The Chesapeake Diaries Series (21 page)

“I don’t think Gus checked under the bed or any of the closets. What if someone’s hiding up there?”

“Good point.” He draped the jacket over the back of a chair. “I don’t want you lying awake all night
worrying that someone will pop out from that closet. I’d better come up with you and check.”

She turned off the lamp and started toward the stairs.

“Do you have a basement?” he asked.

“What?” She frowned.

“A basement. You know, an excavated area under the first floor.”

“Yes, I have a basement.”

“Is the door inside or outside?”

“It’s right through there.” She stood on the bottom step, her hands on her hips, and watched him disappear into the kitchen.

He was back in less than a minute. “You could use a better lock on that door. It’s just a slide bolt. You should have dead bolts that require keys on it and the back door.”

“I have a dead bolt on the back door.”

“It has a latch that’s located right under the glass panes.”

She started up the steps slowly, glancing over her shoulder. He was following her, his eyes on her face.

“So?” she asked.

“So someone could break the glass, reach in, turn the latch, and just like that, they’re in.”

“Oh, thanks for that mood breaker.” She stopped midway up the stairwell and glared at him.

He came up behind her, chuckling softly. “If the mood is broken, we’ll just have to find a way to get it back again.”

“Think you’re up to it?” She tugged on both ends of his tie.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

She laughed and led him by the tie to her room facing the back of the house. Three arched windows framed a bay, and moonlight streamed in through the sheer curtains. She backed toward the bed, then stopped at the side and raised her hands to undo her dress.

“Are you sure you aren’t too rattled from the break-in and everything …?”

“I don’t want to think about it anymore tonight. You’re here to protect me, right?” She dropped the dress and it puddled on the floor at her feet. “Besides, do I look rattled to you?”

“You look beautiful. In or out of that dress.”

He reached out for her and she walked into his arms. His hands slid up and down her back, and she unbuttoned his shirt, pulling the tails out from the waist. She pulled up the T-shirt and ran her hands over his bare chest, then fell back on the bed, taking him with her. His mouth met hers halfway to the pillow, and she parted her lips to his tongue that thrust inside and teased the corners of her mouth. His hand reached for her left breast, but she moved it, offering the right one instead. She felt crazed with wanting him, could not seem to get close enough. She felt as if she were on fire, inside and out, everywhere he touched seeming to burn. His mouth moved to her throat, and she all but purred as his lips made an agonizingly slow descent to her shoulder, then lower, and she arched her back, but when his mouth sought her breast, she moved slightly to offer the right one and he took it between eager lips. She moaned far back in her throat and reached down to tug on his waistband.

“As good as you look in this tux,” she gasped, “I think it’s time to retire it for the night.”

Later, she would wonder how he’d managed to undress without his mouth ever leaving her skin, she was so totally lost in sensations she barely recalled ever having had before. She wrapped her legs around his and drew him inside almost frantically while his mouth drove her to the edge of madness. Wordlessly, the rhythm natural, he began to move inside her, slowly at first. She took him in deeper, as the pace increased, until she could no longer tell her cries from his. He slowed for a moment and raised his head to look into her eyes, then drove them both to completion on waves of sensation that she thought would never end.

He nuzzled the left side of her face without speaking, and before she realized it, he’d run his hand from her neck to her breast. His hand stopped moving, then slowly, with one finger, he traced the jagged line that ran from the nipple to just under her collarbone.

“What happened here?” he asked.

“I, ah, walked into a knife.” She moved his hand away and pulled the blanket around her, but he pushed it down again.

“Who was holding it when you walked into it?” His voice was calm but she detected something disquieting below the surface.

She pushed him away and sat up.

“Ness?” He sat up with her. “Who did this to you?”

Her insides twisted and her stomach knotted and she couldn’t get any words out. She hadn’t wanted him to see, hadn’t wanted anyone to ever see the disfiguring
scar that had kept her from wearing clothes that didn’t cover it, had kept her from getting naked those few times she’d almost let a guy get close. Why had she dropped her guard with Grady? Now that he saw, now that he knew, he’d be outta there.

