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She couldn’t let that happen.
The tears pissed her off because she wasn’t sad. She was furious. Furious at Turner for slipping into her room when she trusted him to spend the night in the Blue Room. Angry and bitter at the fact that she slept soundly without ever expecting that anyone in Hamlet was capable of breaking that trust, outsider or not. Pissed that Lucas could rightly say I told you so and, because she’d been hurt, he never would.
Using the back of her hand, she dashed away the tears. She took a second to compose herself. Right then, it wasn’t about her. Maria chased Turner off—he was the least of her worries.
No. This was about Lucas. Her heart slowed while her brain whirred. She already set off her brother’s guard dog instincts. She’d have to handle it before a bad situation got worse.
“Whatever you’re thinking,” she began tentatively, “it’s not as bad as that.”
“Which means that it’s still bad, Maria Lucia. What. Happened?”
Maria echoed his earlier oath. Merda. He brought out the big guns. Her middle name.
“I’ll tell you, I swear, but first you have to promise me something, okay?” She gentled her voice, hoping he couldn’t hear the strain she couldn’t quite hide. Now that Turner was gone and she was safe, her first priority was to keep Lucas calm. She couldn’t say exactly why it was so important, just that it was. Her gut told her so and, after the way it saved her tonight, she would forever listen to her instincts. She gripped her radio tightly. “Can you do that, Luc?”
“You have three seconds to explain yourself before I head over there to see what happened for myself.”
“Jesus,” she exploded, both her temper and patience in tattered shreds, “just promise!”
“Whoa. Okay. Fine. I promise.”
She exhaled a rough breath. “Don’t get mad.”
Lucas was holding on by a thread. She heard him sigh, before he said in a strained voice, “I’ll try my best. You’re already pushing it. Now, what’s wrong?”
How could she make an attempted assault not sound too bad? Taking a deep breath, she tried.
And, oh boy, did she fail miserably.
7
Once the adrenaline faded away into a shocked sort of acceptance that something like that could happen in Hamlet—could happen to her—Maria thought she would cry. Scream.
Instead, she crawled.
She was angry—so, so angry—but a good part of her was scared, too. And not only because Lucas had taken great pains to point out that, just because Turner was gone now, it didn’t mean he couldn’t come right back.
“Lock the front door,” he commanded. “Don’t go looking to see if he’s still around the house. I hope you scared that fucker senseless and he ran out into the street and got hit by a car. Just in case, lock up and go back to your room. Lock that door, too. Wait for me there, Maria. I’m on my way.”
She tried. Really, she did.
When she was done in the foyer, Maria sat with her back to Ophelia’s front door, her radio in her left hand and her bat in the right. Her grip on both was so tight, she could barely feel them. She would let them go only over her dead body.
A small gasp turned into a strangled groan when she realized that could have been a possibility if she hadn’t had her bat to ward Turner off. It was obvious what he had wanted from her the instant he slipped into her bed but who knows what he had in mind for an encore?
If she wasn’t already on the floor, bracing the front door with her trembling body, that thought would have put her there.
Her legs were weak. Fear made them that way. Because Lucas’s forceful personality was so achingly familiar, she managed to do exactly one thing he told her to do before they gave out and she landed in a heap on Ophelia’s polished hardwood floor. The door was locked. In all of Maria’s twenty-six years, it was the first time she ever turned it. The soft click didn’t make her feel any better.
Nobody locked their doors in Hamlet. There had never been a reason to.
As soon as Maria managed to confess everything that had happened, Lucas rattled off his string of instructions. She repeated them to herself in a loop, though she made no move to get up and follow them.
Go to the front door. Lock it. Head back to her bedroom and lock that one, too. Barricade herself in the small room where she could be safe until he got there. Keep the radio close at hand, but leave the line open in case he needed to call her back—or, worse, she had a reason to buzz him again.
Lucas said he would call Caitlin while he was on the way to Ophelia. Thank God for that. While Maria knew that the sheriff needed to be told—Hamlet needed to be warned that a predator was on the loose—she didn’t think she could tell another soul how close she came to being attacked.
