Stolen: A Novel of Romantic Suspense (34 page)

Elliot wrapped an arm around her and she was tempted, so very tempted, to just press her face against him, let him get her out of there. He would. She knew he would. All she had to do was let him know. But it wasn’t right. She’d spent too much time hiding, and this woman had lost her daughter.

Calling on the strength that had gotten her through all the hellish nights, the nightmares, even the trial when she’d had to sit across from her stepfather and say what he’d done to her, she eased away from Elliot and made herself breathe. Level out. And then she stared at Ella Montgomery.

“Your daughter was one of the best friends I had—one of the only friends. I don’t make them easily. She all but chased after me in college and dragged me out of my hole, wouldn’t give in. She was my first real friend. You have no idea how much I miss her.”

Through her tears, Ella smiled. “That … well, that sounds like Darcy. Thank you.”

Shay nodded.

“Well, was that helpful or not?” Elliot asked as they left.

Shay paused outside the car, staring at him over the roof.

“Two years ago … that was when Darcy started to change on me. Little things. Always little things. Then, gradually things got bigger and bigger, but when you’re used to things being how they are … I guess I just never noticed.” She licked her lips and then said softly, “It was helpful. It hurt like hell, but it was helpful.”

He continued to watch her, his eyes blank. “You talk to her on the phone. Right?”

“Yes.” He didn’t have to say anything—she already knew what he was thinking. Looking away, she stared at the house, at the woman who stood at the window near the door, watching them with that sad, heartbreaking look in her eyes. “Come on. I want you to listen to something, but not here. You can listen to that, and I’ll show you the email that freaked me out.”

“It’s a hand,” he murmured.

“Yes.”

She’d pulled it up on her laptop.

Ugly, brutal. Skin that had been soft and pale was now pallid and chalky, splotched with blood. A close-up of just that small hand. Nothing else.

Tucked in their room at the hotel, Shay sat on the couch, clutching a glass of rum and Diet Coke that held more rum than soda. She sipped at it in numb horror and stared at the monitor.

It was gruesome and horrifying—and oddly, revealing it was the easier of the two tasks. She had to show him this and she had to let him listen to the voice on the message. Let him hear that woman who sounded so much like Darcy.

Listen to the woman that Shay suspected had killed Darcy.

Shit, yes, this was easier. Right now, she was pretending that hand wasn’t real and for all she knew, it wasn’t.

“Damn it, this just keeps getting more fucked up,” Elliot muttered. Shoving up off the couch, he prowled the room. “Who would send that? Is this related to … hell, why would it be related?”

Shay swallowed and looked down at her lap. She didn’t know if there was an answer to that. If there
was
one, it was trapped back in the black depths of her memories, in that ugly pit that she didn’t want to look at too closely.

Shut that fucking baby up …

Shay flinched as that voice echoed through her memory. So much louder. So much clearer. And then, that giggling. That mad little giggle, followed by a singsong voice.

Somebody finally shut that baby up … know who did?

“Stop it,” she muttered, covering her eyes with her hands, swaying slightly.

Warm, strong fingers closed around her wrists, eased them down. Shay found herself staring at Elliot’s face. “Are you okay?”

“No.” Desperate, she flung herself at him and buried her face against his chest. “No, I’m not. Damn it, Elliot—those voices, the memories. They’re getting louder, clearer, all the time.”

Blood … bright red … dripping …

Do you remember what happened, Michelline?

Turning her head, she stared at the laptop, at that ghastly, gory image. “Shit.” Easing away from him, she sat back on the couch and stared at it another minute. Whether it was real or not, just seeing it made the voices in her head scream louder and louder.

Unable to take it another second, she archived the file. She’d show it to somebody in the Earth’s End police department. Filing it away didn’t do anything to silence those screams in her mind, though.

Shifting her gaze away from the laptop, she focused on Elliot. He wore another one of those old Bob Marley T-shirts; he seemed to have a hundred of them. The dark auburn of his hair was falling into his eyes, and he looked ridiculously alert. Ridiculously calm. There was a bottle of beer sitting next to his elbow and he looked so … normal. So calm.

She’d never felt normal. But she’d found that calm before … she didn’t think she’d ever have it again, though.

