Chapter Eleven
After dinner, Seth and I were at the table playing a game of cards when Austin came out of his room decked out in a vest and plastic chaps with a holster hanging from his waist. He pulled out his fake plastic gun and pointed it at Seth. “Put your hands in the air.”
“Austin!” I said, raising my voice. “You know better than to point a gun—even a fake one—at someone. We talked about this.”
“Seth let me. We played cowboys earlier today.”
“Well, playtime is over. It’s time for your bath and then off to bed.”
Austin threw himself onto the floor and rolled around as if he were in physical pain. “Aw, Momma. Not now.”
“Yes, now,” I said, firming the tone of my voice.
“But I’m trying to be the sheriff.”
“Well, deputy, I suggest you get in there and take off your uniform so you can get in the tub, or you’re going to be taken into custody and all of your toys are going to be confiscated.”
Austin quickly rose to feet and left the room. The threat of me taking away his toys always worked well on him. The kid loved his toys.
Seth’s lips curved. “So do you need to arrest me, too? Because, if so, I will tell you now that you might need to frisk me. I’ve hidden something on my body, and I’m hoping it takes you a long time to find it.”
“Uh-huh. Like I would fall for that ploy?”
“Hey, it was worth a shot,” he said, chuckling. “By the way, I didn’t get Austin into trouble, did I?”
“No. But please tell me you didn’t say anything else to him that I need to know about.”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“Thank God for that,” I said, laughing as I rose from my chair and headed down the hallway.
After I gave Austin a quick bath, I tucked him into bed. I sat there talking with him for a minute before kissing him good night and turning on his nightlight. Then I walked briskly down the hallway. The front door was wide open, and I figured Seth had gone outside to sit on the porch in the night air. He did that sometimes. So I shoved open the screen door and found Seth sitting on the stairs.
Without hesitation, I walked over and punched him in the arm. “What the hell?” I yelled at him.
Surprise registered in his eyes. “What was that for?”
I fisted my hands on my hips. “You told my child that babies are made whenever Momma is feeling lonely and wants some company.”
He paused. “Oh. That.”
…
It was just after three o’clock in the morning when a faint whining sound woke me up from a dead sleep. Worried that my son might be having another nightmare, I immediately tossed my covers back and headed straight down the hall to his bedroom. But when I went inside, Austin was sleeping peacefully on his side with his two hands folding together and tucked under his cheek.
I stood there just to be sure. Yet the little angel didn’t move a muscle and continued to breathe deeply in slumber. So I adjusted his covers, tucked them in around him, and kissed him on the forehead before leaving the room.
I stepped into the hallway, and the muffled sound happened again. But this time, I knew for sure it hadn’t come from Austin, since the barely perceptible noise had echoed from somewhere down the corridor.
An intruder, perhaps?
My heart leaped up into my throat, but I quickly moved back into my son’s room and grabbed the signed wooden baseball bat that was displayed on the wall above his dresser. My hands trembled as I lifted it up over my right shoulder and slipped back out into the hallway. An uneasy sensation swept over me as I crept slowly down the narrow space while trying to keep the old wooden floors from creaking beneath my bare feet. If there was someone in my house, the last thing I wanted to do was warn an intruder that I was coming to knock his head off his shoulders with a streamlined chunk of wood.
As I passed by my bedroom, I briefly considered ducking inside and grabbing the handgun that I kept in a locked cabinet at the top of my closet. But the closet was adjacent to the bedroom door, which meant it could possibly give someone an opportunity to slip past me before I came back out. And I wasn’t giving anyone a chance to get anywhere near my son. The thought alone twisted my stomach into a knot.
I continued walking, holding the bat up over my shoulder as if I were about to hit a homerun with someone’s face, when the strange noise happened again. I froze in place. This time it was much louder and more pronounced. It was a mix between a pained groan and a torturous gasp. And it sounded like it had come from behind Seth’s closed bedroom door.
A sense of relief swept over me, and I managed to regulate my breathing. I hadn’t even considered that he could possibly be awake at this hour. Not only because, like me, he was an early riser, but because he’d retired to his room hours ago and I hadn’t heard a peep out of him since.
