In Love by Christmas: A Paranormal Romance (31 page)
Read In Love by Christmas: A Paranormal Romance Online
Authors: Sandy Nathan
When he slept, he dreamt of a soft woman in blue who loved him in her dreamy way, giving him everything he wanted, mostly herself. He could see them on the mansion’s rear patio, laughing as Fulton and a gang of maids waited on them and their kids. Softness surrounded him. That skin. Those eyes. Her sweetness. A good, gentle life.
Cass burst through those dreams, a Molotov cocktail tossed into a polite drawing room. “Help me!” she screamed in his mind, real screams from the girl who didn’t get away. “Don’t leave me, Leroy. Don’t forget me! I love you.” He sat up in bed sweating, feeling his heart pound. He got up and got a drink of water, wiped himself down with a damp cloth. He paced around his room a bit, stoked the fire.
He needed to marry Arabella in the next twenty-four hours or go back to California and make Will tell him where Cass was. Shit, he could take some of the warriors and find her himself.
A faint knock that might have been his imagination sounded at his door. He didn’t answer. It occurred again. Maybe there was a problem somewhere. He put on his robe and went to the door.
“Yes?”
Arabella pulled him into the hallway. She threw herself at him, grabbing and kissing. She didn’t ask, and she didn’t stop. “Leroy,” she gasped.
He lunged, spinning and shoving her back against the wall outside his door. He lifted her up so that her legs could reach around him. Neither of them knew what they were doing, and yet they knew, because every creature knows what they were about.
He let her kiss him again and again. He let her do more than that. He liked her soft flesh and warmth, her probing tongue. He’d like everything she offered. She certainly wanted to give him more. He felt her body and let her touch him until he was groaning. Sweat covered him.
He wanted to rear up on her like one of his stud horses on a mare. He wanted to do it again and again, as he heard the little noises she was making. She moaned for him. He wanted to roll with her all night …
He opened her robe and searched under her gown. She was wearing panties, just a wisp between her legs. His fingers slipped along their elastic, seeking an edge.
Everything, all the Ancestors, Kachinas, Supernaturals, the nailed Jesus and the plain cross reared up all around him. Inside him. They said: NO! He stiffened and let her feet gently drop to the floor.
“I can’t, Your Ladyship, not until I’ve sorted it out with Cass.”
“How can you do that? How can you leave me like this?” Her hair was messed and her features swollen. Her lips parted. “Please. Help me.”
He did something he’d not done before. Placing his hand in front of her belly, he let some energy go through it. Pulsing. Warming. Pleasuring. She convulsed and fell against him, limp.
“Oh, Leroy. What did you do? Oh, my God.” She wasn’t frantic anymore. She shuddered and wilted, clutching him. “I love you, Leroy.”
He did it again, stretching it out. She shuddered harder and longer. He watched her, fascinated. He wanted to see her full out, no stops. He wanted to see her spread for him, all night, not just twice.
NO! said all the sacred ones around him.
“I like you like that, Arabella. I want to make you feel good and know how much I like you.” He stopped. “No. I
love
you. I do. But I’m not free.”
He heard his cell phone ringing in his room. Only one person would be calling. He went in and pulled the antenna out of the boxy brick.
“Will?”
“She’s in bad trouble. Leroy. She may be dead. It’s my fault. I was wrong about everything; I need you. Please …” The old man could barely talk. He sobbed and hiccoughed. “Please. I’m sorry.”
“You got me.”
“You’ve got to get to New York, fast. Doug and Hannah are already on the way. Havertin … They’re killing Cass. Can a plane pick you up?’
“A helicopter could land in the front lawn, if you fixed the lawn afterward. There’s a big storm here. Fifteen minutes? I’ll be ready.”
Arabella was standing in the doorway. She straightened her robe. “What’s happening?”
“Darlin’, I have to leave.” She looked stricken. A row of velvet pulls hung on the wall by his bed. “Which one of these do I pull to get Tom?”
“The servant’s rooms are here.” She pulled the correct velvet rope.
“You’d better go. You shouldn’t be in my room.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Then stand out in the hallway so no one thinks you and I … I have to change my clothes.” He shut the door. A few minutes passed.
“Sir. What’s happening?” Tom dashed up and Leroy opened the door.
Arabella gasped when he came out into the hall. Leroy wore a black shirt and black jeans. Earrings studded his ears and a black scarf was tied tightly around his head. Brilliant marks flared on his skin. They looked like glowing brands. The feathers on the back of his neck glowed as though they were on fire.
“Tom. I need you to pack my stuff. You and Rich drive the car back to London. Pack up my clothes and send them here,” he handed over a piece of the Manor stationery that was stocked in each room. He had debated on where to have his things sent. The ranch? Will’s? He was too pissed at Will and his dad to use either address. He gave the Numenon headquarters, care of Doug Saunders.
“I’ll leave,” He looked at his watch, “in a couple of minutes.” The rain had stopped. “Will is sending a helicopter. Arabella, gardeners will be out tomorrow to repair the damage to the lawn.
