Sweet: A Dark Love Story (12 page)

As she had the thought, water rolled in again, this time with more vigor, and splashed her in the face. The sensation evoked terror, and she struggled mindlessly again, trying to free herself from the way she was trapped, but having no success. When something touched her ankle, the one pinned between the platform and the boat, she was too panicked to recognize it as Declan’s hand for a moment, but his stern voice cut through her anxiety.

“Stop struggling, Kat.”

As frightened as she was, with her heart racing in her ears, and her stomach churning with nausea, she still responded instinctively to his command and stopped moving. Breathless whimpers were escaping her, and she closed her mouth in a futile attempt to fall silent. She couldn’t completely contain her mewls of terror, but she was still as he tried to free her.

“I can’t quite get this,” he called from above her. It sounded like he strained as he said the words.

She could feel the boat move marginally, but not enough to free her. A second later, his hand disappeared, and she was irrationally convinced he had left her. She began to thrash again, not recognizing the sound she heard for a moment. It was a hydraulic lift, similar to the sound of a garage door opening, and she looked up in time to see the front part of the boathouse rising.

With a splash, Declan jumped from the platform and into the rising tide, swimming over to her by going underneath the boat and coming out on the side next to her. She was feeling woozy from having hung upside down so long, and from running on pure adrenaline since waking, and a wave of exhaustion swept through her when he reached her side.

“What the hell are you doing, Kat?”

“I wanted to escape. I can’t stay here anymore.” She shivered as her strength left her, and she hung limply. The water was over her ears now when she laid her head down and didn’t fight to keep it lifted.

His expression betrayed his pain. “You wanted to leave me so badly that it’s worth killing yourself?”

She wanted to explain, but she didn’t have the energy. Instead she just shook her head. “I need to get away from this. I’m not myself here.”

“Well congratulations, because you’re probably going to succeed by fucking drowning. I can’t move the boat, and I don’t have power tools to cut out a section of the deck. I never fucking thought I’d need them, since maintenance is performed by a company on a routine basis.”

His shouting made her flinch, but it also brought a spark of energy and renewed determination. “Why not just start the boat and drive it out?”

His mouth tightened, and he shook his head. “If I do that, the propeller is likely to disembowel you or decapitate you on the way out. You’re right in the path of it, and I can’t move the boat enough to free you without risking killing you.”

Her eyes watered at the news, and she could feel that futile hopelessness settling over her again. “I’m sorry, Declan. I didn’t mean for it to happen this way.”

“I guess you’re satisfied though, as long as you escape. Doesn’t matter if you’re still alive when it’s over?” He spoke bitterly, but with an underlying note of fear.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave you behind.”

He laughed harshly. “I’d have a lot fucking easier time believing that if you weren’t hanging upside down due to your own stupidity.” When she flinched, his voice softened, and he brushed her cheek. “I’m sorry. I should have realized this would happen.”

“I don’t know what kind of fortuneteller you’ve been seeing, but I doubt anyone could have predicted this outcome,” she said with a hint of dry humor in an attempt to combat the rising panic.

Water splashed in her nose, and she gasped and thrashed, lifting her head above the waterline temporarily. His hand was there to support the back of her head, but she knew it was a temporary solution. Eventually, the water would rise to the point where he couldn’t hold her up. It might eventually get high enough to float her back to the platform, but she probably would have already drowned by then.

She’d wanted to escape her inner darkness, and she might have found a permanent way to do so. In light of the drastic enormity of the solution, she realized it wasn’t so bad to have strange cravings and dark needs—needs that Declan met so well.

“Just hang in there, baby.”

They floated together quietly for a few moments, and still she had no idea what he was thinking. Her thoughts were consumed with what was happening, what she had sacrificed, and with trying to hold the panic at bay. As the water grew higher, she was having less success with doing so. He was still holding her up, but the tide was high enough now to make it difficult for both of them, and her back ached from the angle.

