He came back to set an elbow on the top of the windscreen. She felt his eyes studying her, but kept her nose pointed forward.
“I’m trying to be patient, bella, I really am, but I don’t understand why you’re being so combative. This doesn’t have to be a fight.”
“I could drive this, you know. Probably better than you.”
“Not without keys.”
“You’d be surprised.” She worked her hands on the steering wheel’s soft leather, more than a little enamored with cars, thanks to Ramon. “I can hotwire and drive anything. I’ve been up to two hundred and twenty on a closed circuit in my brother’s Pur Sang. The Gs nearly crack my ribs when I brake from that speed, but it’s quite a rush. Have you ever driven this the way it was designed to drive?”
“No.” His tone was one of forced patience.
“Ramon got into racing after taking evasive driving lessons. We all had to take them.” Like Ramon, she had tried to outrun herself on the track more than once, but it was never a permanent solution. At some point, she had to park the car, take off the helmet and face reality. “Because of my kidnapping.”
She sensed him grow very still, indicating she had his full attention.
Had he thought that wouldn’t come up? She hated that it defined her, but it did. She worked around it as often as she could, but when she did have to face it, she did it head-on with her foot to the floor, even though it also had the power to crack her ribs and shatter everything inside her.
As the silence lengthened, she suspected he was reviewing what he had said in Paris—when he had thought he was talking about her but had been speaking to her.
“You think you were worried when I was stolen.” Her voice trembled against her will. She soothed herself by running light fingers across the bumps in the bottom of the steering wheel, playing over them like keys on a piano, but her hands shook.
His voice was grave. “If I was triggering you today, you should have said.”
“Really?” A smile touched lips that felt so dry they might split. Her body vibrated with fight-or-flight. She was going to crash hard after this, but she couldn’t think about that yet. “Because I did tell you to take me back and you ignored me. Which is exactly what happened the first time.”
Her knuckles whitened where she grasped the wheel again, trying to keep a grip on herself. It was time for the head-on collision.
“I said stop, and no, and please so many times I lost count. I said it when they threw me in their van and I could see Ramon running after us. I said it when one of them pulled me onto his lap and shoved his hand under my skirt and hurt me. I said it when he slapped me because I was fighting him. I said it when he locked me in a cold, dark cellar and I said it a lot when he let me out three days later, only to put me on a filthy stinking mattress and call me lucky. Lucky. Because he was going to show me what men liked.”
She knew it was an assault to throw that at him. It was one of the reasons she rarely spoke about it, but she wanted to hurt him. She wanted to scar him.
“I should check with my therapist, see if my experience of being assaulted might create a profound desire to control my own destiny. Gosh, what an enlightening moment of self-discovery you’ve provided, Xavier. Yes, I’m quite sure that’s why I’m combative.”
* * *
He couldn’t move, wasn’t even sure he was breathing, as he tried to un-hear what she’d said. Who would do such a thing? To a child?
He didn’t have a particular affinity for children, not having had a childhood to speak of himself. Royal duties took him into contact with them, but children were just one more foreign culture with whom certain rituals were observed. He didn’t live among them or desire to.
What he did understand was that they were vulnerable. Those who exploited the weak were beneath contempt. Only a true monster would hurt someone as helpless as a nine-year-old girl, especially sexually.
“I didn’t think I could get pregnant.” Trella’s thin voice echoed off the concrete and steel of his garage, underpinned by the drone of the fan. Her profile was pale and still, grayed by the half-light beyond the row of windows in the doors. “The damage he did was that bad. Do you understand what I’m saying? Because I don’t want to get any more specific.”
A twisted, anguished feeling struck his middle, clenching talons around his chest and squeezing his throat, pushing fear and helplessness to such heights inside him, it became a pressure he could barely withstand. He knew his heart was beating because it throbbed with painful pounds that rang in his ears, but he couldn’t move or speak.