The Avenger (18 page)

"I never meant to take advantage of you." The the words spewed out of his mouth sounding common and inadequate.

"You left me," she said after a painful pause.

The truth stung. "You think I used you."

"I may have been young, Jack, but I always knew what I wanted." She tucked her bare feet under her legs. "What I didn't know was why you left after ... well, you know." She lifted her slender shoulders. "It was my first time. I suppose I was immature enough to dramatize the whole event, but I felt as though you'd saved my life. I thought it meant something." A small smile crossed her lips. "Very foolish of me."

A white, hot jab of anguish stabbed Jack's gut.

Moving to Oakland from Texas at the age of fifteen actually had saved
his
life, he reflected, considering his father was in prison and his mother ran through men and alcohol at the fast pace. He'd been a mess when he came to live with his foster parents, kicked out of juvie and given one last chance to reform.

Turns out his one last chance had been Olivia. She'd saved him then and he couldn't help wondering if she'd save him now. "It's complicated," he said, looking at his interlocked hands dangling between his legs. "I wanted to call you, let you know what happened, send a postcard, but – "

She placed her feet flat on the hardwood floor and leaned forward on her elbows. "Instead you showed up at my office seventeen years later talking about dead bodies and a murder case."

Jack swiped a hand over the scruff of his jaw. "All I wanted was to protect you from that bastard stepfather of yours." For years he'd been stumbling around the truth like a blind man. He stared into Olivia's steady eyes and knew with a wrenching knife-wound to the gut that he had to start being honest with her.

Restless, he slammed out of his chair and began pacing the room, his fists jammed in his pockets. "Graduation night," he began, "I looked for you, thought you'd left early." He remembered how he'd walked off the stage, clutching his diploma in one hand and holding his cap on his head against the stiff breeze with the other. His car keys were tucked in his dress slacks and he searched the crowd.

Olivia nodded for him to continue.

"I couldn't wait to meet at the dugout like we'd arranged." He smiled, thinking of how pumped up he'd been. "I had to see you. Right then." But he couldn't locate the top of her dark curly head among the staff and families that pressed toward the graduates. "Someone said you'd gone home early, so as soon as I could, I drove to your house."

Her surprise was genuine. "I didn't know."

"No one answered, and it occurred to me that you'd already gone to the dugout like we'd planned. As I turned to leave, the front door swung open. Your step-father stood there. No shirt, no shoes. A bottle of Jim Beam in his hand."

He saw it as clear as a picture, Roger scratching his bare belly with the hand holding the liquor bottle, drunk as a skunk and mean as a rabid dog. Pure ugliness around his mouth.

Jack sank into the chair and leaned on his forearms. "I didn't lie to you when you asked what I'd done with my life. I just gave the short version."

Olivia sat up straighter, steel in her eyes. He couldn't tell if she believed him or not. "Give me the long version," she ordered.

He sighed, staring down at his hands. "I went to college just like I told you, but it was a Special Forces training school that crammed five years of academic studies and intensive training into three."

Her beautiful green eyes widened. "Military school?"

He nodded. "Invictus. Right after that the Marine Corps. Did time in Kuwait and South America."

Shock layered her face. "You were just a kid."

"I'm not sure I was ever a kid." He smiled without humor. "I finally went back to Maryland, to Invictus." He spread his hands, palms upward. "Pretty soon, the Organization was the only home I ever knew. The only place where I felt half-way normal."

"I don't understand. What did they do to you?"

Jack didn't answer and cradled his head in his hands.

Olivia rose and knelt in front of him, but not touching him, he noticed. "That still doesn't answer why you left so abruptly."

He looked up into her face, closer now. "After the night when you and I ... after that night I felt different, changed."

"Emotionally? So did I."

He shook his head, unable to meet her eyes, and rose again, left her sitting on the carpet. He gazed through the wide glass window into the night as if he'd find the words there to explain that long-ago time. "I swear to God, Livvie. I loved you. From the moment I first saw you, I loved you." First as a friend, then ... "

In fact, Jack recalled the exact moment he ceased to think of Olivia Morse as a nuisance and tagalong and saw something in her that sparked his interest. The promise of womanhood in her budding breasts and skinny hips and legs, of something alluring that drew him to her like a magnetic force field.

