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He tugged the throw from beneath her grasp and draped it around her. “I’m going to get some towels and find you something to wear. Take off the underwear and add it to the pile. I’ll throw it all in the dryer.”
He moved away. She swayed and he stopped short, came back. “I’m going to sit you down.”
She shook her head. Instead, she took one step back and sank to her knees.
She did it with a deliberate slowness, directed by something that had the force of a conscious decision, though she gave no words to it in her head. This was what she needed to do, for reasons she couldn’t articulate but hoped he understood. That same subconscious compulsion said he would.
So did his stillness. If he hadn’t understood, he would have lunged to catch her, thinking she’d finally become too weak to stand.
She lifted her head and stared at him.
“I didn’t come here for you to be nice to me,” she rasped.
Chapter Six
Les had attended Beulah’s Baptist church a couple times in Richmond. In one of the sermons, the theatrical preacher had said sin was burned away. “The soul is purged and cleansed by fire,” he’d shouted. The syllables had lifted and fallen, like heavy metal music punctuated by a bass line.
Tension emanated from Brick as she mumbled those words. She wanted to close both hands on that wire of energy and feel it rip through her.
“You don’t want me to be nice to you,” he said slowly. The words thickened, deepened. Emphasized like the preacher’s, they struck answering chords within her. It didn’t make sense to her. But hearing him say it, the relief that swept her was so strong, so widespread. He knew. He understood.
At her jerky, shaky nod, a roughness edged his next response. “Why should I be mean to you, Celeste Joy? Tell me.”
She stared at the floor. Started to shake again, only unlike it had been on the drive here, this wasn’t a cycle that would crest and ebb, pausing before it repeated again. Now it would keep intensifying until it could shake apart a ten-story building.
She stared at his shoes, his long legs and powerful thighs, denim creasing around his hips and groin, holding what was there and making her stomach flipflop. Noticing it made sense, no matter her emotional turmoil. It was part of all of it, what held her still and aching.
Slowly, he reached down and curled his fingers in her hair, twisting it, a gradual pull against her scalp that increased until a sound escaped her, animal-like. Oh God, she couldn’t stop it. The crack raced outward, breaking apart the concrete foundation. What it had held clawed its way up the sides of the building, releasing the four damning words that brought it all down.
“I killed a child.”
She stuffed a fist against her teeth hard enough to cut her raw knuckles, despising herself for the cry she made on the ragged end of the statement, an outburst that begged for pity, for a forgiveness she didn’t deserve.
Brick squatted in front of her. It wasn’t like his kneeling to undress her, the cosseting that had disturbed her. This brought the full force of his presence right up into her field of blurred vision. He pulled her hands away from her mouth. His gaze dropped to the bludgeoned knuckles, the blood that had dried there after her fight with the garden wall.
A muttered oath, and he had his arms around her. She fought him, fought herself, seeking movement to escape the truth that invaded too much abhorred stillness.
“No.” A single, relentless word, which contained an order to submit. He wouldn’t let her go, so she had to surrender to the exhaustion, the tears, let them scald through her.
She knew the body had limits, even for something like this. She’d known the truth would break her a hundred times over when it breached the wall she’d put around it to get her here. Maybe that was why she’d had to get here, because he didn’t break. Nothing held in Brick’s arms could break apart.
Unless he wanted it broken.
His hand was back in her hair, that tight grip. She buried her face in his neck, breathing wet sobs against him. She’d already doused him with her rain-soaked clothes, so the tears were absorbed into damp cotton.
Even after surrendering to it, she couldn’t stop the hard waves of emotion. She’d thump a fist against him, turn it toward herself, and he would recapture and hold it. He was all the way on the floor, his broad back against the sofa, her sprawled between his legs, pressed against his torso. When her body at last gave out, all she could do was lie there.
Only then did he pick her up again, blanket and all. He took her up the stairs to a bedroom. The master bedroom, not a guestroom. He carried her into the bathroom, setting her on the commode as he started up the shower.
He turned and framed her face in both hands. He studied her the way she checked on a patient going through a procedure, to see where they were at. Only his regard penetrated to a different level, looking for different things.
“Shower and then bed,” he told her. “You’ll sleep, and in the morning, we’ll go from there. Does anyone know where you are, Les? Your roommate, your family?”
“No. It doesn’t matter.”
He leveled her with a stern look. “It sure as hell does. I’ll take care of it.”
He peeled the blanket off her and stepped back. Steam billowed out of the shower. “Underwear,” he said.
