"No. Just hold on to me. Just hold on. I remember what it was like. Like not being human anymore. Like the animal that lives inside us had leaped out. Then I crawled away, over there."
She shivered still as she looked over at the corner, but she made herself see it, see herself, as it had been. "I watched him for a long time, waiting for him to get up and make me sorry. But he didn't. When it was light, I got up and washed his blood off me in the cold water. And I packed a bag. Imagine thinking of that? I hurt— my arm, where he'd raped me again—but it was buried under the shock. Still, I didn't use the elevator—had enough wit for that. Used the stairs. Crept down the stairs and went outside. I don't remember a lot of that, except it was bright out and my eyes stung. Lost the bag somewhere and just walked. And walked."
She eased back. "He never called me by a name. Because I didn't have one. I remember that now. They didn't bother to give me a name because I wasn't a child to them. I was a thing. I can't remember her, but I remember him. I remember what he said the first time he touched me. What he told me to remember. That was what he kept me around for, and when I'd learned, that was how I'd earn my keep. He was going to whore me. Nothing like young pussy, he said, so I'd better learn to take it without the whining and crying. He had a fucking investment in me, and I was going to pay off. We were going to start here. Here in Dallas, because I was eight and that was old enough to start carrying my weight."
"It ended here." He brushed tears from her cheeks. "And what started, darling Eve, was you."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
He ignored her request to head straight to the central police station and drove to the hotel, one he did own, and where the owner's suite was prepared for them.
The fact that she was too tired to argue told her he was right, again. She needed time to pull herself together.
She went through the enormous parlor into the equally sumptuous master bedroom and left Roarke to deal with the bellman. She was already stripping when he came in.
"I need a shower. I need to... I need to get clean."
"You'll need some food when you're done. What would you like?"
"Wait on that, will you?" She was in sudden, desperate need for floods of hot water, for waves of clean, fragrant soap. "Let me think about it."
"I'll be just in the other room then."
He left her alone as much for himself as for her. The rage he'd managed to chain down was threatening to snap free. He wanted to use his fists on something. Pound them until his arms screamed for rest.
She'd shower, he thought, with water that was brutally hot, because once she'd been forced to wash in cold. He never wanted her to be cold again, to shiver as she had shivered in that room where the ghosts, the viciousness of them, had been so tangible he'd seen them himself.
Watching her relive that night, as she too often did in dreams, had ripped him in two. It had left him helpless, useless, and with a violence borne of fury he had nowhere to vent.
To have birthed and bred her, beaten and raped her all for selling her to other scum. What god made such creatures as that and set them to prey on innocents?
Riding on rage, he stripped off his shirt as he strode into the small workout area. He yanked the speed bag into place. And attacked it, bare-fisted.
With each punch his anger grew, spreading through him like a cancer. The bag was a face he didn't know. Her father's. Then his own father's. He battered at it with a concentrated rage that bloomed into hate. Pounded, pounded, as the black haze of that hate narrowed his vision. Pounded, pounded, as his knuckles went raw and bloomed with blood.
And still he couldn't kill it.
When the bag snapped off its tether, plowed into the wall, he looked around for something else to hammer.
And saw her standing in the doorway.
She'd wrapped herself in one of the white hotel robes. Her cheeks were nearly as pale.
"I should have thought how this would make you feel. And I didn't." His torso gleamed with sweat. His hands were bleeding. When he saw her there his heart shattered.
"I don't know what to do for you." His voice was thick with emotion, with the accent that took over when his defenses were most compromised. "What to say to you."
When she took a step toward him, he shook his head, stepped back. "No, I can't touch you right now. I'm not myself. I might break you in half. I mean it." His voice whipped out when she took the next step.
She stopped. Because she understood it wasn't just her that might be broken. "It hurts you as much as me. I forget that."
"I want him dead, and he's dead already." He flexed his battered knuckles. "So, nothing to be done about it. Still, I want to beat my fists into his face; I want to rip the heart out of his chest before ever he laid hands on you. I'd give everything I own if I could. Instead, there's nothing."
"Roarke—"
"My father was there." His head snapped up, his gaze boring into hers. "Maybe in that very room. We know that now. I don't know as his various and filthy appetites ran to young girls, but if the timing had been just a bit different, you might have been sold to him." He nodded, reading her face. "I see that's occurred to you as well."
"It didn't happen. There's enough that did without adding to it. And don't say there's nothing. Most of my life I kept all this buried,