Edge of Darkness (20 page)

“How long have I been asleep?” she whispered back, not wanting to break the spell.

His smile grew larger. “A few hours.”

“That long?”

“I didn’t want to disturb you. You looked so peaceful.” His lips quirked. “Though I was a little worried all the noise would frighten Corbin.”

Yawning, she frowned at him. “Noise? What noise?”

He said innocently, “Your snoring. Loud as a buzzsaw, little firecracker—”

Ember gave him a horrified shove in the chest. “I do
not
snore!”

“That’s what you think. It sounded like I had a houseful of lumberjacks—”

“Christian!”

His laugh shook them both. He wrapped his arms tighter around her and kissed her forehead. “Found a sore spot, did I? That was much too easy.”

Suddenly she was stricken with a pang of regret. Much too easy—had she been?

“What?” he asked, tensing.

She sighed. “Are you always going to be able to read my mind like that? It’s really annoying.”

His body relaxed. “I
wish
I could read your mind,” he murmured thoughtfully. “It would solve an awful lot of problems.” He skimmed his fingers over her shoulder and down her arm to the crook of her elbow. “It’s not your mind, though. It’s your body. Your body is an open book for me.”

“Yes,” she said sourly. “Among other things.”

He chuckled, but the sound faded as he trailed his fingers past her elbow and hesitated over the vein on the inside of her arm. Slowly his fingers drifter farther and he began to trace the outline of her scars. One by one, silently and with an almost religious reverence, he learned the length and width of them, where they puckered and pulled, where they were smooth and nearly unnoticeable, all the way from elbow to wrist. She allowed it because she knew he wanted to do it.

And because she was certain he wouldn’t ask her about them again, she was suddenly gripped with the urge to tell him. She began, hesitantly, to speak.

“I was eighteen,” she whispered.

His fingers stilled on her arm. He glanced up at her face, but she dropped her gaze to his chest, hiding, and drew a ragged breath before she continued.

“It was the day I graduated high school. My dad bought me a new car for my graduation present, though it was really for my mom because I would be going away to school in New York in the fall. I’d won a scholarship to Juilliard that spring and I was going to spend the summer performing with the Taos School of Music.”

“The cello,” he whispered, his body utterly still.

Ember nodded. “I was good. I was really good. Better than that, actually, my teachers all thought I’d be the next Yo-Yo Ma. But…you know…” Her voice wavered. She took another breath and said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”

Christian waited, just holding her, watchful and silent. A chunk of wood fell through the grate in the fireplace and sent an orange feather of hot ash floating up into the chimney with a sigh.

“It was a little red Honda, nothing expensive, but I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.” She closed her eyes and remembered with vivid detail her excitement when her father had driven it into the driveway and honked the horn so they would all come outside to see it. The glossy paint, the new car smell, the black tassel from her graduation cap, with the little gold plastic numbers that commemorated the year, which she hung over the rearview mirror.

“I drove it around to all my friends to show off, then picked up my mom and my little brother Auggie. My parents had a special dinner planned for me at my favorite restaurant.”

The name of the restaurant was La Fiesta. Ember would remember that detail for the rest of her life.

“My dad was going to meet us there. He just wanted to finish a painting he’d been commissioned for; it was due the next day. So the three of us went ahead.” She paused, swallowing, feeling an old, familiar weight begin to press down on her chest. Quieter than before, she said, “There used to be these really nasty electrical storms on the mesa during the summer monsoons—they came on sometimes without much warning. So it was raining when it happened…just after sunset…like it is now.”

Christian whispered, “Baby.”

The pressure in her chest increased. She moistened her lips, ignoring the water gathering beneath her closed eyelids. “The car hydroplaned. There weren’t guardrails on the main highway then, between the oncoming traffic or on the shoulder. So when I lost control of the car, we spun right into oncoming traffic, and then went over the edge into a ravine.”

Christian’s fingers were digging into her arm. He’d stopped breathing.

“They put in guardrails after,” she whispered. “So it could never happen again.”

It was the second worst car crash in New Mexico history. There were eleven vehicles involved by the time it was over, and thirteen fatalities.

Thirteen dead.

Ember was the only one who survived.