At the first blush of spring that last year the three of them were together all the time – Olivia, Ben, and Jack – like the three musketeers. They'd driven Ben’s pick-up truck to the rock quarry north of the city. They wore tank tops and shorts, and relished the pale sun beating on their bodies for the first time since winter. After rummaging for empty beer and soda cans, they lined them up on the largest rocks and took turns shooting the rifle.

Jack's arms wound around Livvie, demonstrating how to hold the rifle butt against her right shoulder and sight down the barrel before squeezing off the shot. He bent his head to see the sight line for himself, and Livvie shifted her hip into his body and turned her head into his face. Jack inhaled the sweetness of peppermint on her breath and the smooth skin of her cheeks tinged with the sun’s warmth. She peered upward through impossibly thick lashes and stared unblinking at his mouth while something inexplicable shifted inside him, a turn down a divergent road from which he couldn't return.

If he’d known that the force of their attraction would nearly destroy him, would he have acted on it anyway? Or was his destiny decided long ago by some cosmic force he didn’t understand and over which he had no control? Determined by the unique arrangement of his genes?

Jack had seen a matching emotion in Livvie’s face, and he knew she’d felt it too, that shift in their friendship. As he gazed at her, all those years ago, a placid serenity seemed to descend over her. She’d reached a momentous decision, but he didn’t know what that meant until much later. When it was too late to go back.

Then Ben shouted up at them from the creek bed, and the moment was lost.

Jack turned from the window, saw Olivia brush her fingers against damp cheeks, and continued his story. "Within a week of that night I noticed changes in myself," he continued, "significant ones. I moved up a weight class in wrestling because my body bulked up so much. I became strong – so damned strong – my muscles developed overnight, and I grew five inches that spring."

Olivia crossed to the window to stand beside him while they both searched the inky night. She still avoided touching him, but he felt her soothing warmth. "I didn't notice," she whispered.

"Every one of my senses heightened – sights, sounds, smells so acute I thought I'd suffocate. I pushed you away because I wanted you all the time and didn't want you to think I was some lust-crazed maniac."

"But we never ... " she protested, "after that."

"Yeah." He tried to smile, faltered. "The most bizarre thing was the healing."

"Healing?" He sensed her confusion.

"Amazing powers, a cut, a wrenched ankle, a scrape or burn – all healed freakishly fast. I must have injured myself a dozen times that spring and never saw a doctor once."

She wet her lips and touched his shoulder so that he turned toward her. "You ... you can't expect me to believe that."

He went on anyway. "After that the dreams started, weird psychedelic images and nightmarish stories, like someone had slipped me acid. But none of them made sense the next morning. Night sweats, headaches, nausea, blurred vision ... "

"That sounds like drugs." Accusation registered in her voice.

"God, Livvie, something much worse."

She shook her head in bewilderment. "What could be worse?"

But Jack wasn't ready to talk about that yet. Instead, he pulled out the one fact he knew he had to tell her. "Like I said, it was grad night and I couldn't find you, so I went to your house, but you weren't there." He hesitated. "Roger was."

Roger Strong, who'd made a believer of him long before anything else.

Jack rushed the words out on a single breath. "I killed him."

She jerked back from him and sank into the wing chair. "Oh my God."

Silence filled the room while the magnitude of his confession hung between them.

Finally Olivia spoke, her voice frantic, a light sheen of sweat on her upper lip. "But ... it was an accident, right? Roger was always getting into drunken brawls." Her fingers clutched the arm of the chair. "Tell me it was an accident, Jack."

"Not exactly an accident," he said disgustedly. "More like him swinging a broken whiskey bottle at my face and me avoiding it the best way I could."

"What do you mean?"

"He was an ass, Livvie," he insisted quietly, not wanting to excuse his actions, but needing to explain them. He'd been horrified by what he'd done, but not sorry. "Roger deserved everything he got. It wasn't only you he bothered. He went after any girl who wasn't smart enough, or old enough, to stay clear of him."

She stared up at him and shook her head as if denying the facts.

