Chapter Seventeen

Della couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe. Her throat swelled, and her lungs seized. Nausea roiled through her gut as an oily slick of bile coated her stomach. Adrenaline pumped into her system as the darkness pressed in on her, sitting like a dead weight on her chest. Her pulse ratcheted up as she grabbed for breath, waiting for the hand to come from the dark, for the squeeze at her throat, for the blunt force to push past her lips and teeth and invade her mouth.

Coughing and sputtering, she dry-heaved as the memory from her past sank barbs into her flesh, twisted liked vines around her body. Panicked, she broke through the layers of darkness, sitting bolt upright in bed, fully in terror’s grip.

She stared blindly into the night. It was dark. So dark. Nothing but the staccato hammer of her pulse in her ears, the never-ending blackness, and the old movie reel in her head stuck in the same rut. Clawing at her throat, gasping for air, she groped blindly for the light, barely registering the presence of a warm male body, barely hearing the puzzled “Della?” as her fingers desperately sought the switch. “Della?”

He was sitting now, too, but nothing mattered except the light. Panic was making her fingers useless, and she whimpered in frustration and then in triumph as they finally located the tiny little button. Pink light flooded the room. Relief flooded her system. The barbs fell away, and the vines retreated. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she hugged them tight, waiting for the toxic cling of memories to recede.

They always took their time in retreat.

“Della? Are you okay? It’s me, Tucker.”

Tucker. It was Tucker. Tucker was still here.

She knew on one level that Tucker being here, witnessing this, was going to matter a great deal soon enough, but right now, she could barely hear him through the ringing in her ears. All her concentration was on her breath, on bringing it under control, just as Selena had taught.

“Hey,” he said. Even through the distortion of her hearing, the gentleness in his voice was coming through loud and clear. “Can you tell me what’s going on? How can I help?”

His hand slid onto her shoulder, also gentle, but Della flinched nonetheless, her system still too overstimulated and hyperreactive. He dropped his hand away without comment, and he just sat beside her as her breathing slowly came back under control and the darkness still rimming her peripheral vision finally cleared. The urge to cry was strong, but she fought it.

She’d already humiliated herself once. She wouldn’t compound it with tears.

Damn it. She’d had this amazing night, when it finally felt like she was reclaiming her life and banishing the ghosts—and wham! Major panic attack/freak out. Right in front of Tucker. The guy she’d spent the last couple of months convincing she was fine. She was strong. She was ready to move on. Ready to embrace life.

This is why she hadn’t asked him to stay the night, even though she’d hated watching him leave. Because how did she explain to another adult she needed the light on to sleep? Like some little kid? Every other grown-up in the world, it seemed, needed dark fifty layers deep to sleep, but she still needed a night-light. How did she ask someone to upend their routine, to mess with the delicate day/night balance a human body requires to adequately function, so she could sleep?

This was why she was better off alone.

“Are you okay now?”

Della shook her head. A deep well of hollowness opened up in the pit of her stomach, and she pulled the sheet up over her nudity, lowering her knees so she could tuck it firmly under her arms. “You should go.”

“What?”

Ignoring the note of incredulity in his voice, she gave him a gentle shove with her shoulder. “I’m fine. Just go, okay?” She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. She couldn’t bear to see pity or amateur psychoanalysis in his eyes.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t need you here.”

He didn’t answer for a beat or two, and then, “I’d like to stay anyway.”

The kindness in his voice was like steel wool on all the rawness inside. “Why?” she demanded, blinking back tears as she glared at him. “So you can humor the head case?”

“Della…” His hand lifted a little like he was going to touch her, but then he seemed to think better of it and dropped his hand to his thigh. “I don’t think you’re a head case. I think you’re a warrior.”

She snorted at the very idea. She didn’t feel like a warrior. She felt tiny and scared and…ashamed. “Who needs a night-light?”

“Sure.” He smiled at her. “Warriors use whatever is at their disposal to fight and survive.”

Oh God. Her heart contracted. He always knew just what to say. And…she loved him for it.

