The Off Season (24 page)

But Harris was still talking, his explanation cutting through the clamor. She sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to focus on what he was saying, not herself.

“. . . figured a real man didn’t sit around and talk things through. He sucked up everything and got on with his duty, the way men did in those old flicks my mother used to watch. She might’ve stayed married to my father, but her heart belonged to John Wayne.”

“My—my mom loves those old movies, too.” She frowned, though, as she wondered how many souls—how many families—had shattered on the rocks of those old-school expectations. Men, taught to bury all their feelings. Women, raised to sympathize, to serve, and demur to the primary wage earner, no matter how much abuse he dished out. “But I don’t think they’re meant to be taken literally.”

“Trust me when I say that even at his worst, the Duke was a better role model than my dad when it came to how to treat a woman. Dad’s the reason why I don’t drink, why I never should’ve gotten married.”

“He was drinking, wasn’t he? On the night of the rollover?”

Harris nodded. “His brother had had a heart attack. He was racing to try to be there in time—and God forbid he’d ever let my mom take the keys, or that she’d insist he did.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said uselessly, her gaze drifting across the family photos hanging on either side of an antique oval mirror. How lucky she and Annie had been to be raised in this loving household. Hers wasn’t a perfect family by any means, hadn’t been and never would be. But at least addiction and abuse had never had a seat at the table. “I know you had a lot of—you lost your entire family in one fell swoop.”

“I’m answering your questions, not making damned excuses,” said Harris, the bitterness in his voice unmistakable. “And I sure as hell don’t want your pity.”

“I pity Renee, not you. She’s the one who got hurt.” She spat the words, answering his anger with her own. Maybe because she didn’t want to ache for him, too. Didn’t want to be another patsy who imagined she could fix a broken man. “How many times?” she asked him. “How often did you hit her?”

“I didn’t hit her, not exactly—or at least not the way you’re thinking. And it was just that once, as she shook me awake when I was—I was caught up in a nightmare. Trying to get to Yardley, stop him. Stop him before he detonated, this time, so I could save the others.”

“Wait a minute. You weren’t even conscious?” From her own childhood experiences, she knew the flashbacks triggered by posttraumatic stress disorder could seem incredibly real, the resulting night terrors far more vivid than a normal dream.

“I flailed out with an arm. Knocked my pregnant wife right off her feet. She hit the nightstand face-first. I’ll never forget the blood.”

“In your
sleep
?” Christina repeated.

“I hit her. Hard enough to—her nose was broken.”

“She’s never said a word about it.”

“She was embarrassed by the black eyes and, I think, even more embarrassed about staying.” He raked his fingers through his short hair, looking as if he meant to pull it out. “When I was the one who should’ve been ashamed.”

Her gaze latched onto his. “But you were
dreaming
. And you clearly got help afterward.”

He stood again and started pacing. “I damn well did. I saw a doctor afterward, went to counseling religiously. Joined a veteran’s group to talk things through, to figure out what I’d been trying so hard not to feel that it kept cropping up in my sleep. Slept in the guest room, just in case—except I never went back, even when she asked me.”

“Back to where? You mean Renee’s bed?”

“I couldn’t take the chance again. I couldn’t risk—she doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds. I could’ve killed my child’s mother.”

“So you’re saying that all this time, you haven’t—? Not since she was pregnant?” Knowing she had no right to ask the question, but unable to resist it. Just as she was unable to resist her own upwelling of compassion for a man who had clearly punished himself for years. Punished himself for something out of his conscious control.

“We tried to make things work, for Jacob’s sake, tried for a lot longer than we probably should have. But Renee—she might’ve been able to get past what happened, but what she took as my rejection was another story.”

“You said you went to counseling. Did you ever try together?”

“She didn’t feel the need, she always said, not when it was all my problem.”

That sounded like Renee, like her wounded pride and anger talking.

Christina rose from her seat, mostly because his pacing was making her neck ache.

“And then she found someone else,” Harris admitted. “Someone who reminded her she was still a young, attractive woman, for a little while, at least.”

“
She
had the affair?”

“It wasn’t her fault.”

“But you didn’t?” Christina asked, still trying to wrap her head around it. “Even after the two of you were finished? Find some other woman?”

