Sweetest Taboo (SIN 3)

"So have I," said the brunette.

"Could it be us?" they asked in unison, then pushed him into the pool.

He sank to the bottom, then floated there, looking up, the ripples on the surface seeming to take the shape of a woman.

He kicked toward the surface, toward the woman, toward the truth.

But it kept getting farther and farther away. His lungs burned. His muscles ached. He wasn't going to make it. He was going to go down. Drown. Gone.

And then a hand burst through the water and grabbed his wrist and hauled him up, up, up until he was gasping on the pool deck.

Adele.

"Let me help you," she said. "I'll always be there to help you."

--

When Jane found him, Dallas had been sitting on the glider on the porch for two hours. It was still dark. And he was wide awake.

He was, he knew, still in shock.

"Dallas?" She came and sat beside him, dressed only in a thin cotton robe. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

"Adele," he said simply. "The Woman is Adele."

He saw her eyes go wide. Saw her tense and swallow. "Are you certain?"

He stood up, needing to move. He'd been on autopilot for the last two hours, pulling his thoughts together. Hell, pulling his proof together.

And now, goddammit, it was all catching up to him. The horror of this insidious truth. The reality that he had lived. The nature of a woman he had once touched intimately.

Bile rose in his throat.

Oh, god. How the hell did he miss it? How could he not see it?

"Dallas, dammit, talk to me."

"The pieces just started falling together. Her obsession with getting close to me. The way she knew about our relationship."

"She's a therapist. She's trained to see below the surface."

"The way she predicted that someone would leak that we had sex when we were in that cell. Who else knows that? Who else has been consistently in our lives?" His voice took on a hard edge. He saw it so damn clearly now, why didn't she?

Now she stood, too, then started pacing. "But it hasn't been consistent. Adele didn't marry Colin until after we were in college. That was years after the kidnapping."

"Plenty of time to set up a new identity. To change her appearance, even. Heal from surgical scars."

Jane licked her lips. "But--" She cut herself off with a frown, not sure how to contradict him.

"You see it, too, don't you?"

"I don't want to. Oh, god, Dallas, I don't want to. But it makes sense."

"It more than makes sense. It's blindingly obvious now that I've backed away. I was too close before. I mean, hell, at one time I even suspected her of writing those damn letters. But I ruled it out."

She nodded. "You told me. But you ruled her out because the timing was off. Not because you didn't think she had it in her to go psycho-stalker on you." She exhaled loudly. "Shit, Dallas. This is--"

"Huge," he said. "A complete mind fuck. Yeah. I know."