Star Bright (27 page)

She tightened her slender fingers around the tumbler with such force that her knuckles went white again. “Peter did.”

Parker released a pent-up breath, not entirely sure he was ready for this, but the stricken look in her eyes told him that she’d been holding everything in for far too long. “Made you do things you weren’t comfortable with, you mean?”

“I never knew when it might happen. No matter how good I was, or how hard I tried to do everything right, he’d still get mad.” She fixed him with a shimmering stare, and he knew in that moment that she no longer really saw him. “Remember I told you that he bought expensive wine?”

“Yes.”

“I hated some of it. It tasted like alum to me, this awful, dry, nasty stuff that I could barely swallow. I always pretended to like it because Peter insisted that I become sophisticated in my tastes. But this one night, the wine was so awful that I made a face. He drew back his arm and slapped me. From clear across the table, bang, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, my goblet broken, the wine pooled all around me.”

Parker sat frozen on the tipped-back chair, not wanting to hear this, yet hanging on her every word.

“He grabbed me by the hair, smashed my face against the tile, and told me to lick up the mess, that he’d teach me to appreciate fine wine or kill me trying.”

Parker closed his eyes. The picture taking shape in his mind made him feel physically sick.
Damn Peter Danning straight to hell.
Parker no longer wanted only ten minutes alone with the son of a bitch. He needed at least an hour so he could make the bastard suffer as badly as he’d made Rainie suffer.

“So I did,” she whispered.

He jerked back to the moment. “What?”

Her small face contorted, her skin so white and drawn that she looked skeletal, her eyes huge spheres of haunted darkness above her jutting cheekbones. “I licked it up,” she said in a choked voice. “Only I got some glass on my tongue, and he got mad when I gagged. So he shoved my face in it—and I thought—” She broke off, closed her eyes, and gulped for air like a hooked fish. “I thought I was going to drown. I couldn’t turn my head. My nose was in the wine. I tried not to breathe it in, but I did anyway, and then I choked. I choked so bad that I vomited. He thought I did it on purpose, to show him how awful the wine was. He said I was an unsophisticated hick who would embarrass him in front of his colleagues, that I had no taste in wine, furnishings, clothes, makeup,
nothing.
So he started kicking me. In the ribs so the bruises wouldn’t show.” She grabbed for air again and then held her breath in a valiant attempt not to start sobbing. She went without breathing for so long that Parker could see the blood vessels in her forehead popping up, and he started to worry that she might pass out. Then she suddenly sputtered on an exhalation of breath. “It was always important for him to hit me where the bruises wouldn’t show.” She touched her cheek. “He only forgot once, when I accidentally dropped one of his crystal goblets.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Parker’s resolve not to go to her weakened, but still he held himself in check. “Come here,” he said, patting his knee.

She held her breath again, so long that her beautiful, tear-filled eyes bulged a bit, and then on the release, she said, thinly and tautly, “I
can’t
.”

And in that moment, Parker knew she really couldn’t come to him. He also knew he was a damned fool for just sitting there. One of them had to cross the chasm, and Rainie didn’t have the courage to take the first step.

He pushed up. “If you can’t come to me, honey, I’ll come to you.” In one fluid motion, he scooped her up off the chair and sat down, cradling her close against his chest. He wasn’t surprised to discover how perfectly her body fit against his. They had been made for each other. He truly believed that. “No funny business, I promise. Just friends. Okay?”

She turned in to him and hooked an arm around his neck, her face buried against his shoulder. “He broke my ribs that night. It hurt so bad I couldn’t breathe, but I was afraid to go see a doctor. He would have beaten me up again if he had found out. So instead I wrapped a torn sheet around myself, fastened it tight with safety pins, and took aspirin for the pain.”

Parker’s feet felt as if they’d turned to water inside his boots. He pressed his face against her hair and clenched his teeth. He was definitely his father’s son, he decided. He wanted to rant and rave and kick the walls. It wasn’t easy for him just to sit there, holding her and doing nothing. She’d been hurt, hurt so badly, and he had a horrible feeling that this one incident she’d told him about was just that: only one moment during a hellish eternity. His heart hurt for her as it had never hurt for anyone. He wanted to soothe her with the brush of his hands and kisses on her cheeks. He wanted to tell her with his body what he couldn’t say with words.

