But the good news was that the Martins had exchanged her lethal perimeter-control collar with one
that would cause only a mild shock and unconsciousness if she crossed the invisible property barrier. Riker finally had a way of getting her out of there without killing her.
“I’m taking you home today. Myne, Baddon, and Ka-
tina are waiting behind the wall.”
“It’s too dangerous. I won’t let you do it.” Terese’s hands slipped under his jacket. “I won’t let you die for me.” She brought a dagger, lifted from his harness, to her throat.
The warrior in him, the male who despised weakness
and never stopped fighting, got really fucking pissed. “Dammit, female, what are you doing?” He wrapped his fingers around her hand. “I’m not worried about the danger, and I don’t plan to die. I’m taking you, and that’s final.”
A single drop of blood formed where the tip of the blade made a dimple in her pale skin. “Please, Riker. Don’t do this. Please.”
“We’ve got it figured out, Terese. We can do this. We have to. You’re due any day now, and I won’t let our son be born here.”
Terese stared blankly. “It’s not your baby, Rike.” There was no emotion in her words. It was as if she was reading lines from a book she didn’t even like.
It was Riker’s turn to stare, his brain having trouble processing what she’d just said. Finally, he managed to utter a few stunted, croaked words.
“Not mine? Whose?”
“I don’t know his name.”
Riker shook his head, still unable to think through the cobwebs. “You fucked someone else? Was that where you were this whole time? With him?”
“I was locked inside a Daedalus lab.” Her gaze went
somewhere he couldn’t follow, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “There was a male in a cell. They put me in it with him.”
A slow burn started low in his belly. “And you . . .”
“I was restrained.”
Emotion consumed him . . . rage that Terese had been abused that way, self-loathing that he hadn’t been able to protect her, and sorrow that the child he’d been wanting so desperately wasn’t his.
But her confession explained so much, and even now, as he looked down at her swollen belly, he knew that what she needed right now wasn’t an explosion of fury that would terrify her. She needed comfort and reassurance, and he needed her and the baby— his baby, dammit—to be okay.
“Listen to me, Terese. Everything will be all right. I promise you. We’ll raise the baby as mine. I will be his father, and no one has to know.”
“I can’t!” she cried. “Don’t you see that I can’t do this? I don’t want this monster inside me. I don’t want the memories in my head.” She gave him a small, sad smile that chilled him for a reason he couldn’t pin down. “I’ve never been strong, not like you. You deserve better than to be saddled with me.
You always have.”
“That’s not true,” he croaked. “Our match wasn’t of our choosing, but I never regretted it.”
“That’s because you’re a good, decent male who doesn’t go back on his word. You made a commitment, and you kept it. But I release you from it now.” She pushed the tip of the blade deeper into her skin. “Please. Do it for me.”
“No! How can you ask that?” He squeezed her hand in an attempt to pull the knife away, but she didn’t budge.
“Dammit, Terese, we can do this. I’ll get you out of here. Once you’re home, you’ll see that it’ll all work out.”
Then he saw it in her eyes, something that had been there for weeks but that he’d denied with all his heart: lifelessness.
She’d lost the will to live. She was dead before he’d even arrived on the Martin property.
“Riker?” Nicole’s hand came down on his shoulder. He wanted to shrug away from her touch, but his body wouldn’t obey. “That day . . . the day she died, I heard her beg you for something.”
Bitterness welled up like acid, scorching his throat and putting a caustic edge on his words. “She begged me to not risk my life to rescue her. And then she begged me to kill her.” He’d been angry at her weakness, and now remorse threatened to eat him alive. He could have handled things so differently.
“When I wouldn’t, she did it herself. I think I couldhave talked her down or overpowered her, but a siren went off.”
Terese had panicked at the sound of the alarm and raised voices, and while Riker was distracted, she’d plunged the blade into her throat.
He didn’t see Nicole stiffen, but he felt it. “It wasn’t your fault.”