"The boys are fine." She would have never stayed at Danny's for so much as one night if she'd thought for a second Kent would come near the boys. He'd always been precise in his sanctimonious anger. "It's me he wants to rattle."
"He?"
"My ex-husband."
"Your ex did this? How can you be sure? You haven't even let him know you're here." His eyes narrowed with a glint of … jealousy? "Have you?"
"No! Of course not. But somehow he must have found out." She nudged the bottle beside a stack of junk mail on the table. "Only he would think to leave behind a medicine bottle with my name on it, used back when we were married."
Medicines to increase fertility.
A bottle from one of her daily shots.
As much as she hated giving Daniel details, she had to convince him, for his own safety and the boys'. "Kent didn't take our breakup well. He pulled stunts like this all the time right after I left him."
"You still haven't explained why you know this is from him."
"I had difficulty conceiving. We tried … everything. I wanted to adopt. Kent wanted to keep trying for a biological child." She couldn't make herself tell him about the miscarriages. Her precious son born too early. But Daniel needed to know her suspicions, no matter how paranoid they sounded. "I think maybe this wasn't the first time he's attempted to rattle me since I returned to the States. There was a plant mixed in with your neighbor's potted garden, a plant that's supposed to promote fertility. I thought it was a coincidence, and now I'm not so sure. I'm so very sorry for not telling you then."
Daniel's hand fell to rest beside the bottle, inching over to straighten the stack of junk mail beside it with an odd precision. "Why not just contact you?"
Long-buried resentment clawed its way to the surface, having been denied light too long, due to her more basic survival needs of the past year.
"Because he's a sick bastard who enjoys tormenting me. God, I could go on forever. Regardless, he's a nut case, Danny. And I'm so, so sorry for bringing him anywhere near the boys. I didn't think there was any way he could know where I was. Even if he'd tracked me to Rubistan, it's not like my leaving the country was exactly out in the open."
"You went to Rubistan to get away from him?"
"I'd have gone to the moon to get away from Kent McRae." She pushed out the words she'd told her parents, only to be parted on the hand and ignored by them. "Danny, my ex-husband was more than just a mistake. He's dangerous."
"The bastard hit you?" Daniel's eyes flamed.
He canted forward, already on the offensive just as she'd predicted. As much as her heart cheered his ready acceptance, she also feared his reaction.
With her own anger building by the microsecond, how would she stay calm enough through the rest of her explanation to keep him from going ballistic? She forced herself to sit still when her feet wanted nothing more than to pace out the edgy bite of emotions.
She shook her head. "No. He never raised a hand to me. He's much more subtle than that, like with leaving this old medication bottle. You can call the police, but what are they going to do? Unless we can prove he broke in here, they'll just issue another restraining order, all the while looking at me like I'm a hysterical woman because I don't have bruises to show for proof."
Sometimes she wondered if things might not have spiraled down so if only she'd left sooner, once Kent started changing from the charming man she'd married into a manipulative control freak. Easy to second-guess now with hindsight, but at the time she'd let guilt blind her to the signs. Deep in her heart she'd been certain the fault was hers because, God help her, she didn't love Kent as much as she'd once loved Daniel.>And once she had her life back?
Simply because she'd reclaimed her inner self didn't make her any more right for Danny than she'd been eleven years before. Not that he was even the same person. Parts of Danny remained, mingled with the newer, darker Daniel. Even if he stayed single after however long it took her to reclaim her life…
She didn't know. But for the first time in years, she knew she wanted to dare. To dream.
And the steamy whispers of possibility made packing somehow easier and tougher at the same time.
"Hey, Mary Elise, where ya going?" Austin piped from four steps ahead as he sprinted into the condo, his blankie dragging.
Going? Daniel's brain went numb.He stood in the open doorway staring at Mary Elise's suitcase, and freaking couldn't process what he was seeing.
Didn't want to.
Hell, his mind never stopped working. Never. His thoughts always operated three paces ahead of his feet, and his feet were mighty damned fast even on a bad day.
And thanks to Austin's question, this promised to be a sucky day. Once again Mary Elise flipped his world.
Daniel double-timed into the condo, his boots traveling ahead of his reason. He charged past the boys, stopping toe-to-toe with Mary Elise and her small suitcase.
Austin shuffled to a stop in front of her, his bottom lip trembling.