She jerked her gaze up. The man was fucking sexy as hell, doll fetish notwithstanding. She swallowed and continued her exploration around the perimeter, attempting to make sense of it. As she wandered, she peeked back every now and then, finding him tracking her every movement with hooded eyes.
A weight bench sat at one end, surrounded by a mess of mismatched dumbbells. She hoped to learn a lot more about him than the location of his damned workouts. When she reached the farthest corner, she faced him again. “Why do you break them? You don’t sell them?”
His huge hands cradled a small headless body, his thumb moving over a two-inch hole punched through the torso. “I’m more interested in quality control.” He tossed it behind him.
She flinched as the doll skidded across the cement floor. He broke dolls for fun. Her heart crashed into a roaring panic. Had he harmed a real child at some point? Was this his way of dealing with that? Or maybe he had been the child?
Her spine crawled with millions of icy pinpricks. Her feet stuck to the floor, the span of the garage separating her from the darkness surrounding the man she might’ve gravely misjudged. “Why do the dolls need quality control?” Fear quivered in her voice despite her best attempts to stifle it.
He rose from the stool and walked toward a box of undamaged bodies with a terrifying calmness. Paralyzed, she watched as he yanked out the plastic mold of a baby—its limbs attached—and dropped it on the floor. Then his bare foot came down, smashing the body with one stomp.
She stopped breathing. Was this some kind of reenactment? Horrified, she wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. She had to know.
The torso cracked beneath his foot, and the head popped off. Dizziness swarmed her head, sending her ears ringing in a frenzied pulse.
With hands on his hips and his head tipped down, hard eyes rolled up and locked on her. “That’s why.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist, her fingers sticky and trembling. Quality control meant he was looking for flaws, right? Was he looking for a doll that could survive a heavy foot? That didn’t make any sense. Oh God, she didn’t want it to make sense.
Breathing deeply from her diaphragm, she smothered her dread with a strong voice. “I don’t understand. Why are you smashing them like that?”
He looked away, his lips in a flat line, seemingly refusing to answer. But he wanted to. She could see it in the rise and fall of his chest and in the shift of his eyes as they studied the collection, searching for the words.
Endless seconds passed, the stillness strangling, before his Adam’s apple bobbed and his fingers twitched on his hips. “It was the first and last toy I owned. A goddamned doll.” He laughed nervously, his hand lifting to rub the back of his neck. “I don’t even know how I got it. Probably from one of those missionaries who would pop in to deliver food and Jesus pamphlets.”
A clot of emotion gathered in her throat. Something had happened to him. She lowered her hands to her shorts, gripping them. “This was when you lived in the colonia?”
He nodded and crouched over the broken doll, glaring at it. “I was a nine-year-old boy. What the fuck was I doing with a doll?”
His tone was angry, at odds with the tender way his finger traced the jagged hole in the doll’s torso at his feet. He seemed to be lost in memory, his silence hardening the lump she couldn’t swallow. She stepped forward, aching to erase the distance, but the jerk of his shoulders halted her approach.
“He was a huge man. My mother was a whore, sold herself for the needle, and he was just some random john, but he was the first one I remember. He fucked her right there in front of me. She was so fucking high I don’t think she was conscious.” A tremor shook his body, and he sat back, legs folded against his chest, his arms wrapped around his knees. “And there I was, curled up in the damned corner, hugging that doll, kissing her ratty hair like she was my only friend. Hell, she was my only friend.”
He put his hands over his face, and his shoulders hunched like a scared little boy. Her heart clenched painfully, and her eyes burned. She wanted to hold that little boy so damned badly.
Straightening the legs of her shorts, she moved with fast, quiet steps. Then she dropped before him and mirrored his pose with her arms around her knees.
His hands lowered and dangled between them. He didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge her at all. “When he was done with my mother, he turned to me. I wouldn’t let go of that doll. He was so goddamned strong I couldn’t stop him from ripping Isadora out of my hands.”
“Isadora? Your mother?”
His head cocked, and his eyes narrowed in confusion on the broken doll between their feet. He squeezed his legs tighter against his chest, his body curling inward. He was shutting down.
In a bold gesture, she reached out and placed her hand on his cheek, stroking her fingers through the thick hair above his ear.
He shook his head, eyes on the floor, then leaned into her touch. “I’d named the doll after my mother.”
There was no embarrassment or resentment in his tone, just...sadness. He loved his mother, that much was clear, and evidently that love wasn’t reciprocated.
A burn seared through her nose. She envied his devotion. She didn’t know her mother well enough to love her. There’d been no connection, no relationship. Just illness. She rocked
