Page 30 of Shopping for an Heir
Very carefully, Gerald moved his hands from his chest holster, and then moved like a flash of lightning as security guards poured into the room.
Seconds too late.
The blow rolled out in slow motion, Kulli’s clean-shaven jaw hooking left so fast it seemed like it was a separate body part from the rest of him, as if it would have ricocheted off a far wall if the layer of skin stretched over bone hadn’t been there. Gerald’s mouth stretched, more teeth showing than she thought a face should have as he grimaced in battle, a glint of gold from a back molar shining in the room’s overhead light.
A spray of Kulli’s blood, a long drop gone to spatter, hit her directly on the exposed skin above the V of her shirt, a drop sliding down between her breasts.
Mayhem.
Mayhem erupted.
Kulli centered himself quickly, bending his knees, arms whipped into fight mode, his suit jacket pulled tight around the elbows and shoulders, an impediment as seconds turned into minutes. Without any such obstacle, Gerald’s blows were rapid fire, like a machine gun array, rat-a-tat-tat, punch punch punch.
“STOP IT!” she screamed, her reaction to Kulli’s revelation truncated by the rush of fight hormones that coursed through her as she started to reach for Gerald, to pull him off, as his fist smashed into Kulli’s eye once, twice, and then they were down on the ground, a mass of enraged muscle and senseless breaths, grunts and groans and blows filling the air.
Guards poured into the room, six of them on top of Gerald and Kulli, the mass of body parts and movement and blood a bastardized version of the old kids’ game, Twister.
Only these guards had guns, zip-tie handcuffs, and authority.
Within seconds Gerald was on the ground, gun removed, face down, wrists cuffed, with Kulli screaming, “He started it! Check the video!”
And then Kulli kicked Gerald in the head, the thump of shoe against skull making a sickening sound like a melon dropped from a rooftop. Gerald twitched, then slumped against the carpet, out cold.
Red rage filled her vision.
Two guards dragged Kulli away from Gerald as she advanced, throwing off her jacket, ready to do damage.
She stopped.
She breathed.
She closed her eyes, the cacophony too much.
Enough damage had been done. Jail for her wouldn’t help Gerald, and could be career suicide. Barely able to manage her impulse control, she struggled, but found the place inside that said to stop.
The place Gerald couldn’t access ten seconds ago.
She couldn’t blame him. If what Kulli said was true...
Dropping to the floor, she checked Gerald. Pulse was fine. Breathing was regular. He had blood from cuts on his knuckles, but was otherwise okay.
Being a former medic had its pluses.
“I’m pressing charges!” Kulli screamed.
“You just kicked him unconscious!” she roared, searching her jacket for her cell phone, pressing Send to complete the 9-1-1 call she’d primed earlier.
“He started it!”
“And you finished it while his arms were tied behind his back? You fucking sick piece of cowardly shit,” she said, her voice dangerously low.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
The police hauled Gerald off to jail.
But damned if she didn’t get them to take Kulli, too.
Video works both ways.
Bailing her ex-fiancé out of jail after he assaulted their former commanding officer in front of a rare artifact that could change the world’s understanding of its origins wasn’t on her Google calendar for the day, but Suzanne did it anyhow.
“Thank you,” he muttered as she pulled him aside roughly and examined his injuries under a blinking fluorescent light.
“Ow!” Her fingers pressed against the butterfly bandage. Kulli’s kick had split his eyebrow. A red spot where the toe had connected with the temple wasn’t pretty and would go through the bruise color cycle over the next two weeks.
“If you think that hurts, just wait.”
“What does that mean?” he grumbled.
She walked away. Marched out into the cold urban landscape where she’d rather talk to a homeless guy than Gerald right now.
He followed her.
Slowly, but he did.
“What in the hell did you think you were doing back there, Gerald?” She whipped around, heedless of passersby.
“Rescuing you!”
“I don’t need to be rescued, damn it! I need to be loved. Trusted. Was Kulli telling the truth?”
He flinched, eyes stormy, changing color second by second as he reacted to her words.
