Defying Desire (13 page)

“Order some food, I don’t care what, and have it sent up immediately,” Trent said watching as Lyle jabbed the button to summon the elevator.

Stepping inside Trent pulled Tia closer to his chest. She was moaning now, a pitiful sound that ripped at his self-control. What had happened to her in that house?

Once in his apartment Trent moved instantly to his bedroom, laying Tia down gently. He stood, was going to go into the bathroom to wet a towel for her and wipe her face but she reached up to him, her fingers clutching as if she were trying to grab at something.

“Please. Please. Take me…instead,” she whimpered. Then her head thrashed back and forth on the pillow. “No. No. Everybody leaves. Please, don’t leave.”

Trent was confused and then again he wasn’t. Sitting on the bed he gathered her up in his arms, pulling her onto his lap and cradled her.

Rubbing his hands over her hand, across her cheek, he rocked her, whispering as he did.

“It’s okay, baby. It’s all over. It was just an accident, Tia. It’s all over now.”

After a few minutes her thrashing stopped, her heart still pounded, he felt it with each tremble of her body. She was still crying, silently now, not those gut wrenching sobs that were tearing at his control.

“It’s all right, baby. You go ahead and cry. Everything’s going to be all right.” He was telling her wondering how he was going to make that a reality.

For once in his life Trent felt completely helpless. A semiautomatic weapon and a good strategy wasn’t going to win this battle.

What ailed Tia wasn’t an enemy he could hunt down and kill to protect her. It was an inner demon that would haunt her as long as she allowed it. And Trent, no matter how much he wanted to, didn’t know how to exorcise that.

He had no experience in this area, never having dealt with women on an emotional level. Adam thought he didn’t give a damn about Tia, thought he was going to use her and dismiss her as he had the other women in his life—and for a while he’d thought to do the same. Yet here she was, in his arms, clinging to him as if her life depended on it.

“They’re gone,” she said her voice sounding tiny in the big space of his room.

He nodded his head. “I know, baby.”

“They died and they’re not coming back.”

“It’s all right. They’re in a better place now.”

She shifted, then pulled away from him slightly.
“Trent?” she asked as if for the first time realizing it was he who held her.

“Hi,” he said weakly, lifting a hand to smooth her hair back from her face.

She reached up with shaking hands trying to wipe the tears from her face. He pushed her hands away and used his fingers to do the job himself.

“How did I get here? Where am I?” she was asking looking around the room.

“Calm down. I brought you to my house because it was closer than trying to take you to yours.”

“What happ—” she was about to say then her eyes flew to his again. “You said you know. What do you know?”

Trent knew she was going to be pissed off but he didn’t care. Tia needed to talk to someone. From what Adam had told him, Camille didn’t know about the accident so she couldn’t help.

Originally Trent had no intention of confessing to Tia about his look into her past but that was because he hadn’t wanted to deal with her on this level. Now, things had changed.

“I know about Jake and Jessica and the car accident that killed them.”

She tried to squirm off his lap but Trent held her still. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay to cry and to scream. You lost the people you loved most in this world. It’s okay to be upset.”

“How did you know? How did you find out?”

“The information was there, Tia. All I had to do was look.”

“You looked into my past?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

That one question had him stumped. Despite what his brothers thought, Trent did not go through the time and
trouble to investigate every woman that he slept with. But from the start he’d known that Tia wasn’t like every other woman. He’d seen something in her eyes, heard something in her voice that said she was dealing with a situation that she couldn’t handle on her own. It was instinctive that he try to help, it was his job. He went off to foreign countries trying to save the lives of Americans and other people that he didn’t even know. He knew Tia, intimately, why shouldn’t he do what he could to save her?

“I knew there was something going on with you and I wanted to help,” he said finally, admitting to himself that the need to help her was much stronger than the need to possess her body.

“You had no right,” she said looking away from him. “It was my business.”

Reaching around he touched her chin, turning her face to his. “And now you are my business.”

