Lovegame(86)

“First off, what happened in my hotel room yesterday morning…it really did have nothing to do with you. You were perfect, amazing.” I cup her cheek, stroke my thumb over her impossibly high cheekbones. “I’ve never wanted a woman the way I wanted you that night. The way I want you still.”

“You don’t need to say that.”

“I don’t need to say anything,” I counter. “But it’s the truth. If we’re going to try to build this trust thing between us, I owe you that much, don’t you think?”

It’s a rhetorical question and I don’t wait for her to answer before I continue on. If I pause too long, I’m afraid I’ll never get the words out.

“So, I feel like I have to preface this by saying that I’ve never had sex like that before. So raw. So devastating. So hot. And I’ve never let myself even think about doing to another woman what I did to you.

“Even as I was doing it, there was a voice inside of me telling me to stop. Telling me that I was getting too close to the edge, too close to the line I’d set myself years ago. I ignored the voice, the warnings—how could I not when you were so responsive, so beautiful, so goddamn perfect? I ignored it all and I stepped over a line I swore I’d never cross. I hurt you—”

“You didn’t!” She sits up abruptly as she says it, half-passionate, half-distraught. “You gave me more pleasure than I’ve ever felt before.”

“And more bruises.” Once again, I trace a finger over the one on her jaw. “Anyway, I woke up in the morning and saw what I’d done…and it freaked me out. Hell, it sent me into a panic. I’d behaved like an animal, had ravaged and bruised and spanked you. And worse, as I lay there looking at you, there was a part of me that wanted to do it all over again. That’s why I kicked you out. Not because I didn’t want you, but because I did. Too much.”

“There’s no such thing as too much,” she tells me as her long, delicate fingers stroke softly over my back, my chest. And though I’m telling this story, though I’m in the middle of revealing my darkest secret—my biggest shame—my body still responds to her. My breathing quickens, my dick goes hard and my hands ache to touch, to caress.

But I know if I do we’re going to end up right back where we were at this time yesterday and I don’t want to go there. Not right now. Not when there’s still so much for her to understand.

And so I grab on to her hands and press soft kisses to her palms before sandwiching them between my own. “I can’t do this if you touch me,” I admit as I gently squeeze them. “There’s no way I’ll be able to get out everything I need to say to you.”

For a second, she looks like she’s going to argue, but in the end she doesn’t. She just squeezes my hands in return, burrows closer into my chest.

I take a deep breath and continue, though it’s the last thing I want to do. “I didn’t just accidentally become a behavioral analyst for the FBI. I mean, obviously, you have to work hard and have some pretty impressive credentials to get the job, but that’s not what I mean. A lot of the people I worked with had started out wanting to be field agents or psychologists or police detectives. Very few of them ever actually set out to be profilers. I mean, who volunteers to crawl inside the minds of some of society’s most depraved individuals and tries to see the world the way that they see it? It’s not a pretty place and usually, the FBI picks profilers and analysts from agents who have a knack for the job, who see things a little differently than the others. But that’s not how I got the job.”

Her eyes are wide as they search my face, but her voice and her hands are steady when she says, “You went after it. From the beginning.”

Fuck. This is harder than I thought it would be and I never once imagined it would be anything less than excruciating. “I did, yes.”

More silence as I try to form the words, try to force them out. But how do I say this? How do I just thrust it out into the open when I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to hide it?

Veronica takes the choice out of my hands when she cups my face between her palms and looks deep into my eyes. “Tell me,” she says.

And so I do, the words spilling out of me in fits and starts.

“My brother is in prison in Texas, and has been for most of my adult life. He’s awaiting execution for three counts of first-degree murder. He’s committed more, they think, but those are the three they could actually get him for.”

She stiffens against me as soon as I drop the bombshell. I wait for her to pull away, to walk away, but she doesn’t. So I give her a minute to assimilate and then I continue. “He killed three UT college students over a period of six months. All female. He kidnapped them, raped them, tortured them, and then killed them in the most inhumane ways possible.

“He was good at it, too. I mean like, really good at destroying evidence and disposing of the bodies. It’s one of the reasons the authorities are so certain that he’s committed other murders. Because these ones were so clean it was hard to imagine this was his first time.”

“But he got caught anyway.”

“He did. But it was a fluke. The only reason they caught him at all was because there was a witness where there shouldn’t have been one at three in the morning and she saw him dumping the body of the third girl. She hid, but was smart enough to take a photo of his license plate as he drove away. There was no evidence on the body at all, nothing but that photograph to prove that he was connected to it all. But when they got the warrant and got to the house he was renting…he hadn’t had a chance to clean it up yet. It was a regular little shop of horrors.”