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Marc’s eyes quickly swept her from head to toe when she entered the dining room the next morning and Dawn wondered if he’d expected her to be dressed in something fancier than the black T-shirt and jeans she was wearing.
“Did you sleep okay?” he asked, his voice sounding more concerned than she’d ever heard it.
“Yes.” She’d had a shower and jumped into bed within minutes of rudely closing the door in his face and had been asleep within an hour, too physically and emotionally drained to toss and turn in bed as she’d been doing since arriving here.
Sleep would have come even sooner than that if she’d been able to stop remembering how it felt to be swept up in his arms and carried as though she weighed nothing, or imagining what would have happened if she’d stood her ground and let his lips come close enough to touch hers later on. She’d felt in need of comfort and for a moment she’d almost let it happen, but she panicked at the last minute and placed the solidness of the door between her and temptation.
“You said you would tell me about your parents,” he said when she sat down and prepared to start tackling her breakfast.
She had hoped that he would be too polite to remind her of the promise.
She would just have to give him the bullet points.
“As I mentioned before, my father returned to Guyana as Chief Medical Officer. I was seven, my sister Star twelve. We lived here until I was eleven.” Saying the words this way was easier. It felt almost as though she was relating someone else’s story. Almost. “It was a burglary gone wrong. My mother had a lot of jewelry and kept it all in the safe here. We had an alarm system and two security guards who worked alternate shifts. The one who should have worked the night of my sister’s sixteenth birthday party called in sick. I guess he was annoyed that the other one had been invited to the party and not him. The other one had worked a twelve-hour shift before he attended the party and claimed that he was too tired to work the rest of the night. My father changed the combination to the safe as a precaution, but he thought that we would be fine for one night. A masked gunman broke in just after the party ended at midnight. He shot everyone.” She shrugged one shoulder. “To leave no witnesses, I assume. He only left me alive because he thought the bullet that killed my sister had killed me, too.”
“Dawn, I’m sorrier than words can express.” He reached out and she reluctantly placed her hand in his. “It must have been devastating for you.”
“As I said last night, it was a long time ago.” She eased her hand from his. “I’ve put it behind me.”
He looked as though he was itching to say more, but she picked up a forkful of scrambled eggs and chewed on it.
“Are you still going to the orphanage today?”
“Yes,” she confirmed, relieved that he’d accepted the not-so-subtle action as a sign that that conversation was over. When his eyes dropped to her t-shirt, she realized that he might be wondering why she was dressed more like she was going to bodyguard the children than play with them, she added, “We’re taking the children to the botanical gardens and the zoo. Later we’ll play some games and have a picnic. I’ll get thoroughly dirty.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It will be.”
Minutes later, seated at the back of the car, Dawn couldn’t help recalling his words.
It was a simple enough statement, but if she didn’t know that the billionaire would surely find the idea of playing with a group of parentless waifs as dull as dish water, she would have thought that he’d wanted to join them.
***
Turning off his laptop several hours later, Marc stood up and unbuttoned the dark gray cardigan he’d pulled on when he’d felt suddenly chilled during his marathon search of the internet.
He stretched to unkink his muscles.
Usually he was fanatical about taking breaks from the screen, but he’d been obsessed with finding out more about Dawn.
He stepped out onto the balcony and tilted his head backward to let the Atlantic breeze warm his skin.
He was trying hard not to think the unthinkable.
Greedy for information he’d searched until he’d found a further three articles on the murders.
The first stated that Dawn, or Raye as they kept calling her, had recognized the masked killer as Shawn Miller, the security guard who had attended the party earlier that night and then claimed that he was too tired to fill in for his absent colleague. The man had vehemently denied the allegation, claiming that after leaving the party he’d driven to his brother-in-law’s house, drank too much and had ended up staying overnight. His older sister’s husband, a top ranking police officer, had confirmed his alibi and he had been released without charge.
A week later, another article had covered the mass funeral services for Dawn’s mother, father and sister which had taken place in a village on the East Coast of the country where her father was born. Dawn was seated in the front pew, her hands in her lap, between the stiff looking woman and a man the papers identified as her late mother’s sister and her husband. The article had stated that the woman had travelled from London to attend the funerals and then take the bodies of her parents back to the UK for burial.
Looking at the photograph, Marc was infuriated to see that there was enough space between Dawn and her aunt on the church pew for another small child to fit comfortably. Even if the woman had been prostrate with her own grief, she must have known that Dawn would have been suffering equally or even more. She hadn’t even held her niece’s hand in comfort.
At least her grandfather, somehow relegated to the pew behind them, had had his hand clasped comfortingly on Dawn’s shoulder.
Marc recalled her telling him on the plane that she and her aunt and uncle weren’t close. If the photo was anything to go by, he fully understood why she would choose to spend Christmas Day at an orphanage rather than with the dour-looking couple.
Marc couldn’t wrap his mind around the thought of Dawn at the tender age of eleven witnessing such a horrific event.
He’d kept on searching, hoping to find out more about the incident and needing to know why no one had yet been held responsible.
He couldn’t have rested if they had been members of his family.
It wouldn’t have brought them back, but he would have needed closure...or vengeance.
Dawn might not be aware of it, but she needed a resolution, too.
If Marc hadn’t seen her with the children at the orphanage, he wouldn’t have known that there was a fun-loving, warm woman beneath her stoic exterior.
He wanted to see more of that smiling woman.
The only way he could do that was to bring Shawn Miller, or whoever was responsible to justice.
He had decided that he first needed to know everything about the security guard who, from the tone of the article, had been extremely fortunate to escape justice.
The security measures put in place to protect the databases he needed to access had been no match for Marc’s skills. Quickly writing the necessary lines of code, he had performed unauthorized searches of all the country’s online newspapers, its death registry and its police records.
The Death Registry had failed to turn up an entry for the man.
That had pleased Marc.
Death was too easy for such a man.
The search of the newspaper records was slower and more time consuming.
Just as the timer on his phone had pinged, reminding him that he had to kill the search before he was detected, Marc had noticed the link to an article with the headline: MAN’S GENITALS ALMOST SEVERED BY MASKED INTRUDER.
Both the man’s first and last names were common in the country. A few of the articles in the search results had pertained to other men of the same name. Marc had almost dismissed the article, thinking that it had to be irrelevant.
But something had made him click on the link.
*****
