was.

He glanced around the study and wished he could self-medicate the urge to scream by going out and fighting something: His only other options were hitting the gym or getting drunk, and he was just back from the former and not all that interested in the latter.

He checked his phone again. Beth hadn’t returned his text, and he’d left it three hours ago. Which was fine. She was probably just busy, or sleeping.

The hell it was fine.

He got to his feet, slipped his RAZR into the back pocket of his leathers, and headed for the double doors. The doggen just outside in the hall was putting a ton of elbow grease into the buff-and-polish routine, and the fresh smell of lemon that rose from his efforts was thick.

“My lord,” the doggen said, bowing low.

“You’re doing great work.”

“As is my pleasure.” The male beamed. “It is my joy to serve you and your household.”

Wrath clapped a palm on the servant’s shoulder and then jogged down the stairs. When he got to the foyer’s mosaic floor, he went left, toward the kitchen, and he was glad that there was nobody inside. Opening up the refrigerator, he confronted all manner of leftovers and took out a half-eaten turkey with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

Turning toward the cabinets-

“Hi.”

He jerked his head over his shoulder. “Beth? What are…I thought you were at Safe Place.”

“I was. But I came back just now.”

He frowned. As a half-breed, Beth was able to tolerate sunlight, but he stressed the fuck out every time she traveled during the day. Not that he went into it now. She knew how he felt, and besides, she was home, and that was all that mattered.

“I was making something to eat,” he said, even though the turkey sitting on the butcher-block table was a dead giveaway. “You want to join me?”

God, he loved the way she smelled. Night-blooming roses. Homier to him than any lemon polish, more gorgeous than any perfume.

“How about I make something for both of us?” she said. “You look like you’re about to fall down.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say, Nah, I’m tight, when he stopped. Even the smallest of half-truths was going to underscore the issues between them-and the fact that he was utterly exhausted wasn’t even a little lie.

“That would be great. Thank you.”

“Have a seat,” she said, coming over to him.

He wanted to hug her.

He did.

Wrath’s arms just snapped out, latched onto her, and pulled her against his chest. Realizing what he’d done, he went to let her go, but she stayed with him, keeping their bodies together. With a shudder, he dropped his head down into her fragrant, silky hair and gathered her up, molding her softness to the contours of his hard muscles.

“I’ve missed you so much,” he said.

“I’ve missed you, too.”

As she sagged against him, he wasn’t a fool to think this moment was an instant cure-all, but he would take what he had been given.

Pulling back, he moved his wraparounds up onto the top of his head so she could see his useless eyes. To him, her face was blurry and beautiful, though the fresh-rain scent of tears didn’t please him. He brushed both her cheeks with his thumbs.

“Will you let me kiss you?” he asked.

When she nodded, he cradled her face in his palms and brought his mouth down to hers. The cushioned contact was at once utterly, heartbreakingly familiar and yet something from the past. It seemed like forever since they had done more than peck-and that separation wasn’t just what he’d done. It was everything. The war. The Brothers. The glymera. John and Tohr. This household.

Shaking his head, he said, “Life has gotten in the way of our life.”

“You are so right.” She smoothed her palm down his face. “It’s also gotten in the way of your health. So I want you to sit down over there and let me feed you.”

“It’s supposed to be the other way around. The male feeds his female.”

“You’re the king.” She smiled. “You make the rules. And your shellan would like to wait on you.”

“I love you.” He pulled her in tight again and just held on to his mate. “You don’t have to say it back-”

“I love you, too.”

Now he was the one sagging.

“Time for you to eat,” she said, tugging him over to the country-style oak table and pulling a chair out for him.

When he parked it, he winced, shifted his hips up, and took his cell phone from his pocket. The thing skittered across the table, bumping into the salt and pepper shakers.

“Sandwich?” Beth asked.

“That’d be great.”

“Let’s make it two for you.”

Wrath put his sunglasses back in place, because the overhead light was making his head pound. When that didn’t go far enough, he closed his eyes, and although he couldn’t see Beth move around, the sounds of her in the kitchen calmed him like a lullaby. He heard her opening drawers, the utensils in them rattling. Then the refrigerator cracked open with a gasp and there was shuffling, followed by glass knocking into glass. The bread drawer was slid out and the plastic wrap around the rye he liked rustled. There was the cracking of a knife going through lettuce…

“Wrath?”

The soft sound of his name brought his lids open and his head up. “Wha…?”

“You fell asleep.” His shellan’s hand smoothed over his hair. “Eat. Then I’m taking you to bed.”