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Jason grinned down at Tessa. “Whatever you do, don’t flatter him. His head’s already big enough.” Without asking if she wanted to change partners, he handed her over to his brother, leaving Tessa feeling once again like a piece of property.
* * *
It was a night made for romance. The glass wall in the hotel room provided a dazzling view of the city lights. A late-afternoon rain had washed away the smog, and the stars shone like diamonds in the midnight black sky.
“Would you like some champagne?” Reece had ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon and caviar to be waiting when they arrived back at the suite. A splendid bouquet of long-stemmed red roses had been delivered, as well.
The story Lena was determined to tell Reese wasn’t exactly a cause for celebration and she debated turning down the offer of champagne. Then decided that a little bottled courage might be in order, after all.
“Thank you. That sounds wonderful.”
Although the words fit the occasion, her expression reminded Reece of a condemned prisoner on the way to the electric chair. The fear he’d felt earlier rose again. Again he tamped it back down and concentrated on opening the wine. The cork came out of the dark green bottle with a discreet pop and a hiss of vapor.
“You do that very well,” Lena murmured. She looked at Reece, so handsome in his custom-tailored tux, marveled not for the first time at the easy sophistication of this man she’d married, and wondered why he hadn’t chosen a sleek, elegant woman from his own world for his wife.
“It’s all in the wrist.” He had no idea if that was the case. But he felt the need to say something to ease the strain building between them. He poured the sparkling wine into the flutes, then handed one to her.
“To the best wife any man could ever wish for,” he said, lifting his glass in a toast.
“To the best husband,” she corrected quietly.
Reece wished to hell she’d smiled when she’d said that. “How about a compromise? To us. And a New Year filled with love and laughter.”
Reece swore inwardly when he watched the suspicious sheen of moisture suddenly appear in her eyes.
“To us.” It was little more than a whisper. Lena took a sip. Although the sparkling wine danced like laughter on her tongue, her mood remained bleak. When the suffocating silence settled over them again, she began nervously rubbing a crimson rose petal between her thumb and index finger, releasing the blossom’s sweet fragrance.
Never having been one for game playing, Reece decided that as much as he wanted to let Lena take her time with whatever it was she wanted to say, he’d go nuts if they didn’t just cut to the chase.
“Is this about your visit to Dr. Carstairs?”
“No.” She abandoned plucking petals from the roses and began running her finger nervously up the crystal stem of the champagne flute. “Yes.” She shook her head. “No.”
Reece forced a smile he was a very long way from feeling. Happy goddamn New Year. He wondered what magic it would take to make his wife happy.
“Which is it, sweetheart?” Not wanting to make things worse than they already appeared to be, he managed, just barely, to keep his building frustration from his voice.
Her bare shoulders slumped. “Dr. Carstairs only confirmed what all the other doctors have already told me. That there’s no way I can ever conceive a child.”
She’d already shared the unhappy news with Molly, who’d assured her that her infertility, possibly due to a sexually transmitted pelvic infection acquired before her marriage, had not been punishment from God for her promiscuous behavior. But still, having been brought up under the stern guidance of the St. Joseph nuns, Lena couldn’t help wondering.
“I always wanted children,” she murmured, looking out over the city, wondering how many people were sitting home alone, wishing they had someone—anyone—to love them. New Year’s, she knew from personal experience, could be one of the loneliest nights of the year. That thought reminded her of all the strangers she’d gone to bed with, just to avoid being alone. “I always dreamed of becoming the mother I never had.”
“I know how important having a child is to you, sweetheart,” Reece said carefully, feeling as if he were making his way across a deadly conversational minefield. “But I’ve never felt any great need to perpetuate the Longworth name. And we could adopt.”
“I suppose that’s one possibility.”
She sighed and sat down in the suede chair across the room. Although he longed to take her in his arms, Reece took the fact that she’d chosen not to sit next to him on the sofa as a sign she needed her own space to tell him what was bothering her.
“You never asked how my mother and father died.”
“I figured you’d tell me. When you were ready.”
She smiled at that. A soft sad smile that tore at something elemental inside Reece. “You are so incredible. I’ve never known anyone with such patience.”
For some reason, her words rankled. “Dammit, Lena, don’t make me into any kind of saint. Because I’m not. I’m just a man. Who loves you with a depth I never would have imagined possible. I’ve tried to come up with a word for how I feel. Obsession comes close. But it’s still not enough.”
She felt the traitorous tears overbrimming her eyes. “I’m never going to make it through this if you keep making me cry.”
Reece managed, just barely, to remain where he was, watching with admiration as she drew in a deep, calming breath. She’d changed since Molly’s attack, the emotionally frail young bride he’d married had begun to show signs of becoming an independent woman.