"He smashed the beer bottle on the porch railing and came after me with it. Opened up a vicious gash on my bicep. Then I made the mistake of turning my back on him. He tackled me from behind. It all happened so fast."

Jack looked away, still horrified at what he'd done next. "I swung around, got him in a choke hold. And then ... I heard his neck snap."

Stunned silence filled the room for long moments.

Horror and shame flitted across Olivia's face. "My mother told me he left her," she said slowly, "deserted without a word. I was glad he was gone." Her lips twisted in a wry grimace. "The police investigated and said he probably ran off with another woman like my mom suggested. Nobody cared, least of all me."

Her voice slowed to a crawl. "If you killed him, what happened to his body?"

"I went home to clean up. I was terrified. I didn't know what to do. When I went back, Roger was gone."

Hope flared in her eyes. "Maybe you didn't kill him. Maybe what my mother said was true. Maybe he was stunned and just got up and walked away."

"I killed him," Jack insisted dully. "I heard his neck snap. He was dead." He remembered how afraid he'd been, the confrontation with Roger, the fear of getting caught and serving time like his old man.

"Then that healing power kicked in. My arm was dripping blood so heavy I thought he'd hit an artery, and the next thing I knew, the bleeding had almost stopped. Twenty minutes later an eight-inch long, inch-deep gash in my upper arm was starting to heal." Jack paused and looked her square in the eye. "All. By. Itself. It's been happening ever since."

She looked as if she'd been sucker punched. "That's not possible."

His body's regenerative powers still amazed Jack after all these years. How could he expect Olivia to believe?

"This weird strength and the healing factor began after we'd been together," he said and watched her sink under the weight of this strange knowledge. "That's one of the reasons I didn't dare be with you again."

"Even though we both wanted it," she murmured.

"There's more," he added.

It was really too much to take in all at once, Olivia thought, her head swimming with Jack's wild tale. "I need a drink." She walked on shaky legs into the dining area and retrieved a decanter and two glasses.

Jack shook his head. "Not for me, not tonight."

When she looked askance at him, he added, "I – I have to keep a clear head."

She poured herself a stiff drink while Jack watched her carefully. "I know you don't want to hear this," he said, "but I have to go away by myself for a little while."

She choked on the swallow of burning liquid. "Why?"

"It has to do with Invictus."

"And – let me guess – you aren't going to explain, right?" The bitterness in her voice sounded ugly to her own ears.

"What else do you want to know?" he asked in a reasonable tone that made her angrier.

She gulped another drink and waved her hand in empty gracelessness. "There's more, you said. What more?"

Jack looked weary, and for a brief moment all she wanted was to hold him in her arms and comfort him, but she steeled herself against those tender feelings.

"I'll be gone a few days, no more," he said, "and when I get back I'll tell you the rest."

She glowered at him, glad she hadn't succumbed to the momentary weakness. "Go then." She turned her back to him. "Get out. Keep your secrets. I don't care about them." She felt dizzy and realized she'd drunk the alcohol too quickly.

"I promise I'll tell you everything," he repeated.

His words were so soft she almost missed them, thought he'd gone. Suddenly his hands lightly touched her shoulders. He dropped a kiss on the top of her head and ran his fingers gently up and down her arms. "Don't be angry."

Olivia melted into his body, feeling for a brief moment as if she'd come home. Her breath hitched and her blood pounded at her temples. God, she wanted him. Her body vibrated with the need to touch and be touched by him. He gently nuzzled her neck. His hot breath on her skin sent shivers of pleasure through her. When he turned her around and captured her mouth in a sweet kiss, she was so hungry for him that she moaned silently.

The intensity of the kiss pounded through her veins like an unleashed dam. She wrapped her arms around his neck and slid her fingers into his thick hair, pulling him harder, closer to her. The resonating pulse of his desire hummed between them. He wanted her as much as she wanted him, she thought, feeling the electric shock of need spark between them. He pulled away for a moment, dark fierce eyes staring into hers as if asking permission. She tugged his mouth down and nipped at the beautifully carved bottom lip. He responded by plundering her mouth until she couldn't think, couldn't breathe, couldn't stop.