She leaned forward, letting her head fall into her hands. “It’s been two years. You’d think I’d be over these panic attacks by now.”

“Have you seen a doctor about them?”

She shook her head even though he’d already known the answer to that.

“Maybe you should.”

“No. They’ll want me to talk about it, to relive it and I…I just…can’t.”

Her body trembled and he knew she was crying again. He didn’t pull her back into his arms although the need to hold on to her until she was better was powerful. Instead he moved until he was right beside her, simply wrapping an arm around her.

“You have to try to make peace with what happened, Tia. Or you’ll never be free to move on with your life.”

“I have no life without them!” she screamed and jumped up off the bed.

She was pacing the room back and forth and, for a few minutes, Trent simply let her be. She needed space to regain her footing. He knew Tia was a fiercely independent woman. Leaning on him of all people wasn’t going to be easy for her. But in the end, she would. She would trust him to take care of her and to help her through this. Trent would have it no other way.

“Tell me about Jake,” he said slowly, still sitting on the bed.

Her pacing slowed. She folded her arms over her chest but continued to walk. “He was my manager. I met him at an audition in New York. We clicked immediately.”

“Love at first sight,” Trent said tightly, not liking the thought of Tia giving such a deep emotion to another man.

“No,” she said stopping suddenly. “We were friends. Really good friends. I used to think of him as a brother at first. Then one night we ended up in bed together.” She looked contemplative, then gave a stilted laugh. “I don’t even remember how it was that we ended up in bed together. I just know the next morning we woke up naked and smiling.”

Okay, she could stop with the trip down memory lane. Trent’s jaw was clenching so tight he feared he’d dislodged a few teeth.

“And just like that we were a couple. I got pregnant about six months later and Jake asked me to marry him. Everything happened really fast but it felt right.”

“You wanted to marry him and to have his baby?”

“I wanted a family.”

Trent nodded, not sure she understood the depth of what she’d just said, or what she didn’t say.

“I found out immediately that I was carrying a girl and
we decided on the name Jessica. I had everything all ready for her. The room, her clothes, everything was all planned.” She stopped walking. “And then they were gone.”

Trent stood then, but didn’t go to her. “But you survived. You’re still here. Do you think Jake would want you living this shell of a life because you can’t let go of your grief?”

“I’m living the best life I can.”

“Bull! You’re hiding in that apartment, coming out only to work. You’re not living at all.”

Lifting her head defiantly she retorted, “You don’t seem to be complaining when my non-living consists of sleeping with you.”

He did walk to her then. “Sex is easy, Tia. It’s physical, not emotional,” he told her hearing the truth in his words and feeling the pity that he himself believed them so stoically.

She stared up at him, letting his hands go around her waist, her hands hesitantly falling to his chest. “You’re wrong. Nothing is easy with you, Trent.”

Recognizing that she was probably right, Trent sighed. “It doesn’t have to be hard, Tia.”

“How else would it be with you? The last of the Triple Threat Donovans with his navy SEAL secret assignments and irrefutable reputation—everything in your life is hard.”

Her statement held him quiet.

“I’m sorry you went through this horrible time, but I want to do whatever it takes to make you whole. Do you understand that, Tia? Whatever it takes to keep this from haunting you, I’ll do.”

Her chest constricted, tears once more stinging her eyes. This was unexpected. He was unexpected.

“I don’t want you to do anything.”

“I don’t need your permission.”

“You’re a bully,” she spat.

“No. I’m just a man who wants what’s best for…his woman.”

She should have pulled away again. She should have run out of that apartment and back to her own. She was too exposed, too vulnerable. And Trent Donovan was too good, too smooth and too potent for her to ignore. His words wrapped her in a protective cocoon that she’d longed to feel. His hands and his gaze held her perfectly still, and when his head descended, his kiss took her to a place she’d never known. A place she never wanted to leave.

The next clear thought Tia had was around eight o’clock the next morning. That’s when she attempted to roll over in bed and found herself face-to-face with Trent.

