Shatter (12 page)

Her lids cracked and those light aqua eyes twinkled at him through black lashes. His gut twisted with resignation. He had to at least mention it, even if he didn’t want her to utilize it.

He shut down his emotions, much the way he did when he walked into court. It was easier to do when she didn’t have that body of hers plastered to him. “I’m agreeable to leaving the topic alone until you know for sure, but because this is a time-sensitive issue, I wanted to bring it up now.”

A whisper of a smile tugged at one corner of her lips. “
There’s
that negotiating, bargaining attorney I remember. Reassuring to know the bully hasn’t taken complete control.”

He laughed softly, but the topic on his mind killed any humor he might have felt. Better to just get it out and let it go.

“I don’t know a lot about it, but I’ve heard there is a pill, one that has to be taken within—”

“Forty-eight hours after unsafe sex.” She came fully awake and popped up on her elbow. Her eyes turned an ice-cold shade of blue and narrowed. “The morning-after pill. Is that what you want, Mitch? You want me to take a pill so you can forget this ever happened? Are you afraid a child would strap you to me? Or are you just horrified to have a child with someone like—?”

“Stop.” He pressed his fingers to her lips, closed his eyes to gather patience and shook his head. “That is
not
what I said. And that is
not
what I’m implying. I don’t know where the hell you got this shitty self-image, but those are your own sick projections, not mine.”

She pushed his hand away, but didn’t speak.

“No, I
don’t
want you to take that pill,” he said. “But I don’t want you to feel trapped either. And as much as I would be willing to shoulder one hundred percent of the responsibility, it’s impossible for me to imagine you giving it to me even if I offered. It’s your life, too, Halina. I wanted to make sure you knew the choice existed before the window passed. That’s all.”

She scanned his face and her expression shifted to awkward discomfort. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s a solid no to the pill, then?”

“Yes.”

Mitch released tension he hadn’t realized cramped his shoulders and let out a breath. He took her hand and kissed the back. “Get a couple hours’ sleep and we’ll talk.”

Halina cuddled her face back into the pillow, curved an arm over Dex’s chest as if she were hugging a huge stuffed animal, and closed her eyes on a sigh.

Mitch, anything but settled, pushed from the bed and pulled a Heineken from the fridge. Dropping into the lounge chair, he picked up another pad of hotel paper, another hotel pencil, and turned his mind toward the uncomfortable subject of Schaeffer, Abernathy, and how the hell to get them both off the team’s back.

 

Halina closed her eyes and pretended to sleep as a flurry of emotions hammered her. Man, she was making mess after mess after mess of this situation.

Everything was so controlled when she lived alone. She kept a rigid training schedule, ate well, slept well. She meditated, read, worked. For relaxation she sculled on the lake, rock climbed at a local gym, or took a day trip with a few other climbers to the state park nearby. And she spent a lot of time with Dex—training, walking, running.

Nothing ever went wrong. She never got sick or hurt. She never had conflicts with friends. She didn’t have family or lovers to cause stress. Her work life was basically autonomous. A job she would have to call in to soon with an excuse for her absence. An absence she didn’t know whether to qualify as temporary or permanent.

And after only hours with Mitch, she was falling apart.

She’d forgotten birth control, for God’s sake! Okay, so it had been a really long time since she’d had sex. And okay, she’d really,
really
wanted . . . needed . . . Mitch. And, wow, okay, they’d gotten amazingly, beautifully, wildly out of hand. But . . .
still
.

Pushing him to keep the encounter physical had been . . . heart wrenching. She’d never expected him to slap his heart on his forehead. Couldn’t fathom how he could have held on to those damn romantic notions after what she’d done. But the emotion she’d seen flash in his eyes had frightened her—on several levels. The final straw had been witnessing the wheels of his brain turning in that bright gold-green gaze as if he’d been trying to fit her into a mold he could understand.

She didn’t want him to understand. The risk was too high. If she had to sacrifice his opinion of her to keep them both safe, so be it. She only had to get through the next few days without compromising the safety net she’d spent the last seven years protecting. Then he’d leave and life would go on—for both of them. End of story.

