If I Should Die_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [32]
He pulled her from the bed, hoping the motion would jerk her awake.
“Lucy, it’s Sean. Look at me!” He shook her limp body. She stiffened and threw her head back, her dark eyes open, glazed and filled with pain.
A sob caught in his chest, and he held Lucy tightly against him. Her heart raced as fast as his, as if they’d both just run a marathon. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her face pressed against his chest, her body still shaking violently.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
Sean had never been so scared as when he couldn’t wake up Lucy, knowing she was suffering. Knowing he couldn’t stop her pain. He wanted to hit something. The people who hurt Lucy all those years ago were dead. If they weren’t, he’d kill them himself. The urge toward violence was unlike him. But he couldn’t think, not where Lucy’s pain was concerned, and he ached keeping his feelings bottled up. She’d told him that her nightmares had all but disappeared in the seven years since her attack, until a few months ago when her rapist had been found dead only miles from her house.
“I—I—I—” Lucy’s teeth were chattering and she couldn’t form her sentence. Sean sat on the bed with her, grabbed the down comforter from the floor, and wrapped it around her.
“Shh,” he whispered. He’d let her talk if she wanted, though hearing her speak of her attack would shred him inside. He braced himself.
“You were dead.” Tears streamed down her face.
“What?” It wasn’t the same recurrent nightmare she’d been having? He was relieved, but uncertain. He cleared his throat. “I’m right here, sweetness.”
She pressed her clammy forehead against his chest, his T-shirt fisted in her hands. “I need you.” Raw emotion clouded her voice.
Sean rocked her. He hated that he felt better knowing her bad dream wasn’t about the attack. He pushed aside his anger and focused on Lucy’s heart. Because that’s exactly what this was about—her, him, them. Though she’d handled his fall down the mine shaft professionally, he’d known she was worried about more than his injuries. That she’d had something to do helped her deal with the fear of losing him, but in sleep her defenses were down. All the barriers she’d put up to protect herself, gone.
“I need you, too, Princess.”
She shook her head. “Not the same.”
“Yes, it is the same.” He kissed the top of her head. “I love you.” Lucy held back a cry, and he pulled her closer. “Don’t be scared of my feelings.”
“Not yours. Mine.”
“I know.” She wouldn’t admit she loved him. She didn’t want to need him. He knew she did, but it would take time and patience for her to accept it. He’d never been patient about anything in life, until he met Lucy. She had spent years learning to be alone, to protect her heart and her mind and her body. He’d been methodically working his way beneath her barriers because he needed her to lower her shields—at least when she was with him.
“How? How do you always know?”
He shrugged and kissed her. “I just do. I know you were scared yesterday when I was at the bottom of the mine shaft. I know that you didn’t want to give voice to your first thought that I was dead. Finding the woman’s body made you think, what if you hadn’t found me? What if I died down there?”
“Don’t—” She swallowed a cry.
Lucy still didn’t want to think about that, and Sean’s rhetorical question had her picturing the bullet in his chest, just like the nightmare she was still trembling from.
Sean said, “Luce, you’re the strongest woman I know.”
She didn’t feel strong, not now. “It’s not the dead that get to me.” Lucy struggled to find words that wouldn’t make her sound childish. “I killed you, Sean. In my dream, I was holding the gun.”
Lucy had killed two men, but it was the first—one of her attackers, seven years ago—that had her constantly questioning her morals and ethics.
She’d shot Adam Scott in cold blood, six bullets to the chest. And she didn’t regret it, not for one second of her life. What terrified her was the lack of guilt—no remorse, no doubt that if she had it