Brooke couldn’t stand to see the pain in his eyes. She turned to her dresser to put away her things and tossed her dirty tank top and washcloth in the laundry basket.
“You were waiting for the wedding to be over and for Kristi and me to come back from our honeymoon. Mindy Sue told me last night. She also told me you almost called to tell me you were pregnant after I left you that damn message telling you Kristi lost the baby. But you didn’t. You love me that much, you’d let me marry another woman, even though you were pregnant with my baby.”
“I wish I had called.” Immediately, she wanted to take that back. She couldn’t let him think that anything would have been different. She turned and faced him, even though she couldn’t look at him. “It wouldn’t have changed what happened.” She sighed and spilled the truth. “Adam Harris and I met at the Fourth of July picnic at the ranch. He’d been there several times before, I just never really talked to him until then. We talked about school and how he lived in his father’s shadow, always falling short of his family’s expectations. I don’t think anyone really listened to him or cared about how he felt. I did. It was that simple, and he warped it into something that wasn’t real.”
“Mindy Sue told me he’s been stalking you this whole time. Terrorizing you. Still, you didn’t call me. You never said anything to your mom.”
“What was the point of making you and Mom worry about something that seemed creepy, yes, but also innocuous? He sent me flowers to the house after the Christmas party, remember?”
Cody’s eyes went wide. “The roses you thought I sent you?”
“The note said, ‘You made last night remarkable.’”
His mouth fell open. “Of course you thought they were from me.”
She nodded. “Then it was gifts and nice notes when I returned to campus. He did seem like a secret admirer with an undertone of something scary because of the way he followed me around without my knowing. It unnerved me. It made me paranoid. I suffered overwhelming anxiety. After a couple weeks without the person coming forward to ask me out, it went from odd to a warning of something ominous.”
She sat slowly and carefully in the chair at the desk. “The detective who came to see me in the hospital said even if he hadn’t attacked me that night and got me to wherever he planned to take me, that he probably would have killed me eventually.” She shook off the chill that ran down her spine and invaded all her bones. “Adam imagined us in love, that I was his perfect woman. The second I didn’t live up to the fantasy, he attacked me. He said I was supposed to be his. He stared at my baby bump and couldn’t believe I’d let another man touch me.”
“Not just another man, sweetheart. Me. I got you pregnant. She wasourbaby. We’ll get through this together.”
She ignored the last part, too aware that there was nothing left between them, not when the Brooke he’d known had died along with their daughter. She felt like an empty shell. Or rather, one filled with nothing but heartache and pain.
It hurt to breathe.
She didn’t want to be here.
But she trudged on anyway and cocked her chin toward the closet. “Could you get that bag for me?” Too tired to get up, she waited for him to retrieve it for her. It took too much effort to simply exist through the emotional and physical pain.
A fine sheen of sweat covered her skin. Getting herself cleaned up and talking about what happened had sapped every ounce ofenergy she’d stored up after her fitful night of sleep. She needed to take a nap, and she’d only been up for an hour.
He grabbed the paper bag from the closet and dumped the contents on her bed, then rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, hesitation in his eyes. “I’m afraid to see what’s under all those bandages.”
“It’s not pretty.” She tried to use her right hand to unwind the bandages on her left arm, the one less injured, but it hurt to move her swollen fingers and hold her arm up at all.
Cody lightly touched her hand to still it. “Let me help you, honey. Just sit and rest. I’ll do it.”
He took the strand of bandage in one hand, her wrist in the other, and continued what she’d started. As he went, he removed the gauze pads covering long and short gashes that had been stitched closed. The sight of them made Cody’s eyes cloud with concern.
“They look better today, less swollen,” she said softly. “Um, there’s a tube of medicine to put on the worst of them.”
Cody rifled through the stuff he’d dumped on the bed. He found the tube and turned back to her.
Seeing the gashes triggered something primal inside her. One second, she was aware of the room, Cody, the pain inside her that never ceased. The next second, her mind shut off. It happened just that fast. She simply checked out. Lost in the fog of her mind, everything dull and quiet and blank.
Better than the images of the attack that tried to suck her back into a terror-filled nightmare.
Everything just went black.
Cody didn’t know what happened. One second she was looking at him, then the grizzly gashes on her arm, and her eyes and facesimply went blank. Nothing there. No movement. No emotion. Nothing.
Brooke was simply gone. Lost to wherever she went in her mind.
He bent at the waist and cupped her cheek, waving his other hand in front of her eyes.
Like a switch flicked, she came alive like she was ready to fight. She exploded, swatting and kicking and blocking. She screamed and tried to hit him again.
“Brooke!” Cody shouted right in her face.