Crap. This was bad. Super bad.

Della’s pulse thudded like bells of doom in her chest. She’d gone and done the stupidest thing in the world and fallen in love with him.

It was only supposed to be a sex thing. A temporary thing. She’d promised him that at the beginning of all this. Not love. Not feelings. But her chest was practically bursting right now, flooding with feelings.

Crappity crap. They were supposed to go back to being friends, damn it.

How dumb was she? And how unfair was life? To give her this wonderful man when she was incapable of offering him any kind of normal. And why would he want her, anyway?

That was the insidiousness of what she’d been through. How sullied and unworthy she sometimes still felt. Why would she inflict herself and her hang-ups on a guy who’d been so good for her? So good to her.

The unjustness of the situation dug talons into her heart. After everything she’d been through, she deserved a guy like Tucker. And she was so much stronger than she’d ever been, but he deserved better.

Her nose prickled as she fought off the tears. “Can you please just go?”

His gaze searched hers, and Della felt it probe right to the back of her brain. “I will, if that’s what you want. But…I’d rather stay.”

Della shook her head. She just wanted to curl in a fetal ball and cry her eyes out. “I want you to go.”

“Because of…the light?”

No. Not just the light. But even in full panic mode, she wasn’t about to admit she’d fallen in love with him. “Yes. Because of the light. Because I feel…stupid and…infantile and…humiliated.” She didn’t have to lie about that—her cheeks were still flushed with her mortification.

“Is that why you haven’t asked me to stay the night?”

Della gave a bitter kind of half laugh. “Give the man a cigar.”

“God, Della…” He half turned in the bed so he was facing her, his big, broad shoulders and wide chest filling her peripheral vision. “You seriously think I care about whether the light’s on or not?” His eyes raked her face, pleading and earnest. “If you need it, then you need it. Hell, if you need the sun in the room to sleep at night, I’ll pluck it out of the sky for you and hang it over there in the corner.”

Her breath stuck in her throat at his words, at their absolute sincerity. To have a guy offer to do something like that? Her chest suddenly felt way too tight. He was too much. Each word, each look, each little thing he did for her were like tiny arrows to her heart.

“It’s just a stupid psychological crutch,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “But I can’t seem to let it go.”

He raised his hand again, hesitating for a moment as if waiting for her to shrink back. When she didn’t, he gently cupped her cheek. “It’s not stupid. And everyone needs a crutch sometimes.”

Della doubted Tucker ever had. “But what if I need it forever?” On her good days—which was most days, now—Della was okay with the thought that she might always need the light on. On her bad days, it felt like the ultimate failure.

“Some people do need them forever. And that’s okay, too.” He shrugged. “But if you’re worried about me sleeping with the light on? Then don’t. I sleep like a rock, and even if I didn’t, I would still be okay with the light situation. And—” He paused for a moment, his eyes roaming over her face like he was trying to commit it to memory. “Any man worth his salt will be, too.”

Tears burned at the back of Della’s eyes. Selena had assured her that any potential partners would understand, but hearing it from Tucker, knowing that he was okay with it, had given her hope for the future.

Not that she wanted any other man.

His thumb brushed along her cheekbone. “Can I please stay the night?” he asked, his voice a low murmur.

Della fell into the intense whiskey of his gaze. She wanted nothing more than to go to sleep with Tucker beside her, to lie all night next to the man she loved. But she shouldn’t. Now more than ever, she should be keeping an emotional distance. If he stayed tonight, he’d stay every night, and that would only make the goodbye harder.

Because she’d promised him an end to this, and she wasn’t about to renege. He might have given her faith tonight that maybe someone could love her despite her challenges, but that didn’t mean him. Tucker had spent three years of his life propping her up, being there for her in dozens of different ways, and she loved him too much to lumber him with her forever.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t strong enough right now to deny him something she also craved a little too much. She’d find that strength tomorrow.

“Okay,” she said around the huge lump in her throat. He smiled at her, and Della didn’t think her heart could possibly get any bigger, any fuller. Her ribs already felt stretched to capacity.