When she hit the first car, a Chevy truck that crushed the entire right side of her Honda, her sliding spin instantly and violently changed to a flying tumble that rolled them over and over, shattering every window as it went. She remembered nothing of that roll but the screaming, which seemed to go on and on and come from everywhere. There was the sensation of motion and gravity pulling in the wrong direction, then a horrible sound like a bomb detonation, then blackness.

When she blinked her eyes open, she was upside down, still strapped into the driver’s seat, and her mother was dead in the passenger seat beside her.

In the back seat, her little brother was screaming.

There was a lot of smoke and water, along with the acrid stench of burned electrical wire and scorched rubber. Ember’s left arm had been crushed between the seat and the driver’s door, which was now a crumpled hunk of metal. She couldn’t turn her head to look at Auggie because there was something wrong with her neck, but she could see his face in the cracked rearview mirror. She saw him lying there, his face contorted in pain, his legs mangled beneath him. He hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.

She found out later it was almost twenty minutes before the paramedics and police came; there was no one left alive but her. The closest cell tower had gone down in the storm, so the cars that arrived on the scene immediately after the accident had no mobile phone service. Someone had to drive all the way back into town to the police station to report it.

Ember hung upside down in the car in the smoke and the rain for twenty minutes, with her dead mother beside her, while her little brother slowly bled to death in the back seat.

And all the while he cried. Through her agony and shock, she tried her best to comfort him, telling him it would be okay, they were going to be all right, someone was going to come. But over and over, he just kept crying and pleading, “The Broken Man is coming to get me, Ember. Don’t let him get me. Don’t let him get me,” until finally his cries turned to silence and the only sound was the rain.

The Broken Man.

Those three words forever after haunted her, like a trinity of demons sent from the blackest bowels of hell by the devil himself.

She whispered, “My father couldn’t bear to stay in New Mexico after that. We moved to Florida, but that wasn’t far enough, so a few months later we moved to Spain. He thought the only way we could start over was in a new country, but it didn’t help.”

Unnoticed and unfettered, tears streamed down her cheeks. “He never finished a painting again. He would start one, then abandon it for another. And I never played the cello again; even after the surgeries, my fingers didn’t work right. There was too much nerve damage.”

She drew in a long, shuddering breath. “Neither one of us ever moved past that day. We went through the motions, but everything was hollow. Nothing meant anything anymore. It was as if we’d both died, too—we were the walking dead. The day I graduated high school was really the last day of my life.”

Christian’s arms around her were crushing. Against her cheek, his heart beat furiously, keeping time with her own. He whispered her name and she had to squeeze her lips together to keep from sobbing because his voice was so full of compassion.

She didn’t deserve his compassion. She deserved only his disgust.

Because there was one other little detail she’d left out. The one detail that mattered the most.

Christian cupped her face in his hands. “I know you blame yourself because you were driving, Ember,” he said urgently, gazing at her with his brows drawn together and his eyes shining with empathy. “But you can’t. It was an accident. It was raining, it could have happened to anyone—”

Ember whispered, “I don’t blame myself because I was driving, Christian. I blame myself because I was
drinking
and driving
.
”

Suddenly it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room. Christian made the smallest little sound of horror, a sound that was reflected in the new look in his eyes, the look that replaced the compassion from seconds before. All the color drained from his face.

As swift and hard as two fingers snapping, he recoiled from her and sat up.

“You have to go,” he said in a hoarse, flat voice, his back turned to her. To Ember it felt like a shotgun blast to the stomach.

Shaking, she whispered, “Christian—”

He stood abruptly, ignoring his nudity, letting the cashmere blanket fall, and strode away. He disappeared into an open door on the far side of the room and reappeared mere seconds later, dressed in a new pair of jeans, carrying a small pile of clothing. Without looking at her, he dropped another pair of jeans and a sweatshirt at her feet, pulled on a white T-shirt over his own head, and said, “Put those on. They won’t fit. You’ll have to roll them up.”

His voice was still flat and empty, his head turned slightly away as if he couldn’t stand to look at her. Ember sat up and pulled the cashmere blanket tightly around her body. The shaking was getting worse, and her throat didn’t seem to be working right; no words would form around the fist-sized lump that blocked it.

Christian strode to the door of the bedroom, pausing just before passing over the threshold. Over his shoulder he said, “Corbin will take you home,” then he walked out.