He snorted. “What? And ruin her life, too? Turn her furious and bitter? I have enough to do with my son and my job, my work with the VA on the weekends. I’m a peer-support volunteer. It helps—helping others. Helps to take my mind off things I was never meant to have.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said as she followed behind him. “You can’t. And
please
, will you quit pacing so we can have this conversation?”

He stopped, then wheeled around to face her, so close that she could feel the anger rolling off him in waves. “I damn well don’t need your advice on this. Don’t want it.”

Only inches from his face, she thrust her chin high to look into his eyes and threw down the question like a gauntlet. “Then what is it you do need from me, Harris Bowers? Because after the way you—the way you look at me, the way you touched me earlier, I can tell you, you didn’t come here just for dinner.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Harris stared down into her deep-brown eyes, the ground beneath him shifting as her pupils dilated. He felt himself falling into their expanding darkness, swallowed by the need and loneliness he saw reflected in them.

Still, he didn’t make a move, the long habit of self-denial holding him back, though his body was shaking with temptation.

Shaking as it hit him that she knew the worst about him. Knew what a wreck he’d been, knew his most shameful secrets. Knew, too, that he’d kept celibate for more than four years now. Four long years, while he’d told himself that some men were better off alone.

His thoughts arced back to his father’s sadness, to his shame and self-loathing each time he’d sobered up and left the family. Harris thought, too, of his mother, who’d invariably beg the man who hurt her to come home, neither one of them knowing how to live without the other.

And God forgive him, he couldn’t live without this, either. Couldn’t hold off another moment before Christina was in his arms, his mouth claiming hers with a kiss that left no doubt about what it was he wanted.

Her lips parted, their kiss deepening in an instant, a contact that burned what remained of his self-control to ash. And if he’d thought it was good then, at eighteen, with the heady mix of lust and vengeance in his veins, he’d been mistaken. For the sounds she made in her throat, the murmurs of encouragement and the way she wriggled as he pulled her tight against his body made him want to push her back, to take her here and now, atop this table.

With her murmur pitching higher, she turned her shoulders slightly. Realizing her injured arm was pinned between them, he came up for air.

“I—sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt you. I could—I could stop,” he offered. “We could—maybe we should think this over, before things go any—”

“I’m going upstairs to check on Lilly. You should—I think you should put the food away in the refrigerator in the basement. I’m not feeling very hungry.”

“I am.” He slid one hand lower, until he’d cupped her ass, and his whiskers, in need of a shave this time of evening, lightly scraped her neck. “So I’ll be praying she’s a damn sound sleeper.”

Christina pulled away to look up at him, her eyes huge as she gave a shaky exhalation. “This is—this is crazy. I’m heading up.”

Turning on her heel, she made a break for it. He followed for a few steps, enjoying the hell out of the sight of her heading up the stairs. And drawing in a deep breath, trying to suck in enough oxygen to bring himself back to sanity. Which might prove a challenge, since so little of his blood flow was going to his head.

With a grimace, he distracted himself by finding the door to the basement and heading down a steep and narrow flight of stairs with the groceries, as she’d suggested. Stashing the food quickly, he turned to head back up, only to fall victim to a hitch in his bad knee, which caused him to catch his foot on the lip of one crooked stair and pitch forward. Gut clenching, he recovered barely in time to keep from falling and reminded himself to watch his step . . .

Including the one he was about to take. The one that could cost him both his job and the self-respect he’d spent years rebuilding.

And what about the cost to Christina? Would he hurt her, too, when he was forced to pull back to focus on the investigation? To follow it wherever it led—even if that meant closer scrutiny of her sister’s relationship with Reginald Edgewood and the man’s possibly criminal son? The son that Harris knew he should be picking up right now so the kid could be questioned about his involvement with the burglars who had, at the very least, ransacked house after house and assaulted an old man.

Christina had it right. This was crazy, and Harris had better put a stop to it right now, before any more damage was done . . .

The rightness of the decision settled over him, along with the certainty that Christina would come downstairs anyway with a fussy toddler in her arms.

Taking a deep breath, he walked past the piano and into the house’s living room. As he tried to make out what to say, how to tell her he thought he really needed to get going, he squatted in front of the fireplace, needing to do something with his hands.

