LITMIR.BIZ

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broke.

      The horror of the situation suddenly hit Kullen with the force of an anvil dropping on his head. He called himself seven kinds of a jackass. Here he’d been feeling sorry for himself for loving her, and all along she’d been a victim.

      “He raped you?” Kullen asked, struggling to contain his outrage.

      She drew her lips together in a thin line, then nodded.

      He stared at her, stunned. “Why didn’t you report him to the police?”

      “Because I was ashamed.” It was so hard not to cry. Talking had sharpened all the edges of the incident. She could feel them all pricking her flesh again. “It would have been just my word against his. People saw him at the party talking to me. Walking me out to my car. They’d think that the sex was consensual and that I cried rape after the fact because he wouldn’t allow himself to be blackmailed.”

      It seemed too fantastic for words, but Kullen was acutely aware of the dead man’s reputation. “Is that what he said?”

      She nodded, avoiding his eyes. “He told me it was my fault. That I’d asked for it and that I couldn’t expect a guy to shut down after I ‘got his engine going.’” She drew in another shaky breath. “All I wanted to do was forget that it ever happened.” She smiled at Kullen and it all but broke his heart. “You almost made me forget. And then I found out I was pregnant—”

      “Why didn’t you tell me?” He would have taken care of her—after he’d beaten that scum to a pulp.

      “Because I didn’t want you to look at me with disgust, or pity—”

      “So letting me think that something was wrong, that you’d rather run away and disappear than marry me, was better?” he demanded. She made no answer. “Didn’t you know me any better than that?”

      She wasn’t going to cry. Please, God, don’t let me cry. “At that point, I didn’t know anything except that what I had once hoped for was now completely out of reach. I had a child on the way. A child I didn’t want.”

      “There were options,” he told her quietly. Not options that he would have chosen for her, but they were hers to reject, not his.

      She shook her head. “Not for me.”

      “Then adoption,” he suggested.

      Lilli shook her head. “My mistake, my burden,” she said firmly.

      Her reasoning frustrated him. His anger against the dead man bubbled up within him and he had nowhere to vent it. His temper flared and it was a struggle to keep it under wraps. “He raped you, you didn’t rape him. How the hell was any of this your mistake?” he asked.

      She’d told him what he needed to know. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

      She waved away his question. “That’s all in the past. And in one of those ironic twists of fate, Jonathan is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Pausing, she looked at him, then softly amended, “Well, one of the best.”

      She could sense that he wanted to ask more questions. Lilli looked down at her hands. She’d just stripped herself naked and felt utterly vulnerable.

      “Satisfied?” she asked in a whisper.

      Chapter Seven

      Sympathy, guilt and anger suddenly warred within Kullen.

      The sympathy was self-explanatory. The guilt was because he’d had to force her to relive the ordeal, and the anger was directed against the narcissistic bastard who’d assaulted Lilli. And ultimately robbed them of a life they could have had together.

      “No, I’m not,” he told her. “I won’t be satisfied until I can beat Erik Dalton within an inch of his life.”

      “But he’s dead.”

      “Hence, my dilemma,” Kullen acknowledged with a straight face.

      It took her a second to realize he was kidding. Lilli laughed softly. “You always did know how to make me smile.”

      “We do what we can,” he quipped with affection.

      He kept it light. What he really wanted to say was that she should have come to him with this the moment she knew she was pregnant. It pained him to think of her facing something so huge on her own. He would have been there for her every step of the way if only he’d known. If only she’d trusted him to stand by her and not judge her.

      But for now he kept the question to himself. He could see that Lilli just wanted to table the subject. He had no choice but to abide by her obvious wishes.

      In his mind, Kullen promised himself that they would come back to this discussion in the near future. Lilli needed to fully purge herself of this incident. She’d taken the first important steps. The rest would come.

      “Do you think she can do it?” Lilli asked, trying her best to disguise the tremor in her voice. “Do you think that Mrs. Dalton will be able to take Jonathan away from me?”

      He chose his words carefully, his eyes never leaving hers. “I think Elizabeth Dalton’s going to do her damnedest to try,” he told her, “but no, I don’t think she’s going to take your son away from you.”

      Her hand covered his, creating the bond that she so desperately needed. “Promise?”

      Logically, Kullen knew he couldn’t guarantee anything. It was no secret that judges were a whimsical breed. If he and Lilli drew the wrong judge for the case, one who was either impressed by Elizabeth Dalton or whose appointment had somehow been facilitated by her pull or covert financial backing, then they were in for a hard fight—and the daunting possibility of an initial ruling against them.

      But he knew that Lilli wasn’t asking him for a logical answer, or the truth when it came down to that. She was asking him for an answer that she could hang on to with both hands. An answer that told her everything would be all right. What she needed most of all was hope.

      After all she’d been through, he figured it was the least he could do. So he smiled at her and said the one word she wanted to hear. “Promise.”

      The sigh that escaped her lips was one of relief and she mirrored his smile. But her expression told him she knew what he was doing and why. She appeared grateful that, for her sake, he was playing the game. There was time enough to deal with reality and all its hoary ramifications later.

      “Thank you,” she told him with feeling. “And now, I’d better get back and tell my mother she’s free to go home if she wants to. Although half the time I suspect she likes sticking around Jonathan and me. Now that my dad’s gone, we’re all the family she has.”

      It occurred to him that he hadn’t given her condolences where they were due. “I’m sorry to hear about your dad.”

      “Yeah, me, too.” Her father had died shortly after Jonathan was born. Because she’d been in the midst of dealing with her own issues, she hadn’t known of his sudden illness until a week before he passed away. She blamed herself for that, too, and still grieved that her father never got to see his grandson.

      Wanting to change the subject, Kullen nodded toward the pizza box. There was still a little less than half left.

      “Why don’t you take some of this with you for Jonathan?” he suggested. He saw that she was about to demur—he could still read so much of her body language. Funny how some things never left you, he thought. “I don’t know of any seven-year-old boy alive who doesn’t like cold pizza.” With that, he went to the kitchen to get a container for her.

      Lilli followed him. “Don’t you want it?”

      “I’ve got more than enough,” he assured her. “Just in case you didn’t notice, you still eat like a bird on a diet.”

      Kullen opened an overhead cupboard and she saw a collection of plastic

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