“Yes.” He sighed. “I can explain.”
“You should have done that ten years ago.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t trust me with the truth,” she said softly, her voice dropping, all her energy pouring out of her. “Nothing you could have told me would have been worse than what you did to me. Shutting me out was more painful than killing me, Gerald. It was its own death, only worse, because I had to live with the pain.”
He closed his eyes, cutting her off from the view of his emotions. “I know that now.”
“But you didn’t reach out. Didn’t try to reconnect.”
“I assumed you hated me after I ended things like that.”
“I did. For a long, long time. I knew something was wrong. You don’t come out of that hellhole without being screwed up in so many ways,” she said, choking back a sick laugh. “And I guessed it had to do with PTSD. Intrusive thoughts. Dreams. Nightmares.”
“Never intrusive thoughts,” he insisted, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I never had actual...images...or fantasies of....”
He seemed to need her to know that. She nodded.
“Just because you dream something doesn’t mean you want it to happen.”
“Jesus, Suzanne, it was the opposite. I couldn’t get the fucking dreams out of my sleep. So I stopped sleeping.”
“Which really helped,” she said with a wry smile. “I’m sure.”
“I went mad. Crazy. And the fleeting sleep I did have was filled with dreams of hurting you.” He looked at her with such rawness, such tender pain, that Suzanne felt the wind knocked out of her. Once in a while, during litigation, Suzanne had moments where every thought in her head drained out of her at once, abandoning her to a world of eyes and judgment. She would stand still, horrified by her muteness, completely incapable of putting together a coherent sentence.
Over the years she’d learned to weather those moments, and to trust that her brain’s hiccup would end.
She had no idea her heart could hiccup, too.
“You hurt me emotionally in unfathomable ways to prevent yourself from hurting me with your hands?”
“You could put it that way.”
“I just did.”
“Then yes.”
“I wish you’d told me. I wouldn’t have left.”
“I knew that. Which is exactly why I did leave. If I’d stayed, I would have dragged you through everything. Every crazy bit of it.”
“I had my own crazy, too.”
“Not like me, Suz. Not like me.”
Haunted men have a similar look. Their eyes go hollow and ragged. Women, too, except the look is more subtle. Muted. Trained from childhood to smile, to please, grown women who go through trauma have a pained friendliness that belies what’s underneath.
Men aren’t held to the same standards.
But Suzanne could still see the trauma in him.
“Has ten years been long enough?”
“For what?”
“To heal?”
“Yes. I have better tools in my coping toolbox. I know how to handle life. I didn’t at first.”
The isolation, the loneliness, the outright madness he must have felt all those years ago, driven to leave her in order to protect her, made her ache.
And pissed.
But mostly sad. So sad.
Another sliver of anger peeled off her, floating on the wind, carried far away like wood shavings in the hands of a fine woodcarver.
This was a breaking point. Years ago, he’d broken her. She’d put herself back together and gone on, but even now she had to admit to herself how much she hadn’t gotten over him. How the hole had remained, though she’d learned to live with it. His revelation meant nothing.
Truly.
“Do you know how hard it was to leave you? In my own twisted logic, I was sure I made the right decision. But people who aren’t thinking right are, by definition, unable to make good decisions.” His look was feral. “I was a lost cause. I was damned either way, so I thought that picking the one way that wouldn’t damn you, too, was the best choice.”
“And I hated you for it. All these years, I’ve hated you for it.”
“I understand.”
“And loved you, too. Not for making that decision. Just for being you. Just—”
“I know,” he said softly, respecting the space between them, not closing. She loved him for that, too. “I know.”
“Look at me,” she demanded, forcing his eyes to stay on hers. “You just told me your biggest secret. Your biggest fear. And I’m still here. Right here.”
His throat shook as he swallowed.
“See? Whatever you thought would happen, didn’t.”
He nodded, closing his eyes, the wave of emotion that coursed across his skin a kinesthetic sign of the emotional tsunami underneath.
“You never looked me up?” she asked.
“I knew you went to Michigan for law school. Then I stopped looking.”
