Authors: Jenna Mills
CROSSFIRE (13 page)
Lantern-cast shadows played across her face, emphasizing dark circles beneath her eyes. "You sound like my therapist."
He wondered if she realized what she'd just let slip, why she needed professional help. But he didn't ask. "I'm a man of many talents, remember?"
That got signs of life from her. A shot of color returned to her face, light to her eyes. "So was Davy Crockett, but look where that landed him."
He fought the instant grin. "You comparing me to a national hero?"
More life, this time a whisper of heat beneath his fingertips. "What do you think?"
"I think you're trying to change the subject," he said. "I think you're afraid to tell me what happened."
And he wanted to know why. Instinct told him whatever she held locked inside was important, a piece of the enigmatic puzzle he'd never been able to put his hands on.
She looked away, toward the mouth of the cave, but didn't pull away, remained tucked against his side. Against his leg, one of her hands opened. "She was a senior at the
From the toasty confines of the Carrington ancestral home. Hawk had already been in the Army for two years, stationed in Kosovo and sharing drafty, cramped barracks, with absolutely no knowledge that his mother had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
"We'd only been back a few days when a blue norther slammed into the East Coast and dumped record amounts of snow. The whole campus turned into a winter wonderland."
Long-forgotten images clattered through him, of the rare snow days of his youth. He'd never known his father, but his mother had done her best to be both parents to her only child. She'd bundled up her son and taken him to a hilly park west of town, where the sledding had been killer. After hours of play, they'd always built a G.I. Joe snowman before heading home.
Frowning, Hawk shoved the mushroom cloud of memory aside.
"It was a Tuesday," Ellie went on, "the night Kris and I always met for dinner. But classes had been canceled and the whole day blurred."
A day without structure, he thought, but did not say. Normally he didn't miss a chance to razz Ellie about her strict adherence to plans and protocol, but the trance-like tone to her voice warned him now was not the time.
"I loved days like that," he said instead. When he'd been a kid, a day without the litany of chores and reminders had been a gift.
A faint smile curved Ellie's mouth. Her lips were no longer the pale shade of blue that had alarmed him, but instead a hint of coral gave them life. "So did I. Miranda and I could lose a whole day playing in the snow, making snow angels and castles."
"And Kristina?"
The soft sound that broke from Ellie's throat could only be called nostalgia. "She was always too busy, working on an assignment for school or a project for Dad."
Hawk shifted against the wall of the cave, ignoring the bite of cold against his back and his hamstrings as he allowed
Elizabeth
to sink deeper against him. He doubted she realized she no longer fought him.
Slowly he stroked a hand along her back. "That doesn't surprise me." From the stories he'd heard, Kristina Carrington had been fierce and driven and unyielding, rarely taking time to stop and smell the roses. She'd followed her father's plan for her, going so far as to date the son of his best friend, a wealthy
Richmond
banker. There'd been talk of a new dynasty in the making.
"She could be such a drag,"
Elizabeth
said with a rich
The bittersweet words slammed through Hawk. And for the first time, he began to see a different picture of Elizabeth, one of a young girl torn between her picture-perfect older sister and her free-spirited younger sister. From what she'd told him tonight, she'd leaned more toward Miranda than Kristina.
But somewhere along the line that had changed. Somewhere along the line
Elizabeth
had turned her back on mischief and embraced structure.
Instinct warned that snowy day in January eleven years before had a hell of a lot to do with the change.
He knew better than to let himself be drawn back into her world. He knew better than to hold her, listen to her, let his fingers drift through her hair. This was the woman who'd agreed to marry another man just six days after sharing Hawk's bed, and he'd long since quit believing fundamental truths changed. Trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome was truly the definition of insanity.
Pull back,
the detached survivor in him warned.
Pull back now.
And yet he couldn't force himself to move.
"What happened, Ellie? What happened the day classes were canceled?"
Nestled in the V of his legs, she stiffened. "I … I called her in the morning to see if she wanted to go sledding with me and the guy I'd been dating, Shane, but Kris said she had a paper to work on. I…" She paused, dug her fingers into his thigh. "I was hurt. I don't know why, but I took her decision personally and I … told her."
Hawk winced. He had a bad, bad feeling he knew where this conversation was going. He'd always thanked God that while he'd been unable to be with his mother when she drew her last breath, at least the last time he'd talked with her, the morning he'd received word that her condition was deteriorating and that he should get back to the States immediately, he'd told her he loved her.
"The two of you argued?" he asked carefully.
Elizabeth
shook her head, sending long sable hair drifting across his chest. It took every ounce of willpower he had not to twine the strands through his fingers.
"Kris had this way about her," she said, staring into the light of the lantern. "She didn't argue. She simply made her point, and that was that."
Shadows flitted across the hollows of her face, fueling the urge to touch. But he didn't. This, he knew, was something she needed to do on her own terms. "And what was her point?"
Against his thigh, her fingers pushed harder, deeper. And when she spoke, the edge to her voice bordered on devastation. "That life wasn't all fun and games. That some day, when I grew up, I'd realize that."
Abort, abort, abort!
The command rang through him, loudly, fiercely, warning of the bedrock ahead.
But Hawk had never been one to obey orders.
