Killing Secrets (13 page)

He frowned. “No. Why? Is something wrong?”

“No.” She chastised herself for her disquiet. It was a package, for crying out loud. It was probably from Katy and she just forgot to add the return address. Maybe she only sent a few of the paperbacks. The box certainly hadn’t come from her mother’s estranged family in Dallas. She hadn’t bothered to tell them where she was going because they were still upset and fighting what her great-aunt Amanda had done with her estate when she died three months ago. Her lawyers were talking to their lawyers and that’s the way it would continue until the case was settled.

The only other person from her old life that knew she was in Denver was Greg…and, that’s where these prickles of anxiety were born. He hadn’t exactly been in a gift-giving mood yesterday when Patrick chased him off the property.

“Rachel?” Patrick said, his hand holding out scissors to cut through the tape sealing the contents, his gaze searching her face. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

“No. I’m good,” she replied with a tight smile. She took the scissors from Patrick’s hand and slit the tape. Setting the shears down, she gathered the courage to lift the flaps and expose what was inside. For a moment the contents didn’t register. Then, her heart hiccupped. Stopped.

From her seat across the kitchen island, Jane peered into the box. “Oh! That’s pretty,” she said, smiling, unaware Rachel’s stomach had begun to roil like a mass of angry rattlesnakes.

“Rachel?”

Patrick’s voice seemed to come from far away, and she was incapable of responding. Her fingers trembling, unable to stop herself, she lifted the gorgeous blue silk dress from the box by the shoulders. Her knees grew weak as she remembered where she’d last seen the designer dress. It was the one she’d been wearing the night Greg raped her. The night he’d beaten her senseless.

In the next moment, she spotted the leather horsewhip resting in the bottom of the box where it had been hidden from view beneath the dress. There were rust-colored stains streaked across the top eight inches of the otherwise pristine buff leather that encased the whip.

Blood.
Her blood.

The shaking in her hands raced up her arms. She fought to push down the bile climbing her throat. Losing the battle, she dropped the silk dress into a pile on the floor, turned and raced out of the kitchen down the hall to the bathroom. She barely made it. Her knees hit the cold, porcelain tile seconds before she emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet.

Chapter Ten

Immobilized by Rachel’s sudden disappearance from the kitchen, Patrick stared at the empty doorway she’d run through. “What…?”

The sounds of vomiting coming from down the hall kicked his brain into high gear. Why hadn’t he asked for the details of Rachel’s “troubles”? Oh, yeah, he’d become a heartless ass and hadn’t wanted to know. But, looking down at the horsewhip curled innocently at the bottom of the delivery box, remembering the brutal look in Greg Bishop’s icy blue eyes, he did know. He cursed.

Stalking across the kitchen after Rachel, he looked over his shoulder at Jane. “Jane, don’t touch anything,” he said. “Call the precinct. Tell them to get a car here. Now!”

Leaving his office manager to it, Patrick raced down the hallway toward the bathroom where he could still hear Rachel alternately vomiting and groaning. The sight that met his eyes when he stopped in the doorway made him curse.

Rachel knelt on the floor with both hands braced on the toilet seat and retched into the bowl. She swayed despite her efforts to hold position.

Patrick didn’t think before he took action. Kneeling at her back, he did what his mother always did when he was sick as a kid and feeling weak with the flu. He placed his right hand across Rachel’s clammy forehead to support her head, his left to the back of her T-shirt where he rubbed upward from the base of her spine to her neck.

At his first touch, she shied away with a startled cry, but another spasm ripped at her stomach and distracted her from what he was doing. She began to settle as he held her in place and continued to rub her back. Up. Down. Up. Down. She leaned into the third upward stroke.

When her T-shirt rode up with her position change, exposing a strip of skin above the waistband of her jeans, he remembered how much better his mother’s warm hand felt on his naked back. He dipped his hand under the material to Rachel’s silky skin before he realized his mistake.

