Scars Of Defiance (5 page)

“I thought you said she wasn’t strong enough to attempt an
escape.”

“She’s been on intravenous fluids for a week, what with her
effort to starve herself. She was so weak she couldn’t lift her own head. I
feared that if she came down with whatever we’d all caught, she’d die. I think
we’re all suffering from food poisoning. I’m sorry sir, but she seems to have
slipped through the cracks.”

Reginald slammed down the phone. That damn girl would be the
death of him. “Get me Victor.” he ordered his personal assistant to action.

Moments later, Victor appeared in his father’s room. “You
asked to see me?” Victor still had a green tinge to his skin and looked as if
he wasn’t finished being sick.

“When was the last time you saw Sierra?”

“Yesterday, why?”

“She’s gone.”

“What? Where?”

“She’s.
Gone
. Victor!” He said slowly to his son.
“She’s missing.”

“I’ll ask Riley. He stayed in a guest room last night ’cause
he didn’t feel well enough to drive.”

“Go find her. You know how important she is to us.”

“Yes, father, I do. I’ll find her.”

Reginald picked up the phone and issued the order to close
the border, even though he knew she would already be across it. Reginald knew
she would have fled to Baylend because she didn’t have any more relatives in
Rendier. They would need to start the search over there.

Victor stumbled into Riley’s room and found him sleeping
beside the toilet in his bathroom. “Riley, wake up! Where’s Sierra?”

“Huh?” Riley mumbled.

“She’s disappeared. Do you know where she is?”

“What? No. Are you sure she isn’t somewhere in the palace?”

“They’re searching as we speak, but everyone seems to be
moving in slow motion from this illness.”

Riley sat up quickly and threw up in the toilet. Victor left
the room.

“Where did you go, Sierra?” Victor said out loud to himself
as he looked out the window, feeling incredibly peeved for being fooled by a
girl. He’d believed, like his father, she was too weak to run. The lame excuse
of her suffering from the flu that was issued the night before at the
engagement party had made him look like a fool because anyone who was someone
knew she was trying to end her life just so she wouldn’t have to marry him. The
embarrassment he felt for being played by a girl enraged him to the core. She
would pay for this!

Chapter 3

The sun peeked over the tips of the tall mountains and lit
up the sky. Sierra’s senses came back to her one at a time. Her sense of smell
was first, as she became aware of the delicious aromas filling her nose.
Hearing came next, but all she could hear was silence. She could feel the soft
warm bed under her and the mound of blankets over her. She knew she was lying
on her side with something heavy and warm draped over her waist. She opened her
eyes and saw a wall, painted a pale white. A clock sat on an end table beside
the bed, showing the time as 9:58 a.m.

She couldn’t remember how she came to be in this bed or how
she got out of the lake, but she was fairly certain she was alive.

A shudder ran through her body, confirming that she was
definitely alive — and cold. To her alarm, the heavy warm object on her waist
moved! She lifted the mass of blankets and looked underneath to discover that
she was wearing only her panties and bra and that the thing draped over her
waist was an arm. She immediately sensed that her back was warm, although she
couldn’t feel anything touching her.

Her heart rate tripled. She had no memory of anything after
jumping from the plane. She had heard of bad things happening at crosser homes,
how people had suffered worse fates after leaving Rendier. She had wondered how
much of that was just lies invented to scare people away from the idea of
crossing. But now, as she lay in a strange bed almost naked and, from the looks
of the hairy arm draped over her, with a man lying beside her, her panic turned
to anger — anger at herself, anger at the man who felt he could take liberties
with her while she was unconscious.

She jumped up screaming, kicking and flailing her arms to
free herself from the layers of blankets. Her sudden outburst and struggle
awoke her bedmate. He tried to calm her down but made no effort to keep her in
bed. He had his hands raised with his palms out and his fingers splayed to show
he meant no harm.

“Hey, it’s okay. Calm down,” he said to the panicking girl.

“Get away f-from me!” She stumbled out of the bed and fell
to the floor as pain ripped through her left ankle and foot.

