He braced his elbow on his thigh, brought his fist up and rested his chin on it. “It’s my fault,” he said, voice weary. “If I hadn’t left, you never would have…” He trailed off, gaze dark and sad as it lingered on her face.
It hit her like a fist, his self-recrimination, and it made her furious. “No.” She shook her head, hand clenched tight in her hair. “You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself about this. If it disgusts you, that I was ever with him, then you can get the hell out.”
“This is my room.”
“You don’t have a room!” she snapped. “Or a house, or an apartment, or anywhere, because you–”
“Left,” he snapped back. “Yeah, I left. We covered that already. You think I wouldn’t have done it different, if I could?” His scowl was thunderous; a small part of her knew that to anyone else it would have been terrifying. “You think I don’t want to go snap that little bastard’s neck?” He rose off the bed, his full height unfurling in one smooth, impressive flexing of bone and sinew. “Is that what you want?” He gestured to the door. “You want me to bring his head back to you in a shoebox?”
She let her head fall back, hands going limp to her sides. In this moment, she hated him, herself, Ronnie…the whole world. “Would you do it? If that’s what I wanted?”
He closed the gap between them, stepped in until her head had to press back farther in order to maintain contact with his black gaze. His eyes flashed, face tightening to fierce angles, razor-edged planes.
“With a red ribbon around it,” he said. “You know I would.”
The trembling started in her fingers, moved into her hands, migrated up her arms. She sucked in a huge breath and the tears came. “I can’t believe I was so stupid,” she whispered, shutting her eyes. “Mercy, I let him…”
He gathered her up in his arms like a little doll, lifted her off her feet. She tried to resist, pushing at his chest, but he would have none of it, sitting down on the bed, cradling her in his lap. He spoke to her softly in French, lips moving against her temple, and the tears overtook her. She needed to cry. She needed to press her face into his shirt and let it all out of her system. He stroked her hair and whatever he said sounded like poetry, his Cajun butchering of the language of Paris.
She cried until her head ached, until she was breathless and dizzy. And then she blinked and willed her vision clear, drawing in deep, rattled breaths as she let the hard wall of his chest support her.
“You didn’t know, baby,” Mercy said. “You had no idea. Everyone knows that.”
“How could I not, though?” she whispered. “How could he have…touched me, and I didn’t…God, I’m so disgusting.”
“Hey.” He eased her back so he could look into her face. “You’re not the first person in the world to sleep with the wrong jerk. It’s not the end of the world.”
“He’s not just a jerk, Mercy. What Mason did to me…what if Ronnie had got me pregnant, huh? What then? What if I’d had a baby related to the man who murdered my first child?” She shuddered at the thought and tried to glance away from him.
Mercy caught her chin in his hand, held her fast and forced her to hold his gaze. “That didn’t happen, though.It didn’t happen, Ava.”
“But it could have. I can’t forgive myself for being that stupid and weak.”
He leaned in and kissed her, but she wouldn’t respond, her lips closed against his, the awful grief building inside her again. That’s what it was: grief. The loss of a part of herself she’d thought untouchable: her loyalty to her family.
“Fillette,” he breathed against her lips as he pulled back a fraction. “You think I don’t want you now?”
She sniffed. “How could you?”
“Because you’re my girl, and I’ve wanted you since it wasn’t legal. And I won’t lose you over the ghost of some motherfucker I’m going to kill anyway.”
She smiled, despite the awful lump in her stomach, smiling against the threat of more tears. “Because you love me.”
“Je t'aime, Ava Rose.”
His hand left her chin, stroking slowly down her throat, fingers massaging the back of her neck. “Don’t worry about him anymore, okay? You let me worry. This is my problem now.”
She sighed, and pressed her forehead against his jaw, trying to absorb the feel and smell and immeasurable comfort of him.
My man, she thought. Hers, since she was eight, always hers. And those five years, just a nightmare, one that was haunting her now.
She woke in the black dark, as the sheets rustled and his warmth drew away from her. “Merc…”
He kissed her forehead. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be back later.”
She let her head fall back against the pillow and gathered the blanket up under her chin, cold without him pressed against her. Fear stole over her, directionless and fuzzy with exhaustion. She wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep, she thought, as she listened to his bare feet go across the carpet.
But she must have drifted off, because she tumbled into a nightmare. The old dusty boards of Hamilton House, smell of damp and blood filling her nose. Ronnie and Mason, standing over her, their voices faraway and brimming with laughter. Pain, shooting through her, stabbing deep into her stomach. The blood between her legs. Ronnie’s face dropping down close over hers. “You didn’t even know,” he laughed. “Stupid bitch, you had no idea…”