“Just let me go, Declan. You have to get out of here before you’re trapped or something too.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

Looking into his eyes, seeing the resignation there, she abruptly intuited that if she drowned, he had every intention of going with her. He wasn’t even going to try to save himself or get out of the water while he still had plenty of time.

The epiphany brought a renewed surge of determination and pushed back the panic. “Dammit, no. Get up there and see if you can wrench my foot loose. I don’t care if you have to break my ankle or fucking cut it off. Get me out, because we are not dying here.”

Declan arched a brow, hesitating for just a second before nodding. Perhaps he’d realized that he could always drown himself to join her later if he failed to free her. It wasn’t a reassuring thought.

She was determined not to die in such a careless and stupid way. There was no way she was going to receive a posthumous Darwin Award. The idea made her want to laugh, but she suspected it was more hysteria than amusement prompting the reaction.

He swam away from her and back out from under the boat. Kat heard his footsteps on the platform above her a moment later. After that, there was incredible pain in her foot as he pushed and shoved and tried to cram it downward. Then she felt the boat start to shift as she heard his grunt and imagined he was using sheer stubborn strength of will and all the power in his body to shove the heavy vessel.

Apparently, the water was high enough now to make it easier to move the vessel, and her ankle slipped free. A rush of excitement filled her, and she almost cried with joy, but held back at the last moment as her head plunged underwater.

Relief and jubilation fled in the face of panic, as she confronted her phobia head-on and unexpectedly. She thrashed and tried to fight her way to the surface, vaguely aware of being pulled away by the tide. A moment later, it slammed her upward and into the boat, colliding with the other side of her head.

She tried to fight the surge of unconsciousness, but had little success. The edges of her vision blurred and went gray, and she knew if she couldn’t stave off the wave of blackness trying to wash over her, she would probably die before Declan could find her and retrieve her from the ocean.

Out of desperation, Kat grabbed her nipples and pinched as hard as she could, pulling on the sensitive buds until she wanted to scream from the pain. There was no pleasure associated with the action, but it served to help fight the wave of dizziness pressing down over her.

She was still disoriented, and from the downward angle she was traveling, she assumed she had been washed along the slope leading down from the boathouse and out toward the open ocean. She had to fight her way to the surface so Declan could find her. She knew nothing about swimming, except what she had seen on TV, but she tried a crude form of scissoring her legs and arms.

It seemed to make little difference, and she still couldn’t tell whether she should be moving up or down. Obviously, the surface had to be above her, but was she moving upward or swimming deeper into the ocean—if she could call her clumsy motions swimming, which was far too generous a description? Her lungs ached with the need to breathe, and she fought the urge to take a breath, knowing it would be her last.

Something grabbed her ankle, renewing her panic until she realized it was a rough palm, and then she stopped fighting. Declan had found her, and a moment later, he began to pull her upward. She had been going the wrong way.

After what seemed like an eternity, they broke the surface of the water, and she clung to him as she dragged in deep breaths. She allowed Declan to tow her to the shore with his strong swimming strokes, and she was thankful that he was so accomplished, and also tenacious and stubborn enough to keep looking for her, though he might have risked his own life in the process. She would admonish him about that later perhaps, but right now, all she could do was hold on to him until he pulled her from the water and laid her on the sand several feet from the edge of the incoming tide.

“Kat, you scared the fuck out of me.” His expression was angry, furious even, but the fear in his eyes took away any anxiety she might have experienced if she’d observed only his more obvious emotional reaction. His skin was also pale, and he looked to be on the verge of vomiting.

She felt similarly, her nausea accompanied by a woozy, throbbing head. “Thank you.” Her voice was raspy, and she choked, unexpectedly coughing up some water from her lungs. As the events had unfolded, she’d remained unaware of having swallowed some or breathed in at the wrong moment, but now her lungs burned as she coughed forcefully, urgent to draw in a deep breath once more.

