“Don’t talk to me.” She gripped the newel post, and the cold sweat on her palms made it slick. She pulled herself up the stairs, one tread at a time.
The effort had her breath coming short. Her chest was so tight, so tight it felt as if someone had banded steel around it.
In the bedroom, she pulled off her coat, let it fall, dragged off her clothes as she aimed for the bathroom.
“Jets on,” she ordered. “Full. One hundred and one degrees.”
Naked, she stepped under the spray, into the heat. And exhausted, lowered herself to the shower floor, curled up, and let the heat and force of the water battle the cold.
* * *
That’s where he found her, curled on the wet tiles with water beating over her. Steam hung like a curtain. It ripped at his heart to see her.
He grabbed a bath sheet. “Jets off,” Roarke ordered, and crouched down to bundle her up.
“No. Don’t.” She slapped out at him, automatic defense without any sting. “Just leave me alone.”
“Not in this lifetime. Stop it!” His voice was sharp, and the Irish in it had a bite. “You’ll have boiled your bones in another minute.” He hauled her up, lifting her off her feet and into his arms when she tried to curl up again. “Just hush now. Ssh. I’ve got you.”
She closed her eyes. Shutting him out, he knew well enough. But he carried her into the bedroom, over to the platform that held their bed, and sitting with her on his lap rubbed the towel over her.
“I’m going to get you a robe, and a soother.”
“I don’t want—”
“Didn’t ask what you wanted, did I ?” He lifted her chin with his hand, traced his thumb down its shallow dent. “Eve, look at me. Look at me now.” There was resentment as well as fatigue in her eyes—and it nearly made him smile. “You’re too sick to argue with me, and we both know it. Whatever’s hurt you… well, you’ll tell me about it, then we’ll see what’s to be done.” He touched his lips to her forehead, her cheeks, her lips.
“I’ve already taken care of it. Nothing has to be done.”
“Well, that’ll save us some time, won’t it?” He shifted her, then rose to get her a warm robe.
She’d gotten his suit wet, she noted. Damn suit probably cost more than the tailor made in two years. Now the shoulders and sleeves were damp. She watched in silence as he shrugged out of the jacket, laid it over the back of a chair in the sitting area.
Graceful as a cat, she thought, and a lot more dangerous. He’d probably been in one of his hundreds of weekly meetings, making plans to buy a freaking solar system. Now he was here, flipping through the closet for a robe. Long and lean, a body of elegant and disciplined muscles, the face of a young Irish god who could seduce with one look out of those Celtic blue eyes.
She didn’t want him here. Didn’t want anyone here.
“I want to be alone.”
He arched an eyebrow, cocked his head a little so that silky mane of midnight flowed around his face. “To suffer and brood, is it? You’d have a better time fighting with me. Here, put this on.”
“I don’t want to fight.”
He laid the robe beside her, bent so their eyes were level. “If I have the opportunity, I’ll take whoever put that look on your face, my darling Eve, and peel the skin from their bones. One thin layer at a time. Now put on your robe.”
“She shouldn’t have called you.” Her voice hitched before she could steady it, and added another tear to humiliation. “Peabody contacted you, I know it. She should’ve left it alone. I’d‘ve been all right in a little while. I’d be fine.”
“Bollocks. You don’t go down easy. I know it, and so does she.” He crossed to the AutoChef, programmed for a soother. “This will take the edge off that headache, settle your stomach. No tranqs,” he added, glancing back at her. “I promise.”
“It’s stupid. I let it get to me, and it’s stupid. It’s not worth all this.” She pushed at her hair. “It just caught me off guard, that’s all.” When she got to her feet, her legs felt loose and ungainly. “I just needed to come home for a while.”
“Do you think I’m going to settle for that?”
“No.” Though she wanted to crawl into the bed, pull the covers over her head for an hour, she sat, met his eyes as he brought her the soother. “No. I left Peabody with a mess. I let her take primary, and she did good, but right at the sticking point I left her to deal with it by herself. Stupid. Irresponsible.”
“Why did you?”
Because it was drink the damn soother or have him pour it into her, she drank it in three gulps. “There was a woman waiting for me in my office. I didn’t recognize her, not at first. Not at first.” She set the empty glass aside. “She said she was my mother. She wasn’t,” Eve said quickly. “She wasn’t, and I knew it, but having her say it knocked me. She’s probably about the right age, and there was something familiar, so it knocked me hard.”
He took her hand, held it tight. “Who was she?”
“Her name’s Lombard. Trudy Lombard. After they… When I got out of the hospital in Dallas, I went into the system. No ID, no memory, trauma, sexual assault. I know how it works now, but then, I didn’t know what was happening, what was going to happen. He told me, before, my father, that if the cops or the social workers ever got me, they’d put me in a hole, they’d lock me in the dark. They didn’t, but…”
“Sometimes the places they put you aren’t much better.”
“Yeah.” He’d know, she thought. He’d understand. “I was in a state home for a while. Few weeks, maybe. It’s sketchy. I guess they were looking for parents or guardians, trying to track where I’d come from, what had happened. Then they put me in a foster home. That was supposed to help mainstream me. They gave me to Lombard. Someplace in east Texas. She had a house, and a son a couple years older than me.”
“She hurt you.”
It wasn’t a question. He would know that, too. He would understand that. “She never hit me, not like he did. She never left a mark.”
He swore, with a quiet viciousness that eased the tension balled in her more than the soother.
“Yeah, it’s easier to cope with a direct punch than subtle little tortures. They didn’t know what to do with me.” She pushed at her wet hair, and now her fingers were steady. “I wasn’t giving them anything. I didn’t have anything to give. They probably figured I’d do better in a house with no male authority figure, because of the rape.”
He said nothing, simply drew her toward him to brush his lips over her temple.
“She never yelled at me, and she never hit me—no more than a few slaps. She saw to it I was clean, that I had decent clothes. I know the pathology now, but I wasn’t even nine. When she told me I was filthy and made me wash in cold water every morning, every night, I didn’t understand. She always looked so sad, so disappointed. If she locked me in the dark, she said it was only to teach me to behave. Every day there were punishments. If I didn’t eat everything on my plate, or I ate it too fast, too slow, I’d have to scrub the kitchen with a toothbrush. Something like that.”
I set store by a clean kitchen.
“She didn’t have domestics. She had me. I was always too slow, too stupid, too ungrateful, too something. She’d tell me I was pathetic, or I was evil, and always in this soft, kindly voice with this look of puzzled disappointment on her face. I was still nothing. Worse than nothing.”
“She should never have passed the screening.”
“It happens. Worse than her happens. I was lucky it wasn’t worse. I had nightmares. I had nightmares all the time, almost every night back then. And she’d… oh, God, she’d come in and she’d say I’d never get healthy and strong if I didn’t get a good night’s sleep.”
Because she could, she reached for his hand, let it anchor her in the now while she took herself back. “She’d turn off the lights and lock the door. She’d lock me in the dark. If I cried, it was worse. They’d take me back, put me in a cage for mental defectives. That’s what they did to girls who wouldn’t behave. And Bobby, her boy, she’d use me there, too. She’d tell him to look at me, and remember what happened to bad children, to children without a real mother to take care of them.”