For a moment, he hesitated, aware of the dangerous territory he’d promised himself he wouldn’t breach. He’d acknowledged only this morning that his attraction to Rachel was unreasonable. He was supposed to turn her and little Amanda over to Jack soon, let a police officer take care of them so he could return to his side of the hedge. So he could put his libido back into the deep freeze.

That intent was fading under the heat of her skin burning into his palm, his protective instincts kicking in and pushing everything else aside. Despite the sour smell of vomit that permeated the bathroom, the delicate scent of lilacs rose from Rachel slim curves and curled around his senses to remind him she was a woman. A woman in trouble. His calloused hand, unbearably sensitive on the small of her back above her form-fitting jeans, felt both intrusive and possessive.

What he was doing was helping her though. She stopped vomiting, her stomach emptied, although a dry heave wracked her. Once. Twice. She swayed, clearly weakened.

You’re already committed to helping her. You can’t stop.

His jaw tight, he slowly inched his fingers up her spine. Two inches. His massage stopped when Rachel’s silky smooth skin gave way to a raised line of roughness. Another fraction upward felt smooth. Beyond that, he bumped over another, thicker line. Then another. A sick feeling slammed into his gut when he realized what lay beneath his hand.

Falling back on his heels, he yanked the T-shirt up so he could look at Rachel’s back above her jeans. Every place he’d touched rough skin was a raised, puckered scar. There were at least ten of them, some running horizontally across her back, some crisscrossed, some wrapped around her waist and hip to what he suspected were more scars on her belly. They were pink, shiny, not the white color of old scars.

Anger swelled, his suspicions confirmed. Bishop might not have knocked Rachel down the other day, but it looked like she’d been beaten fairly recently. With the horsewhip that sat in the box on the kitchen counter? “I should have killed him when I had the chance,” he muttered, barely able to speak around his rage at what her ex had done to her.

Rachel must have heard the anger in his low voice or felt his fingers tighten on her T-shirt because she looked over her shoulder, cried out, and yanked her shirt down. “Don’t!” she sputtered, trying to scoot away.

Patrick looked into her wild eyes and cursed his stupidity, but he refused to let her go. He
couldn’t
. He lowered the toilet seat and flushed it, gathered her into his arms, stood up and sat back down on the closed lid with her on his lap. “Shh, Rach,” he said, pushing his voice into a reassuring calm he did not feel.

With her nestled close, he could feel tremors tear at her slim frame testifying to the fragility of her composure. She was so close to completely unraveling, it was all he could do not to set her down, find Bishop, and rip his head off. Trying to keep his voice low and non-threatening almost took more control than he had. “You’re safe, honey. I won’t let him hurt you. He can’t hurt you again. It’s okay.”

Rachel looked up at him with stricken, brown eyes. “I-I’m sorry! I can’t—oh, dear God, he—” She burst into tears.

A hard knot developed in Patrick’s chest right under the spot where her tears soaked his work shirt. He held her closer with each shudder, with each sob, although he told himself he should pull away. He wanted to regain his distance, but his ability to do that crumbled the moment he touched Rachel in his parents’ back yard yesterday and stood toe-to-toe with her ex-husband.
Had it only been yesterday?
He hadn’t been able to walk away then. He wasn’t walking away from her now.

“Rachel,” he whispered into her hair, his hand tucked protectively around the back of her neck. “Stop, honey. It’ll be okay.”

