Hard as You Can (27 page)

“Hmm.” Bruno tipped his beer against his lips and took a long pull from the can, eyeing Crystal the whole time.

“Dessert?” Crystal asked, acting like she didn’t know where his thoughts were going. She rose and reached for their dirty dishes, but Bruno grabbed her wrist and hauled her around the table and in between his spread knees.

He grabbed her breasts and kneaded. “Definitely dessert.”

Too rough. Too scary. Too much about him—always.
The gentleness and affection of Shane’s touch was maybe her favorite thing about him, which was why Bruno’s groping now felt so hard to bear. “Well,” she said, clearing her throat and trying to hide a wince from a particularly hard squeeze. “The nice thing is that you can have your cake and eat it, too.”

Bruno stopped and his gaze dragged up to her face. “You made cake?”

Sucker.
She smiled. “Yup.”

“What kind?”

“Red velvet with cream cheese icing.” Bruno’s eyebrows flew up. The first time she’d ever made him red velvet had been his birthday four years ago, which had only been about two months after he’d pulled her out of that hole in the basement of Confessions. It was the first night she’d let him between her legs, although she’d quickly freaked out when he’d tried to position his weight there. It had taken another month before she could manage sex with him. She cried for an hour afterward. He’d only stuck around for the first ten minutes of it.

So many things she loved had been ruined by their association with Bruno Ashe.

But not Jenna. Never Jenna.

“Yeah, cake,” Bruno said. “Thanks, baby.” He patted her ass and let her go.

Releasing a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, she cleared the table and took the dirties to the sink. She removed the cover from the cake plate and stared at the creamy swirls of white frosting—then she cut him almost a quarter of the cake.

She carried the hunk of sugar out to him with a fresh can of beer and sat opposite as he devoured it.

Why aren’t you having any?” he asked around a too-big bite.

“I made it for you. Besides, I have to watch my figure, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess you do.” His gaze dragged over Crystal’s breasts, and it made her want to shrink into herself.

As his slice of cake got smaller and smaller, her heart raced and her stomach knotted. It was like facing a trip to the gallows. She knew what was about to happen was inevitable, but that didn’t keep her soul from howling in protest.

And then his forked clanked against the empty plate.

“More?” she asked brightly.

He licked his lips and shook his head. “No. I had enough cake. Now I want dessert.” Bruno lifted his hands, urging her to come to him.

For a moment, her muscles refused to respond. But then her survival instinct kicked in, and she got her butt out of the chair and rounded the table to stand at Bruno’s knees. He helped her straddle his lap and pulled her down as far as her snug jeans and his thick thighs allowed. He fisted his hands in her hair and slowly pulled her mouth to his.

And then his lips smothered hers, and his tongue penetrated her mouth. Crystal was drowning in the sweetness on his breath until she felt like she was suffocating. Bruno grew hard between her legs and slid down in the chair to force them more tightly together. He gripped her hips, hard, and ground her down against the ridge of his erection, unleashing a grunt into their kiss.

Crystal’s throat went tight and her eyes stung, but she responded the way she always did, the way he expected. She kissed back. She moaned. She writhed. But everything within her revolted against his touch and his taste and his scent. Her skin crawled, her mouth soured, her nose recoiled. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get out of her own head. Usually, she could tolerate, she could compartmentalize, she could rationalize.
It won’t last long. It’s not that big of a deal. You’ve done it before. Once, you wanted him.

Now, none of those worked. None of those appeased. None of those made her feel any less like she was back in that basement room of Confessions, watching a total stranger undo his belt and leer at her like she was his for the taking whether she wanted him or not. She had been then. She was now.

“Get up, baby. I don’t have a lot of time,” Bruno said, pushing her off his lap. “And I gotta get inside you. It’s been too long.”

Crystal found her feet, though her knees felt soft, like they couldn’t possibly hold her weight. The walls seemed to spin around her.

Bruno grabbed her, kissed her, pulled at her clothing. Her shirt went up, her bra got tugged down. His hands were everywhere, big and hot and harsh. He opened the button on her jeans. Then the zipper. He shoved the denim down over her hips. It chafed at her skin.

“Turn around and brace yourself,” Bruno said in a ragged voice.

