“I don’t want to tell you. I don’t want to tell anyone. But I feel like you’ve got a right to know what you’re getting into with me.” She clears her throat. “I mean, if that’s what we’re doing here.”
I lean forward, bury my face in her neck as her hands come up to pet my hair. “I don’t know about you, but it’s what I’m doing here. I’m crazy about you, Veronica.” I press kisses to the delicate line of her throat.
Her fingers tighten in my hair. For long seconds, it’s her only outward reaction to my declaration, but then she ducks her head so our mouths can meet in a series of light, gentle kisses that are somehow more intense, and more satisfying, than any that have come before.
“I’m crazy about you, too,” she eventually whispers against my lips. “I don’t know how it happened, but it did.”
“It’s my charm.”
“Hmmm, maybe. And here I thought it was your ability to make me orgasm half a dozen times in a night.”
“Oh well, that works, too. It’s always good to know where I stand.”
She laughs, and it’s real this time. Real and pure and so, so sweet. It’s a sound I could easily get addicted to.
But then the smile slips from her face and she turns back around to face the ocean. That’s how I know it’s time to finish this. “Tell me.”
“He was my bodyguard for almost three years and he had unfettered access pretty much the whole time. It was—” She stops, swallows. “It was bad.”
“I’m so sorry, baby.” I wrap myself around her as tightly as I can. “I’m so sorry. That shouldn’t have happened to you.”
“It shouldn’t happen to anybody, but…” She shrugs.
“Why did it end after almost three years? Was he fired?”
“Yes. We had gotten a new maid and she found blood in my bed, and semen. She went to my dad.”
“Blood? So he hadn’t—”
“No, I wasn’t a virgin. But he wasn’t exactly gentle, so…”
Images of all those girls, all those women, that he violently raped and killed flash through my head. No, Liam Brogan doesn’t have a gentle bone in his body.
Even with all the things I’ve seen in my life, I’ve never wanted to kill someone. But here, now, I want to end Brogan so badly that I can taste it. I want to wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him as he begs for mercy.
I don’t think I’d even feel any remorse after doing it.
It looks like there’s more of my brother in me than I ever imagined. Because I can’t touch that thought right now, can’t handle even the idea of it, I focus on her instead. On the totally inexplicable fact that her father never called the police.
“So that’s it? Your dad just let him go? He just fired him? He didn’t even call the authorities?”
She shrugs like it isn’t a big deal. Like her father hadn’t betrayed her in the most unforgivable way. “He had a big film out that year, and so did my mom. The publicity would have been…unsavory.”
“More unsavory than a man he trusted repeatedly raping his eight-to eleven-year-old daughter?”
“If the whole truth came out, then yes.”
My blood runs cold at her answer, and the absolutely emotionless way she delivers it. “What’s the whole truth, Veronica?”
“At the time, my mother wasn’t well. She had to spend some time in a psychiatric hospital after that and she couldn’t have handled it if the story got out, too.”
“She couldn’t handle it? The bastard raped you. He should have gone to prison. Who the fuck cares if she couldn’t handle it?”
“My father cared. Because he loved her and because if William Vargas had to go to jail, then my mother would have had to go along with him. And that wasn’t going to happen.”
“Your mother? What does she have to do with—” It hits me then, with the force of a sledgehammer straight to the heart. “She knew. All along, your mother knew what he was doing to you and she let it happen anyway. She let him hurt you. That’s why your father didn’t go to the police. That’s why he let William Vargas go.”
She doesn’t answer, but then she doesn’t have to.
Chapter 28
I wake up the same way I went to sleep. Wrapped in Ian’s arms.
For a moment, I’m disoriented, trying to figure out why my head is pounding and my eyes are all but swollen shut. But then the fog of too little sleep and too much emotion clears, and I’m left remembering everything that I told him.
Or, more specifically, that I told him everything.
And that he handled it about as well as could be expected. Or, in other words, not well at all.
Oh, he was good to me—so good. So gentle. So kind. But through it all I could see the horror in his eyes. And the rage.
More, I could hear it in the ragged breathing he worked so hard to control.
Feel it in the fine trembling of his chest beneath my palm.
I could even taste it in the tortured softness of his kiss.