Unless . . . she got pregnant.

Halina blew out a breath and pressed her face further into the pillow. The irony of this situation ate at her. She just didn’t have the capacity to appreciate the threat of unplanned pregnancy with the man she’d once hoped would father her children.

But this was not that man. And while Mitch’s 100 percent responsibility offer was a sweet gesture—probably meant to keep her from going off the deep end—it was hardly realistic. As soon as he saw the crimp a child would put in his love life, his leisure time, his travel plans, that offer would be whittled way down.

And that assumed Halina could come out of hiding. Which she couldn’t fathom.

She cracked her lids and watched him. He hadn’t put his shirt back on and sat there with his jeans undone and all that smooth skin pulled tight over a trim, fit torso and muscular chest. Her gut expanded with renewed desire just thinking about how all that muscle and skin had felt against her. Hot and hard and . . . perfect. She couldn’t hold back a moan at the memory and covered by shifting on the bed.

Mitch’s bright eyes lifted from where they’d gone distant on some spot near the floor and watched her. His feet were propped up on another chair and crossed at the ankles. He held the end of a pencil between his lips with a pensive expression.

Just looking at him made her want to sigh. Made her want to crawl down to the end of the bed and right into his lap. She clenched the pillow in both fists and squeezed her eyes closed.

There, in the darkness, the sensations of her body took over. Her sex throbbed from the violent friction after so many years of disuse. Halina’s gut burned with passion as she relived their frantic hunger for each other. And since that one time was the only time she’d have with him again—especially given the scare that had resulted—she let her mind drift back over every detail and smiled into the pillow.

That happiness or contentment or whatever it was seemed to allow her to relax into other memories. Memories from years ago she kept buried. The two of them cuddling on the couch beneath a blanket. Mitch playing keep-away with the remote. A popcorn fight in the kitchen. A weekend with his family getting teased by his brothers. So many smiles. So much happiness. Such deep love. A sense of completion. Of finally belonging.

As Halina relaxed into the delicious buzz of sexual satisfaction and her heart swelled with the love she’d never lost for the man across the room, images drifted through her languid mind.

By the time she recognized the color-washed tones over the scenes, or the scenes splitting into two distinct mini-movies playing side by side, she was already immersed in the visions.

She fought to escape. Her limbs struggled against unbreakable bonds and her muscles screamed with tension, burned with exertion, yet she didn’t move. There was no escape. She knew this. She’d tried so many times before.

On the left side of her mind, the images shimmered in a red hue and played out a dark, tense scene. Mitch and several shadowy figures were present, the others there to capture Halina and kill Mitch. She couldn’t detect any sign of herself in the vision, but knew for a fact she was there, somewhere. Outside the field of view or hidden among the shadows?

On the right side, the images took on a blue hue. Mitch was there again. He would be, of course—these were his futures. But Halina was absent—not just from the scene, but from Mitch’s mind. From his heart. As if she’d never existed.

He was over her. Finally, truly, completely over her.

Mitch mingled at some type of high-end party where all the men were dressed in tuxedos and the women in gowns. A young woman hung on his arm. A woman of such beauty, she drew every gaze in the room, men and women alike. Her deep honey-colored hair flowed over her shoulders in soft waves, and her burgundy gown reached the floor in a clinging, translucent slip of sparkles.

Mitch wound his arm around her petite shoulders, whispered in her ear, and kissed her neck, making her eyes close in pleasure and her hand fist in his jacket.

Fear, frustration and pain mounted until she was boiling inside her skin.

Her gaze pulled toward the red scene where two, maybe three men surrounded Mitch. Halina’s heart hammered against her breastbone and thudded in her ears. She couldn’t hear Mitch speaking, but his mouth moved and he gestured wildly as if he were trying to make a desperate deal. The others continued to close in.

Impending doom crept through her body.
Run, run, run!