And that was when Crystal got out of her head. Out of her body, actually. She had the weirdest sensation of floating, and then somehow she was on the other side of the room. Or, at least, it seemed that way, because instead of seeing the dull white of the plaster wall in front of her face, she saw a couple about to have sex up against a wall, as if she’d become a casual observer not involved in what was going on. The woman’s bottom and thighs were bared, as well as her lower back, showing just the tail ends of her scars.

The man shoved down his own jeans, baring the heavy, corded muscles of his glutes and thighs. He reached a hand in between them and grunted in frustration. She was too tense, too closed. He yanked her hips farther away from the wall. Another moment of attempted consummation. More frustration. Because her body wasn’t responding.
Refused
to respond. He smacked her ass hard enough to leave a red handprint against the fair skin.

“Damnit, what the hell’s wrong?” Spitting into his hand, he reached between them again.

Keys rattled at the door.

Crystal-the-observer slowly turned her gaze away from the couple, who hadn’t yet heard the sound, and watched the door ease open.

Bruno gasped. “What the fuck?” He jerked his pants back around his waist. “Jesus, Jenna, what are you doing here?”

Crystal boomeranged back into her body.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.
It was damn close to every nightmare she’d ever had converging into a real moment in time.

Jenna’s expression was total abject horror—brow furrowed, mouth agape, cheeks flushing with anger. “I
live
here. What are
you
doing here?” Her eyes were like blue fire as they whipped between his open fly and Crystal’s disheveled clothing.

Oh, God, Jenna, stop.
Crystal pulled her jeans up but couldn’t get her fingers to master rebuttoning them. “Sorry, Jen. We just got carried away, didn’t we, Bruno?” She smiled up at him, trying to distract him from what Jenna had just said, and the tone with which she’d said it. “Can I get a rain check?” she asked, wrapping her arms around his neck.

His eyes unnarrowed, just the littlest bit. “Yeah, yeah, tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. I gotta see,” he said, his voice just a few degrees above frigid. “Wrap that food up for me.”

“Uh, yes, sure. Of course.”

Jenna glared at Crystal as she crossed the room, and Crystal threw her a look pleading for her to rein in her anger for just a few minutes. Once Bruno left, Jenna could dump as much of it on her as she wanted.

Crystal’s hands were a jittery mess as she grabbed plastic bowls and matching lids from a cupboard and hefted big slabs of lasagna into one container and thick wedges of cake into another. She pulled a handled brown bag from under the sink and packaged everything up for Bruno.

“What’s your problem?” came Bruno’s voice from the living room.

Crystal’s stomach plummeted to the ground. For a long moment, there was silence. Crystal returned to the living room, still death-gripping her hope that things wouldn’t get worse. “Here you go,” she said, as he finished donning his jacket.

“You wanna know what my problem is?” Jenna asked.

All the blood rushed from Crystal’s face. She felt it, because the room started spinning again, and she perceived sound like it had traveled through a long tunnel. “That’s enough, Jenna,” she said as harshly as she could.

Bruno wrenched the bag from Crystal’s hands and stalked toward her sister. He grabbed her jaw. “Yeah, I’d say that’s more than edamnnough, Jenna. Learn not to bite the hand that feeds you,” he said, shoving her away. She stumbled back a step, and he pushed by her, yanked open the door, and slammed it shut behind himself.

Pale and shaking, Jenna gaped at Crystal for a long minute, then she slipped the security chain across the door. “You want to explain what that was all about, Sara? Why I just got accosted in my own home?”

Crystal grappled to respond, but whatever force had been holding her upright for the past fifteen minutes stopped working at that very instant.

The room went wavy, her skin grew clammy, and her knees buckled. Crystal’s body went into a free fall.

The tenor of Jenna’s words changed. From anger to panic. “Sara!” Jenna rushed to Crystal’s side, to where she’d fallen in a heap in front of the couch.

Crystal curled into a ball and hugged herself as hard as she could.

“Sara? Sara, please,” Jenna said, stroking her hair and her face and her arm. “Tell me what to do.” More stroking, and Crystal became conscious that Jenna’s fingers were wet from where they’d wiped at her cheeks. Someone was making the most mournful sounds, long, low wails of grief and loss. “Sara? Did he . . . did he rape you?”

No, he didn’t rape me,
she thought, shaking her head against Jenna’s thigh. The one bright spot in this whole mess. Her body had locked up so completely that he hadn’t been able to penetrate her. Though, had Jenna not come home when she did, Crystal knew Bruno wouldn’t have been deterred much longer. It hadn’t always stopped him in the past.

