LITMIR.BIZ

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wasn’t responsible, but I was pressured by your boss to make the arrest.”

      It had turned out that Erica had been murdered by her best friend and next-door neighbor, Lillian Cordell. And despite all the drama, Sawyer had found love with the nanny he’d hired to care for his daughter, Molly.

      “I hear Sawyer and Amanda are getting married next month,” she said.

      “Yeah. I got an invitation. It’s going to be a small wedding in Sawyer’s backyard. I’m glad he found somebody who makes him happy. He was unhappy with Erica for a very long time. And speaking of weddings and marriages, tell me about yours.”

      As always, whenever she thought of Frank, her wrist ached as if to remind her of all the pain her marriage had brought to her. “There’s nothing much to tell. We got married, it didn’t work out and we got a divorce.”

      “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?” He pushed the button to lower the bread in the toaster, then turned and looked at her expectantly.

      “I’m surprised you’d find the minutia of a broken marriage of any interest,” she replied.

      “I think there’s more than the usual minutia in your broken marriage. After all, it was you who told me Frank Landers might be responsible for all this.”

      As he took the eggs from the skillet and ladled them onto two plates, she turned her attention to the window and stared out, knowing that she was going to have to tell him how bad things had been, how stupid she had been. The toast popped up and she turned her gaze back to him.

      “I was twenty-one and Frank was forty when we married. We’d met in a bar, and I thought he was strong and smart. He seemed to adore me.”

      She released a humorless laugh and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup. “I guess you could say I was a cliché. My father left us when I was ten and I never had a real relationship with him. My mother worked two jobs to support us and I rarely saw her. When I met Frank I was hungry for somebody to love me, and he fed that hunger. It wasn’t until after we were married that I realized his adoration was obsession and he was dictatorial and mean.”

      Lucas carried the two plates to the table and joined her there. She was grateful that his eyes held no judgment, nor did they hold pity. He just looked at her curiously.

      “I was smart, but I fell into the same trap that other abused women fall into,” she continued. “You’ve probably heard this story a million times before. At the beginning things were okay, although Frank had total control over what I did, where I went and who I saw. I wanted to please him so I played right into his game. By the time I got pregnant I’d been isolated from my friends and my mother. And while I knew things weren’t right, I wanted my baby to be raised in the kind of complete family that I hadn’t had.”

      “When did the physical abuse start?”

      She looked at him in surprise. She hadn’t mentioned anything about physical abuse. Unexpectedly, tears burned at her eyes as she thought of those years with Frank, years of fear and pain and broken dreams.

      “About the time I got pregnant with Billy. Frank wasn’t happy about the pregnancy, although initially I thought he’d come to embrace the idea of a child. The first time he laid a hand on me it was just a push … a shove. I fell into the coffee table and got banged up. He was instantly sorry and we put the incident behind us … until the next time.”

      “When did he hurt your wrist?”

      She flushed and realized she’d been rubbing the ache since she’d begun talking about Frank. “The day I left him. By that time I’d been punched and kicked and slapped enough. I’d already begun to make plans to leave him, but that day he raised his hand to Billy. I stepped between them and he grabbed me by the wrist and twisted. I heard the snap when it broke. He drove me to the hospital, apologizing and telling me how much he loved me. But that snap of my wrist was a defining moment for me and I knew I wasn’t leaving the hospital with him.”

      “You pressed charges?”

      She nodded and once again wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, needing the warmth to infuse the chill that had taken up residence with the bad memories. “He spent a week in jail, then got out. Billy and I went into a shelter that night and we stayed at the shelter until the divorce was final. That day I packed up and Billy and I got into my car and left Shreveport and Frank Landers behind.”

      Lucas picked up his fork and pointed to her plate. “You’d better eat before it gets cold.”

      Although the hunger pangs that had gnawed at her had fled with the talk of Frank, she picked up her fork and took a bite. Instead of hunger, what gnawed at her now was a fire of simmering anger. She was angry with herself for falling into the trap of a battered woman, angry with Lucas for maintaining such control on his emotions, for fixing her eggs instead of finding her son.

      She knew her emotions were irrational, that the anger she felt at the moment was misplaced, but she couldn’t get a handle on it, and as she attempted to take another bite of her breakfast, it flared out of control.

      “You remind me of him,” she said.

      He looked at her in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

      “You remind me a lot of Frank.” Careless abandon filled her. Her pain rose up inside her, so enormous she wanted to strike out and Lucas was a convenient target. “You treat Jenny a lot like Frank used to treat me.”

      He set his fork down and narrowed his dark eyes. “What does that mean? You’re somehow comparing my relationship with my sister to the abusive relationship you had with your husband?”

      “Oh, I’m sure you’ve never laid a hand on Jenny, but emotionally you do to her exactly what Frank used to do to me.”

      His narrowed eyes flickered with the heat of a burgeoning anger. “I think maybe your own emotional baggage is coloring the way you see things.”

      “On the contrary, my emotional baggage makes me see things more clearly.” She wanted an explosion, needed to release not only the tension that balled so tight inside her, but also to diminish the physical attraction she felt for him.

      What she wanted more than anything else was for him to reach out to her, to grab her and hold her tight in his arms as he had done the night before in the cemetery.

      As crazy as it sounded, she wanted him to take her to bed, to fill her heart with anything other than the agonizing horror that was in there now. And that scared the hell out of her.

      “You undermine her confidence, you belittle the choices she makes.” She got up from the table, unable to sit next to him and say the things that threatened to burst from her. “You never let her forget that you have to rescue her, that she isn’t smart enough, isn’t old enough to do things right. That’s abuse, Lucas, whether you recognize it or not, whether you mean it or not, it’s abuse.”

      A muscle ticked in his jaw and his eyes were as dark as the night that had just passed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about me or my sister and the relationship we have.”

      “I know what I see. Did you know that Jenny wanted to be a teacher? But that’s not what you wanted her to be. So she flunked out of college on purpose, because that’s what you secretly expected of her, because she’d rather disappoint you than stand up to you.” She took a step backward, somewhere in the back of her mind appalled at her audacity, yet unable to stop herself.

      “You treat her like she’s stupid and worthless and that’s what she becomes when she’s around you. You’ve stolen her self-esteem. Believe me, I know all about that.” Tears fell down her cheeks and she swiped at them angrily.

      “You have no idea what a great woman Jenny is. She would have made an awesome teacher, and my only consolation right now is that Jenny is with Billy wherever he is and I know she’ll do everything in her power to keep him safe.”

      She left

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