It was easier to talk now, after that little bit of laughter and with the growing darkness concealing both their expressions. She felt herself relaxing, uncurling from her protective knot.
“It was odd,” she said, “but I don’t think he wanted me to be sensual. He wanted me to be his perfect princess, his living, breathing Barbie doll. I had gotten used to his protectiveness while we were dating, so at first I didn’t think anything of it when he wanted to be with me every time I set foot outside the door. Somehow he always came up with a reason why I shouldn’t put in for this job, or that one, and why I couldn’t continue working with him. He went shopping with me, picked out my clothes…at first, it all seemed so flattering. My friends were so impressed by the way he treated me.
“Then he began to find reasons why I shouldn’t see my friends, why first this one and then that one wasn’t ‘good’ for me. I couldn’t invite them over, and he didn’t want me visiting them, or meeting them anywhere for lunch. He began vetting my phone calls. It was all so gradual,” she said in a faintly bewildered tone. “And he was so gentle. He seemed to have a good reason for everything he did, and he was always focused on me, giving me the kind of attention all women think they want. He only wanted what was best for me, he said.”
Quinlan was beginning to feel uneasy. He shifted position, leaning his back against one of the chairs and stretching out in a relaxed position that belied his inner tension. “A control freak,” he growled.
“I think we’d been married about six months before I really noticed how completely he’d cut me off from everyone and everything except him,” she continued. “I began trying to shift the balance of power, to make a few decisions for myself, if only in minor things, such as where I got my hair cut.”
“Let me make another guess. All of a sudden he wasn’t so gentle, right?”
“He was furious that I’d gone to a different place. He took the car keys away from me. That was when I really became angry, for the first time. Until then, I’d made excuses, because he’d been so gentle and loving with me. I’d never defied him until then, but when he took the keys out of my purse I lost my temper and yelled at him. He knocked me down,” she said briefly.
Quinlan surged to his feet, raw fury running through him so powerfully that he couldn’t sit there any longer. To hell with trying to look relaxed. He paced the lobby like a tiger, naked and primitive, the powerful muscles in his body flexing with every movement.
Elizabeth
kept on talking. Now that she had started, she wanted to tell it all. Funny, but reliving it wasn’t as traumatic as she had expected, not as bad as it had been in her memories and nightmares. Maybe it was having someone else with her that blunted the pain, because always before she had been alone with it.
“I literally became his prisoner. Whenever I tried to assert myself in any way, he’d punish me. There was no pattern to it. Most of the time he would slap me, or even whip me, but sometimes he would just yell, and I never knew what to expect. It was as if he knew that yelling instead of hitting me made it even worse, because then the next time I knew he’d hit me, and I’d try, oh, I’d try so hard, not to do anything that would cause the next time. But I always did. I was so nervous that I always did something. Or he’d make up a reason.
“Looking back,” she said slowly, “it’s hard to believe I was so stupid. By the time I realized what he had done and started trying to fight back, he had me so isolated, so brainwashed, that I literally felt powerless. I had no money, no friends, no car. I was ashamed for anyone to know what was happening. That was what was so sick, that he could convince me it was my fault. I did try to run away once, but he’d paid the doorman to call him if I left, and he found me within half an hour. He didn’t hit me that time. He just tied me to the bed and left me. The terror of waiting, helpless, for him to come back and punish me was so bad that hitting me would have been a relief, because that would have meant it was over. Instead he kept me tied for two days, and I nearly became hysterical every time he came into the room.”
Quinlan had stopped pacing. He was standing motionless, but she could feel the tension radiating from him.
“He put locks on the phone so I couldn’t call out, or even answer it,” she said. “But one day he blacked my eye. I don’t even remember why. It didn’t take much to set him off. When I looked in the mirror the next morning, all of a sudden something clicked in my brain and I knew I had to either get away from him or kill him. I couldn’t live like that another day, another hour.”
“I’d have opted for killing him,” Quinlan said tonelessly. “I may yet.”