Lena turned her gaze away from him and looked back out the window at the lights of the city below them. “I can’t remember a time when my parents weren’t fighting.” Her voice was soft, little more than a whisper, but Reece had no difficulty hearing it in the hushed room. “About everything. And anything. My father was a big man. With a big hairy belly that always stuck out from beneath his sweat-stained undershirt. And big hands that loved to hit little girls. But of course, I was very little, so perhaps he wasn’t so big at all. Perhaps he just seemed that way....
“Did I ever tell you I had a kitten?”
“No,” Reece said carefully, feeling like he’d just entered one of those dark carnival fun houses that weren’t really any fun at all but filled with monsters who’d gleefully leap out and scare the piss out of little kids.
“Her name was Miss Puss in Boots.” She turned toward him, her eyes as flat as her voice. “Because she had white paws. Like little boots. I found her in the alley and brought her home. Molly helped me hide her in our bedroom closet and every night I’d let her out of her box and she’d sneak beneath the blanket and curl up next to me and purr. I used to listen to that sound, like a small warm little engine, and it helped me block out the sound of the fighting.”
She fell silent. Reece waited.
“One night he came in to drag us out of bed for some perceived misbehavior. I can’t remember what, and it probably wasn’t anything at all. Drinking always made him paranoid and he’d imagine all sorts of things we might have done. Or even thought.
“Anyway, he found Miss Puss. He pulled her out of the bed, and Molly tried to stop him. He knocked her away and she hit her head on the corner of the metal bed frame. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget that sound.
“She still has the scar on her temple. It’s faint, but if you know it’s there, you can see it. There was so much blood, I thought she was going to die. But of course she didn’t....
“Then he strangled Miss Puss with his big hairy hands. And threatened to do the same to us if we ever brought another animal into his house.”
As an ER doctor, Reece thought he’d seen all the evils humans could do to one another. But never had such horror hit so close to home.
“My God, Lena—”
“No.” She held up a hand. “Please, just let me get this all out. Because it’s taken me years to get up the nerve to say it out loud, and if I stop, I may never be able to do it again.”
Reece tamped down his building fury and nodded.
“I think he raped our mother that night. I didn’t understand the sounds coming through the wall from their bedroom at the time. But now I believe that’s what happened. Then he left the house to go out drinking.
“Molly and I tried to see if Mama was all right—we could hear her crying—but she wouldn’t open her bedroom door. She told us to go to bed and everything would be all right in the morning.... She always said that. But of course it never was.”
Lena shook her head and dragged her hand through her hair. In the moonlight streaming in through the window, the diamonds in her wedding band glistened like ice.
“Molly put a Band-Aid on her head to stop the bleeding, which it really didn’t do, but it finally slowed down. At least it wasn’t streaming down her face anymore.
“Once Mama seemed to be all right, Molly wrapped Miss Puss in a clean nightgown. Then, when we knew he wasn’t coming back that night, when it was safe, she got a flashlight and we went out in the backyard and Molly dug a hole and we buried Miss Puss.
“Our house was by Dodger Stadium and Molly had just finished saying a prayer, when the game ended and suddenly the sky lit up with the most wonderful fireworks.”
She closed her eyes. “I can still see them today. They were so beautiful. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And Molly told me they were in celebration of Miss Puss’s arrival in heaven, where all the angels would love her and she’d have all the cream and kibble she’d ever want.”
Reece had always known what a special person Molly was, but for the first time he was getting a sense of the burden she’d had put on her young shoulders, and he finally began to understand her seemingly limitless capacity for caring.
As if in a trance, Lena continued to relate the story of the lives and times of Lena and Molly McBride. Reece had been sickened by the saga of Miss Puss, but he was horrified by his wife’s tale of the murder/suicide of her parents.
When she was finally finished, when she’d unburdened her heart and her soul, including the self-
destructive sexual behavior that may have left her unable to have children, she turned to him, her eyes wide and dark in her too-pale face.
“So now you know the truth. And I’ll understand if you decide you can’t love me any longer.”
A complicated rage burned through Reece. He wanted to beat her dead father to a pulp for having inflicted such terrible pain on his family. His feelings for Lena’s mother wavered somewhere between fury and pity.
But since there was nothing he could do to correct past sins, at this moment Reece’s overriding urge was to shake his wife. To shout at her. To ask her what the hell kind of man she thought he was that he could ever hold her responsible for any of those horrors she’d described. But understanding that his anger was directed toward the injustice of what had been done to her, he managed, just barely, to hold his tongue.
“I told you—” He had to force the words past the massive lump of anguished fury that had taken up residence in his throat. “I love you, Lena.” Needing to touch her, to hold her, he crossed the room and drew her into his arms. “More than life itself.”
“But…”
“Shh.” He pressed a finger against her trembling lips. She was like a block of ice in his arms. “You’ve had your say. Now it’s my turn, okay?”
She nodded, her shimmering wet eyes on his.
“If I could go back in time and erase all those things that happened, I would. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way, so I can’t change the past. But the one thing I can do is to vow to spend the rest of my life helping you to feel happy. And safe.”
Relief flooded through Lena, like a cool crystal river.