"Ouch," he said softly. Damn it, to hell with caution, he thought as he slid a hand along her back to tangle in her hair. "Did you go sledding, anyway?"
"Yes," she said slowly. "We did."
Kristina Carrington died in a car accident, that much Hawk knew. He could see the sisters had not been on good terms at the time of her death, but the rigid feel of Elizabeth's body against his told him there was more. "What happened, Ellie? Tell me."
Beyond the confines of the cave, the night had grown quiet. The wind barely whispered through the opening in the rock. Whatever fox or coyote had howled earlier had moved on, leaving only the two of them and shadows of the past.
"Every Tuesday Kris and I met for dinner, but that day I forgot. Just the day before she'd told me she really needed to talk with me about something, but after the way we'd argued, I totally forgot. Shane and I had such a good time sledding, and then we went back to his place for hot cocoa. We were laughing and everything seemed so perfect and—" She bit back the words and lifted a hand to her face.
A bad, bad feeling settled low in his gut.
Gently he pulled away her hand and tilted her face toward his. "And what?"
Chapter 7
E
lizabeth
stared at him long and hard before answering. A fierce light burned in her eyes. "Shane was my first," she said. "That night was my first."
Oh, sweet mercy. She'd lost her virginity the night her sister died. No matter what he felt toward
Elizabeth
, no matter how bulletproof his determination to never let her under his skin again, the realization sank through him like a lead weight.
"It wasn't your fault," he said grimly. "Kristina's death had nothing to do with what you did that night."
"But it did!" She ripped away from him and wrapped her arms around her middle. "She got worried when I didn't show for dinner. She called my apartment, but I wasn't there. That was before everyone had cell phones. She left a message on my answering machine saying she was worried and was going to drive out to the park, to see if something had happened."
Hawk squeezed his eyes shut. Because finally, at last, he realized the truth. The reason the Carringtons didn't talk of the night their oldest daughter died.
"Christ, I'm sorry," he said, opening his eyes. The words sounded lame even to his own ears.
"Black ice," she murmured. "They say she died instantly."
Hawk couldn't help it. He couldn't sit there sprawled against the wall of the cave while
Elizabeth
fell apart in front of him. He crawled toward her and pulled her back to his body, held her tight.
For the first time in two years, the way she'd walked away didn't matter.
"It wasn't your fault," he insisted, stabbing his hands into her hair. He was a soldier, a man trained to fight. To protect. He could infiltrate an enemy compound in broad daylight, keep his gaze steady when an assassin held a gun to his head. The word
helpless
didn't exist in his vocabulary. But here, now, seeing the woman he'd always thought of as invincible like this, hearing the jagged edge to her breathing and feeling the complete lack of fight in her body, ripped at him in ways he didn't understand.
Never once had he imagined the hell in which perfect Elizabeth Carrington lived.
Every instinct he owned screamed to fix this somehow, make her understand the truth. He pulled back and gripped her upper arms, spoke with deliberate firmness. "It was
not
your fault."
She looked up at him, revealing eyes huge and dark and devastated, brimming with a vulnerability he'd never seen from her, hadn't imagined possible. "How can you say that?"
"Because it's true."
Damp sable hair fell against her cheeks. "If I hadn't been with Shane, if I'd remembered our dinner, she'd still be alive."
It was an awful kind of logic, the kind that gnawed relentlessly at the soul, growing stronger rather than weaker with the passage of time.
Mom, you've lost too much weight. You need to see a doctor.
Wesley. A woman doesn't complain when she loses weight. She celebrates.
Mom—
Quit arguing. Take the money and buy yourself those new boots you've been eyeing.
His mother had always put her son first. In the end her refusal to tend her own needs, to listen to him, had killed her.
"You don't know that," he said roughly. With both hands he framed her face, refusing to let her look away from him. "None of us is God. It's not for us to say what might have or could have been different." The hypocrisy of his words burned, but there was no way he could sit there and let
Elizabeth
blame herself for her sister's death. "All we can do is accept."
"She wouldn't have been on that road if not for me."
There was no way to refute her claim, so he didn't even try. "
Elizabeth
." He rubbed his thumbs beneath her lashes, brushing away the tears. "If Ethan had been taking Kristina to dinner, and a drunk driver had run a red light and broad-sided him, killing Kris, would you have blamed him?"
Beyond the cave, the wind had picked up, pushing frigid air through the narrow rocky opening. Even he, who normally loved cold temperatures, felt the bite of the chill. But he didn't pull
Elizabeth
close as he wanted to. His question, the force behind it, wasn't about comfort. It was about truth, and the two rarely went hand in hand.
No matter how strong his determination to keep Elizabeth Carrington at an emotional arm's distance, this was one battle from which some stupid, battered code of personal integrity would not let him walk away. After, he told himself. After he forced her to see this truth, he would force her to confront another.
And then, then he would walk away. "Would you?" he asked again.
Temper flashed. "It's not the same thing."
"Answer me," he said firmly, refusing to let her derail the conversation. "Would you blame your brother for an accident beyond his control?"
She let out a deep, uneven breath. "No."
The word was soft, but it echoed between them. The admission cost her, he could tell. He could also tell the scars on her heart would never be erased.
