Husband by Choice

Because girls were vulnerable sometimes when it came to their own protection. Until they learned that they were the only ones who could keep themselves safe.

“It probably was cool, then,” Jenna said. “It was probably just over time that it got creepy.” Which was part of the problem. How could anyone predict how another person might change?

“I just don’t get it. It’s not that Trent was a bad guy. He was into animal rescue and fighting for the underdog....”

Steve had rescued human beings, and had put his life on the line every day to see that they were protected.

“What happened to him?” Carly’s blue eyes filled with tears and she started to shake again.

Jenna had an answer. An odd burst of clarity in a mind that had been foggy....

The research she’d done over the past week, her trying to get into character...she was more prepared than she’d thought.

“Somehow he wrapped up his own sense of value, his sense of self-worth, in his possession of you,” she said slowly. Softly. “As long as he has you he is rich. Anytime he feels like he might not have complete control of you, his prize possession, his sense of self is threatened. He goes into survival mode. Those types of people will stop at nothing to survive. He starts to feel powerless so he has to exert his power. Only when he is certain that you will do only and exactly as he directs, is he at peace.

“You’re a living being he has to own, in order to feel safe, but you have a mind of your own and are escaping him, which makes you an enemy to his basic sense of survival.”

Jenna’s heart started to pound as she spoke. And she knew she was on to something important. Knew that she was stumbling across the key to beating Steve.

“He becomes filled with the anticipation of the hunt.”

“Kind of like those guys who spend a hundred thousand dollars for a chance to go out with some big game experience guy and shoot a bear or some other poor animal that’s being held captive,” Carly said. “All so he can take the pelt home and hang it on his wall and make everyone think he shot it in the wild. Like he’s some big strong man who can take on bears and win. I saw a show on TV about it not long ag

o. It was disgusting. These guys killed animals who were doing nothing more than living the lives they were born to live, animals who weren’t hurting or threatening anyone. Just so these losers could feel more manly among their peers.”

“Exactly,” Jenna agreed. “Or like the guys who spend two hundred thousand to do the same thing over in Africa. It’s like an instinctive need with some guys.”

“It comes, I think, from the the natural instinct to kill in the wild to provide food for his family....”

“Only completely twisted,” Jenna added.

She was in Steve’s mind-set now. Getting him. He didn’t just want to keep her on the run so that he could keep her vulnerable to him. He wanted her on the run because he got off on the challenge of the hunt.

Because I dared to get down off of his wall and tell the world that he wasn’t a great hunter at all.

“A man who can’t hunt well can’t feed his family,” Jenna said, going with the metaphor.

“So a possessive guy who feels like he’s losing control of his possessions, acts instinctively, as though, if he can’t get the hunt right, he’ll never have a family to feed. It’s not that he needs me so much at this point as that he needs me not to be able to get away from him.”

“Yes. Though this could be complicated by the fact that on some level he really does love you.

“And I think it gets even more convoluted when you add in the social factor of how everyone else views him. Like the man with the bear pelt on his wall that he has to show everyone who comes to his house—Trent thinks that when people see you with him, they think he’s some great guy. If you leave him, he feels like less in the eyes of the world, like your rejection says there’s something wrong with him. Or makes him somehow less.”

Yes! She was getting it now. Pieces floated into place as though animated and on-screen.

Steve wasn’t just an amazing brain plotting actions that no one could hope to outsmart. He was a fallible man with an emotional need that was being threatened.

He wasn’t acting out of logic. He was acting out of emotion.

Which not only made him less likely to succeed and more likely to make a mistake, but made him more vulnerable, too.

There was something he cared about more than life. More than Jenna.

Something that controlled him.

His own threatened sense of self-worth.

That was her secret weapon.