“Things will straighten out, Arabella. Use your lawyers, and use Fulton. And use Tom.” He turned to his valet, “You’ll help her, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I will never forget
you,
Arabella.” He kissed the soft flesh inside her forearm, his lips lingering the tiniest bit.
Then he gave up fighting and pulled her to him, lips melting together, bodies all but fusing. He showed her the tiniest bit of the passion he felt for her. But he broke it off.
“Is it Cass?” Arabella’s cheeks were streaked with moisture. She grabbed at his arm.
“Yes. They’re killing her.”
39
Psycho Therapy
T
ime was fuzzy
for Cass. She didn’t know when she’d been brought to the hospital, and didn’t remember much of her life before it. She’d have bursts of memories like fireworks, and then time went back to being like pudding. Mushy. You could squish it through your hands, but you couldn’t see anything in it.
The hospital where she gained weight had been nice. She’d been there before. She knew a couple of the nurses. They understood. She didn’t know what she had looked like when she got there. Who wanted to see herself dying with guck pasting her eyes shut? The nurses let her know how close to death she had been, but they didn’t lecture her or show her pictures of herself.
“Cass, do you want some more tapioca? It’s on your diet?” the night nurse dropped by, smiling. Her diet was
everything.
She could stuff herself all day. Cass took the tapioca. She
loved
tapioca pudding.
The nurses let her lay around eating and doing what she wanted. They listened if she wanted to talk, and didn’t want to know more than what she could talk about. If they knew anything about her past, they didn’t bring it up.
“Was there a man with me when they brought me in?” she asked her favorite nurse.
“A couple. Doug Saunders.” Cass knew him very well. They had been a couple at one time, until she bit him and he needed thirty-six stiches. She felt sorry about that. The nurse kept talking, “And a black guy. African American. He seemed to be a doctor or something. He was with you a long time. They practically had to pry him off of you to get him to leave.”
The most amazing thing about the hospital was her daddy called. She hadn’t talked to him since last Christmas when she screamed at him. Before that must have been a year. Or years. He called one day, and he kept calling. For the first time ever, maybe, she felt like things might work out. Like she might really get better.
“Daddy, I remember someone when I was brought here.” She described the man with funny colored eyes. “Who was he?”
“There wasn’t anyone like that, Cass.”
She asked the nurse again. Yes, he had been there. He was very tall. She asked her father again, adding the part about him being tall. “No, Cass. It was just Doug and the paramedic crew.”
Why would her daddy not tell her about him? Maybe he was “the help.” If daddy considered him inconsequential, he would disappear in his eyes. If he was, like, an orderly or something, he’d go poof! to her father. Would having brown skin be a problem? A brown-skinned PhD candidate, no. A brown-skinned orderly? Big problem.
She decided that was it and stopped asking about the guy. She’d track him down when she got out. The ambulance company would know.
As soon as she could, Cass started back running. They let her,
if
she followed the doctors’ orders. She did exactly what they said. And they let her do more. She had to be in shape. Cass knew that she always had to be able to escape and fight her way out.
They had a punching bag in the hospital gym. For releasing hostility. She made it sing. She broke the connection of the little speed bag to its mooring, she hit it so hard. Cass Duane never went down easy. Or for free, she smiled sadly. Once, it had been for free.
She weighed one hundred and forty pounds when she left the hospital. She had gained fifty-five pounds and looked like a pig. The head doctor called her into her office when she hit a chubby one hundred and thirty and told her she would be “moving on to a more advanced level of treatment” in a while. She thought they moved her in September, except that the pudding filled her head and she forgot.
Big time pudding when they moved her to the Havertin Institute. They moved her at night, sedated, she thought, because her memories were so garbled. Her memories were normally garbled, but not as screwed up as they were that night. She remembered glimpses of a white colonial building with floodlights around the roof. A white marble entry hall. That was all she knew of the place, except for the day room, her room, and some corridors.
This was where she was supposed to have a “more advanced level of treatment.” Cass had been in eight mental hospitals, counting this one. She knew something about mental hospitals. This place was shit. How her dad stuck her in there, she’d never know.
She also found out that she had been branded brain-damaged by the hospital. She was
not
brain-damaged. She just couldn’t remember things very well and had big holes in her life. Like years were gone. That wasn’t brain-damage. That was fucked up. And given what she
could
remember, the more years missing, the better.
After two weeks, Cass hated the Havertin Institute with every molecule of her body and every wisp of her soul. She hated it from the moment she woke up to the time she fell exhausted into her bed. She hated all the staff and admins and patients and everything she did and they did and even the walls. Everything. Why not? Who heard of a schedule like Havertin’s? None of the other places she’d been in had been like it.
