Maybe Fiona and Sean would get tangled up in that, get squashed flatter than bedbugs. Faint hope. They'd be more likely to wreck the truck. And Fiona had the persistence of a saint, even if nothing else about her was holy. That book wasn't closed.
He slipped the gun back into the girl's pocket. He had better ones. Then he smiled at her and turned on the charm. "You never told me your name."
She blinked back, still dizzy from the drinks and the run. "Mau-reen," she said, stumbling over pronouncing her own name. "Maureen Pierce. I don' know if Grandma'd call this a formal in-tro-duc-tion."
He took her hand and kissed it, gravely.
"I won't presume upon it."
Now, to adjust her feelings a little further . . . . Any woman who could take what she'd been through and come back with Queen's Gambit Declined was someone he wanted to know better.
A touch of the glamour wouldn't hurt anybody.
Chapter Three
Maureen's thoughts reminded her of some of the test drugs the doctors had tried on her. She felt the same detached unreality, as if she were a normal woman walking home with a normal man after a normal night on the town. The sense of horror and terror had exhausted itself like a moth fluttering against a lighted window.
Only this strange man remained, a courtly knight guiding her to shelter from the storm. She'd never felt protected by a man before. They'd always been the threats.
I'd like to invite him in. I'm afraid, but I'm not afraid of him. A normal woman would invite him in.
Maureen repeated her mantra as they slogged the last block to her apartment. She ignored the faint voice that whispered fear of any man, that whispered of the fire and death behind them in the cold rain. The mantra shoved that voice back under water and held it there to drown. She felt bewitched by this man, and by a longing her body hadn't felt outside of dreams.
The rain rattled on her jacket like dribbles of soft gravel, half sleet, still soaking in rather than just bouncing off. She thought it was about the most miserable weather a Maine winter could produce.
Brian's hand was warm through her sleeve, no gloves. Maybe the same powers he'd used in the alley also protected him against the shitty weather. Calm and safety seemed to flow from his touch, almost like an electric current.
A normal woman would invite him in--to chat, to warm up, to have a cup of coffee or a drink. Not necessarily to stay the night. It would be simple politeness, on a night like this.
He was good-looking, quiet, strong, and he reacted fast. He smelled right. He played Queen Pawn openings in his head. He had saved her from something, tonight. Twice.
A normal woman would invite him in.
She swiped a curl of wet hair off her forehead as if it was a fly tickling across her skin. Caffeine and alcohol tangled in her bloodstream and left her with a detached twitching high that ignored little things like slush soaking through her boots and icicles forming in her hair and a three-alarm fire lighting up the downtown sky. Instead, she paid attention to that warm hand on her arm and the fact that he seemed content to keep a polite distance.
A normal woman would invite him in.
And her cynical inner commentator answered her in the second person singular it always used. You are not a normal woman. A normal woman doesn't take a month of foreplay to work up to a kiss. A normal woman doesn't feel like vomiting from fear when a man comes within smelling range. A normal woman doesn't keep waking up clammy with sweat, eighteen years after that monster crushed her to the grass and forced pain between her legs.
And yet she wasn't doing any of these things. Maybe the night's weirdness had burned out the necessary connections.
A normal woman doesn't see a rapist in every man she meets.
It wasn't fair. After enough psych. classes to take a minor in college, she damn well knew what her problem was. That didn't solve it.
It hadn't "made a lesbian out of her," like some of the idiots she'd met might have said. Sexual attraction didn't work that way. Those strippers did nothing for her. She still dreamed about men--gentle men with gentle hands that never went anywhere without permission. She still would really like to find out what it meant, to do those things with somebody she loved.
And every time she tried, Buddy Johnson elbowed his way into the scene and tore up the script.
She dragged her thoughts out of the filthy slush. Even with all the crap running through her head, she could still find her way home in a storm. They were slogging across a gray-rutted parking lot full of white car-lumps, up to a three-story tenement with rotting balconies and cracked tan vinyl siding. Highland Apartments: the place she hung her hat.
Yeah. Home is where the hat is, she thought. The world hasn't offered you too many places to leave your heart.
Sometimes she wished she could kill that inner voice. She covered her turmoil by walking over to one mound of snow and kicking its bumper, hard. The wet snow slid off its hood, revealing a rusty green Toyota with, if memory served, 145,407 miles on the speedometer. She'd nicknamed it Musashi, after the samurai who never took a bath. Up to now, it had been crude but reliable, like him. Judging by this week, though, it might never turn 145,408.
"Sonuvabitch won't start." She kicked it again, and more snow slumped down off the roof to pile up against the wipers. There was also a metallic clunk that sounded like a piece of rotten tailpipe expiring. Classic rust-bucket.
