Chapter 22
I wake up alone in Nick’s bed sometime in the middle of the night.
We’d made love again after returning home to the penthouse, then fallen asleep sated and content in each other’s arms. My body is still warm, my senses still thrumming from all of the ways we pleasured each other, so it is a jolt to open my eyes and realize he’s gone.
The sheets on his side of the big bed are cold. His phone rests on the nightstand where he set it when we went to bed. The room is dark and silent. No light in the adjacent bathroom, nor in the hallway off the large bedroom suite either.
An unreasonable panic sweeps through me when I see no sign of him here at all.
“Nick?” My voice sounds hollow in the darkened, vacant room.
Apprehension makes my nape clammy as I slip out of bed and set my bare feet down on the rug. Shrugging into the short kimono draped on the small cushioned bench at the end of the bed, I head out of the bedroom and into the living area of the penthouse. He’s not there. When I don’t find him in the kitchen either, I pad anxiously down the corridor that leads to his office and study.
“Nick? Are you here?”
Next I check the second floor of the palatial eight-thousand square-foot penthouse, worry mounting when I find no trace of him in the library or the entertainment room. He’s not in any of the places he might have gone to burn off sleepless hours.
He’s not out on one his late-night jogs either. His running shoes are all arranged neatly in the foyer coat closet, not a single pair out of place.
And anyway it’s not like him to leave me in the middle of the night without a word.
I think about how troubled he’s gotten since we were apart. He’s always had his personal demons but he seemed able to keep them at bay until recently. Or had he?
I think back to the private room in the back of Dominion. The wreckage Nick had hidden from me the entire time we’d been together last year. The admission that he’d been walking a razor’s edge of despair and torment in the months before we first met.
A dark possibility leaches into my subconscious—one that chills me to so much as consider.
No.
Oh God, no.
“Nick!”
I race back into the bedroom, my mind spinning with a hundred ugly scenarios, each of them with an outcome I’m too terrified to imagine. My heart is in my throat, my pulse hammering so loudly in my temples I almost don’t hear the muffled keening sound coming from somewhere nearby. But then I hear it again and I freeze, all my faculties trained on that pitiful, wounded animal noise.
“Nick?” Every cell in my body feels stretched to the point of shattering as I pad in the direction the awful noise seems to come from.
Nick’s enormous walk-in closet is open, but dark as pitch inside.
Not so dark that I don’t see the large naked shape huddled on the floor in the far corner.
Oh, Nick.
I don’t speak now. As soon as I step inside, I recognize instantly that he’s not aware of me or even his surroundings. Hunched like a child with his knees bent and his arms banded tightly around them, he rocks back and forth, his eyes open but unseeing. Dreaming even though he appears to be wide awake.
I bite back the soft cry that bubbles up from my throat upon seeing him like this. Naked. Terrified. Caught in a psychic anguish that was strong enough to wrench him from our bed and drive him here into the dark.
I don’t know what to do. Part of me knows that waking him might only cause greater pain and fear, yet I can’t look away. I can’t let him suffer like this alone.
I step closer to him, easing down at his side on the floor. Tentatively, I reach to him, my fingers lighting in his hair, my touch careful, meant only to soothe not startle. Sweat soaks the thick black waves. His big body shivers against me, seeming to tremble all the way to the bone.
When he doesn’t flinch away from my caress I wrap my arm around his broad shoulders. He sags into me, his breathing shallow and rapid. The moan I heard him make before starts building once more.
“Shh. It’s okay.” Holding him against my breast with one arm, I use my other hand to cradle his head, stroking the damp strands of his hair. “You’re safe with me, Nick.”
“No.” The denial is sharp, but whispered low under his breath. He swallows, his head shaking back and forth beneath my hand. “He can hear me. He’ll find me in here.”
Ice forms behind my sternum—along with a rage unlike I’ve ever felt before. “Who’ll hear you, Nick?” I ask him gently. “Who’s going to find you?”
He shakes his head again. “Be quiet. I have to hide or he’s gonna find me. He’s gonna hurt me again.”
Oh, God. I stroke his bulky shoulder, my arms barely long enough to embrace him fully. Yet I understand it’s not Nick the man I’m protecting now, it’s the boy he once was. The innocent, artistic boy whose father mistreated and maligned for as long as Nick can remember.
And now the sick suspicion I’ve had about his past—about the abuse he suffered in his childhood—galvanizes into a chilling certainty. Bile climbs up the back of my throat and it takes everything I have not to lose it and start crying. I have be strong for him now. I have to be strong for the child who’s still broken and anguished inside.
“No one can hurt you anymore,” I whisper, gathering his big body as close as I can against me. “Nothing bad is ever going to find you while we’re together.”
I don’t know if he hears me. I’m not sure I want him to know what I’ve just witnessed here. I just want him to feel safe.
I think on some level he must. A ragged sigh rasps out of him as he buries his face in my breast.
His grasp on me is unbreakable, as if he is drowning and I am his only life line.
Long minutes pass before his breathing deepens and levels out to something close to normal. It’s even longer before the shudders finally begin to subside. I don’t know how long we sit like that, huddled together on the floor in the dark.
I only know I’ll hold him for as long as it takes.
If he’ll let me, I’ll hold on to him forever.