Happy to find that at some point it had been converted to gas, he opened the damper and lit a cheery blaze. When he turned back around, he saw Christina standing alone, wearing a thick, wine-colored robe that fell past her knees. She’d taken off her sling, he realized, and like her feet, her lower legs, so close to his eye level, were bare.

“Lilly’s fast asleep. Out cold for the night, I believe. But I—um—I was thinking,” she said, sounding nervous as her fingers clutched the collar’s overlap, “of all the reasons I should send you home right now.”

He stared up at her, needing to know what lay beneath that robe more than he needed to draw his next breath. Aching to touch, to taste, to have his fill of her for whatever span of time the two of them could manage.

“I’ve been thinking along those same lines,” he admitted as he came to his feet. “But right this minute, I can’t think of anything but you.”

A few short hours later, Christina woke shivering, her nude body bathed in flickering light and shadows. Though the afghan had slid to the floor, the fire was still burning, and Harris’s arm was wrapped around her, cradling her in a protective embrace.

He was sleeping, his face peaceful, and utterly unself-conscious about the scarring that marred the perfection of his tight, toned body. Scarring she saw as a badge of honor, proof that he’d learned to put the needs of others first.

Heaven only knew, he’d put
her
needs first. Several times, using his clever fingers and his mouth until her doubts morphed into a white-hot ball of pleasure. With his pupils dilated and his erection impossibly hard against her, he’d been shaking with need by then, yet she’d sensed that with a word, she could have stopped him even then, could have paid back the deception of his youth with her own cruel brand of interest.

Instead, she’d whispered, “Now I want you. All of you. No holding back. No regrets. No promises beyond this.”

And when their bodies joined at last, it had been better than she remembered. So right, so good, it banished all the loneliness she’d felt, not only since Doug’s death, but before it—the loneliness that came with a marriage, not of equals, but with a man who’d come to think of her more as a patient to be managed than a partner or a wife.

The thought touched off a wave of guilt. How could she blame her husband, her poor husband, after what she’d done?

And how could she ever expect another man to really love her? Because Harris was certain to find out the rest, with all his digging. Certain to discover that the scars she bore were no less serious than his, no matter how deep she kept them hidden.

But he hadn’t asked for love. Hadn’t asked for anything more than the temporary harbor each of them had offered.

She’d do well to remember that, she thought as she reached for the fallen afghan to cover him and then found the robe she’d borrowed from her mother’s closet. As she dressed, she heard a noise from upstairs, whimpers and the sounds of scratching—claws scraping against woodwork.

Christina tensed, her thoughts flying back to that night in the Victorian, when she’d imagined she’d heard footsteps in the hallway. She didn’t remember closing the dog in the bedroom with Lilly. Come to think of it, she knew she’d left the door ajar because she’d wanted to be able to hear her daughter if she began to stir. Wanted Max to be able to find his way downstairs without waking Lilly if he was hungry or thirsty or needed to go out.

Stomach fluttering a warning, Christina glanced at Harris, wondering whether she should wake him, ask him to check things out. An instant later, good sense came flooding back. How could she ask him to check on her own dog and child, especially here, in the house where she’d grown up, the house that sprang to mind whenever anyone mentioned
home
? Was she really going to let Max, who wasn’t exactly known for his brilliance, scare her by accidentally pushing a door closed, or let the act of making love with Harris make her dependent?

There was another whine, this one clearly canine, and the clawing noise grew more insistent. Insistent enough that she thought of how upset her mom would be if she came home to find the door to the newly repainted bedroom scratched and scored by greyhound toenails.

“Hang on, Max,” she murmured as she shoved her feet inside her shoes. But at the base of the stairs, the flutter in her stomach intensified, and the darkness of the open space above seemed to spiral in on her.

In that moment, the rush of the waves filled her ears, though she knew it was impossible to hear the ocean from this distance. The woman’s voice came next, words that echoed through her memory as winter’s breath. “If you don’t come, baby, you’ll both stay lost forever.”

And whether it was fear, ongoing stress, or pure imagination fueling it, a white-hot jolt of pure energy shot through her. Along with the instinctive comprehension that this time, there was no mistake, no room for doubt or hesitation. Springing up the staircase, she ran straight for the bedroom where she’d left her sleeping child.