A Profiler's Case for Seduction(61)

As she walked on the sidewalk from one class to her next, she passed the bonfire site and smiled to herself. She thought of sharing the night of craziness and school spirit with Mark.

What had been on her mind throughout the morning had been the idea of making love with Mark again. They’d managed to get through the week with just enough physical contact between them to set her on a simmer that begged for release.

As if he’d been conjured straight out of her mind, she saw Mark approaching in the distance. Despite the fact that she couldn’t be in love with him, her heart lifted at the mere sight of him.

She smiled and waved as he drew closer, close enough that she could see the fire in his eyes and the determined set of his jaw. Uh-oh, somebody was having a bad day.

“Hey, you,” she said as he walked up to her. She smiled up at him, but no answering smile lit his stone-hard features. Instead, he took her by the upper arm.

“We need to talk.” He started to tug her down the sidewalk.

“Mark,” she protested, “what are you doing?”

“We’re going to your place. I have some questions to ask you.”

“I can’t go now,” she exclaimed. “I have a class to get to.”

“Forget your class.” He released his hold on her. “I need to talk to you now. It won’t wait until after your class.”

She stared at him, suddenly afraid as she saw no kindness in his eyes, only hard, cold orbs piercing through her. Whatever conversation he wanted to have with her, she knew she didn’t want to have it here in the center of the campus.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said.

It was the longest walk of her life. Mark didn’t speak a word and she didn’t, either. He had found something out, something about her...about her past. With every step they took she realized that he knew she wasn’t the woman she’d portrayed herself to be to him. He knew what she had been and now he wanted to tell her what he thought of her.

Her steps began to drag the closer they got to her house. She didn’t want to hear the disgust, and she didn’t want her last vision of him to be one where his eyes were full of revulsion.

Tears stung her eyes and she quickly blinked them away. It didn’t really matter what he thought of her, she told herself. He was only temporary in her life anyway.

She didn’t care what he said to her. She’d give him all the ugly he wanted. If he couldn’t accept who she had been, and who she was now, then to hell with him anyway.

It took her two stabs to get her key into the lock of her front door. She opened the door and stalked into the living room and then turned to face him, her chin lifted in defiance.

“So, exactly what do you want to talk about? The fact that I was a drunk or the fact that I was a whore?”

He blinked twice and appeared speechless. “Dora, I don’t know—”

“You’re right, you don’t know,” she said, interrupting whatever he was about to say. “You don’t know what it was like for me in that small town where my father was an evil, hateful man and my mother was an alcoholic who bedded every man in town in the back room of the little café she owned.”

To her horror the tears she’d been determined not to shed stung her eyes once again. She swiped at them angrily and realized she had come to a place in her life where she would own what she had been, but she refused to allow anyone else to tell her what she’d been.

“You don’t know what it was like, to be branded just like your whore mother before you’ve ever kissed a boy, to let a town label you as a bad girl when you’ve done nothing wrong. I was Horn’s Gulf’s dirty little joke, along with my mother. Despite everything I was a virgin on my wedding night to Billy Cook, who was supposed to be my knight in shining armor. Instead, he beat me and told me every day that I’d come from dirt, that I was nothing but dirt.”

Mark remained standing frozen in place, his features reflecting nothing as the words tumbled out of her. “My life in Horn’s Gulf was not a safe place to be. When I finally married Jimmy I thought I’d found my safe place, a man who might respect and love me, but when he told me I was nothing more than my mother’s daughter and nothing could make me respectable or clean, I lost my heart, my soul, my very mind. I crawled into the bottom of a bottle of gin and wanted to die.”

For the first time since they’d stepped through her front door she stopped long enough to draw a deep breath. “So, I’ll ask you once again,” she said softly. “What do you want to talk about, the fact that I was a drunk or the fact that I was rumored to be the town whore?”