Puppet On A String (16 page)

      
“Be what? Go ahead, say it.”

      
“You can’t be
right
yet.” She said this knowing only half of what
Shelby
had been through at the detention center.
 

      
“That’s just the point. I need some normalcy to heal. I need to do something other than rattle around in my apartment with nothing to do. I’ve slept until I can’t sleep anymore. I’m sick and tired of daytime TV. I’m bored with books and cleaning and eating. I need some human interaction, for crissakes!”

      
A long pregnant pause followed, and finally a reluctant, “Okay, but just for half a day, and if you show any signs of…well, breaking down, you’re out of here. I love you, but I need you sane,
Shelby
.”

      
“Oh, Maureen, you are a gem!”

Diving into a busy day, waiting tables and making sandwiches,
Vienna
was far from
Shelby
’s thoughts, so was
Col
, Jessup, Clive Darcy and Padraig
Finnian
. She stayed far longer than the four hours Maureen conceded to, and ended the day with a cup of her own coffee and a long talk with her business partner; not about anything to do with her nightmare of incarceration. She smiled as she left the coffeehouse and let Maureen lock the door as she headed to her car.

      
An amazing feeling of relief was beginning to make her feel almost sane. But when she pulled up in front of the apartment, she found Padraig pacing on the steps, obviously annoyed that he had to wait.

      
“Where have you been?” he spit off angrily as she came up the walk.

      
“I had to get out.” Just the expression on his face, and all her restlessness came back to her, the gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach, the agitation over so many lies and half truths and pieces of Shelby Ryan that Padraig could never know. The reality of home seemed far more difficult to deal with now than her weeks in captivity.

      
“You had to get out why? Where’d you go?”

      
“What is this, Padraig, the third degree? I was at the coffee house, working.” She shuffled inside her purse, looking for her keys.

      
“What’d you mean working so soon? We agreed you’d stay home, you needed to rest. You didn’t even answer your cell phone when I called and now you tell me you’ve been gone all day?”

      
“I’m sorry about the cell phone. I guess I didn’t bring it with me.” She opened the front door and moved inside with Padraig at her back. “I was getting restless, Padraig,” she said with a sigh. And now she was tired after a long day.

      
“Restless for what? I don’t understand. Is there something you’re not telling me?”

      
Dammit
! Why wouldn’t he stop!

      
But he wouldn’t stop. He spun her around, and though she was afraid to look him in the face, she had no choice now. He stared her down with his green eyes almost ruthless the way they appraised her. She’d never seen him quite like this in their three years together. Everything about him made her shudder in strange ways.

      
She wanted him, but there was so much that he didn’t know about her, so much she’d deliberately kept hidden. Why would he need to know about the kinky sex with Clive and his demented friends if she had no intention to go back there? It seemed like good excuse at the time. And it worked perfectly until the hard S&M in captivity brought back her masochistic desires. Submission to sadists was as real to her now as it was when she became Clive Darcy’s slavegirl. There’d be no hiding from the truth again. But Padraig
Finnian
would never understand how or why she could endure the beatings and the hard sex. How could she even admit to her Irish boyfriend that her body still craved that rough abuse? At night when Padraig wasn’t with her, this was what she thought about. There wasn’t a gentle thought in her head, just the images of surrender and punishment and the exhilarating ride on waves of pain.

      
“Padraig, I don’t know if I can be with you now,” she said to him, sighing heavily. She moved into the living room and flung her purse on a chair.

      
“What? What do you mean?” he came after her. “Turn around and look at me.”

      
She turned to see his eyes still flashing, though they were full of worry now.

      
“I-I’m sorry. I just don’t think this is going to work.”

      
“What the hell are you telling me?”

      
“The truth. The truth about me. You have to know that I’ve kept things from you. Not just now, but before. And that’s not right.”

      
“And what is it that that you’ve kept from me?”

      
“Padraig, please. This is so difficult…”

      
“What’s so difficult about the truth?” he pressed, moving closer still.

      
“They did terrible things to me when I was incarcerated. Terrible things. Things that would give most women nightmares for a long time.
Most
women, anyway.”

      
He stared at her skeptically. “But not you, eh?”

      
“Not in the same way,” she admitted. And now there was no way out, none. “Sit down, Padraig, please.”

      
They sat on opposite couches;
Shelby
curled up in the corner of one, Padraig in the center of the other leaning forward, his eyes not wavering from his distraught girlfriend.

      
“I never told you this because I was hoping that I could just forget it…but now I have to tell you.”

      
“Tell me what?”

      
“I have a past with a man who used to do those sorts of things to me. The things Col. Jessup and the others did while I was captive. He would bind me, beat me, and make me crawl at his feet. The reason he could do that was because I loved it. I craved it. I can’t explain why, but it’s who I am, like I was born to be a kinky slut. I thought I was over it after I left him. I mean, it seemed as if those desires for submission were gone, at least for the three years you and I have been together. But the last few weeks have proved my assumptions wrong. The desires have hovered on the sidelines of my life, but have never really gone away. And then…like fate catching up with me, or bad karma, or an angry god’s revenge, I get searched at the airport and all of a sudden my past hits me squarely in the eye.”

      
Padraig peered at her carefully, like he was counting every hair on her head. “So maybe, you’re sayin that what happened to you wasn’t all that hard to take?”

      
“It was horrible, Padraig. I was so afraid, every day I was afraid it would be my last. But the sex and some of what was most painful…I, um…” She bit her lip and closed her eyes.

