A Profiler's Case for Seduction(69)
She sucked in her breath, as if feeling a physical blow to her stomach. “I let him finish with me and then I got out of the bed, got dressed and walked down to my mother’s café.” Her voice was flat, without affect. “I went into the back room where my mother kept her bottles of gin and I drank until I couldn’t feel anymore, until I couldn’t think anymore.”
Her gaze finally met his and he realized she was back in the here and now. “I stayed my mother’s daughter until the day Micah and Melinda plucked me out of the gutter and put me in rehab. That’s where I came from, Mark. And that’s why I didn’t want anyone to know that I was the great, illustrious professor Grayson’s sister.”
His heart was so filled with her damage he couldn’t speak. The great brainiac couldn’t find the right words to verbalize the depth of his sorrow, of his grief for her.
“Just go, Mark,” she said, the weariness back in her voice as she raised a finger to point at the door. “I was fine before you and I’ll be fine after you. Get back to your crime investigation and tie things up here in a neat knot so you can get back to your life and I can continue with mine.”
“I wish I would have been there for you.” He finally found his voice. “I wish I would have been there to beat up all the children who bullied you, to shoot your father dead the first time he broke one of your bones. I wish I would have been there to sweep you out of town and save you from the horrors you went through.”
Her eyes widened in surprise and then immediately narrowed as she shook her head. “I didn’t need to have a hero in my life, Mark. I needed to figure out how to be my own hero. I took the easy way out. I allowed small-town people to label me and then I did my very best to live up to the label they’d provided. It’s taken me thirty-seven years to realize I don’t need a hero. I’m all I need and I’m strong enough to build the rest of my life alone.”
“But, you still need a date to the bonfire on Friday night. Why not allow me to accompany you?” He couldn’t just walk away from her now. It all felt so unfinished.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked. She lowered the pillow from her chest and set it on the sofa between them.
“Because for the last week I’ve heard nothing but how amazing the bonfire is, how the burning of the effigy isn’t to be missed, and I can’t think of anyone I’d like to share the evening with more than you.” There were so many more things he wanted to say, but she looked beaten and bruised from her walk down memory lane.
“It’s foolish for us to have anything more to do with each other,” she countered.
“I don’t want it to end like this, Dora. Come to the bonfire with me. Let’s have one more night with no past and no future between us, just the here and now. It will be a night to enjoy together as friends.”
Her eyes filled with a swift yearning, only there a moment and then hidden as she blinked it away. “Won’t that somehow compromise your investigation if I’m a person of interest?”
“You’re only a person of interest to me, and that has nothing to do with the crimes,” Mark said truthfully. He held his breath, wanting, needing her to give in to this final wish. He needed one last night with her, a night of laughter and fun before she kicked him to the curb to get on with her new life.
“Okay,” she said, although it hurt him that there was no joy, no sweet smile accompanying the word. She stood as if to indicate that she was done, fried to a crisp and more than ready for him to leave.
“Why don’t you come by here at seven on Friday? The bonfire is lit at nine and that will give us a couple of hours to mingle and hang out with the crowd.” She looked at the door, an obvious indication that she had said her piece and now it was time for him to leave.
Reluctantly he got up from the sofa and walked to the front door. “Then I’ll see you Friday night at seven,” he said. She nodded and he realized that was all she had left.
He stepped outside her door and gently closed it behind him. Failure. Somehow he knew he’d failed Dora and for the life of him he didn’t know how to fix it.
Chapter 15
Dora awoke Thursday morning after a night of bad dreams. In her dreams she had been back in Horn’s Gulf and she’d awakened with the bitter dredges of memory in the back of her throat.
Buck Grayson had been a brutal man, but through the first ten years of her life Dora had learned what set him off, how to dodge and weave most of the physical blows he tried to deliver to her. By the time she was fourteen she was spending almost no time around Buck at the family ranch, rather she spent most all of her time with her mother at the Daisy Café.