The Burning Point (21 page)

First, secure the wires so she could let go of them. She wedged the tip of the brass punch into a small crack in the lip of the drilled hole. Then she twisted the wires around the shank of her improvised anchor.

Cautiously she leaned out over the elevator shaft. The dynamite was dangling precariously from the hole, supported only by the thin wire leads. She should be able to reach the back of the column to retrieve the explosive without a problem.

Though she'd never been particularly afraid of heights, she was very aware of the yawning chasm below her as she tried to get a good grip on the column with her left hand. Wishing it were square instead of cylindrical, she stepped to the edge of the shaft and reached around with her right arm. Easy.

Except that what looked like solid floor crumbled under her weight, plunging her left leg downward. "
What...?
"

As she cried out, her body pitched forward into the shaft, snapping the thin safety tape. Her grip on the column broke and for a horrifying instant she was falling out of control. Lashing out frantically, she caught the corner where the column intersected the floor.

Before she could even scream, she swung around, her head slamming into the concrete, her left arm and leg yanked as if being pulled from their sockets. It took her a dazed moment to realize that crumbling of the floor slab had created the treacherous hole. Paradoxically, the hole had also been her salvation by trapping her leg long enough to stop her lethal fall.

Still jammed knee-deep in the hole, her leg was bent into an awkward hook that supported most of her weight, with some help from the handhold. Amazingly, her hard hat had stayed in place and protected her head from major damage. Though her position was precarious, with head lower than hips, at least she wasn't lying in broken pieces ten stories below.

She forced herself to take a deep breath and
think
. Should she yell for help? No, she'd never be heard over the roar of the generator banging away at the ground level. Someone might glance up the shaft and see her clinging there, but that wasn't particularly likely. She couldn't count on Donovan. He might be tied up downstairs anywhere from a few minutes to hours.

Was her leg wedged in so tightly that she would stay in place even if her hand grip failed and left her hanging upside down like a bat? No. The strain on her leg and knee was ferocious. Soon the limb would be too numb to maintain the tension that was holding her in position. When that happened, her weight would pull her loose and she would drop like a stone. Certainly her handhold alone wouldn't support her.

She hoped that she had the strength and leverage to pull herself up onto the floor again, because that looked like her best hope. Maybe she could find some kind of hold for her right hand on the column. She skimmed her palm over the rough surface. Ah, there was a rough depression about the same level as her shoulder.

Setting the heel of her hand in the depression, she warily transferred some of her weight to the hold. It felt secure, so she started levering herself upward, at the same time sliding her left hand along the floor to find another grip. Damn, but she should have gone in for gymnastics rather than softball and field hockey in her younger days--this was going to require a contortionist.

Painstaking she raised her torso until her right arm was straight without finding anything to hold with her left hand. Her whole body shook with the effort of holding her position. With growing fear, she recognized that she might really die here.

"Kate!" Donovan's voice echoed around the bare glass walls.

An instant later he was kneeling above her. Bracing his left hand on the column, he wrapped his right arm around her waist and heaved upward. She whipped through the air and tumbled over him, her leg pulling free of the hole and her hard hat flying off. They rolled away from the shaft, ending with Donovan half on top of her.

Near hysteria, Kate's first surge of relief was followed by a panicky reaction to the weight of his body. Touching her. Trapping her.

"Christ, Kate! How could you do something so stupid?"

The terror flooding her veins connected to an older, deeper horror. She shoved him away and grabbed a ragged chunk of concrete. "Stay away from me!"

Donovan pushed himself to a sitting position while she raised her improvised weapon, ready to strike if he moved toward her. He stared at the concrete in her upraised hand. "Planning to bash my skull in, Kate?"

She dropped the concrete and wrapped her arms around herself, on the verge of nausea. "Oh, God, I'm sorry, Patrick. You save my life, and I react as if you're a mugger. I'm...sorry."