“As soon as we get back to the house, I’ll call in the helicopter to bring a doctor.”

She nodded, slumping against him is the last of the coughing faded, other than an occasional tickle in her chest that made her emit a small cough again. There was so much she wanted to say to him, but she was too weak to do so. Instead, she collapsed against him and let his arms hold her in a comforting embrace.

She woke in a relentlessly white room, with light pouring through the window that was so bright it burned her eyes. Lifting a hand, she waved it with a marked lack of coordination, as though she could ward off the sunlight.

“Easy there,” said a kind voice off to her left.

Carefully, aware of the throbbing in her head—painfully aware of it—Kat turned her face toward the voice and saw a balding doctor with a round face, silver wire-rim glasses, and a paternal smile. “Where’s Declan?” she asked in a raspy voice.

“He’s right over there, Miss Evans.” The man, who she assumed was a doctor from the white coat he wore instead of scrubs like nurses typically used, leaned closer and in a pseudo-whisper said, “He hasn’t left your side since the helicopter brought you in two days ago.”

“Two days?” she asked groggily. “I’ve been asleep for two days?”

The doctor patted her arm, but her gaze moved from him to Declan, who stood a few feet back, hovering but not approaching. She wondered why he wasn’t directly by her side, but assumed the doctor had asked him to stay back for a moment.

He checked her over quickly, looking at her eyes with a bright light that made her wince. “Lingering effects of the concussion, my dear,” he said sympathetically. “You’ll probably have headaches and vision sensitivity, especially to light, for the next few days until the rest of the swelling goes down in your brain.”

“Am I okay otherwise?”

The doctor nodded. “You have a broken ankle, along with some scrapes and bruises, but the major concern was the concussion. Now that you’ve woken up lucid, I don’t think we have anything to fear, though you’ll be staying as our guest for another day or two.” He winked at her before writing something on her chart.

The doctor looked up, a hesitant expression on his face. “There is one matter to settle though.”

“What?” she croaked out.

He touched his own neck in an awkward gesture. “There are…marks on you. Is someone,” He glanced pointedly at Declan, who remained impassive, “Hurting you?”

“Yes, but I wanted him to,” she admitted with a blush.

The doctor blushed too, quickly looking away. “I’ll send a nurse to check on you and bring more pain meds in a few minutes. In the meantime, I know there’s an anxious young man who wants to assure himself that you’re going to be fine.”

As the doctor walked past Declan, he nodded at him. “Now you can stop stomping around the hospital like a bear with a thorn in its paw, Mr. Mulgrew.” He said the words in a kind, slightly teasing fashion, as he slipped by him and out of the room. Apparently, he was reassured that Declan had no evil intentions toward her. If he only knew, she thought with a slight upturn of her lips.

After the doctor had left, Kat waited for Declan to approach, but he still stood at the periphery, just hovering. Could it be that he was uncertain of his welcome? She frowned as she extended a hand, wiggling her fingers to indicate she wanted him to take it. It was worrisome when he continued hesitating for a moment before stepping forward and finally taking her hand. He sat on the bed beside her, disdaining the chair provided for visitors, which reassured her.

“Thank you for saving me.”

His lips twisted. “It seemed like the very least I could do, considering I’m the one who endangered your life to start with.”

Kat rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly the idiot who decided to break into the boathouse and have a freak accident and get stuck, Declan.”

He didn’t respond with humor or anything else besides the utmost seriousness. “I made you so miserable, and I hurt you so badly, that I drove you to that desperate act. You would have rather died than stay with me another moment, and that is solely my fault.”

She gasped softly, responding to his words, but even more so to the raw pain in his eyes. She didn’t have to think twice before tightening her hand around his and bringing her other up to trap his between both of hers. She lifted his slightly resisting hand to her mouth and pressed a kiss to the knuckles. “I wasn’t running away from you.”