“I’m gonna call nine-one-one, sweetie. I’ll be right back,” Jenna said, stroking her hair again.

“No!” Crystal said, twisting to grip Jenna’s wrist before she rose. “No, don’t. I’m okay.” Her voice sounded warped, strained.

“You’re not okay,” Jenna said, a deep frown on her face. Though it was one of fear and concern, not anger.

Crystal shook her head. “He didn’t rape me. He didn’t hurt me. I promise,” she rasped.

Jenna eased back to the floor. “You didn’t look okay. When I came in . . .
God.
Sara, you looked like you were three seconds from a panic attack.”

“I know,” Crystal said, hiccuping. “I know.” She pushed onto her hands, but the sudden movement left her dizzy.

“Don’t rush,” Jenna said. “Just lie here with me for a little bit.” When Crystal laid her head in Jenna’s lap again, Jenna rubbed her back. “You’re the one usually taking care of me,” she said.

“Yeah,” Crystal said. “I never mind.” Her breathing shuddered, and the crying left her wrung out and headachy. She had to pull herself together.

“Well, I don’t mind either. I just really hate seeing you this way. Nobody should get to do this to you,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could as she rubbed wide circles over Crystal’s back. Jenna’s hand slowed. Stilled. “Sara?” she asked in a high-pitched voice.

Crystal closed her eyes. She’d been so wrapped up in herself, she’d forgotten. For a moment, she’d just let herself be comforted. And now Jenna knew. Now, Jenna had seen.

Slowly, the cotton of Crystal’s shirt slid farther up her back, just a few inches, as Jenna leaned around her.

Jenna gasped. “Oh, Sara. Oh, my God. What is this? Oh, my God.”

Crystal’s tears started again, and she burrowed into Jenna’s lap and wrapped her arms awkwardly around her waist. Jenna leaned down and returned the embrace as best as she could. They cried together for a long time.

When Crystal’s body simply had no more tears left to give, she slowly rolled onto her back, her head on Jenna’s legs. “I didn’t want you to know,” she said, her voice a raw scrape. “I didn’t want you to . . . think . . . less of me.”

“Less of you? How could I?” Jenna asked, shaking her head. “My God, I would never have thought this was your fault. Because it’s not. How could it be?”

“I know,” Crystal said, her throat tight again. “I was just so ashamed.” She covered her mouth with her hand, and Jenna stroked her palm over Crystal’s sweaty forehead.

“Will you tell me now?”

The thing she’d never wanted to do. Crystal was supposed to have shielded Jenna from all this. Let her live her life free from the knowledge of this reality. It was part of what she’d promised their father, at least that’s what she’d always told herself. Too late now. The failure sat like a ten-pound weight on her heart. Crystal’s head moved down in a nod without her telling it to, but it was the right thing to do. “I’ll tell you,” she whispered. “I’ll hate it, but I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

T
he sun had set, and the team had been in position for almost two hours when the first vehicles pulled into Pier 13, a long stretch of concrete slab that ran from the road along a mammoth and abandoned industrial granary to the pier that stretched into the dark waters of Baltimore Harbor beyond. A gray van, two black Suburbans with tinted windows, and a box truck circled into the lot behind the granary.

“Hold your position everyone. Engage only if hostiles engage first. We are fact-finding only,” came Nick’s voice through Shane’s earpiece. From his sniper roost on an old barge moored to one side of the pier, Shane watched as men climbed out of the trucks and fanned out in a defensive circle. Ten in all. Heavily armed.

Against their six.

Near the middle of the group loomed the man Shane had seen kissing Crystal at Confessions. Bruno Ashe. He stood at the right hand of a tall, thin black man in a sharp-looking suit. Shane’s gut said that had to be Jimmy Church. Who else but a self-appointed Messiah, the name he called himself inside his organization, would radiate that kind of self-assurance or warrant the kind of deference the rest of the men paid to him?

Eyeballing the white box truck, Shane wondered if Church was giving or receiving tonight. Maybe both. And, really, it didn’t matter. Shane just hoped the nature of the delivery and those with whom Church was making the trade would help them figure out what the hell Merritt had been up to and how they could use that intel to regain their good names, their reputations, and their honor.