“Just in time for you to change your college major and go into the FBI?”
“Something like that, yeah.” All the old memories are crowding in now and I shake my head in a futile attempt to clear it. “My parents didn’t get it. They couldn’t understand why I would want to have anything to do with the organization that arrested my brother. That helped convict him in a trial that would eventually end up taking his life, too. But it wasn’t the same for them, you know? They didn’t understand that I needed to understand. That I needed to figure out how he could go so wrong when…”
“When you hadn’t, despite having the same genetics and background.”
Fuck. I can’t believe how well she gets me. No one has ever gotten me like this before, just so instinctively. Like she can get inside my head as easily as I can get inside everyone else’s. Everyone’s, that is, but hers.
“It wasn’t that I hadn’t,” I tell her as the anguish of those first few years boils up inside me. “It was that I was terrified that I would. I look just like him, you know. I mean, just like him. So much so that when we were young, people used to call me Jason’s mini-me. We had the same parents, the same genetics, the same upbringing. Fuck, for a long time we even had the same interests. And then he went and did all those things and I…I didn’t understand how he could do it. How he could be so sadistic, so evil, when we came from the same place. The same people. And there was a part of me that was terrified—that’s terrified still—that I have that same darkness in me, too. That if Jason can do these things, then maybe I’m capable of it as well.”
“No.” Veronica grabs my shoulders, squeezes tight. “You aren’t.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I do know that. And so do all the people you worked with. You were a behavior analyst for the FBI, for God’s sake. You worked with some of the best investigative minds in the world—and, I’m assuming, you also had fairly regular psychiatric testing. If they accepted that that wasn’t in you, then I think you need to do the same thing.”
“It’s not that easy. I mean, when I joined the FBI, I wanted to understand why he did it. It’s been fourteen years and I still want to understand. What went wrong? What happened to him that he just broke wide open like that?” The idea that I’ll never know, that I’ll never understand, haunts me like few things ever have.
“That’s why you write the books you do, isn’t it? It’s not about Jason, it’s about all of them. You want to know what went wrong deep inside everyone you’ve ever written about.”
I nod. “That’s exactly what I want. It’s what I looked for in every case I ever worked for the FBI. Because if I know what went wrong, then—”
“You’ll know how to make sure it doesn’t go wrong in you.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“And did you always find the answer?”
“Not always. I usually did, but sometimes there is no answer.”
“Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes people just do bad things because they want to. Because they enjoy it. Sometimes there’s not anything more to it than that.”
“I’ve never been able to accept that.”
“Of course you haven’t.” The smile she gives me now is as sad as it is sexy. “You wouldn’t be who you are if you accepted that fact, and you sure as hell wouldn’t be able to do what you do.” The smile she gives me now is a little sad and a little sexy all at the same time. “I’m not sure what it says about me, but the fact that you can’t is turning out to be just one of the many reasons I’m falling for you.”
Chapter 24
The second the words are out, I wish I could take them back. For a second, I squeeze my eyes shut and pretend that this isn’t happening. That I didn’t just tell Ian that I have feelings for him right after he told me about his homicidal brother, barely an hour after I scratched him all to hell.
And to think, I’m actually known for my perfect timing on screen.
He doesn’t say anything at first, just kind of looks at me with wide eyes and a slack jaw. Not that I blame him. We’re barely five days into this and suddenly I’m talking about falling for him? After I’ve kicked him out of my house, refused to let him interview me, played every game in the book with him, and then asked him to help me anyway, after I all but lost my mind on him? He’s probably wondering what it’d be like if I actually hated him if this is what me caring about him feels like.
“I’m sorry,” he finally says and my heart sinks.
“Please, don’t apologize. I don’t know what I was thinking. Blame it on the meltdown. Or the fact that it’s five in the morning and we haven’t slept. Or the orgasms. Yes, blame it on them. Is it any wonder a girl gets a little wonky after you give her a dozen orgasms?”