LITMIR.BIZ

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and was happily besotted these days. Cait thought it showed. He seemed more relaxed than she had ever seen him.

      Maybe that was what happened to a person when sex turned out right, she thought.

      “I gathered that,” he answered. “Have a seat.”

      “I don’t have a lot of time.” But she took the chair across from him. She desperately needed his help, but now that she was here, she faltered. This sort of thing was never supposed to have happened to her. “I don’t know where to start,” she murmured.

      Cross brought his hands down. “Want me to do it for you?”

      She blinked at him. “How can you? You don’t even know why I want to see you.”

      “Try this on for size. You’re having a hell of a time getting back to the woman you were before the rest of Hines’s hostages escaped through the vent in that storage room, before he returned in time to keep you and Sam Walters from doing the same thing.”

      “I…yes.”

      “Now, suddenly, you’ll be going about your business and—wham!—blazing fury seems to come at you from out of nowhere.”

      Cait sat up straight. “You’re good.”

      He grinned and she liked him better for it. “I memorize well and I read all the books.”

      “What books?”

      “On post-traumatic stress disorder.”

      She sat up straighter. “I don’t have a disorder.”

      “Tell me what’s been happening to you lately.”

      With the simple question, she felt something begin to shake inside her. Cait sank back in her chair again. “It’s not just Hines. He was crazy, a horrible person, but he’s gone.”

      Cross nodded. “He’s in jail. Which, theoretically, should make you feel safe again. But you don’t.”

      Cait shuddered. “People like him don’t happen to people like me, at least not twice in the same lifetime. And he’s incarcerated.”

      “He was supposed to have been incarcerated once before.”

      It was true, Cait thought weakly. Hines had disrupted the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new maternity wing, then tried to kidnap the son of Crystal Bennett, the hospital fund-raiser. Already wanted for other crimes, he’d been remanded to the maximum-security prison in Lubbock. Somewhere between Mission Creek and Lubbock he’d escaped to follow the hatred in his heart right back to the hospital. He’d uprooted her life, not to mention those of several other people. But she and Sam had been the only ones held hostage in a room beneath his house. And then—

      No, she couldn’t think of that again.

      “Caitlyn?” Cross prodded.

      She jumped. “I’m sorry. What?”

      “You were saying?”

      She felt herself flush. “I was about to say that I seem to be doing a lot of that lately—fading in and out. That’s what I meant. Hines is over, behind me. But I’m different.”

      “Flashbacks?” he asked. “Do you experience flashbacks to your time in that underground room?”

      She felt Sam’s hands on her breasts again. The heat that slid up over her skin, from her chest to her throat to her face, was excruciating. “Yes,” she said quietly.

      Cross was watching her closely, but he said nothing.

      “I think the worst part is that I’m…I’ve become paranoid,” she whispered, the final scalding admission. The word made her sound so…crazy.

      “Checking your locks three, four, five times?”

      “That’s it.” She swallowed dryly. “And I keep feeling like someone is…I don’t know. Watching me. Following me.”

      Cross sat forward and put his elbows on his desk. “Describe your childhood to me in five easy sentences.”

      Cait’s eyes went big. “What kind of a shrink are you? I thought that sort of thing was supposed to take weeks. ‘Tell me about your parents…. Did you wet the bed?”’

      He laughed. “I’m a shrink who has a few more minutes with you today and who wants you to schedule another appointment. But in the meantime I’d like to point something out to you, and I might be able to do it if you answer my question in a nutshell.”

      Cait took in air and shrugged. She felt fragile. “Okay. When I was two, my mother left me with her aunt so she could find a decent job in a larger city. She didn’t come back.”

      “What about your father?”

      Cait lifted one shoulder again carefully. “Who knows?”

      “Where he was?”

      “Who he was.”

      “Ah. Okay, what happened then?”

      “My great-aunt died when I was four and from then until I was eighteen I pretty much bounced from foster home to foster home.” She touched her hands to her cheeks. “I am so terribly embarrassed about the way I’ve been acting lately. Why does any of this matter?”

      “I just wanted to nail down the fact that you had a shaky childhood.”

      “But it didn’t affect me.”

      “Sure it did. Your childhood is directly responsible for the type of adult you’ve become. For every action, there’s a reaction, and that goes for the human psyche, too. The reaction doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. Maybe you never had a problem with your past before—until Branson Hines grabbed you.”

      Cait brought her chin up. “I put myself through college, then nursing school. I’m here. I did fine.”

      He nodded.

      “Those foster parents were kind enough. No one was ever cruel to me!” She shouted it and was instantly mortified. “Oh, heavens.”

      “What?”

      “That. That’s what I mean! I’m volatile. I’m…I’m out of control.”

      Cross grinned. “I like that word. Control. Great nutshell word.”

      “Why?” she pleaded.

      “Because that was what you’ve had your whole life—or at least from the time you left that last foster home and went to college. And now—” he snapped his fingers “—it’s gone. Hines took from you something you’ve fought hard to never have to relinquish again.”

      “Control,” Cait whispered.

      Cross nodded. “Rumor has it that you run a pretty tight ship here at work. What about at home?”

      She paid her rent months in advance just in case anything untoward should happen and she was suddenly unable to find the money. The apartment was hers, the first place she could really call home, and she would not lose it. “I…yes. I guess.”

      “You had no control over things when Hines took you,” Cross went on. He laid his palms flat on the desk. “He proved that all your efforts in that area have been for naught. That could shake a person like you to the core. Anyway, here’s the deal. You did the right thing in coming back to work today. But I’d recommend that you confront the site of your trauma, too, and all the people associated with it.”

      “The room where it started?” She didn’t want to go there.

      “And Sam Walters. Though you work with him, so I imagine you’ve already dealt with him, right?”

      Sam. Cait bit her lip.

      “Was that a problem?” Cross asked. “Seeing him again?”

      “Of course not. I’ll do whatever

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