“C’mon,” he whispered, his lips brushing her forehead. “Lie down.” Slipping his arm around her shoulders, he eased them gently back.

Della settled on her side again. Pushing her hair behind her, she snuggled her head into the crook of his neck, his whiskers scratching her forehead. His fingers trailed slowly over the flat of her shoulder blade, goose bumps following in their wake. Silence settled over them—and not the kind of silence that made her nervous, made her want to fill it up, like in those early days with Selena. But the kind of silence two people who knew each other well didn’t need to fill up.

Still, part of her felt she owed him an explanation for her meltdown. He hadn’t asked, and she assumed he wouldn’t, because Tucker Daniels was that kind of guy, but, surprisingly, the thought of telling him what had happened to her didn’t break her out in a cold sweat.

To date, only Arlo, Selena, and the police who took her original statement knew the full story. Thankfully, Todd had pleaded guilty, and she’d been spared exposure to a courtroom full of strangers. The fact she wanted to open up to Tucker told her a lot about the depths of her feelings for this man.

“I wasn’t always like this, you know?” Her voice was low and husky as her fingers absently caressed the sweet curve of a pec.

His drugging caress halted for a beat or two before resuming. “Yes. I…figured.”

“Todd…he used to…he forced me to—”

“It’s okay.” His hasty assurance cut her off abruptly. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I know. But I feel like you deserve an explanation, and—”

“No.” His hand stopped and didn’t resume the caress this time. The ropey muscles of his neck seemed to tense. “You really don’t have to explain anything.”

Flattening her palm against his heart, she noticed the tension in his chest as she pushed up onto her elbow to look down at him. Gratitude welled up. Knowing there were men like him in this world made her so damn thankful. She understood he was trying to spare her from reopening old wounds, but she wanted this. “I know. But I’d like to.”

“Then of course,” he said with a smile.

Della returned his smile before resuming her position from earlier, his fingers resuming their lazy pattern on her shoulder blade. He was more relaxed than he had been, but she could still feel residual tension in his body—or maybe it was new tension as he mentally prepared himself for this conversation.

Hell, if her own pulse wasn’t fluttering a little at the import of what she was doing.

“I met Todd in my final year of high school. He’d been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Iowa because his father was going through some financial hardship. I’d been at school with the same boys for years, and none of them looked at me sideways because my father—or not my father, as it turned out—was strict to the point of controlling. But Todd smiled at me like I was something new and interesting, and I fell hard.”

Della smiled as she remembered those few heady weeks of attention. Todd had been told her father was a tyrant, but he hadn’t grown up in town and he didn’t seem to care.

“After about a month, we had sex. It was okay, I guess—quick and fumbly. I didn’t know any different, and the fact he loved me was enough. We’d probably had sex about a dozen times when I realized I was pregnant.”

“I’m guessing the shit hit the fan about then?’

She laughed at the apt description. “You could say that. Neither of us wanted to get rid of the baby, so we told my father and then his father—neither of us had moms anymore—and there was absolutely no choice, as far as they were concerned. We got married. I was ecstatic, finally out from under my father’s austerity, and I went to live in Kentucky with Todd and his dad.”

If only she’d had a crystal ball.

“They lived in the mountains miles from anywhere on some land with a rundown house, and the nearest neighbors were…well, I never met them. I didn’t know another soul, but it was a palace to me. I was free and in love, and we were going to raise our baby in the pure mountain air of Kentucky.”

God…she’d been so naive.

“His father worked in a coal mine. He was a lot like mine, big and overbearing, except he was also oppressively religious, and he never let a moment go by without pointing out our sin. Todd never tried to be intimate with me while I was pregnant because, according to his father, a woman’s body is sacred, particularly when she’s been chosen as a vessel for the Lord’s holy gift. And then I had a late miscarriage at nineteen weeks, and things went downhill from there.”

“Nineteen weeks?”