He was wide awake and looked as if he had been for some time since he was fully dressed, except for shoes. Glancing down quickly at herself she realized she was still fully dressed, as well.

“We just slept, Tia. I’m not into having sex with emotionally distraught women,” he said by way of a good morning.

“I wasn’t emotionally distraught,” she snapped, then attempted to roll in the other direction.

He stopped her by rolling on top of her, pinning her to the mattress. “Don’t for one minute believe I didn’t want to make love to you all night long. I just like to know that when I’m with a woman, she’s with me one hundred percent.”

“Point taken,” she said, noting his raging erection pressing into her center as he parted her legs.

“As for the emotionally distraught part, don’t get all uptight over it. I’m just telling you what you need to hear. What I suspect other people close to you have wanted to say but have not, for fear of hurting your feelings.”

“And let me guess, you don’t give a damn about my feelings so you’ll say what you want.”

She tried to break free of his hold but his fingers clamped tightly over her wrists.

“I don’t mince words, you know that’s not the type of person I am. As for your feelings,” he sighed. “I care about your feelings much more than I anticipated I would.”

Tia blinked, not sure how she was supposed to react. What she was sure about was that she’d completely embarrassed herself yesterday. She needed to call Camille and apologize to her and the rest of the women of the Donovan clan. But first, she needed to get Trent off her before she made a further fool of herself by begging him to make love to her.

“I need to get home,” she said turning her head away from him.

He kept her wrists pulled together then gently held her by the chin. “Yesterday you had a panic attack,” he said matter-of-factly.

Tia waved his words away. “I’ve had them before. I have medication that I refuse to take, given to me by a therapist that I no longer see. It’s not a big deal.”

He ignored her flippant tone. “Last night you were emotionally distraught over an accident you could neither have prevented nor foreseen. I want you to talk to someone about it. You need to move past this grief or it’s going to consume you, Tia.

“And I’m not saying this because I’m the infamous Trenton Donovan, the brother with no feelings and no cares in the world.” He paused looking at her earnestly. “I’m saying this because I want you to be well. I want you to be able to go to a baby shower without falling apart, to leave your apartment and socialize without creating barriers to
keep everyone at a distance. I want you to live.
You’ve
got to want to live.”

The pain she’d felt in her chest yesterday was nothing compared to the immediate warmth moving through her at this moment. It consumed her, slowly building, then wrapping her heart in a tight little bundle. Why had his words meant so much to her? Why him? Why now?

Too many questions and not enough time to analyze them, she thought. Yet ignoring Trent was never an option.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “Nobody’s ever put it quite like that before.”

“They should have. But since I’m the one who had to tell you I’ll be the one to follow up on your progress.” He smiled.

“I didn’t say I was going to see anyone,” she said, knowing full well it wasn’t the response he wanted to hear.

“You should know I’m not a very good negotiator.”

“You don’t control me, Trent. We’re not a couple, we’re just lovers, remember.” She said the last part with more vehemence than she thought or intended. She didn’t want Trent to be anything other than her lover. Right?

She probably should have thought to say that sooner because he jumped off her as if she were the carrier of some deadly disease. Standing a good distance from the bed he said, “Camille used to see this really good therapist. Either I’ll get the name and number for you or you can get it yourself. But I’m warning you not to take too long. I don’t have a lot of patience.” That slow, sweet smile again.

“You don’t have a lot of sense,” she said moving off the bed and looking for her shoes. “I’m a grown woman. I’m capable of taking care of myself.”

She’d just found her other shoe and was standing up when he grabbed her by the shoulders. His front was
pressed into her back and he spoke in a soft, but gruff voice directly into her ear.

“This is not a game, Tia. It’s your life you’re playing with. Now if you don’t want me bossing you around then stop being a nitwit and do what we both know is right.”

“Let go of me. You have no right,” she said icily.

“Now see, that’s where you’re wrong. Since we are ‘lovers’ I have every right to touch you when and where I want to. Unless you want to change that, too.”