All he had to do was figure out how.

~~~

When Rachel woke up in the dark bedroom that she’d been using since her arrival in Denver, she peered at the digital clock sitting on the dresser. Two o’clock. She’d only meant to sleep until midnight, just long enough to gather her strength before she ran again.

This time, she had to do it alone. Katy could no longer help her. Evelyn and Ross Thorne meant well when they’d offered her a place to hide, but she was no longer hidden. She couldn’t jeopardize them or their family any longer. She couldn’t bear the thought of Greg taking out his anger on Patrick. It was as unbearable as thinking about her ex-husband getting his hands on Amanda.

She had to break ties with everything and everyone she knew to keep her daughter safe. She couldn’t allow anyone to talk her out of bolting like the frightened rabbit she was or she didn’t stand a chance of escaping Greg before he followed up on the threat he’d made with the contents of the box delivered before dinner. The police officers that showed up in response to Jane’s phone call had removed the box and contents from the house, taking it with them to the station so they could contact the delivery service and the driver in the hope of tracking it back to Greg
.

The package removal didn’t eradicate the threat from Rachel’s mind.

Message received. Loud and clear.

Put on the clothing I picked for you when I dressed you to suit my desires. Relinquish control of yourself and don the persona that serves my desires, or suffer the consequences
.
“’Til death, darlin’. You’d better get it because, next time, it’ll be your precious brat. And, next time…I…won’t…stop.”

Looking down at the little girl she loved more than life itself, snuggled into her side, Rachel watched her sleep. Amanda’s eyelids twitched in a dream. Her face twisted with distress. She whimpered, as she’d often done in the six months since they fled San Francisco and began sleeping together. Rachel swept baby-fine hair off Amanda’s face, her fingers tracing lightly over her tender skin from temple to jaw. Over and over. Until Amanda settled into a deeper sleep again with a long sigh.

Rachel continued the caress, as much to soothe her child as herself. She hated feeling so helpless. Amanda used to sleep like the dead, hardly moving, never waking once she curled up in her new, big girl’s bed with puppies painted all over the headboard. She’d been a bright-eyed, loving four-year-old whose worst nightmare was a scraped knee.

Until the night Rachel limped out of her bedroom six months ago.

Her little girl’s peaceful dreams had been replaced by nightmares. Nightmares she couldn’t share with her mama since she’d stopped talking. There was little doubt she’d heard everything her father said and did that night. Rachel wished she knew whether Greg said something to Amanda before leaving them alone in the house in a vain attempt to escape the FBI warrant. She’d never know until the doctors could help Amanda work through her trauma.

They’d barely started before Greg’s release from jail. Emotional danger had been replaced with physical danger, and she didn’t have a clue how to protect her child from either. Her heart skipped at the thought of what Greg might do to his daughter if Rachel didn’t give in to his threats.

She pushed the worries to the back of her mind before they could take hold, and inhaled deeply, imprinting Amanda’s scent on her senses, a mix of little girl, the lilac talcum powder she shared with her mother after each bath, and a hint of something new but somehow reassuring.

It was a scent she knew.
Patrick.
Amanda smelled like Patrick.

He’d given the four-year-old one of his T-shirts to sleep in when they’d had a sleepover while Rachel was in the hospital. She didn’t realize the child had dragged the shirt home with her until after Amanda took her bath. The T-shirt was over her head and swamping her little body with material before Rachel saw it and her daughter refused to take it off, her head shaking stubbornly when her mama tried to reason with her.

With the trauma of the past twenty-four hours, Rachel decided it wasn’t worth fighting over. It wasn’t surprising Amanda found comfort in Patrick’s scent. Her mama certainly did.

Not that Rachel needed the illusion of comfort now. That’s all it was. Illusion. What she needed was strength. Strength to pack the rental car, to hit the road again. Strength to go it alone. She’d become too dependent living with Katy. She’d not been confident enough to walk away from the support Katy and her friends, Evelyn and Ross, had offered her. She’d been too scared to strike out on her own last week. Tonight, she had no choice.

Another glance at the dresser and the red numbers of the clock blurred. Sharp pain traveled from the back of her head in both directions. She was tempted to close her eyes again, give in to the sweet oblivion of sleep, but it would only delay the inevitable. And, as her father used to tell her every time she dug in her heels about something she didn’t want to do, it was time to make a decision.
Fish or cut bait, little chickadee. You can’t do both.

With a sigh, she erased her father’s unwelcome voice from her mind and gingerly eased off the bed. There were pain pills that would clear her head in her purse downstairs, but putting the city lights of Denver in her rearview mirror was all she could concentrate on. She’d take some pills after they put a couple hundred miles behind them. Maybe.