The Defiant Hero (42 page)
She shook her head. “It became a different kind of fear. Fear he was cheating on me again, fear that it was right there under my nose but I didn’t see it, fear that the entire rest of the world knew but wasn’t telling me. Fear that it was somehow my fault. That I wasn’t good enough for him.”
“I hear you say things like that and I want to kill him all over again. How could you think—”
“This isn’t about Daniel and me,” she interrupted. “This is about you and me.”
That shut him up.
“I had to explain about Daniel, because before I met you, love meant being afraid. But with you . . .”
She laughed again, and again it sounded so sad. “You had no expectations, John. You just . . . liked me. I knew you weren’t telling me the truth about a lot of things, but I never doubted that you liked me. I could see it in everything you did and said, and I loved the way that made me feel. I knew you weren’t perfect—in a lot of ways you’re frighteningly similar to Daniel. All those secrets and deceptions. But when it came to our friendship, you had no ulterior motives and that was so refreshing. You know, that’s why it shook me so badly when you admitted you sought me out in DC to try to get revenge on Daniel.”
“I told you that wasn’t really what I—”
“I know,” she interrupted. “And I believed you—because I had this solid sense that you liked me. You liked me exactly the way I was. You didn’t want to change me, you didn’t disapprove of me. You were just so sweet and so wonderfully okay with me.”
Sweet? “Meg—”
“Just listen, all right?” She looked down at her hands in her lap, at the weapon she still held. “In the end that’s why I let you go,” she told him softly. “I’d fallen in love with you, and I was afraid that making love to you and admitting to myself how much I did love you—I couldn’t have slept with you if I didn’t. I was afraid making love to you would be such a . . . I don’t know, a joyful, wonderful thing, I guess. Everything I felt for you was so clean and sweet and pure. So untainted. I was afraid of letting myself love you even for only one night—and I had no expectations that you truly wanted anything more than that, honestly. But I was afraid that after experiencing that, it would be torture to go back to the fear and disappointment that came with loving Daniel.”
She’d loved him. Nils couldn’t keep his mouth shut a second longer. “Jesus, Meg, didn’t you know that I wanted you to leave him? I didn’t want just one night with you. I wanted—”
“All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t leave Daniel.”
“Why the hell not?”
She looked up at him, looked him straight in the eye. “Because of Amy. My daughter wanted me to try again, John. She didn’t say it in so many words, but I knew. And I’d promised her I’d try. Before she went to England, I promised her I’d give Daniel another chance. She wanted her father back. And I wanted that for her, too.”
“So you sacrificed your own happiness—”
“Yes and no,” she told him. “I sacrificed you. I sacrificed something that I wasn’t sure was real. I sacrificed a chance. A promise of something that might’ve been wonderful.”
“It would have been. Jesus, I’ve always regretted leaving that night. And now . . .”
“Would you have married me?” she asked him. “Or did you just want to sleep with me, John?”
He shook his head. Marriage. Jesus. The idea still scared him. “I don’t know. I wanted more than a one-night stand, I do know that.”
She gave him a small smile for his honesty. “That was a moot question anyway. If I had slept with you, it really wouldn’t have changed anything. I wasn’t going to leave him. That wasn’t an option. And I did love him, too. Please don’t misunderstand that.”
Nils didn’t misunderstand. But he couldn’t believe her. He felt sick. Maybe if he’d been honest with her, if he’d given her what she’d wanted and told her the truth about who he was and where he’d come from, maybe if he’d allowed himself to admit both to her and to himself that he was crazy in love with her . . . Maybe that would have changed everything.
“Even if you’d told me you loved me,” she said, as if she could follow his thoughts, “it wouldn’t have made a difference. I went back to Daniel for Amy.”
For Amy. He’d lost her because of Amy three years ago, and now here it was, happening all over again. Still, he understood. If it had been anything else, he’d argue, try to talk sense into her, try to change her mind. But a mother’s love for a child went beyond sense and logic.
Nils didn’t say anything. He just watched her, knowing what was coming, powerless to change it.
“You better believe that if I could give you up for Amy’s sake three years ago, I would do anything to save her now.” Meg shifted slightly so that she was facing the backseat. “Including kill Osman Razeen. Including . . .” She shook her head.
She held her weapon now with both hands, aimed directly at Razeen’s forehead. “So leave the keys, John, and get out of the car.”
Nils didn’t move. “No,” he said. He laughed. “You can’t tell me you love me and then kick me out of the car. That’s just . . . it’s not fair.”
“Loved,” she corrected him tightly. “Past tense. That was three years ago.”
But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—meet his gaze.
“You know, most of the time, you still lie worth shit,” he told her.
She said it again, louder this time. “Get out of the car, John. I’m not taking you any farther.”
“I need to come with you,” he told her. She wanted the truth? He would give it to her, stark, bare bones. “I need you to let me help you. Because I love you, too. Not past tense, present tense—at least as much as you still love me.”
Meg didn’t say a word, but he knew she wasn’t buying any of it.
“Please,” he said, “if you stop and think it through, you’ll realize that you do need me—now more than ever. Don’t sacrifice me again, Meg.”
There were tears in her eyes. “Don’t sacrifice you? Damn right I won’t sacrifice you. That’s why I’m doing this my way. And yes, that’s probably going to get me killed. But as long as there’s a chance that I can save Amy . . .” She drew in a deep breath. “But I won’t risk your life, too. No way. So get out of the car, or I’m blowing Razeen to hell when I count to three. One.”
She looked at him, and time hung as he gazed into her eyes and saw the truth. If he tried to call her bluff, she was going to kill Osman Razeen. Not just to save Amy, but to save him, too. Because despite what she said, she loved him still.
