“If I let you go are you going to talk calmly about this?”
“Are you going to hit me?” she shot back over her shoulder, stunning him.
“Hit you?” He let go of her immediately. “Christ, no. Of course not.”
Hitting a woman was inconceivable. For as long as he could remember, that lesson had been drummed into him, by his mother, his maternal grandfather, hell, even his old man would never stoop so low as to hit a woman and he had run through women like water back in the day.
“Has someone hit you, Andrea? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’m not telling you anything. And stop calling me Andrea. I can’t stand it anymore.” Her hands went up to block her ears and she crumpled to the floor, so unlike the cool Miss Prentiss he barely believed it was the same woman.
“Okay,” he conceded, crouching down beside her, gently taking her hands from her ears, holding them though they were ice cold. “I won’t call you that anymore.”
She took a deep breath and then seemed to come to herself, looking around blankly. When she rose to her feet, he followed her, letting go of her hands as she tugged them away. After that comment about hitting her, he felt as if he should tread lightly, it was so outside his experience.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.
“There’s no need to be sorry, Andr—”
She looked up, embarrassed at his sudden stumble. “I don’t know why I said that. You can call me whatever you want. What does it matter anyway?”
Her real name was the least of his concerns right now. “I would never hit you. I would never hit a woman. That’s so wrong.”
She nodded dully. “Of course. Of course.”
God, she didn’t believe him. What did that say about where she had been?
“Whoever hit you was a sick bastard.”
“I didn’t say anyone had hit me,” she responded in a way that made him think it was automatic.
“You don’t have to say anything. I just want you to know, to believe, I would never lay a hand on you or any other woman in violence. I swear it to you.”
She said nothing. It had come out too formulaic, too Boy Scout–like anyway. He needed to make her understand.
“My mother will swear it to you,” he added urgently, desperate for her to believe him.
She gave him a small smile. “And a mother always knows, doesn’t she?” she said obliquely.
“Oh sweetheart.” He pulled her to him, rubbing her back, ridiculously gratified that she put her head on his shoulder.
“The worst monster I ever knew had a mother who loved him. Still does, for all I know. Thought he could do no wrong. How he felt about her I was never quite so sure. But we all come in this world the same way, Evan, the monsters and those of us trying to stay out of their way.”
He wanted to kill whoever had left her like this. And it wasn’t a metaphor. He wanted to kill him. With his bare hands.
And by God, he would.
“Not quite the cool, collected Miss Prentiss now, am I?” She was echoing his thoughts.
“Well, you’re not an uptight, prissy ice queen.”
“Is that what you thought of Miss Prentiss?”
It was eerie the way she talked about herself in the third person sometimes.
“No. I thought she was wonderful. And I think the girl in front of me is even more wonderful still.”
“I’m not surprised you don’t want to have relationships with women. They’d be stalking you for life, you’re so sweet.”
He hugged her tighter and buried his face in her hair. It was an open question who would be stalking whom for life here.
Chapter Seven
Tommy O’Neal watched Cassie Bailey drive the speedboat into the boat house next to her father’s grocery store.
“Why do you let that little slut jerk you around?”
Tommy glanced sideways at his cousin Patrick, a year older and about one hundred I.Q. points stupider. “Cassie’s none of your fucking business, Pat. Remember that.”
He held his palm open for the five hundred bucks Pat had collected from the bet Tommy had placed and Pat handed it over sullenly. “I’d say what she needs is a hard fuck up against the—”
The words were swallowed in the constriction of his fleshy throat as Tommy grabbed his cousin’s collar and jerked tight. “What did I just say?”
Pat gurgled a little and nodded and Tommy released him, stuffing the hundred-dollar bills in his jeans pocket. “Get lost.”
Pat looked sullenly toward the boathouse. “You going to come by Rita’s tonight? She’s got some great dope.”
“No.”
Tommy crossed the dirt road and entered the beat-up old boathouse that sat next to Bailey’s Grocery Store just as Cassie was tying down the boat and nimbly jumping out. She looked up. “Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”