Yeah, well, he was leaving anyway, she reminded herself.

“Vanessa, look at me.” He turned her face to his. “Tell me who did this to you. What’s this scar …?”

She wet her lips and took a breath.

“Just something I could have avoided if I’d been smarter and faster. It’s not a very interesting story.”

“Let’s say I’m interested.” When she didn’t respond, he reached over her to turn on the light on the bedside table.

“Don’t. Please don’t.”

He sank down next to her.

“All right. But from what I can feel, I’m guessing it’s not a surgical scar. It’s too ragged. Any doctor who cuts like this should be behind bars.”

“He
is
behind bars but he wasn’t a doctor.” Vanessa sighed. It was clear Grady wasn’t going to give up.

“Who was he?”

“My second husband.”

“Why would he do something like this to you?”

“Why?” She laughed, her voice harsh. “Because he was angry with me, and because he could.”

Grady ran his finger along the scar very gently. “You loved him?”

“I thought I did.”

“That boils down to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

“You loved him, and he did this to you?”

“He was very angry because I told him I was leaving. He didn’t want me to. He picked up a knife, said that he’d make it so that no one would ever love me again, no one would want to make love to me again. He’d cut off both of them.” In a defensive motion, she raised her arms to cover her breasts.

He was so silent for so long she wasn’t sure he was still awake. Then he gathered her to his chest and stroked her back softly, but he still didn’t speak.

“Such a cliché, right?” She covered her face with her hands. “Woman wants to leave an abusive husband, he disfigures her.”

“How did you stop him from cutting the other one?”

“I kicked him straight up the middle, and he dropped the knife, and I ran outside, to a neighbor’s, and they called an ambulance and the police. As you can imagine, there was quite a bit of blood—”

“Did you press charges?”

“I did. Yes, I did.” She twisted the end of the sheet into a point, first one way, then the other. How to tell him what that time had been like? Why even try? “And there was a trial. That was the worst part of it.”

“It couldn’t have been worse than the abuse.”

“Oh, yeah. His whole friggin’ family was there in the courtroom all day, every day. They whispered at me when I came in, and they whispered at me when I came out. They threatened me with everything you could imagine. The day he was sentenced, at Maggie’s insistence, I went back to Illinois with her. That night, they set my house on fire. Burned it to the ground. I lost everything I owned.”

“I’m guessing the police figured it out quickly enough.”

“Oh, sure. One of his brothers and one of his cousins were arrested and brought to trial, but there was no physical evidence and the jury didn’t convict them.”

“Where is he now? Your ex-husband?”

“He’s still in prison. He got seven years and he had to agree to anger management while he’s in prison.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Three years and a couple of months.”

“Any chance he’s out?”

She shook her head. “No. Someone would have contacted me. The district attorney promised me that if I’d testify, they’d make sure that I was notified before he was released.”

“And where did all this happen?”

“Back in Wisconsin.” She sighed. “Anyway, that’s why there’s that scar. And that’s why I didn’t want to turn on the light. I didn’t want you to see how ugly my body is.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head.

“Vanessa, there is nothing ugly about your body. If anything, yours is the most beautiful body I’ve ever seen up close and personal.”

“You’re just saying that because you think you’ll get lucky again.”

He cupped her face in his hands.

“I got lucky the day I walked into Hal Garrity’s backyard and stood on his deck and watched this beautiful woman float across it. She took my breath
away,” he told her. “She takes my breath away every time I look at her.”

She felt as if something inside her cracked, then broke.

“Stop it.” She swatted at him, tears welling in her eyes.

The tears became a torrent. She had no words, only emotions, too many at one time for her to separate shame from the relief that he had not recoiled in disgust, or from the mind-numbing pain she felt every time she thought about the night that Gene had pushed her back against the kitchen table and sliced through her shirt into her flesh. It had been hard for her to admit even to herself that she’d left one bad marriage only to fall headfirst into another. She was embarrassed to remember what she had been like back then. It had been a long time since she’d talked about it, longer still since she’d cried for the woman she had once been.