Paul jumped out of the bed to help her. She sat on the
floor, curled up in a ball holding her left knee close to her chest and wincing
with pain. Her body trembled uncontrollably.

He approached her.

“St-tay away f-from me!” she screamed. Her chattering teeth
and shivering made it difficult for her to speak. She stretched one of her arms
out to keep him away, while clutching her bent leg close to her chest.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. He stepped closer. She
noticed now that he was wearing only his underwear.

She slid away from him back toward the corner. “Where am I,
and why am I und-d-dressed? What did you do to me? And wh-who are you?” She
couldn’t spit the questions out fast enough.

He smiled and sat down on the floor at arm’s length away
from her. He felt slightly hurt that her presumptions of him were evil. “You’re
in Baylend,” he explained. “You were on the crosser plane last night, remember?
I picked you up and brought you to my house. You were frozen to the bone. I had
to … I was only warming you up with my body heat.”

She looked back at him nervously, trying to figure out what
he was going to do next. She knew she couldn’t run away. She didn’t know where
she was, and something was wrong with her foot and ankle.

“Nothing happened, I swear. My name is Paul. Are you hurt?”

“What kind of question is th-that? Of course I’m hurt!”
Anger flashed in her beautiful hazel eyes, which Paul now got a good look at
for the first time. Their color was on the green side of hazel, with a
definitive brown border around the edge of her irises. The perfectly shaped
eyebrows that he had admired in their relaxed state were now arched in anger,
and after having slept with wet hair, her locks were kinked in disarray and
flopped forward over one shoulder. This girl was full of fire. But he figured
as much the night before when he saw the markings all over her back and legs.
He looked at her legs again in the morning light, and a tight knot formed in
his stomach.

Paul realized she must be feeling vulnerable because of her
nakedness, so he reached up and grabbed a blanket off the bed and handed it to
her. He got up and walked over to the dresser, took out a pair of jogging
pants, and put them on. Then he pulled out an oversized tee-shirt and tossed it
to her.

The shirt landed on her head. She pulled it off her face and
looked at him in confusion. What was he playing at now?

“Well, put it on,” he said. “Clearly you’re worried that I’m
going to take advantage of you in your helpless state. Cover up so you can
think straight.” He knew he sounded gruff, but he felt his actions were
necessary to help her to relax.

She watched him leave the room, then she hurriedly pulled
the shirt on before he came back. She tried to stand up, but her foot wasn’t
going to cooperate. She hopped toward the bed, trying to keep her balance. She
tumbled onto the bed whimpering in pain and crawled back under the blankets to
get warm. She could hear voices from outside the door. In walked Paul and an
older woman. They stood over the bed and looked at her.

“Nice to see you awake, honey,” the woman said. “How do you
feel?”

“My foot hurts,” Sierra confessed. She admired the woman’s
beautiful features and her short, wavy brown hair. She stood several inches
shorter than the boy next to her.

“Any other pain?” the woman asked pleasantly.

Sierra thought for a second. “Just some aches. Nothing bad.”

“Are you hungry?”

Sierra nodded her head.

Paul stepped out of the room and came right back with a tray
of food. It must have been sitting just outside the door. He brought it over to
her, and the woman helped her sit up in bed. He placed the tray in her lap,
then stood up straight and looked at her.

He still wasn’t wearing a shirt, just the jogging pants. He
was lean and trim, with impressive muscle tone and broad shoulders. As she
looked more closely at his face, she could see he wasn’t very old, probably in
his early twenties, maybe younger, and exceptionally good looking. Victor and
Riley had nothing on this guy.

He had dark brown hair and thick bushy eyebrows. His eyes
were the kind a girl could drown in — dark brown, almost black. He had a
perfectly straight narrow nose with just the right amount of bridge and a small
indentation at the tip. The ridges and valley between his nose and top lip
helped shape his mesmerizing mouth. The lower lip was plump, and the upper one
thin with the shape of an “m.” His cheekbones weren’t extremely prominent but
were high set, elongating his cheeks down to a firm jaw line that was shadowed
with a slight amount of dark stubble. His light skin tone accentuated his dark
features even further. The combination resulted in perfection. Plain and
simple, Paul was gorgeous, and just looking at him made her mouth go dry.