He certainly didn’t look like he’d just stared at a small, severed hand or like he was involved with a woman who dreamt of screams, and blood, and mad little giggles.

He looked so calm … so normal.

So not for her.

“Tell me something about you,” she blurted out.

He’d been in the middle of lifting the bottle to his lips and now he paused, eyeing her curiously. “Shay, you know all sorts of things about me.”

“I know that. I just …” Groaning, she shoved her hands through her hair. “I’ve been stripping myself bare and everything I know about you … it’s all wonderful. It’s so normal, and even in the middle of this chaos that’s my life, you’re so calm. You have a great sister, even if she does crazy shit like bring you rubbers in the middle of the night—which is freaky. You had great parents. You own a bookstore, you were in the army …”

“That wasn’t so great,” he said sourly, lowering his gaze to stare at the bottle of beer. He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, dangling his beer there and staring at it. “You sure you want to hear this, baby?”

“If I didn’t want to hear it, I wouldn’t have asked.”

He nodded and took another drink from his bottle of beer.

“You know that shit the woman pretending to be you posted? About how I supposedly raped her?” He lifted his head and stared at her, his eyes burning.

Shay curled her lip. “Don’t get me started.” Even now, it sickened her and fury beat through her, hard and fast and wicked.

“She isn’t the only woman who tried to say that—somebody else did. When I was in the service.” He continued to watch her, his gaze steady, eyes unwavering, mouth grim.

Shay’s heart stopped. The air in her lungs froze even
as everything inside her tried to whisper … 
lies … just lies. This is Elliot
.

And she knew that. She
did
, but the memories were beating at her, sucking her under. She shoved them back and focused on him, just him.

Drawing in a desperate breath, she looked back at Elliot and stared at him. “You would never hurt a woman.”

“Don’t bet on it,” he muttered, lowering his gaze to his beer again. “If I ever find the woman doing this to you, I just might hurt her. A lot. But no, I haven’t ever hurt a woman that way. I wouldn’t.”

Shay nodded. “So what happened?”

A bitter smile twisted his lips. “She was trying to fuck with her boyfriend’s head. From what I was able to piece together in the aftermath of it all, I think he was getting ready to dump her. He was in line for a promotion and a transfer, and she was always pushing for a ring. He was on the fast track, too. Heading for big things. She knew it. She was an army brat—knew where he was heading, what he had coming toward him. She wanted to go along for the ride but when he told her he wasn’t going to play, she got mad. Went out slumming.”

His words were so flatly spoken, so coolly stated … and she could see the emptiness in his eyes. Hear the echo of pain, the lingering whisper of sadness.

“What happened?”

“I didn’t know her,” he said quietly. “Hadn’t ever seen her before, although I did know her boyfriend. We were friends. I guess it says something that I hadn’t ever met the woman—I’d met one of his girlfriends before. She came on to me at a bar and it was one of those stupid things. I was still young enough to think with my dick and we went back to her place. I spent the night.”

He paused, lifted his bottle, and half-emptied it in three long gulps. “I left and didn’t think about her again
until a few days later when the MPs showed up. They told me a civilian had filed charges against me for rape.” He shrugged and fell silent.

Shay remained quiet, waiting.

The silence didn’t last. Surging up off the floor, he slammed the bottle down and started to pace. “The MPs took me in, questioned me. I got an attorney and I didn’t talk to anybody but him—only smart way to play it.”

All of that calm was gone, Shay thought. He paced, wild, restless. One glimpse at his face revealed eyes that burned, swirling with emotion. “My career was hanging in the balance; I’d planned on making a life out of it. I didn’t have high aspirations, but my dad—the guy who fathered Lorna and me—he’d died in the army—Desert Storm—and I was following in his footsteps, or trying to. Wanted to serve. That was all. Now I’ve got this woman who I’d never met before, didn’t even really know, and she’s accusing me of rape—she’s got this crazy story, telling them that she tried to fight me off, but she couldn’t, and telling them how I made her lie down and told her if she fought me, I’d kill her.”