Della rubbed her nose against the scratchy growth of Tucker’s whiskers, touched by the concern in his voice. “Yep. I was in the hospital for two days, and all I wanted was to get back to Todd. Only…he was different. A stranger, almost. I think his father spent those two days pumping his head full of fire and brimstone and a whole lot of guilt.

The change in the boy she’d married had been bewildering.

“Todd was convinced the miscarriage was our punishment for succumbing to sins of the flesh. He didn’t comfort me. He barely talked to me. He went to work with his father every day and left me home alone too grief-stricken to do anything but stare at the walls most days. I made their meals, I did their washing, and kept the house tidy, but mostly, I was invisible. Todd certainly didn’t touch me anymore. In fact, he moved out of our bedroom. Until one night about four months later, I woke to…”

The memory flashed on her inward eye, and it took all of Della’s willpower not to flinch. The roil in her gut was as potent now as it had been then. Tucker’s hand slid around her shoulder. “You don’t have to go into the details.”

Della shook her head. She’d come this far. “His hand was at my throat,” she continued. “He was straddling my chest, pinning me to the bed with his body. His…penis was pushing into my mouth.”

She shuddered, suppressing the urge to gag. “I tried to scream and thrash, but I couldn’t shift him, and I could barely breathe. He kept saying it was all my fault for tempting him. That sex was bad, that it had made him a sinner, and that God had punished him by killing our child and now he had to punish me.”

“By abusing you?” Tucker demanded, disgust in his voice, his hand tightening on her shoulder. Della could feel the tempo of his heartbeat pick up. “Isn’t that a sin also?”

She stared at a point on the wall as those days closed in. “It was divine punishment, as far as he was concerned. And as long as he wasn’t having the traditional Biblical interpretation of sex, he could justify it.”

“Fucking…bastard.”

The anger in Tucker’s voice could have smashed granite, and Della absently stroked his chest, trying to soothe him. She understood his rage intimately. There wasn’t one single word Tucker could call her ex that she hadn’t already used.

“It happened a lot after that. I used to dread the night. Dread going to sleep.”

“Did his father not intervene?”

Della snorted. “Pa was an Old Testament kinda guy. He believed in women being subjugated to their husbands and in sins being punished.”

She hadn’t lost any sleep when Arlo had informed her of her father-in-law’s death a few months after Todd’s.

“Was there no one you could turn to?”

Della shook her head. “We lived in isolation. Pa had a phone that never left his side, but there was no house phone or computer. My father visited once. I begged him to take me home, but he just looked at me with cold, cold eyes and told me I’d made my bed.”

She hadn’t lost any sleep over her father’s death, either. Her mother had tip-toed around him all her life, and while he’d never been overtly abusive, he’d been a quiet menacing force.

“I tried to run a few times, in the beginning. But as I hadn’t grown up in the area, I didn’t know where I was or where to go for help. And they found me every time. That’s when Todd started shackling me to the bed in the basement whenever they left the house.”

That had been more frightening than the abuse at times. It had been so dark, and she’d been chained like an animal.

“God…Della.” He hugged her tighter. “I’m so sorry.”

Della shut her eyes, clinging to the raw empathy in his voice as she remembered. Her fear of the dark had started with Todd’s abuse and been compounded by her captivity in the cellar. “That’s where Arlo found me that night.”

“Thank God he came along,” Tucker muttered.

“I was out front picking some tomatoes from the vines when he first called by. He asked me my name, then introduced himself—said he thought I might be his sister. I couldn’t wrap my head around what he was trying to tell me, but he had the kindest eyes. I panicked, though. Todd was home, and I knew he’d be furious if he saw me talking to someone.”

Della had been so beaten down she hadn’t even thought of Arlo’s sudden appearance as her ticket out.

“Then Todd came out on the porch and told me to go inside. He and Arlo spoke briefly, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Arlo handed a card over and left, but Todd was furious when he came inside, waving Arlo’s work card around. Todd accused me of calling the police somehow and dragged me down to the basement. Just until the cop stops sniffing around. That’s what he said. Lucky for me, Arlo’s spidey senses were pinging like crazy.”

“Yeah. He’s a suspicious sonofabitch.”