      
“You were turned on. Is that it?”

      
Her eyes popped open hearing him nail the truth. “Yes. I know that sounds awful, but I couldn’t help it.”

      
“An’, you think I doan know that, lass?”

      
Her face reflected back her befuddlement. “What? You know about my kinky fetish? How could you, Padraig?”

      
“I’m not the naïve choir boy you think I am, Shelby Ryan.”

      
“No?” Her heart started beating very fast. Her hands began to sweat. She stared at him not knowing how to answer, and he not saying more. What did he really know? What had he guessed, or was it something else…? Then suddenly little things, like pieces of conversations flashed through her mind. Padraig in
Vienna
, Clive mentioning his name, sex since she was rescued having a harder edge than normal, and that odd feeling she’d been battling back for the last couple days. “Padraig, how did you get the money to fly to
Vienna
?”

      
He looked at her surprised. “Why would you ask that?”

      
“I want to know. I want to know the truth.”

      
“You so sure about that?”

      
“Yes, I’m very sure.”

      
“Your Mr. Darcy gave me the money.”

      
“Clive? Clive Darcy gave you the money? You know him?”

      
He nodded. “Indeed.”

      
She felt a sudden lurching in her belly, something awful grinding there, almost like she was about to vomit.

      
“You’ve known all along, haven’t you? He sent you to me, isn’t that right?”

      
He didn’t answer but he didn’t object. He just kept holding her in his gaze.

      
“And you knew this was going to happen? You knew where he was sending me. You knew and you didn’t stop the man!”
 
She suddenly stood up, hugging herself with her arms, tears running down her cheeks. She wanted to run away, as far away as she could get from everyone who knew her.

      
Padraig stood up too. “No, I did NOT know. I did not know what he was up to. I swear I didn’t,
Shelby
. You ‘ave to believe me.” He moved forward and grabbed her by the arms to hold her shaking body steady.

      
“No! No!” She shook her head. “Take your hands off me!” She threw her arms out and pushed him off, then backed up to the bedroom door. “Get out of here! Now! Out! I want you out! I never want to see you again!”

      
“No, lass, you can’t do this. You hafta let me explain.”

      
“No, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to listen to you! I cut my ties with Clive and I can cut them with you too. Now get out.”

      
She slipped through the bedroom door and slammed it behind her before he could say another word.

      
She’d seen the fury in his eyes, and knew that in the quiet seconds that followed that he was holding back his Irish temper. Would he come after her? The tension mounted as she waited sitting on the edge of the bed wondering what came next.

      
A moment later, the front door slammed and he was gone.

A day later, there was a message from Padraig on her cell phone.

      
“Listen to your answering machine. I’m guessing there’s something you haven’t heard. You owe it to me, Shelby. You owe it to us.”

      
Since she’d returned, it hadn’t even occurred to her to look at her answering machine. The blinking light had been covered by a newspaper so she hadn’t even seen it. Strangely enough, it had crossed her mind that she could now get rid of the land line since her ties with Clive were cut. He didn’t trust cell phones, part of an intelligence agent’s paranoia, and he never left her important instructions on one. She’d kept the old relic of a phone to please him.

      
When she got
Padraig’s
message, her anger was still just a hurtful memory away. And though she pulled the newspaper off the blinking light to the recording device, she didn’t punch the button to hear what he had to say. She didn’t want to hear his voice, the Irish brogue, the tenderness, or the stern way he could sometimes rebuke her. At one time she found his rebukes an act of love. But she didn’t want any of that now. She didn’t want the lying bastard in her life anymore than she wanted Clive Darcy making her dance on puppet strings.

      
Throwing the newspaper back over the answering machine, she went about the business of forgetting Padraig
Finnian
.

Part Two

Chapter Eleven

Dr Ramsey – Session One

The neutral cream shades inside Dr. Ramsey’s office seemed to soothe her in a blanket of calm, much as they had always done. The carpet was nearly white, and the couches, the walls and the chairs were lustrous shades of cream with just subtle variations in the fabrics: a little stripe in the client’s couch, a plaid in four shades of pale on Dr. Ramsey’s easy chair.
 
Everything in the room was perfectly executed to coordinate; the few accents were several large potted ferns and simple abstract paintings on the walls. Even the paintings’ muted pastels matched the color scheme that had been designed by a woman whose business was to offer her clients serenity when they might have little of it in the rest of their lives.

      
Sylvia Ramsey was as serene as her carefully appointed office. Her bulky body fit her loose clothes well:
 
Birkenstocks, muslin pants and a pale blue silk tunic the same color as her eyes. She wore scant make-up on a pleasantly aging face, and her dark greying hair was tied at the neck in a neat bun. She was distinct in personality but an earthy, easy woman who looked as much like a grandmother as she did a psychologist.
Shelby
loved her. Not once during the two years she’d sought her counsel had the woman judged a thing she’d said. How could she not love her? She’d told her everything about her life with Clive Darcy, and the woman hadn’t freaked. That counted for a lot in
Shelby
’s world.

      
“Sometimes, I think you’ve been down the same roads I have been,”
Shelby
said in grateful admiration at the end of one of her sessions.

      
“In a way I have,” Dr. Ramsey replied. “But only because you’ve painted such a clear picture for me to see. What I have to do to understand you is to understand where you’ve been. If I haven’t been there myself, I need a pretty good imagination.”