“Two.” Her voice shook. “Damn you—don’t make me do this!”
Nils got out of the car.
Meg slipped behind the wheel and pulled away before she would have reached three. She did a yooie, tires screaming on the asphalt as she headed back toward the highway.
And Nils took off at a dead run, bare feet be damned, heading for the glimmer of lights he’d seen just beyond the thicket of trees.
Light.
It was growing stronger, streaming in through the uncurtained windows, penetrating her closed eyes and sending a knifelike shaft of pain directly into her brain.
It was dawn.
Locke kept her eyes tightly shut against both the light and the pain, aware of the fact that her head was drumming nauseatingly, and that her brain felt as if it were sloshing around loose inside her skull.
What had she done?
Her mouth felt as if she’d spent the night gagged, but there was nothing in it now but her own tongue.
Her own tongue. Not . . . someone else’s . . .
The world seemed to shift, and a vivid memory of Sam Starrett, gloriously naked, kissing her, sweeping his tongue into her eager mouth, as he thrust, hard, into her as she spread her legs wide for him, up on . . . the kitchen table . . . ?
Locke opened her eyes.
And shut them fast as the brightness of the day assaulted her.
What had she done?
She opened her eyes just a little, squinting against the light and the pain. Oh, God, she was completely naked, with Starrett sprawled next to her, naked as well, amidst the rumpled sheets of his bed.
She was sticky with something that looked like . . . chocolate? With horror, she saw that it streaked the T-shirt that hung off the handcuffs that still connected her to Starrett, too. The shirt she’d been wearing yesterday before she’d let Sam Starrett undress her—oh, my God, what had she done?
Another flash of memory ripped through her, this one of her gasps of pleasure as Starrett ran his tongue from her breasts to her stomach and then lower, as he licked chocolate syrup from her body. She’d done the same to him, licking him, and taking him into her mouth and . . .
What had she done?
All of the whiskey she’d had the night before churned inside of her and she sat up. The movement made the top of her head feel as if it were going to lift off, and she knew that she was, without a doubt, going to be sick. Dear God, could she even make it to the bathroom? It was impossibly far away and she wasn’t sure if she could get her legs to work—forget about dragging Starrett.
Beside her, he stirred. He stretched, and winced only slightly as he opened his eyes and the morning light hit him.
“Uh-oh.” One look at her face and he somehow knew. It was awkward with the cuffs on their wrists, but he got her off the bed and into the bathroom in record time.
Just in time.
Locke crouched naked on the bathroom floor and leaned over the toilet bowl.
It was violent and vile. Her stomach churned and her throat burned, and vomiting took precedence over all else—including the humiliation.
Although through it she had patches of awareness, a sense of Starrett holding her, murmuring words of nonsensical comfort. It’s all right. What, was he stupid? This was close to the farthest place from all right that she’d ever been in her life.
She felt him wipe her mouth and her face with a cool washcloth. “Go away,” she gasped when the sickness subsided enough for the humiliation to take center stage. “Please go away!”
“I can’t,” he told her softly, as if he somehow knew that talking more loudly than a whisper would split her head open. “I’m sorry, Lys. You’re stuck with me until we can make it into the living room and get the key.”
The key to the handcuffs.
“Oh, God,” she groaned, resting her head against her arm as she still leaned against the toilet. It was going to take a superhuman effort to stand up and walk into the living room, but until she did, she was locked—naked—to Roger Starrett.
Her mortal enemy.
The way she was crouched, she was curled into a ball. That was bad enough, but the idea of having to stand up in front of him and walk—naked—into the living room was mortifying.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she moaned. Talk about self-sabotage. Fifty billion men in the world, and she had to go and have a one-night stand with Roger Starrett. “Fool,” she chastised herself. “I’m such a fool.”
“Give yourself a break.” Starrett rubbed her shoulders and neck with a familiarity that was chilling. “You’re human. You had too much to drink. It’s not that big a deal, Lys.”
“Don’t touch me!” She couldn’t bear it another second and pulled away from him, even though the movement made her head explode. She whipped a towel down from a rack and wrapped it around herself. “And don’t call me Lys.”
Starrett sat on the bathroom floor, much too close, just looking at her. He cleared his throat. “You liked being called Lys last night.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t like it now.” She couldn’t meet his steady gaze, couldn’t bear even to look at him. He was completely unconcerned about his own nakedness, completely comfortable inside his own extremely bare skin.
And why shouldn’t he be? Even hungover, with gold-tinged stubble glistening on his chin, with his hair a mess and his eyes rimmed with red, with streaks of chocolate still on his chest and stomach, he was sexy as hell.
He sighed. “We’ve reached that part, huh? The part about the regrets and recriminations. The embarrassment part. The light of day, dawning of common sense, morning after part.” He laughed, but it was without any humor. “Shit.”
Locke hauled herself to her feet, and her head managed to stay on her shoulders, but just barely. “Please. I need to get the key.”
She needed to take a shower, wash the stickiness of the chocolate from her body, wash away the scent of Starrett—the sweet, faint smell of sex.
If she could, she would wash away the bits and pieces of memories that were coming back, stronger and longer, with remarkable clarity. Condoms. They’d used condoms, at least, thank you, God.
He just sat there, head in his hands, and she tugged on the handcuffs. “Come on.”
Starrett looked up at her. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll run away the minute you unlock me?”
“Please,” she whispered. There was no way she could drag him into the living room. She was barely going to be able to drag herself.
He pushed himself to his feet. “Guess not. Guess it’s me who’s afraid to unlock you. I wish I had more of an appreciation for irony, because—”
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