He snorted, though he didn’t pull away from her. Instead, his hand unclenched and he cupped her cheek, as though it was an unconscious action. “Yeah, right. Now that you’re back in civilization, you can tell them what I’ve done to you, and they’ll arrest me. With the justice system we have, I’ll either end up with life in prison or sixty days’ probation.”

She smiled slightly, though his comment wasn’t really funny. It was more insightful and bitter than anything, but she couldn’t disagree. “I don’t intend to tell anyone anything. What happened on the island is between us. It’s private.”

He shrugged, and his expression indicated it didn’t really matter. “Whatever you want to do is fine. Doesn’t matter where I am.”

She frowned at him. “It matters to me. I don’t intend to come visit you in solitary confinement or whatever. Also, I hear conjugal visits are just awkward.”

He still didn’t smile. “I can’t go back to what I was before. Losing you… Nothing else is important anymore.”

The heaviness in the way he held his shoulders and the weariness in his tone looked like they were a familiar cloak he had worn often. He had the posture of someone who had given up, and it alarmed her. “What do you mean, you can’t go back to before?”

“After Hilary and Cordelia… After I lost them, it seemed like there was nothing left to live for. I bought an island to escape the world, but I still couldn’t escape myself. Hilary had wanted me to go with her that day, but I was too busy. I wouldn’t cancel a meeting, so I was talking about exports and financial figures while Joseph Evans was raping and murdering her and Cordelia. I failed them, and I knew I deserved to eat a bullet.”

She flinched, remembering the gun in his nightstand and realizing that hadn’t been there for self-protection, or even as a way to keep her in line. She could visualize him sitting on his bed while holding the gun and thinking about ending it all. Her fingers tightened around his wrist, and she pulled his hand closer to her cheek, covering it with her other one. “Please don’t say that. Don’t think that way.”

“Ironically enough, you saved me, Kat.”

She frowned at him, confused. “How did I save you?”

“I was so angry, and there was no one at whom to direct that rage. I drank myself practically to death and had an insane love affair with a loaded gun, keeping just one bullet in the chamber. Every night, I spun it, put it in my mouth, and pressed the trigger. As I did so, even I wasn’t certain if I wanted it to be a blank or live round.” He shook his head. “Clearly, it never was the live round, but it would have come up eventually.”

“What changed?” She knew it had something to do with her, but she didn’t know what.

“There was an article in the paper, some honors student thing. It was talking about a local girl who had won a scholarship. I still kept a subscription to the paper, you know? I don’t know why, aside from sentimental reasons. Hillary love that neighborhood so much, though it had never felt completely like home to me. I guess it just was a habit to read it when it came with the monthly mail.”

She nodded, encouraging him to continue as she got an inkling of what he would say next.

“There was a picture of the senior girl—one of those grainy black and whites, but I recognized you immediately. It had been thirteen months since I’d seen you in that courtroom, but I knew who you were. I knew you were Joe Evans’ daughter, and rage filled me.” His expression was tortured, though his voice was almost impersonal. “I ripped that article to shreds and burned it in the fireplace, wishing the whole time it was you instead of just the paper.”

She flinched at the violent words, though she could understand what had led him to feel that way. She had been a convenient target for his anger when there had been no one else available.

“Before then, my day consisted of obsessing over the trial, what had gone wrong, my last few months with Hilary, and my disappointment with having lost the chance to ever meet Cordelia. It always ended with my nightly routine of too much fucking alcohol and spinning the bullet chamber before trying to shoot myself without success. Then I’d wake up and do the whole damn thing again the next day.”

She rubbed her cheek against his fingers, turning her head slightly to press a kiss to his palm. He flinched at the tender gesture, and his hand flexed as though he wanted to pull away. Kat tightened her hold to keep him from doing so. She didn’t speak, just allowing him to tell her in his own time and way.

“After that article came, suddenly I had a focus for my rage. I started fantasizing about the ways I would make you pay.” There was a haunted look in his eyes when he met her gaze, and a clear apology as well. “At first, it was strictly violent. I wanted to beat you and strangle you and stab you in…” He trailed off, closing his eyes for a moment and looking sick.

