She didn’t waver as she answered without hesitation, “I’m a mess, Mac. When I’m in the grocery store, I get scared if a man looks at me for too long. I’ve left my cart in the aisle countless times when my mind convinces me that there’s a threat. I don’t date because the few times I tried, I had a panic attack and didn’t answer the door when they came to pick me up. I don’t have sex because the one time I tried, I hyperventilated until I passed out. And . . . I don’t let myself get close to you because—I love you so much, and I don’t want you to see how pathetic I really am.”
Mac sat staring at her bent head, feeling as if she had taken a sharp knife and gutted him. If he were to believe what she was telling him, then he had suffered through the fires of hell for years while she hid who she really was away from him. He still couldn’t quite believe that she had perpetrated such an elaborate cover to conceal what was going on in her life. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he closed his eyes in pain as he asked, “Who were the men who came home with you, then? Some of them were here all night. How do you explain that?”
“They were college kids that I paid to spend time with me. They did work around the house, watched movies, or played Monopoly.” She gave an embarrassed laugh before catching herself and falling silent once again. When Mac looked over at her, her head was still lowered and she refused to look at him. Somehow that angered him even further. She had ripped his world apart with her words, and she couldn’t do it to his face.
He jumped to his feet, feeling the anger ripple from him in waves. Without thought, he grabbed a glass vase full of flowers from the side table and hurled it against the wall. Ava was finally looking at him, her eyes wide in shock. He wasn’t the type of man prone to displays of anger, but she had just taken years of his life and told him that he had needlessly suffered because of a lie, or in this case, years of lies. He felt shattered at her underlying reasons, but somehow knowing that she’d suffered through years of pain when he could have been there, helping her to heal, slew him further. Mac was a quivering, raging mass of emotion and could no longer trust himself to be near her. He’d never physically hurt her, but he couldn’t guarantee that his words wouldn’t wound her just as deeply. He had to get away; he needed to breathe again.
Mac heard her calling his name almost as if in a tunnel as he stalked out the door and to his car. In the back of his mind, he felt bad for leaving her to clean up the mess he had made with the vase. But he just couldn’t stay there for one minute longer.
* * *
Ava stared at the door in shock, expecting Mac to come back. She waited, but it never happened. He was gone and from the look on his face, she wasn’t sure if he was ever coming back to her apartment . . . or to her. She’d never seen him so out of control before. She could handle his anger, even though it was foreign to her, but the hurt. . . . God, the hurt when he looked at her was devastating. Without warning, she felt her stomach start to churn and she bolted from the couch, just making it to the bathroom before the contents of her stomach released. She slumped back to the cool tile of the bathroom floor and stared at the ceiling. Dominic had been right—Mac had lost it when he found out about her ruse. Her gentle giant had cracked before her very eyes, and it had been all her doing.
She wasn’t naive; she knew Mac didn’t suffer fools gladly, but somehow she always thought she would be on the other side of that. Now it seemed that he was angry with her more often than not. Of course, the anger over her new reckless hobbies was much different from his anger today. He wasn’t just mad; he was a mass of seething fury. She had the shards of glass and water all over her living room to prove it.
Her anxiety levels spiked as she faced the very real possibility that she had finally driven Mac away for good. Could he ever forgive her for what she had put him through? In trying to hide her pain from him, she had caused him to suffer immeasurably. At the time, she was like a junkie trying to hide her shame from the world. She didn’t want people feeling sorry for her. For months after her rape, her brothers and Mac had treated her as if she were different. She had ceased to be the kooky sister and had turned into someone whom everyone wanted to tiptoe around. Conversations stopped when she walked into a room, and concerned eyes followed her every movement. Her very identity had died that day. In their eyes, she was broken. That impression didn’t change until the day that she’d decided to bury the old Ava under the persona of a new Ava. The new woman was cool, indifferent, something approaching normal. She wasn’t scared of anything, including men. Or so they had all thought. Maybe after worrying about her for so long, they all saw what they wanted to see. Did that make it right? No, even though at the time she thought she was doing what was best for everyone. Now she didn’t even know what choice she had other than to keep doing what she had been this past week. For, as crazy as it sounded, things had been more real with Mac than they had been in years. She only hoped he cared enough now to continue watching over her.