He settled for tightening his arms around her, trying to tell her with the urgency of his embrace that he was bleeding inside for her.

“He’ll never touch you again,” he whispered. “I swear it, Rainie. Never again.”

Her wet lips parted, her breath hot and moist against his neck. “What if Loni’s right, and he finds me?”

“He’ll have to go through me to get to you, and I guarantee that won’t happen.”

“He’s
big
.”

Parker smiled sadly against her curls. To Rainie, the man probably seemed huge. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” he whispered. “If I hit a man and he doesn’t go down, I’ll be circlin’ behind him to see what the hell’s prop-pin’ him up.”

“He shoved my head in the toilet once.”

He closed his eyes. Clenched his teeth again.

“I said
shit
, and that was how he punished me for my filthy mouth, by shoving my head in the toilet bowl.”

Parker didn’t know when he started to rock. He registered the fact that he was swaying back and forth on the chair with a strange separateness, as if some man he didn’t know had taken over—some guy who had better instincts than he did. Rocking was good. She was so young to have endured so much. A sweet, innocent, injured thing that needed to be rocked and comforted. So he rocked back and forth, back and forth, his chest feeling as if it might rupture from the pressure of his pent-up rage, which he wanted to spew out in a wall-rattling roar.

Instead, he rocked her, stroked her glorious hair, and tried to absorb her pain. She would fall quiet sometimes, and then suddenly she’d tell him something more, each story as horrible as the last. Parker didn’t know how she had survived. He just thanked God that she had.

“He never once hit me until he got control of my inheritance. I was so gullible, Parker. He pretended to accidentally open one of my bank statements, and then he told me it was insane to let that much money sit in an account, drawing so little interest. He said he would invest it for me and triple the amount in a year.”

Her voice had gone soft and drowsy, but she kept talking.

“I wanted us to get a house in the suburbs, maybe with a little land so we could have kids and a dog. He kept putting that off, saying the market was in a slump and it wasn’t a good time to sell the penthouse. If he invested my money and tripled it, I hoped we could get a house sooner. I never dreamed he meant to invest all the funds under only his name so I couldn’t get my hands on any of it.”

Parker breathed deeply of her scent, which always made him think of warm apple pie. “I’m so sorry, Rainie.”

“They say love is blind, and I definitely was. I look back on it now and wonder how I failed to see what he was up to, but by the time I figured it out, it was too late. The only money he gave me was a household allowance. I tried to cut corners so I could save to get away from him, but he figured out what I’d need right down to almost the exact cent. For a while, instead of sending his shirts to the cleaner’s, I tried to do them at home, but eventually he found out.”

She fell quiet, which told Parker that she’d gotten another beating for that transgression.

“He was jealous because he was older than me and thought I might be attracted to younger men. When I wanted to get another internship at a different company, he flew into a rage. When I volunteered at the hospital, he beat the hell out of me. When I joined the gym, he had a fit and turned one of the bedrooms into a workout center. He never wanted me to leave the house without him, and even when we went out together, he imagined that I was looking at other guys.” She sighed shakily. “My chronology sucks. I’m telling everything out of order.”

It didn’t matter. Parker now had a clear picture of what she’d been through. He suspected that she’d neglected to tell him some of the more private things—the sexual things. It was difficult for him to imagine anything worse than what she’d already shared, but, like it or not, her unflagging dread of physical intimacy erected a red flag in his mind. She’d told him nothing about what had gone on in the bedroom. He suspected that her memories of those encounters were so horrible that she simply couldn’t put them into words.

What she had chosen to reveal circled through his mind as he continued to rock her. Being beaten for allowing the building maintenance man into the apartment while her husband was gone. Being beaten for ogling a male ballet dancer. Being beaten for looking at a male movie star on television. Being beaten for serving the Tuesday special on the wrong night. The list went on and on, every instance so ugly that Parker could barely wrap his mind around it. Only an animal did such things to a woman he’d sworn to love and cherish.