His eyes opened again, and they were still haunted. “Then it evolved. There were still the violent images, but the fantasies became sexual too. I started to fantasize about wrapping my fingers around your throat and strangling the life of you out of you while you sucked my cock. I wanted to do awful, horrible things to you, but I also wanted to taste you and fuck you and own you. It all became a jumbled mess in my mind, and I couldn’t think about you without getting angry and hard at the same time.”

She shivered under the intensity of his confession, but it was a mild fear. She had seen his worst, and hearing what he imagined doing and knowing he had never done those things allayed the stirring of disquiet. “Go on,” she encouraged gently when he fell silent again, looking as though he was preparing himself for her revulsion.

He looked away from her, obviously deeply ashamed. “I started learning everything about you that I could. I contacted your foster parents to make sure they were going to keep you and offered them money to make it easier.” His gaze flicked back to hers. “I swear to you that I’m sure they were going to keep you anyway.”

She nodded. “I imagine they were. Claire and Clay have always been good people, and I know they love me. I’m okay with them accepting your help, and I’ll get over them hiding it from me.”

“They, of course, had no idea about the real reason I wanted to help, and why I wanted to keep tabs on you. I wanted to demand daily updates and have unfettered access to you, but I knew that would arouse their suspicions. Instead, I played it cool and only occasionally asked about you when I called to make sure they had received the checks I sent. I learned little tidbits about you, and Claire started to write me letters filled with your goings-ons. She sent me pictures and scraps of information, and as I started to realize you were more than just Joe Evans’ daughter, my fantasies changed again.”

“How so?”

“I still wanted to do dark and terrible things to you, and I fully indulged those fantasies by stocking the armoire and storing them in my brain, but I no longer wanted to destroy you. I wanted to own and control you, and I wanted to keep you. I got the idea that you could give me children and companionship, the things your father had taken from me.

“As the years passed, it wasn’t about revenge any longer, but simply obsession. I needed you and had to have you, so I made it happen. I waited as long as I could, hoping to give you a chance to have some normal life experiences and finish school before succumbing to my need to completely possess and consume you. If I’d given in to the urges inside me sooner, I would have kidnapped you from your dorm room and locked you away with me on the island four years ago.”

She nodded, revealing no reaction. Her heartbeat accelerated at the thought, and she wasn’t sure if it was from relief or regret that he hadn’t. They had lost for years, but she wouldn’t have been able to handle him or his dark appetites when she was freshly out of high school and barely eighteen. She could barely handle them now, though it was her own intense reaction that frightened her far more than his actions.

“After I had you there, you know the rest.”

She nodded. “I know what it turned me into. That was what terrified me, Declan. I was so frightened and shocked by my own behavior that I knew I had to get away, or I’d sink into that role forever.”

He flinched, but his lip curved into a halfhearted smile. “I guess I’m glad to hear it wasn’t completely me that made you so desperate to escape that you nearly killed yourself in the process.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No, it wasn’t you. That last night together, before the morning a couple of days ago, I was deliberately pushing you. I was being my worst and bratty itself, because I wanted to see you lose control.”

He frowned. “Why would you do that? You have no idea what I’m capable of.”

Kat smiled at him. “Yes, I do. I saw you lose control and get extremely angry with me, but at no time did you do anything that could have seriously harmed me or endangered me. You forced me to beg for your attention, and I ended up begging for you to choke me all on my own.”

She broke off, lowering her voice to a whisper after she glanced at the door to make sure no one was looking. “That was what broke me, and not you. My own depravity was what terrified me. I was escaping that, because I already knew that even at the boundaries of your control, and so enraged with me that you could have killed me, you still made sure I was sexually satisfied, and you took care of me afterward. I knew I could trust you, but I couldn’t trust myself.”