She rocked back and forth.
This
was why she had stayed a continent away from her former husband, because of this pain, this fear--this searing rage--that had never gone away, only been buried by time and her passionate desire to forget. Yet it had taken only an instant for the old scar to rip into an open, bleeding wound.

The worst he'd ever hurt her had been an accident, really. He'd become furious for a reason she couldn't even remember. Some jealousy thing. She'd been putting together a peach pie when he came raging into the kitchen. He'd grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him, his expression ferocious. She cried out.

Struggling to control himself, he pushed away from her and swung around to smash his fist into the refrigerator. Knocked off balance, she fell, her head striking the corner of the counter. She blacked out for an instant and come to with blood pouring from a laceration in her scalp as Donovan frantically tried to staunch the flow.

That time they did end up in the emergency room. The young doctor sent Donovan away while she cleaned the wound and stitched Kate up. Quietly she asked what had happened, adding that Kate could tell the truth, her husband wasn't there.

Shocked that the doctor suspected she was an abused wife, Kate swore that she'd tripped and fallen against the counter. It was almost true, after all. Donovan had been angry, but he certainly hadn't meant to injure her.

The doctor pressed her lips together, but said no more.

Later Kate recognized how much her fear had increased after that incident, which had demonstrated that her husband could hurt her seriously without meaning to. At the time, though, her most fervent desire had been to pretend it had never happened, and she had become world-class at denial.

The doctor had wanted her to stay overnight for observation, but Kate had been desperate to return to normality. Donovan drove her home and put her straight to bed. Hazy from a painkiller, wanting to show that she didn't blame him for the accident, she'd seduced him. Rather easily--he'd been as eager as she to repair the damage to their relationship. He made love to her with tender care, then held her as she slept.

Kate returned to the present to find herself compulsively tracing the ragged scar hidden by her hair. Her hand dropped, and she made an effort to collect herself. "Please excuse my temporary insanity. It was a side effect of practically getting myself killed."

"Kate, don't brush this aside. It's normal to be scared by an accident that could have killed you, but there's nothing normal about reacting like a cornered animal."

"I don't want to talk about it." She retrieved her hard hat. "Time to get back to work."

"No, dammit." He took off his hard hat so that his eyes were no longer shadowed. "You've refused to talk for too long. After you left Baltimore, did you ever go to a therapist? Get counseling?"

"What could a therapist tell me? That I was an abused wife who had spent far too long denying and rationalizing? I already knew that."

He didn't back off. "A good counselor could have helped you come to terms with what happened, so it wouldn't hurt as much now."

"Which would let you off the hook for what you did? I didn't go into therapy, but I did a lot of reading. One thing I learned is that abusive men are nowhere near as out of control as they claim. They know who they can get away with hitting. Not the boss, not their friends, that would cause trouble. But wives and kids, that's okay. They're property. Perfectly all right to knock them around."

"It was never right, and even at my worst, I never thought it was," he said quietly. "I'd give anything to change the past, but I can't. The best I can do is try to make amends. That's why Julia supported the idea of us being forced into each other's company--so that we could get out of our emotional ruts."

She turned her hard had restlessly in her hands. A scrape on one side marked where she'd bashed into the concrete column. "I kind of like my emotional rut."

"Oh? I think you can't forgive yourself for having gotten tangled up in such a sleazy situation, or for staying in it so long," he said. "Things always came to you easily, maybe too easily. You were attractive, intelligent, charming, doted on by everyone who met you. Yet you weren't spoiled. I always loved how nice you were to everyone, the geeks as well as the A crowd."

Thinking her youthful self sounded obnoxious, she asked, "So where did I go wrong?"

"You never really had to deal with the hard stuff. Until you met me, there
wasn't
any hard stuff. So when the first problems showed up in our marriage, you went into denial for a long time. Then, during the"--for the first time, his voice faltered--"the last incident, something snapped and you got out of Dodge as fast as you could. You were right to leave. The situation was going to hell fast. I hate to admit it, but as long as you put up with me, I didn't have reason to change."