“You’ve already done that,” she said on a deep, shuddering breath. “I realize I don’t say it enough, but I’ve been happier since meeting you than I ever thought possible. And I’ve never felt so safe.” Wrapping her arms around his waist, Lena hung on for dear life.
Reece kissed her then. A deep, heartfelt kiss filled with love and promise. And then he carried her into the bedroom, where he made love to her with a tenderness that made her cry all over again.
But this time, Lena’s tears were not born of sorrow, but joy.
Chapter Seven
“You’re very good,” Miles said with apparent surprise as he led Tessa through a sophisticated tango.
She tilted her head back and gave him a coolly dismissive look that fit the style of the dance to perfection. “For a ‘chipmunk-cheeked farmer’s daughter’?”
He had the grace to laugh at that. “Thanks to my brother’s expert eye, no one would ever know you weren’t born with a fistful of gilt-edged stock certificates in your lily-white hands.”
He slipped his fingers beneath her hair, brushing at the suddenly ultrasensitive skin at the back of her neck in a way that created little tremors. “I think you should pose for me.”
“Really?” Her pulse quickened. The photographs lining the trophy wall in his Bel Air home looked like a promo for “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
“You’re a gorgeous woman, Tessa. With the right photographs you could end up owning this town.”
“Right now I’d settle for a part in a feminine hygiene product commercial,” she muttered.
Although Jason had told her that it would be almost impossible to make an appointment with an agent during the holidays, she was admittedly impatient. And there was also the salient fact that her traveler’s checks were disappearing a great deal faster than expected.
His hand warmed her back as he bent her into a low dip. Tessa could feel each of his long fingers against the pale flesh bared by the halter-style dress. “Oh, I think we can do a great deal better than that.”
There was something in his eyes—something that promised more than a photography sitting—that caused a frisson of fear to skim up her spine. But before she could dwell on it, the music stopped.
“You can let me up now,” she suggested.
“I suppose you’re right.” His smile was slow and unnervingly intimate as he kept her bent backward over his arm. If he suddenly let go of her, she’d fall to the floor.
“Miles—” Her heart was hammering in her throat. From fear. And something else. An emotion darker and more dangerous than she’d ever felt before. And strangely, more enticing.
They’d become frozen in some sort of strange tableau, Miles’s hooded eyes looking down at her, while she stared back up at him, when a familiar deep voice shattered the spell.
“Dammit, Miles,” Jason complained, “quit playing your cat-and-mouse games with Tessa. She’s not one of your usual women. She’s a nice girl.”
“So you keep telling me.” His eyes not moving from hers, Miles lifted her back to an upright position. But as he did so, his fingers dipped even lower beneath the black silk, creating a flare of sparks. “Such a pity,” he murmured as he trailed the back of his other hand down the side of her face. Tessa could feel the heat, the bane of a true redhead, rising in her cheeks.
“Don’t pay any attention to my brother.” Jason knocked Miles’s hand from her face in a fraternal, nonaggressive way that suggested this was not the first time he’d had to come to the rescue of one of his dates. “Anyone in town can tell you that Miles is the evil twin.”
“It’s a dirty job.” Miles’s insolent eyes settled on her lips in a way that made Tessa’s mouth go dry. “But someone’s got to do it.... So, when are we going to do it?”
“Do it?” she echoed blankly.
“Your photos. As it happens, I have some time next Wednesday afternoon about five.”
Tessa couldn’t help glancing over at Jason, who laughed in response. “You’ve gotten her spooked, Miles.” He put his arm around her waist and drew her against his side in a possessive gesture that made Tessa feel immediately safe. “I’ll go with you and stand guard to make certain my evil twin doesn’t get any kinky ideas, then afterward we’ll go out on the town.”
“That sounds wonderful.” There was one more thing to be considered. She didn’t want to be obligated in any way to Miles. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your fitting me into your busy schedule, but I’m not certain I can afford—”
“Why don’t you let me worry about that,” Jason broke in smoothly.
“But you’ve already done so much.”
“And had a dandy time, too.” His smile, in contrast to his brother’s, was warm and absolutely harmless. “Why hoard money when you can use it to make people feel good?”
He was such a good man. Such a generous one. Tessa was instantly reassured. “I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
He winked in a sexy, seductive way she suspected very few women could resist. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something. If we put our heads together.”
He then turned to Miles. “Five o’clock it is. And don’t forget, my partner, Dan Kovaleski, just got transferred to the vice squad. You try to use my girl for any of those dirty pictures you like to take, and I’ll turn you in.”
“The kid always was the family snitch,” Miles told Tessa in a light, easygoing way that almost made her think she’d imagined his earlier dark edge. “I suppose that’s why he became a cop.”
As the twin brothers shared a laugh, Tessa’s mind was not on a joke she suspected they’d shared before, but on what Jason had called her.
My girl.
As the words warmed her, thrilled her, Tessa decided that they were the sweetest she’d ever heard.