“After that, it was all so easy,” she murmured, ignoring him. “I just packed my suitcases and walked out. The doorman saw me and reached for the phone…and then stopped. He looked at my eye and let the phone drop back into the cradle, and then he opened the door for me and asked if he could call a cab for me. When I told him I didn’t have any money, he pulled out his wallet and gave me forty dollars.
“I went to a shelter for abused women. It was the hardest, most humiliating thing I’ve ever done. It’s strange how the women are the ones who are so embarrassed,” she said reflectively. “Never the men who have beaten them, terrorized them. They seem to think it was their right, or that the women deserved it. But I understand how the women feel, because I was one of them. Its like standing up in public and letting everyone see how utterly stupid you are, what bad judgment you have, what horrible mistakes you’ve made. The women I met there could barely look anyone in the eye, and they were the victims!
“I got a divorce. It was that simple. With the photographs taken at the shelter, I had evidence of abuse, and Eric would have done anything to preserve his reputation. Oh, he tried to talk me into coming back, he made all sorts of promises, he swore things would be different. I was even tempted,” she admitted. “But I couldn’t trust my own judgment any longer, so the safest thing, the only thing to do was stay away from romantic relationships in general and Eric Landers in particular.”
God, it was so plain now. Quinlan could barely breathe with the realization of the mistakes he’d made in dealing with her. No wonder she had pulled away from him. Because he’d wanted her so much, he had tried to take over, tried to coddle and protect her. It was a normal male instinct, but nothing else could have been more calculated to set off her inner alarms. When she had needed space, he had crowded her, so determined to have her that he hadn’t let anything stand in his way. Instead of binding her to him, he had made her run.
“I’m not like Landers,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll never abuse you, Elizabeth, I swear.”
She was silent, and he could sense the sadness in her. “How can I trust you?” she finally asked. “How can I trust myself? What if I make the wrong decision about you, too? You’re a much stronger man than Eric could ever hope to be, both physically and mentally. What if you did try to hurt me? How could I protect myself? You want to be in charge. You admit it. You’re dominating and secretive. God, Quinlan, I love you, but you scare me to death.”
His heart surged wildly in his chest at her words. He had known it, but this was the first time she had actually said so. She loved him! At the same time he was suddenly terrified, because he didn’t see any way he could convince her to trust him. And that was what it was: a matter of trust. She had lost confidence in her own ability to read character.
He didn’t know what to do; for the first time in his life he had no plan of action, no viable option. All he had were his instincts, and he was afraid they were all wrong, at least as far as Elizabeth was concerned. He had certainly bungled it so far. He tried to think what his life would be like without her, if he never again could hold her, and the bleakness of the prospect shook him. Even during these past hellish months, when she had avoided him so totally, even refusing to speak to him on the phone, he hadn’t felt this way, because he had still thought he would eventually be able to get her back.
He had to have her. No other woman would do. And he wanted her just as she was: elegant, acerbic, independent, wildly passionate in bed. That, at last, he had done right. She had burned bright and hot in his arms.
He suspected that if he asked for an affair, and only that, she would agree. It was the thought of a legal, binding relationship that had sent her running. She had acted outraged when he had mentioned marriage and kids, getting all huffy because he hadn’t included her in the decision-making, but in truth it was that very thing that had so terrified her. Had she sensed he had been about to propose? Finding the file had made her furious, but what had sent her fleeing out the door had been the prospect that he wanted more than just a sexual relationship with her. She could handle being intimate with him; it was the thought of giving him legal rights that gave her nightmares.
He cleared his throat. He felt as if he were walking blindfolded through a mine field, but he couldn’t just give up. “I have a reason for not talking about myself,” he said hesitantly.
Her reply was an ironic, “I’m sure you do.”
He stopped, shrugging helplessly. There was nothing he could tell her that wouldn’t sound like an outrageous lie. Okay, that had been a dead end.
“I love you.”
The words shook him. He’d admitted the truth of it to himself months ago, not long after meeting her, in fact, but it had been so long since he’d said them aloud that he was startled. Oh, he’d said them during his marriage, at first. It had been so easy, and so expected. Now he realized that the words had been easy because he hadn’t meant them. When something really mattered, it was a lot harder to get out.