“That’s kind of contradictory,” Shay said, forcing the words out through a throat gone tight. Her mouth was dry, she realized. Terribly, horribly dry. Tossing back half of her rum and Coke, she clambered to her feet and made her way over to the bar. Another drink and maybe she could get through this without freaking out.

It wasn’t that she believed the woman’s accusation. She didn’t. At all. But it was hard to hear …

Go ahead and fight me, you stupid little cunt—

“Yeah. It’s one of the things my lawyer grabbed and used. There were a lot of inconsistencies. First she said I used a rubber, then I didn’t. Then I made her clean up before I left so there wouldn’t be any evidence. People reported her coming up to me at the bar, but she tried to
say I dragged her out of the parking lot …” He shook his head, staring down at nothing, his beer bottle now hanging, forgotten, from his hand.

“So if her entire story was shit, I guess it didn’t go anywhere, did it?”

He gave her a look over his shoulder. “The military has a harsh line on these things. I was basically screwed from that point on. The charges were dropped—she had a history of false allegations and she recanted, then later tried to press charges against a different man. But the stain was still there. And I came up against a wall everywhere. Worse, the guy who used to be my friend …” He shrugged. “Well, I guess he wasn’t. I tried to ride it out, hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. Once I realized there were always going to be whispers, rumors and shit, I decided I was done. I finished up my time and got the hell out. Came home. End of the story.”

Shay stared at him, bottle of rum in hand. “They shut you out, didn’t they?”

He emptied his bottle and tossed it in a garbage can sitting a good ten feet away. It hit with a heavy thunk that made her jump even though she’d known it was coming. “Hey, I could have kept trying.”

“Why bother? They had a crazy bitch spouting lies and they knew it and they still didn’t care. They shut you out. Completely. And your friend. He’d rather listen to some idiot he was getting ready to dump anyway? That’s insane.”

“Yeah.” He gave her a savage smile. “Fuck them.”

Putting her glass aside, she crossed the floor to him. Her belly was a tight, ugly mess and her legs felt quivery and weak. What she wanted to do was hide in a corner until she felt a little more steady, a little more secure. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. So she didn’t.

“You look afraid,” Elliot said, his voice raspy.

Shay shook her head, knowing she was probably
going to mess this up. “I’m not … not exactly. I’m not afraid of you.” With her heart tripping in her chest and blood roaring in her ears, she swiped her sweaty palms down the sides of her jeans and then reached up, resting them on his waist. “When I read what she’d written on Facebook, it took about four tries before I managed to get through it without a panic attack. But it had nothing to do with
you
or even what she said about you. It was just her words.”

He continued to watch her, waiting, showing no sign of emotion, barely any sign he’d even heard her.

“Any time I even write a book that deals with assault, I have these mini-attacks. Not full-blown ones, but sweats, rapid heartbeat, nerves. It’s nothing like dealing with it in real life, though, thinking that somebody else has dealt with it—I used to not even be able to watch the news because I knew it would be mentioned.” She tried to smile and failed. “Once Darcy … my
real
friend … we’d gone to a sports bar and a news blip came up about this football player who’d raped his girlfriend … I passed out. Darcy lied and told everyone I’d had an anaphylactic reaction. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. I woke up in an ambulance.”

Nervous, she reached down and caught his hand. His fingers linked loosely with hers as she whispered, “It’s not you. It’s me.”

“No.” He sighed and lowered his head, pressing his brow to hers. “It’s not you. It’s the fucked-up world around us and what it let happen to you.”

As he eased her body against his, she sighed and snuggled closer. Some of that weird, nervous weakness drained away, replaced by a warm, loose feeling … almost contentment.
Almost peace
, she thought.

“I guess you weren’t expecting that kind of something, were you?” Lips pressed against her temple, he
slid another hand around her waist, then skimmed it up her back, settling her more firmly against him.

“I knew there was something.” She grimaced and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I guess I should have been more prepared. Ah, maybe I should warn you. I think whoever is doing this has been poking around in your background. She said something …”

He tensed.

Lifting her head, she looked up at him.

“What?”

Shay swallowed. “She … whoever
she
is … said something about how you’d done this before after that shit went up on Facebook. I thought she was just trying to freak me out, and she was. But she was using your past to do it.”