Colin had trust issues. She hadn’t needed his confirmation to figure out that much. Still, he was there. Needing to be with her.
Giving her his trust—at least a modicum of it.
And more than she could remember needing anything personally, for herself, she needed to be worthy of his trust.
The feeling passed. As all of her personal feelings did. But the peculiar sense of hopelessness it left in its path didn’t sit well with her.
Frustrated, Chantel took another sip of a drink she didn’t really want. She was getting nowhere and losing the grip that would allow her to maintain the facade indefinitely.
“I actually didn’t hear any rumors about the Morrisons,” she told him. No, she’d gotten her information straight from the school counselor who’d told her about Ryder’s collage reading. About the boy’s timid denials of any wrongdoing in his home. From the emergency room medical reports, and from a sealed police record, denoting Morrison’s murder of his younger brother. A record she could never, ever talk about to Colin. “Only what you and Julie mentioned obliquely in the car on the way home from the library meeting last week.”
“Good to know,” he said. “I’ve misjudged my fellow man.”
“You didn’t answer my original question, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you know if Leslie was ever...hurt? Like Julie thought I was?”
“Not for sure, I don’t.”
“But you have your suspicions?”
He hesitated. Emptied his glass. And then looked her in the eye. “I have my suspicions.”
“You think she was raped?”
“I don’t know any particulars. It’s just something Julie said one time when she was upset with me. Something about not understanding how it felt to be a woman who’d been overpowered. She implied that Leslie understood.”
Chantel went cold. Adrenaline burned through her. “But you don’t think her husband would hurt her?”
“Absolutely not. If anything, I think James does all he can to protect her. Probably because he knows she’s more fragile than some. Like Julie.”
Thoughts ran through her mind in beat with myriad feelings. Fear for the women unknowingly in her care. For any woman who, like her younger self, suffered at the hand of someone physically stronger. Chantel was the lucky one. She’d known how to fight back.
But she couldn’t think about all that right now. She had to stay on track, stay in character. She needed to be Colin’s girlfriend so that she could get her job done.
“What about you?” His look had turned tender. “Was my sister right in sensing that you’ve also been hurt?”
His words swamped her with a sudden need to have him protect her. Like he protected Julie. And thought James was protecting Leslie...
No. No! No! No!
“Not like that, I wasn’t,” she said softly, feeling, oddly, like she was turning traitor on herself. Her younger self. “But I lost my best friend to violence.”
She hadn’t meant to give him so much.
Or to lose so much of herself when he said, “Come here,” so softly and pulled her down to the couch, to cradle her in his arms as though he really could protect her better than she could protect herself.
What scared her most was that for just a few minutes she wanted to let him try.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HE SPENT THE night with her. Woke up in her arms. And wanted to stay there. Conscious of how she’d been alarmed when he’d woken her the morning before, he just lay there, holding her.
Blond hair splayed across his arm. One of her legs was in between his. Her hand was resting on his thigh.
They were rougher than he’d expected, those hands of hers. He’d noticed the first time he’d held them. And again, each time she’d run them over his skin. They were strong, too. Sometime during the night, in between making love and dozing, he’d been aware of her hands on his shoulders, massaging him so well he’d awoken with delicious chills.
Not surprising, that strength. She was a writer who spent her days pounding keys. And the roughness—he liked that, too. Not only for the slightly raspy feel of her dragging them down his skin, but because of what those hands told him about her. She wasn’t afraid to chip in and help out. To use her hands for more than adornment. Maybe she tended flowers. Or loved to cook and had her hands in water a lot.
Could be they were chafed from living in the cold of upstate New York? Though he knew from his mother and sister that lotion would take care of that malady.
She might paint. Julie, who was a writer, did. She grumbled about the turpentine taking a toll on her skin.
It could also be chocolate. He’d asked her to order some for the night before, though he hadn’t realized until after their drink at the bar and a few minutes on the couch that she actually had done so. Fondue. To make up for the dessert they’d missed the night they’d gone out to dinner.