One of the men raised his weapon and fear swamped Halina in one scalding wave.
No! No, no, no!

She couldn’t stand to watch. Couldn’t bear to see him killed again. Couldn’t live through the sight of his life draining from his body while he lay there helpless on the ground bleeding out.

Halina’s attention shifted to the blue scene, where Mitch and his . . . woman . . . had drifted into a secluded hallway. Where they talked and laughed and kissed. The two were young and happy and carefree, both with so much life ahead of them.

The woman pulled him into a bedroom at the end of the hall with seductive, heavy-lidded eyes and a smile that promised ecstasy.

Hell, Halina could
not
go into that room. She simply could not watch him . . .

She tried to avert her gaze, but it stopped in the only other location available—the red scene. There, Mitch held up both hands, fear replacing grim hope. His mouth moved and Halina read the offers, bargains, deals, spilling off Mitch’s lips in an effort to save her life.

Behind him, a battered and bloody version of herself crawled from one of the shadows, her hand pressed to her side, face tight in pain. The replica’s mouth moved with pleas for Mitch’s safety, for a trade—spare his life, take hers. In the vision, Mitch pivoted toward the battered version of herself . . . and Halina knew what was coming.

She glanced at the blue zone and found Mitch in the bedroom with the beauty who’d already stripped down to a bra and thong and was now dragging Mitch’s shirt off while they kissed.

With agony ripping her apart, Halina returned her attention to the red zone just as a bullet exited a gun. It exploded in slow motion—the muzzle flash, the gunpowder cloud, the launching bullet. Halina’s damaged clone, still crawling as if in too much pain to stand, screamed at Mitch. Too late. The bullet pounded Mitch in the back. He arched, head thrown back, mouth open in a scream.

Nooooo!
Her own scream shattered the vision. Images exploded into millions of tiny colored shards of glass and shot through the darkness.

“Mitch! No. Mitch,
no
!” Her scream pierced her own ears and she sat straight up in bed. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear anything but her own scream.

The hum of another voice faded in. Far, far away at first. Nothing more than a murmur underwater. She couldn’t gather enough air to yell again, and the vision was gone now, but her whole body continued to shake. Halina pulled her arms tight to her chest, dropping her face into her hands.

She did what she always did when these came: She focused on her breath. One breath in, one out. One in, one out. But she hadn’t had a vision like this in years; it was different from the one she’d had in the car with Mitch earlier. The ones after sex were always deeper, more detailed, and showed two sides of a future farther forward in time as opposed to one negative flash of the immediate future.

The terror from the most recent visions seemed to take forever to fade. When her hearing returned and her mind settled, she realized Mitch’s arms were wrapped tightly around her, his body rocking her gently, murmuring at her ear.

“Just a dream.” His voice was smooth and deep and delicious. “It’s over.”

But it wasn’t a dream.

And it wasn’t over.

The room phone rang and Halina jumped, her heart tearing out of her chest.

Mitch tightened his hold. “Shh, just the phone.” He reached for it and Halina melted against him again. “Yes, we’re fine,” he said into the phone. “A bad dream. Yes, sir. Thank you.”

Mitch hung up. “Just the front desk.”

Halina wanted to dig a hole to China, learn a new language, and start a new life so dark Mitch would never find her. At least then she would forever be able to keep him safe. But with Mitch holding on like this, she was tempted to close her eyes, tighten her arms around him, and cling. It wouldn’t be difficult to pretend her visions were meaningless dreams. Not when she was in his arms.

She drew a deep shuddering breath that scraped her sternum like broken glass. Which brought back images of shattering shards glittering at the end of her vision, and Halina knew she could never risk Mitch’s life.

He brushed her hair back and cradled her face, so careful, as if she were precious. “Bad one, huh?”

This was classic Mitch—the Mitch she’d known all those years ago. He’d always seemed to own an endless well of patience and compassion and love inside him. It was one of the things she’d missed most. What she believed had made her so lonely after she’d left. If she hadn’t been so deeply connected to him, she would have fared better on her own.