Wanting to make sure everything was all right, I tiptoed down to his room and put my ear to the door. He groaned again, and the noise came through even more clearly. For a second, I wondered if he was masturbating, but the sound was just too… I don’t know. Different somehow. Worried about him, I quietly turned the doorknob and cracked open the door, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t find him stroking himself. Otherwise, things were going to get awkward fast.
Since my eyes were already adjusted to the dark, I was able to peer inside the dimly lit room and actually see what I was looking at. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Seth lay on his back with his eyes closed as his feet dangled off the end of the queen-size bed. His legs twitched several times before I spotted his sheet and blanket on the floor at the foot of the bed.
But the thing that I noticed the most about Seth was that he was completely stark-ass naked. Not a stitch of clothing in sight.
His large body outlined only half of the bed, and his arms were held up over his head, buried beneath his pillow. The pose stretched his lean, muscular frame out in the most delicious way possible, accenting the vee of his narrow waist that led downward to his gloriously large…
Jesus. What the hell was I doing?
I was standing there in the dark, staring down at Seth’s naked body, like some kind of voyeuristic pervert. Just great. That’s all I needed was for him to wake up and find me gazing at his junk.
But as I started to leave, Seth let out an agonizing groan that sent a cold shiver down my back. Startled by the sound, I gazed back at him over my shoulder. His eyes were still closed, but he sweated profusely as his whole body trembled with some kind of manic distress. His laborious breathing heaved in and out forcefully as if he were not getting enough oxygen to his brain.
He murmured something else that I couldn’t quite comprehend, and I began to worry. It was as if he was having some kind of nightmare and watching him struggle to get through it was heartbreaking. Not knowing what else to do, I switched the unneeded baseball bat into my left hand and reached for Seth with my right one.
I touched his arm lightly to wake him. “Seth—”
The word barely escaped my lips when I flew through the air with dizzying speed and landed on the other side of the mattress, flat on my back. Shock at the unexpected movement quickly turned to alarm as Seth’s heavy weight pinned me down and feral hawk-like eyes gleamed back at me in the moonlight.
My heart beat wildly. The man had the reflexes of a jungle cat, and his intense eyes held a hostile edge that I hadn’t ever seen before. One that had real fear welling up inside of me. I tried to scream but his muscled forearm mashed against my throat, cutting off most of my air supply.
Panicking, I wedged my hands between us, pushing at his broad chest. But it was like trying to knock Stonehenge over with my bare hands. He didn’t budge an inch. So I swung my arm up to hit him, but he managed to grab it and hold it down against the mattress in a tight grip. He’d moved with such precision and lightning fast speed that I hadn’t even realized he had disarmed me of the bat until this very moment. And that only made my heart pound faster.
Primitive lines etched into his face, and his lip snarled. “Who are you?” he asked, as if he was in some weird, altered state.
I shoved desperately at his shoulder with my one free hand, but he still wouldn’t release his hold against my throat. “Seth, it’s me,” I choked out. “It’s me!”
He blinked and shook his head, as if he was clearing his vision, and then immediately removed the pressure of his arm from my neck and lifted himself off me. I gasped in a breath and rubbed at my sore throat.
His hands instantly began grazing over my body, touching me everywhere. “Christ. Did I hurt you?”
He hadn’t hurt me. Not really. But he’d scared the crap out of me. “No,” I said, taking a deeper breath now that his weight was off of me. “You just…frightened me, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
I placed my hand over my racing heart. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. I’m fine. Really.”
His jaw tightened. “Next time someone grabs you like that, thrust your hand up into their nose, like this,” he said, grabbing my hand and showing me how to aim it up at his face. “They’ll let go of you instantly.”
“Okay. But…what the hell was that even all about?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “I…don’t know. I guess I was dreaming.”
“I wouldn’t call that a dream. You looked like someone was torturing you in your sleep.”
His eyes lifted to mine, and his lips pursed. “It was just a dream,” he growled, though his wounded eyes spoke of something else. Something tragic.
I had the chilling revelation that I had gotten it right the first time, which explained the scars I’d seen on his body every time he took his shirt off. Had he been tortured by someone? And if so, why? “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. Just leave it alone.” Anger tainted his tone of voice.
“Okay,” I told him, not pushing the issue.
But I had no intention of leaving it alone. Something was troubling him. And I wanted to know what. I’d give him a couple of days to tell me himself. But if he didn’t, then I would just have to get the answers from someone else. Either way, I would find out the truth.
One way or another.