At last she fell asleep. He knew that by the change in her breathing and the limp way she rested against him. Moving slowly, he pushed up from the chair and carried her to the living room. The whiskey had done its job. After depositing her gently on the sofa and covering her with an afghan, Parker burst from the house, anger still roiling within him. His truck was parked out front. He strode directly toward it, drawing back one boot when he reached it to kick the front tire with all his strength. His toe connected solidly with the wheel rim.

Son of a bitch!
Pain shot clear to his knee. He hopped around on one foot, calling himself a dozen kinds of fool and asking himself if he felt better now.
Not.
He wouldn’t feel better until he’d kicked Peter Danning’s ass good and proper.

“You mad at that truck, son?”

Parker stopped hopping and turned to see Toby standing a few feet away. “No, I’m pissed at the whole damned world.”

Toby plucked a can of chewing tobacco from his hip pocket. With a flick of his wrist, he gave the lid an expert tap, then twisted it off to finger out a wad of chew. After tucking it inside his bottom lip, he spat, returned the can to his pocket, and said, “Breakin’ your toe won’t fix what’s wrong in this old world.”

“I didn’t break my damned toe.” Parker gingerly put weight on the foot. “I don’t think so, anyway.”

Toby chuckled and spat again. “That girl got your tail tied in a knot?”

Toe still throbbing, Parker shifted his weight to the opposite leg and planted his hands at his hips. “She’s got trouble nippin’ at her heels, Toby, bad trouble.”

The foreman gazed thoughtfully at the house. “Anything you can’t fix?”

“No, but I’m gonna need help. It’s time for the Harrigans to circle the wagons. Can you call Clint and Quincy for me? Tell ’em to get their butts over here. I’ll call Dad, Zach, and Sam.”

Toby nodded. “You gonna be needin’ me, too?”

“Not just yet, but I might soon, so thanks for the offer.”

As Parker returned to the house, limping every step of the way, he went back over everything that Rainie had told him, the most alarming revelation being that Loni believed Peter Danning was hot on her trail. Parker didn’t understand his sister-in-law’s gift, but he no longer questioned its validity. If she said Danning was about to find Rainie, Parker believed it.

That meant there was no time to waste.

Chapter Eleven

R
ainie awakened to the low thrum of deep voices interspersed with an occasional female intonation. For a moment, she couldn’t think where she was, but then she recognized Parker’s shade-drawn living room. Covered with a crocheted afghan in a colorful Native American design, she lay on the sofa. She pushed the coverlet away and swung her feet to the floor, feeling a little dizzy as she sat up. Unless her ears were deceiving her, her name was being spoken a lot in the kitchen.

She gained her feet and headed in that direction. When she reached the archway, she saw a bunch of people gathered around the oak table. Chairs had been brought in from the dining room to accommodate everyone, and extra leaves had been inserted to create more seating space. Two large bowls of popcorn flanked a platter of cookies. Aromatic steam wafted up from scattered coffee mugs. As Rainie took in the scene, she noticed a plump baby girl napping in a carrier beside one man’s chair. Another man held an ebony-haired boy about eight or nine years old on his lap. Fast asleep, the child was curled against his chest, his lolling head cradled in the bend of the man’s arm.

Most of the faces Rainie saw bore the unmistakable Harrigan stamp. One of those faces belonged to a woman, whom Rainie guessed to be about thirty years of age. Samantha, she decided, the owner of the jeans she had borrowed. A tiny individual with large, dark eyes and a mop of wildly curly black hair, she was strikingly beautiful despite the slight irregularity of her features, a feminine version of her father’s. Beside her sat a fellow who wasn’t a Harrigan, judging by his build and coloring. Even slouched on a straight-backed chair, he seemed loftier of stature than the other men, and his hair was chocolate brown instead of jet. The burnished umber of his chiseled countenance showcased intelligent, arresting blue eyes outlined with thick brown lashes. Handsome, Rainie thought, just not, in her opinion, quite as handsome as Parker.