 “What would you like us to call you, honey?”

“Hmm?” She pulled her eyes off Paul and tried to swallow.

“What’s your name?” Paul asked with a soothing tone in his
voice.

“Sara.”

“Okay, Sara. This is my mother Elsie.”

“We’ll step out now and let you eat your breakfast,” Elsie
said, ushering Paul out the door.

Sierra had not planned to use the name “Sara.” It just fell
out of her mouth when he asked. She wished she had used a different name like
Amy or Lisa and not one so similar to her real name, but her mind turned to
mush after her in-depth appraisal of Paul. As she thought about it now, the
name “Sara” would symbolize a dramatic change in her life. That was what she
was trying to do:  change her life, change her future. Her mind went back to
her father. He was always full of one-line aphorisms that were deep in meaning
like “You can’t change the past” or “Living in the past makes you ignore the
present and prepares for a bad future,” but her favorite was “Stop should-ing
all over yourself.”

She looked at the warm plate of food in front of her and
stopped for a moment to appreciate the fact she was alive. She had survived the
jump somehow, and her future was now in her own hands, not in the Rawlings’.
She dug into the food Paul had brought her:  fried potatoes, toast, and some
type of warm cream sauce over scrambled eggs, with a glass of milk. She was
grateful for the meal, and it really hit the spot. She couldn’t remember the
last time she had eaten. By the time she finished, her foot was throbbing, and
she wished Paul and Elsie would come back in.

While she waited, she looked around the bedroom and
scrutinized her surroundings. To her left was the door, a dresser, and double
doors that she assumed went to a closet. The wall at the foot of the bed was a
solid white wall. There was a window on the wall to her right, and in the right
corner was a cushioned armchair. A simple white valance stretched across the
top of the window, with white sheers that partially obstructed the view but
still allowed the light to come in. To her immediate right sat an end table,
with a matching end table on the other side of the bed. There was a lamp with a
popular sports team logo and an alarm clock on the table to the right. There
were no pictures, no posters, and nothing else that personalized the room. The
dark waxed hardwood floor completed the emotionless room.

About thirty minutes later Paul returned. He knocked first
and waited for her to tell him to come in. “Here, let me take that for you,” he
said, leaning over the bed to take the tray.

 She looked up into his dark eyes. “I’m sorry for panicking
like that,” she said. “It’s only that I woke up and was so disoriented and …”

“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t need to apologize.” Paul cracked
a smile on one side of his mouth.

“Your other crossers probably don’t give you this much
trouble.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”

She looked puzzled. “Isn’t this a crosser home?”

“Yes, but I’m not … I’ve never taken care of … well, someone
like you.”
Let alone a girl
, he thought.

“I don’t understand.”

“My job is to pick up crossers after a drop. I picked you up
and brought you here. The other beds in the house were already full, and it was
either take you somewhere else or put you in my own bed.”

She looked out the window in a daze. “There was a bad
storm.”

“Yeah, it was a total blizzard. They told me a plane was
flying in, and I wondered who would fly through such a mess. They must have had
some valuable cargo on board.”

“So, I must have made it to the road for you to find me,
right?”

“No, I found you stuck in the ice about fifteen feet into
the lake.”

Her eyes widened, and her voice became soft. “I never made
it out of the lake?”

“Well, not on your own. But that’s my job, remember?”

The situation suddenly became clear to her. “Thank you for
saving me, and warming me,” she said. “I understand my cold wet clothes had to
come off so I wouldn’t freeze to death. I’ll be sure to thank your mother for
undressing me to save my life.”

“Well, she … sort of … wasn’t the one who undressed you. I
did.”

Her eyes opened up so wide that Paul thought they might fall
out if he gently tapped her on the back of the head.

“She was busy with the other crossers when I brought you
here. I didn’t know we were full” —
thanks to my brother
— “and she was
going to send you to another crosser home, but I told her I’d take care of
you.”