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“I see. And did she help you? Take you to the authorities?”
“No. I don’t think she believed me. I was only young.”
“How young?” The words were dragged from deep in his gut.
“Fourteen.”
His hands formed fists behind her back. He would hurt someone for this. Whoever had done this would pay. He swore it as surely as he knew he would breathed his next breath.
“I see.” His voice was calm. He would not add to her pain by allowing her to see how this knowledge affected him. “Did you know the person who hurt you?”
She nodded.
“And you told your mother who it was?”
Another nod.
“Then I find it hard to believe she would not heed your complaint.”
Cassie’s laugh was a gurgled sob. “How could she? She didn’t want to believe me. She didn’t want to think he was capable of it.”
“Who?”
She swallowed, and dipped her head back against his chest. His heartbeat was comforting. “My stepfather.”
Layth stroked her back, his mind processing this horrible truth. “Your stepfather.” His tone was grim. “So your mother divorced him?”
“No.”
“She is still with this bastard?”
A nod.
“And you moved here when you were sixteen. So what happened in those two years? Who did you live with?”
She sobbed. “Them.”
Layth could fill in the blanks. He didn’t need her to relive any more of this. His heart was breaking for the child she had been. A child who’d grown into a woman who blurred sexual confidence with promiscuity because she’d lost any of the normal sexual awakenings she had been entitled to.
“Afterwards, I used to have this dream. Always the same. I was stuck in the middle of a river, standing on a tiny island. The water was coming at me, from all angles. I was going to be swallowed whole by the currents. But then, out of nowhere, this incredible lion would bound across to me. Not to attack me. Not to hurt me. But to save me.” Her voice dropped to a shaky whisper. “It’s absurd, I know. There was no one to save me. No person. No lion.”
He stroked her back until her breathing returned to normal. And still he held her close. “I’m so sorry, Cassie.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not your fault.”
Wasn’t it? Wasn’t he just another man using her body for his own selfish needs? Knowing he could never, in a million years, give her what she deserved?
He stepped away from her, his expression impossible to comprehend. Cassie, for her part, having revealed something so monumentally vital felt more exposed and naked than she’d ever been in her whole life.
“Shower, sweet Cassie. I will make you a tea.”
10
“How old were you when you ceased to think of rain as magical?” Cassie asked quietly, staring out of the window at the softly falling water.
Was it raining? Layth hadn’t noticed. Since returning to his hotel suite that evening, his entire focus had been on Cassie. He hadn’t so much as looked outside.
His mind was reeling. What had happened to her made him ache to fix things. To punish the man who had hurt her, and the mother who’d failed to protect her; to assure her she would be, forever after, safe. The more he thought about it, the more Layth Sati realised he couldn’t live in a world where Cassie was damaged by other people’s actions.