"Have you changed now?"

"I hope so." His eyes darkened. "God knows that I've tried my damnedest."

"Have you ever abused any other women?"

"No," he said flatly. "Never."

Her voice became edged. "How did I get to be the lucky one? Was I bitchier than your girlfriends?"

"Never that." His gaze slid away. "I...I was violent with you because I cared more, Kate. And I don't need to be told that's a lousy, sick reason."

Her eyes narrowed. "The East Baltimore guy I married never would have talked like this. Did you actually get counseling?"

"After you left, I couldn't hide from the fact that I was a rotten bastard. Basically it was a matter of change, or shoot myself. So I joined a group for abusive men sponsored by a women's shelter. The worst part was admitting to myself how much I had in common with the other men." He looked away. "After all, I loved you--I had never wanted to hurt you. Then I found that most of the other men said they loved their women, too. Obviously love wasn't enough."

She'd learned that, too, and it had been the saddest discovery of her life.

"I learned more practical stuff, too," he said. "Such as the fact that I had lousy impulse control. That the times I hit the wall instead of you might not have inflicted physical damage, but they were still emotionally brutal. That there's nothing romantic about irrational jealousy. I stayed with the group until I had a good handle on where I went wrong."

"So now you're all repaired."

"I don't really know." His mouth twisted. "I've avoided any relationships that would put me to the test."

"You seem to have everything figured out. So tell me where I crashed and burned."

"I suspect that you swept everything under the carpet after you left," he said. "Not surprising, given the hell I put you through, but not a good long-term solution. Now the edge of the carpet has been flipped back, and you're finding that the pain and anger are alive and well."

Maybe there was some truth to what he said. She'd always prided herself on being able to control her anger. It was terrifying to learn how easily it could sizzle into ugly life. It had erupted with appalling force in the explosive end of her marriage, and it simmered inside her now.

She fingered the scrape on her hard hat. "Any suggestions, Mr. Enlightenment?"

"Forgive yourself for the fact that you were young, Kate," he said quietly. "If you'd been older and wiser, you would have caught on sooner. But you were barely nineteen when we married, and my fatal weaknesses were heavily camouflaged by a lot of love. That was very real, and I'll never believe otherwise."

She felt the sting of tears. Yes, the love had been real. But as Patrick had said, it hadn't been enough.

"You used to be pretty good at expressing your feelings," he said. "It's time to get back in the habit. If you get mad at me, yell instead of being so damned civilized. You're half Italian--you should be able to yell."

She had her "Italian moments," and when she did, she was apt to do a lot worse than just yell. That's why she tried so hard to control her temper. "This is a really strange conversation to have while sitting on the floor of a building under demolition."

"It would be a pretty strange conversation anywhere and anytime."

"But maybe overdue." She got to her feet, and almost fell as pain shot through her knee. Muscles weren't designed to be yanked the way hers had been.

"Your leg is bleeding."

"Scraped it on some rebar, I guess. When I loaded the charge, it went all the way through the column and out the other side. I was trying to retrieve it when I stepped into a concealed hole and lost my balance."

"Carmen has a first aid kit in the office, so she should be able to patch you up. If your tetanus shots aren't up to date, you get one pronto. That's an order." Donovan crossed to the elevator shaft. Testing the security of his footing and avoiding the crumbling area where Kate had come to grief, he leaned out and retrieved the stick of explosive with a sharp jerk that undid the wires around Kate's anchor. Being over six feet tall gave him an unfair advantage.

He turned back to her, the stick of explosive held casually in his hand. "This wouldn't have gone off even if it had fallen down the shaft."

"I thought it probably wouldn't, but I didn't want to find out the hard way."

"Can't fault you for being careful." He tucked the dynamite into a vest pocket. "We'll have to get another hole drilled. Since this one goes all the way through, it might alter the distribution of force too much for a test shot."