Some of them good. The sound of her mother singing as she moved through the house. Her father tossing Carmen in the air to make her giggle. Birthday parties for her, and grown-up parties for her parents with expensively dressed guests who’d drifted through the house like glittering ghosts.
And some of them bad. The chiding from Ellen when Carmen dragged in mud on her clean floors. The torments from her older cousins who’d once locked her in the wine cellar for an entire day. And the shouting between her parents. When she was young she’d thought they were arguing because they enjoyed the drama.
In retrospect, she accepted that her father had been possessive of his young, beautiful wife. And quick to anger when he feared she might be pulling away from him.
Maybe that was the reason . . .
Her mouth went dry as she passed by the hidden door that held the coat closet. A brutal cold filled her veins as her feet continued to carry her forward. Just as they had that fateful night.
Step. Step. Step.
She thought she heard someone say her name, but it was difficult to hear. As if she was underwater.
Her hands were shaking as she finally entered the kitchen. It was a newer addition to the main house, with lots of sunlight and stainless steel appliances. Once upon a time it’d been Carmen’s favorite room in the house.
Now her memories tinted it in red.
Blood red.
“Carmen.” Strong fingers wrapped around her upper arms, giving her a small shake.
She blinked, struggling to come back to reality. Desperately she clung to the sight of Griff ’s lean, handsome face as he leaned toward her.
“Nothing’s changed,” she said, the words coming out like a croak.
His brows drew together, his expression worried. “You mean the furniture?”
“The furniture. The artwork.” She shuddered, sucking in a deep breath. “It even smells the same. Like my dad’s pipe.”
“Carmen, I’m sorry.” His arms slid around her, tugging her against his chest. “I know this is difficult for you.”
She remained stiff in his arms, but she didn’t try to pull away.
“You know what happened here?” she demanded.
He nodded. “I read a few articles.”
She wasn’t surprised. Griff probably had done a complete background search on her as soon as he realized she’d deliberately approached him on the beach.
“Then you know that fourteen years ago my father shot my mother and then killed himself.” Her gaze lowered to the tiled floor. “In this room.”
His hand slid up and down her back in a soothing motion. “Were you here?”
She gave a slow nod, feeling beads of sweat form on her brow. It was weird. She could remember exactly what she’d done on that fateful day. She’d gone to a friend’s house for a birthday party. They’d played in the pool, rode horses, and giggled over boys. She’d come home after dinner and gone straight to her room. A few hours later she was sound asleep.
After that, things got . . . fuzzy.
“I was asleep upstairs,” she said, her voice low and strained. “The first shot woke me. I didn’t know what it was. I thought someone had broken a window. It frightened me.”
His fingers threaded into her hair, combing through the golden curls.
“What did you do?”
“I crawled out of bed and went to find my mother.” It’d been a warm night, she abruptly recalled, but she’d been shivering as she’d silently crept through the dark house. “I looked in my parents’ bedroom, but it was empty. So I came downstairs.”
He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “You’re safe now.”
Her hands lifted to lie against his chest, taking strength from the feel of his strong arms wrapped around her.
“I started to go toward the living room where my parents usually watched TV at night. Then I turned to go to the kitchen.”
“Why?”
She tilted back her head to meet his dark, steady gaze. “What?”
“Why did you come to the kitchen?”
Oh. Her brow furrowed. Why did she?
She tried to battle through the fuzz.
“I think I heard something,” she finally decided, allowing herself to feel the floorboards beneath her feet that creaked as she moved, and the lingering scent of pipe tobacco that hung in the air. “A voice, maybe,” she said, then gave a shake of her head. It hadn’t been a conversation. “Or my father’s cry,” she at last concluded, still not satisfied. “I was just outside the doorway when the second shot went off.”
His hand splayed on her back as he lifted his head to stare down at her with dismay.
“You didn’t come in here, did you?”
“No.” She grimaced. “The sound was so loud I ran back down the hall and hid in the coat closet. That’s where the cops eventually found me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” She released a shaky breath. “I was a coward.”
“Coward?” He sent her a confused glance. “You were just a child.”
The guilt that churned deep inside her bubbled to the surface, searing against her nerve endings like acid.
“If I’d come in here instead of running away—”
“You’d have what?” he sharply interrupted. “Spent the rest of your life tormenting yourself with the image of their bodies?”
She hunched a shoulder. “I could have called nine-one-one right away. My mother might have been saved.”
He jerked, as if struck by a sudden thought. “Who did call the cops?”
She hesitated, sorting through the thoughts. At last she concluded that she’d never been told who’d been responsible for the call.
“I assume it was Ellen,” she said with a shrug. “I really don’t know.”
“Was anyone else in the house?”
She glanced toward the window, a wrenching sadness making her feel as if she weighed a thousand pounds.
“The cops asked me the same question, but I really didn’t know. I’d been gone all day and I went straight to my room when I came home.”
Perhaps sensing she was reaching the edge of collapse, Griff slid his fingers beneath her chin and turned her face back.
“Look at me.” He patiently waited for her to meet his gaze. “There’s nothing you could have done to change what happened that night.” He leaned so close their noses were nearly touching. “Nothing.”
She pulled back. It was the same thing she’d told herself a thousand times.
She still didn’t believe it.
“How can you be so sure?”
There was a long silence, as if Griff was weighing something in his mind.
“Because I was just five feet away from my mother when she was murdered,” he said. “Sometimes fate decides to be a real bitch, but blaming yourself doesn’t help anyone.”
The air was pressed from her lungs as she studied his grim expression.
“I didn’t know,” she murmured, even as she silently wondered if she had somehow sensed that tragedy had struck his life.
It might be why she’d felt so drawn to him from the beginning. A shared sense of loss that few people could understand.
“Like you, it’s not something I talk about.”
She slid her hand across his chest to rest it over the rapid beat of his heart. She sensed how much it cost him to speak about the past. And she knew he was only doing it to ease her own emotional roller coaster.
“What happened?” she asked.
“My mother was a cop in Chicago.”
She blinked. She didn’t know why that surprised her. It certainly explained Griff ’s decision to concentrate his computer expertise on catching criminals. Still, she found herself staring at him in amazement.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” A small, bittersweet smile touched his lips. “She grew up in a small town, and no one, including my grandparents, thought she’d last more than a few weeks in the big city, but she loved it. And she was good at it.”
There was no missing his pride in his mother.
“She was killed in the line of duty?”
His pride was replaced with the same aching grief that haunted her.
“No, she was out of uniform.” There was a short pause before he forced out the words. “I’d just gotten an A on a quiz and she’d promised me I could have anything I wanted for dinner. I told her that I wanted to go to the pizza joint that was just down the street from our apartment building.”