Without ever once meeting her eyes.

In cold shock, she dressed quickly, rolling up the legs of the jeans to her ankles, the too-long sleeves of the sweatshirt to her wrists. She stood unsteadily, looking around the room but not really seeing anything because there was too much water in her eyes, making her vision waver and swim.

She deserved it—but she hadn’t been expecting it. That’s what really hurt. Shame had kept her secret well-hidden for six years, and with good reason; this moment was proof. No one in their right mind would forgive someone who’d done something so heinous. No one should.

And, most of all, no one as bad as she was deserved to find happiness—or love.

Another lesson learned the very hardest way of all.

With her arms wrapped around her waist, wincing and hunched into herself as if expecting a blow, Ember fled Christian’s bedroom. When she stumbled out the front door, barefoot and crying, Corbin was already waiting in the drive with the car. He stood beside it, holding the door open for her, and tipped his hat in his hand.

She fell into the car, drew herself into a ball on the back seat, and began to quietly sob into her hands.

They drove that way for a while, Corbin silent, Ember’s choked sobs occasionally drowned out by the rain pummeling the roof, by the rhythmic
swish
swish
of the wipers. Finally as they neared her apartment building, Corbin spoke. “It’s not my place to say this, miss, but he’s always been a hothead. And he’s used to getting his own way. I’m sure he didn’t mean whatever he said that’s made you so upset. But just as quickly as he gets mad, he gets over it. He’s going to call you and apologize tomorrow, you’ll see.”

It made her heart ache that he thought this was in any way Christian’s fault.

“It’s not him, Corbin,” she whispered, wiping her eyes and sniffling. “He didn’t do anything wrong; he just finally got to see the real me, that’s all. And he”—she hiccupped—“didn’t like it. Not that I blame him. Not that I blame him at all.”

She saw his frown in the rearview mirror. “I find it hard to believe there could be anything about you that he doesn’t like, miss. Or that anyone wouldn’t like, for that matter. I’ve never seen him so happy. I know you’re to thank for that.”

The car slid to a stop at the curb on the street where he’d stopped that first night he’d brought her here, when she was in the cat costume and Christian had come up to her apartment. A thought occurred to her, something Christian had said that night in her kitchen, and Ember sat up, wiping her nose and face.

In a hoarse whisper, she asked, “Corbin, would it be all right if I asked you a question? A personal question…about Christian?”

He turned in the seat and looked at her, then nodded once.

“It’s just, something Christian told me about…about where he grew up.”

Corbin’s brows lifted. He peered at her in silence, waiting.

“He said there were no cars.”

Corbin nodded, still waiting.

“Well, he told me his parents had been killed in a car accident, and I wondered…I wondered…”

“They were away—on a trip,” he said quietly, and Ember sensed by the tone of his words and the expression on his face there was a lot more to it than that. She didn’t ask for details.

“Oh. I guess…I guess it doesn’t matter. I just wondered what happened. Because my…” She swallowed, and her throat tightened all over again. “Because my mother and brother were killed in a car accident, too.”

A fleeting look of sympathy crossed his face. “I’m very sorry, Miss Jones.” He stared at her thoughtfully for a moment. “It’s terrible to have something so painful in common, but perhaps in a way it could be a blessing, too.”

He saw her look of shock.

“Forgive me. It might be indelicate to say and I may be entirely wrong. But it seems to me that only someone who’s lost someone they love in such a violent way can relate to the pain of another in the same circumstances. You’re kindred spirits, so to speak.”

Kindred spirits. Clearly he didn’t know the circumstances under which she’d left. The pull of morbid curiosity prompted her next question.

“Was it a storm or something? What happened—to his parents?”

Corbin turned back around in his seat. With his hands gripping the steering wheel, staring straight out into the rainy night, he said darkly, “No, not a storm, miss. That would have been merely tragic. It was murder.”

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror, and Ember knew with sudden, freezing surety what he was going to say before he even said it.

Because of course it would be. Of course it would.

“It was a drunk driver. Christian’s parents were instantly killed.” He made a sound of disgust. “The man who hit them survived though, sorry bastard.”

Dying all over again, Ember whispered, “They always do, don’t they?”

Before Corbin could agree with her, Ember opened the door, leapt from the car as if it was on fire, and ran away through the pouring rain.