“You must think I’m the stupidest woman in the world, to let someone do this to me,” she sobbed.

“I doubt very much that you
let
him do that, Ness. I don’t think abuse was what you were looking for when you married him.”

“But I took it, and I kept taking it.” She hiccuped. “I let it get worse. I should have walked that first time but …”

“But he promised he wouldn’t do it again, and you believed him because you loved him, right? You made excuses for him because you loved him.”

“I am such a cliché, aren’t I? Pathetic,” she wailed.

“What’s pathetic is a man who is so small that he has to hurt someone else in order to feel like a man.”

He gathered her up, blanket and all, and let her cry until there were no tears left to fall. When finally she stopped, he asked, “What’s his name?”

“Gene Medford.”

“Is that Eugene?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Just curious. He’s in prison in Wisconsin now?”

She nodded, then rested against him, sniffing and wishing she’d left that box of tissues on her nightstand instead of taking them into the bathroom on Saturday morning.

“Damn good thing that makeup woman used the waterproof mascara.” She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hands. “Otherwise, I can’t even begin to imagine what I’d look like. Bad enough the nose is red now but I could have raccoon eyes to go with it.”

Grady leaned back against the pillow and tucked the blanket around them both.

“Grady?” she whispered.

“Hmm?”

“It’s been one hell of a night, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s been one hell of a night.”

She lay against his chest, watching the shadows from the branches of the tree outside her window move across the floor until she closed her eyes, and, feeling safe for the first time in a very long time, fell asleep.

Grady lay awake in the dark, unable to get the image of a bleeding, terrified, wounded Vanessa out of his mind.

So many times as an agent, he’d seen the victims of vicious attacks not unlike the one Vanessa had survived.
Husbands attacking wives, wives attacking husbands, their children, parents, siblings, best friends, strangers … there seemed to be no end to the number of ways in which to hurt someone.

He’d certainly seen injuries a hundred times worse than Vanessa’s. More than once, he’d seen women for whom the threat to cut off one or both breasts had been carried out. But this ate at him. How heartless could a man be that he’d do something so heinous to a woman who loved him? No one deserved to be treated like that.

Vanessa was as sweet, caring, funny, smart, capable, and yes, as beautiful and as sexy, as any woman he’d ever met. She wore her heart on her sleeve when it came to those she cared about and he really liked that about her. In fact, there were a lot of things he liked about her.

And she was strong. She hadn’t fallen apart when she realized her shop—which obviously meant everything to her—had been broken into, nor did she freak out when he told her that he thought both the burglary at the shop and the vandalism to his car were somehow a message intended for her. She hadn’t backed away from what was obviously a strong physical attraction between them, but met it head-on without pretense. She’d been brave enough to walk away from a bad situation, and courageous to have faced her abuser and his entire family in open court, and despite their threats, she hadn’t blinked. And somehow she hadn’t lost her sense of humor. What she had lost, however, was her self-confidence. How could she see herself as anything less than beautiful? Anything less than wonderful? What did that tell him
about her? How had she come to believe that her scar defined her?

As if she knew he was thinking about her, she stirred slightly, then sighed in her sleep, one hand on his chest like a badge.

That she’d suffered made his heart ache—that she’d suffered at the hands of someone she’d loved made him sick to his stomach.

The longer he thought about it, the sicker—and more angry—he became.

First thing tomorrow, he was going to contact someone at the Bureau and have him check the release status of Eugene Medford.

He awoke to the sound of water driving against glass. He sat up and realized that Vanessa was not beside him, and the sound was coming from the shower in the bathroom across the hall. He got up and dressed in the tuxedo he’d worn to the wedding. Vanessa came out of the shower, her hair in a towel, a robe wrapped around her.