Her Forgotten Betrayal(53)
She did stop then. Her expression when she turned to him at the foot of the stairs was more aware, if still suspicious.
“You’ve been lying to me,” she said with absolute conviction. “You forced me to open the door in my dream, to face that horrible man. You let him shoot me. Why did I dream that? What aren’t you telling me, Cole?”
Her beautiful breasts rose and fell with each frantic breath. Any other time, the sight would have aroused him beyond bearing. Instead, his soul was bleeding at her words.
“You know me better than that.” He prayed some part of her still did. “What exactly were you dreaming? I’ll do my best to help you understand.”
She shivered. Her eyes grew vague, and he wanted to kick his own ass for all the ways he was hurting her.
“You.” She folded her arms around her body and glanced up the stairs to her room, as if calculating the distance he could sense her once more needing from him. She shook her head, as if to dislodge more memories. Her chin came up, flashing him a glimpse of the unflinching courage that had seen her through so much. “You were in the closet with me. It felt so safe. I was stronger, and I wanted you there, and it was going to be okay. For a minute it was okay.”
In her eyes he saw hope and her desperation to hold onto it. Then she shrank farther away from him.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You…alerted them that I was there. This time, you were the reason I was caught. You were so angry. Hostile. You told me I had to know who the shooter was, and I had to find out what was going on. You said I had no choice, even if I had to die to give you the information. Seeing who was there was all you wanted. Not me. It was never about me at all. We couldn’t be together unless I did what you wanted.”
“I wouldn’t do that.” He wasn’t lying. He’d kill with his bare hands before he’d let anyone get to her.
She inhaled, shuddering. She looked miserable, huddling naked in the shadows, facing her demons on her own, even though he was an arm’s length away.
“You’re lying to me now,” she said. “About something else, even if I don’t know what it is. I’ve felt something between us since you showed up yesterday. It’s not just the barn. Or Sebastian. And a part of me doesn’t care. I want you anyway, Cole. I want us. I want this thing we seem to have together, and the past we shared, or I wouldn’t have slept with you. Every instinct is telling me that together we’d be so much better, more real, than the life I’ve lived since you left. That nothing else has felt this perfect. And you want me, too. I believe that. I want to believe that’s why you were in my dream. But you’re still lying to me, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t the man who hurt you, was I? In your dream?”
“No, but you didn’t stop him. You wanted him to find me, even if it meant I would die. That must be what a part of me thinks. And I’m trying to listen to my instincts now, even when they make me sound bat-shit crazy. Tell me what that means. What are you keeping from me?”
He waited, afraid to move, to speak. Her subconscious was working out the truth in leaps and bounds. Which technically meant he’d been right when he’d talked Dawson into letting him stay. His being there less than twenty-four hours had already helped Shaw’s mind grow infinitely stronger. If he could formally debrief this last dream, they’d likely discover more than the Bureau’s investigators had garnered in any of their interviews.
But once he’d told her he was an agent himself, in the state she was in now, what were his chances of convincing her to say anything to him ever again? He had to calm her down first.
“I was in your dream,” he said. “You wanted me there. You want me here with you now.”
She shook her head, backing up the stairs.
“Don’t.” He reached for her, prepared to chase her if he had to. If she got away from him this time, he might never get her back. “Please. Stop running from me.”
“I’m not running from you. I’m running from a man who doesn’t exist. A man you were letting hold a revolver to my head in my dream, ready to watch him blow my brains out.”
Wait. “A revolver? Not a semiautomatic?” She’d never mentioned that before.
“Why do you care? No— I don’t want to hear any more.” She jerked backward, shaking from the same kind of panic attack that she’d suffered in the hospital. “Stay away from me.”
She spun around and started up the stairs.
A creak and an awful crash were the only warning they got.
Before Cole could catch her, Shaw’s leg smashed through the shattered top of the step he’d repaired, and she was pitching forward, her head and undefended body crashing brutally into the stairs.