6:30 AM | Get up and get dressed. Cass had never gotten up at 6:30. Even at summer camp when she was twelve, she got up at 10 AM. If she got up at 6:30, she wasn’t awake, despite having her eyes open and moving around. No one needed to get up that early there, anyway. Nothing they did all day meant anything. |
6:45 | Go to dining hall and eat breakfast. She didn’t eat breakfast. They didn’t have anything she liked anyway. All they had was oatmeal and shit. The dining room looked like detention in grade school; metal and plastic tables with benches cemented to the floor. Appetizing. |
7 AM | Clean your room and make the bed. That’s what maids were for. |
7:15 to 9:30 | Housing unit group 1. This was the first therapy attempt of the day. They got the women in her hallway to sit in a circle and talk about their feelings. Cass had been hospitalized seven times before. She knew what bullshit talking about feelings was. Who cared about |
9:30 to 12 | Clean the building. Why the fuck didn’t they have janitors? Her dad was probably paying a fortune for her to be in there. Why should she have to clean toilets? Back in the hospital where she’d gained her weight back, her dad stopped answering her questions about the man. He said he was a figment of her imagination. That could be true. She’d seen enough shit that turned out to be just in her head. Maybe she |
12 to 12:20 | Lunch and social time. Who wanted to eat that crap? Who wanted to hang with the dopes in there? And they only had twenty minutes. How cozy could they get? |
12:20 to 1 | Individual counseling. They had it every day, which was evidence of Havertin’s therapeutic superiority. But they hired the help from the bottom of the shrink garbage can. Individual counseling was when her counselor attempted to get her to cough up her secrets. To him? Fuck no. The guy was a sex addict. He’d be on her in a minute. She had to be strong. If she got through this, Daddy had told her she could come home. Maybe for Christmas. Last Christmas she had screamed all that stuff at him. She was right; it was true. But she hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt him. She wanted to say she was sorry to him in person and have a nice Christmas. But he stopped calling when she got to the Havertin Institute. Everything was crumbling away. The feeling she had that she could get better. That she could have a life. Everything that happened would stop waking her up every night. She wouldn’t scream anymore when the memories came to her. She wouldn’t do drugs. Maybe she and Daddy could find her mother. Mommy. She had to stop thinking about Mommy. If they saw her crying at Havertin, they’d up her medication. |
1 to 3 | Group recreation. The only place to recreate was the day room. She and the nerds sat around tables for two hours a day making “constructions” out of cardboard. They got no exercise at all. Cass wanted to run. She’d always run and worked out like her dad, but you couldn’t here. There was no outlet for her fear. No punching bag. She couldn’t get into shape to fight. Being able to fight was what always had saved her. She couldn’t fight here. They took everything away. |
3 to 5 | Core group. This was the therapy devoted to treating individual fuck-ups. Cass was in five groups: 1) addicts/substance abusers, 2) eating disorders/anorexia, 3) sexual abuse, 4) trauma survivors and 5) sex addicts. That’s as many groups as they had. She was in so many groups that Havertin got the great idea of rotating her from one to the other. That probably saved her. If she’d had to sit in a room with those idiots talking about that shit every day, she would have broken and spilled her guts. As it was, she never got involved enough to care about anything. Which was the way to be. Her dad had dumped her; he didn’t call anymore. She didn’t have anyone else. Oh, maybe Hannah. But she’d screamed at her too. She was alone. |
5 to 6 | Quiet time. Meditation or reading about uplifting topics. Cass did not want to be quiet. She wanted to scream. The only uplifting thing she could imagine was hearing, “Miss Duane, you’re being released tomorrow.” |
6 to 9 | 12 step groups. They assumed that They lied about everything. The “recent staff changes.” Every fuckin’ cretin who worked there had been there a week. No place she’d been in ever had that. She shut up and shut down. Safest way. During 12 step time, three hours every evening, Cass sat and listened to other women talk about how rotten their lives had been. Those dingbats couldn’t have survived one day of her life. |
9 to 10 | Housing unit group 2. The people on her corridor got together for their eventide whining session. If the whining pigs knew what had happened to her, they wouldn’t have believed it. |
10 | Lights out. Yeah. Her lights were out, but she had a disconcerting feeling that the sleep meds they gave her were a little stronger than necessary and that someone was in her room, touching her. What the fuck? Whatever happened to her couldn’t be worse than what had already happened. |
2 X per week | Individual meeting with psychiatrist. They got to get out of their other activities to meet with their shrinks. Her psychiatrist had hairs bursting from her nostrils and yellow teeth. Her clothes smelled like mothballs. Cass could not tell her how she got into drugs or happened to become a prostitute. She couldn’t open up to her at all. |
Cass looked out the windows in the day room at the meadow behind the building. The yard was a
big
square of grass behind the hospital. At first, it was ringed with very tall, very green trees. It had to be on the East Coast; nothing west of the Mississippi was that green. The trees weren’t green now; they were leafless. The lawn was brown and looked frozen crisp. Patches of snow covered it. The patients didn’t have access to the yard. She saw people out there sometimes, but they were seriously disabled, in wheelchairs or supported by nurses.
For some reason, the Havertin people seemed to think their schedule and “therapeutic modalities” made people well. Cass had been in so many institutions that she knew that they were really on the “increase her meds and maybe she’ll shut up” plan. They stuffed people full of pills. If she swallowed all the crap they gave her, she’d be a zombie like everyone else. As it was, her history of bulimia held her in good stead. After drug and doze time, she puked the pills in the toilet.
Havertin had a great reputation in the shrink trade. Articles about how wonderful the place was covered the bulletin board—with anything that would allow an inmate to know where she was or the date deleted.