Della laughed. It felt good to laugh in the midst of all this horribly heavy history. “He came back twice in two days, and on the third day, he kicked the door in, cuffed both of them, and found me in the basement. I’d never been so pleased to see anybody in my life.”

Her wrist had been in a state, and, to this day, Della still remembered the sting of her raw flesh. Lifting her arm, Della found the ligature mark that circled her right wrist. It was faint now, but three years down the track, it was still there. Tucker slid his hand over hers, bringing it to his mouth and pressing a kiss against the delicate blue veins on the underside. Then he tucked it against his chest, his thumb gently caressing where he’d just kissed.

“How did it feel? To be free like that?”

“It was…” Even now, Della struggled with words adequate enough to convey her feelings about that night. “Stunning. Within half an hour, there were blue lights and cops everywhere. Four years of hell, and suddenly it was…over. Thanks to Arlo.”

“He was like a man possessed after his father’s deathbed confession of your existence. He’d made Arlo promise he’d find you, even though all he had was a name and the town where he met your mother. It took him about five months, but he finally tracked you down. He was pissed at his old man, though, for stepping out on his mom and for not having checked on you sooner. But his father had said that your mom had been adamant about no contact, that she wanted nothing from him other than the child she couldn’t have with her husband and that she was happy. She’d begged him to leave things be, and he’d reluctantly agreed.”

Della knew this part of the story already because Arlo had recounted it in those days after he’d swooped in and changed her life. But she knew deep in her bones it hadn’t been love for her husband that had made her mom desperate for secrecy but fear of what he’d do if he discovered he wasn’t the biological father.

“I wish I’d known him. My real father.” Della drew circles around Tucker’s left nipple. “I know he cheated on his wife with my mom, and Arlo is still pretty pissed at him about that, but I’ve seen the family photos. They looked happy, and there’s a lot of affection in Arlo’s voice when he talks about his dad.”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess he…had his flaws, but from my perspective he was a good man. He wasn’t around much because he traveled a lot, but he had this way about him that made you feel like what you said was important. That your contribution to a conversation was important and he respected it.”

A tiny spike of jealousy pricked at Della’s heart. How wonderful would that have been? “Well…flaws or not, he sounds way better than mine. And Todd’s. God…Todd never stood a chance.”

Tucker moved his head to the side and angled it slightly. As he looked down his nose, his gaze found hers and held. “You sound like you’ve forgiven him.”

Della raised herself up on her elbow. His words had been deceptively relaxed, but his jaw was tight. “No.” She shook her head, her hair brushing her bare shoulders as she ran the pad of her index finger along his bottom lip. “I’ll never forgive him for what he did, and I’m not sorry he went to prison. Or that he’s dead.”

The prospect of Todd getting out one day had been like a yoke around her neck those first few months in Credence. It had her jumping at every noise, every shadow. His death had been the first hurdle she’d knocked over in her long road to recovery.

“But if three years of therapy has taught me anything,” she continued, “it’s that parents can really screw you up. So no, I can’t forgive, but I can see how people like Todd are made.”

Tucker slid his hand along her cheek, pushing his fingers into her hair, cupping her face. He gave her a half smile. “You’re a remarkable woman, Della Munroe.”

Della’s heart grew a little more in her chest. People like Selena and Arlo had been telling her that for three years. Hearing it from the man she loved, though, as he gazed at her with awe and respect, seeped right into her marrow.

But right now, she was done talking about the past. Right now, she desperately needed to affirm that she’d come through the other end and she was doing okay. That she was capable of feeling again, of loving again. Even if it could never be.

“You’re remarkable.” She smiled as she ran her finger down his chin and his throat and lower still. “Now…do you think you’re sufficiently recovered to—” Her finger stopped just above the line of his pubic hair. “Go again?”

A frown flickered briefly across Tucker’s face like he was having difficulty flipping the switch from their serious conversation to something purely carnal. But then it cleared, and she saw empathy and understanding before he pushed her backward and rolled on top.

“I can go all night.”