Taking a deep breath, Witt held it, then let it out, the warmth of it cascading across her face and chest. “She told me it was his.”
Max shuddered, couldn’t find her breath. The pain in her gut lasted only a second, then she snuggled closer, putting her arms around his waist to hug him close, offering something back in the only way she could.
“I wanted to kill him, had my hand on my gun.” A pause. She tightened her grip on him. “I really wanted to,” he murmured. “You can’t possibly know how much.”
She rubbed her face against his chest. “You didn’t.”
“What I did was worse.”
He held her, rocked her, rocked himself. Then he told her worse. “I went back after I locked him up. I brought her home with me for the night, and the next day I took her to a place.” He laughed, a broken sound. “A place.” She felt the difficulty he had dragging in a breath. “I gave her money, and I waited outside while ...”
She opened her eyes to the tears on his cheeks, put a hand up to touch them, but stopped. “You don’t have to say it.”
“Yeah, I do.”
She knew, with those words, that he’d never told another living soul. The idea that he was going to tell her filled her with dread. Yet she couldn’t find the words to stop him.
“I waited outside while they aborted it.”
Max squeezed her eyes shut, pulled her hands into her chest and her emotions back deep into her belly. The words that came out of her mouth seemed like someone else’s, someone she’d never known. “That’s okay. The thing was an abomination anyway.”
He sucked in air. She heard him swallow and didn’t dare look at him because she couldn’t say where the hell those words had come from. She sure as hell didn’t want to know. The shock or censure in his gaze would have been way more than she could handle.
He started talking again, a hint of unsteadiness in his voice. “Three days later I found out she’d lied. Her boyfriend got her pregnant. I didn’t even know she had one. And I gave her the money to kill that baby.”
She thought of his wife, how he’d left her when he found out she’d killed their baby. Left her without a backward glance.
Oh Jesus. Oh God. She was so cold inside, so cold outside. Her limbs started to shake, and she wanted to throw up again. This time she wouldn’t even need her finger.
“So what do you think of me now, Max?” He threw her own words back at her.
DeWitt Quentin Long knew nothing about the really bad things a person was capable of. He didn’t even have a clue. He was a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue. It had killed something in him to find out his little princess was tarnished. What would it do to him to hear the truly bad things Max had done? What would it do to her to testify to her crimes aloud?
He was a fixer. Maybe that’s what attracted him. She was the little lost girl he thought he could fix. Men got off on that. But he couldn’t fix what she’d done. He couldn’t fix her.
Max sat up, pulled away.
He drew his legs up and draped his hands over his knees. Leaning his head against the tile wall, he looked at her, lids at half mast.
Ghostly fingers touched her nape. Cameron whispered in her ear. Tell him, Max. Tell him what happened.
She could only stare at Witt, her stomach rolling and tumbling.
Tell him. Tell me. Tell yourself, Max.
Her breath came and went, so fast she couldn’t fill her lungs, couldn’t use the air. She was suffocating. “What do expect me to say?”
“Nothing.” Witt’s eyes were a bleak gray.
He didn’t even know she wasn’t talking to him.
She went up on her knees, put her hands on the floor and tried to stand. Her legs wouldn’t support her.
“I didn’t want to know that,” she told him.
He put a hand out to her, and she shuffled away on her knees, closer to the toilet, the lid still open, ready.
“I knew you wouldn’t.”
That wasn’t true. Not at all. He’d believed she was the one person to whom he could bare his soul. Anything else, maybe. Not this. She covered her ears and closed her eyes. Hear no evil, see no evil ... remember no evil.
She couldn’t shut out Cameron’s voice. It bled through her spread fingers, amplified inside her head. Say it, Max.
“Shut up,” through clenched teeth.
Tell him now.
“Get out.” The cry ravaged her damaged throat.