Chapter 34
She left the library and headed back to her apartment. There she just huddled on her couch, too battered to do anything, to make any plans or decide exactly what she should do about this situation.
She lay like that for a long time.
Caleb had killed her father, and she had fallen in love with him anyway.
There was no getting over that truth.
Then, unexpectedly, she heard a loud knock on the door.
She ignored it. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.
But the knocking continued, growing louder, until it was finally too much to ignore.
“Kelly!” The voice was slightly muffled by the door and accompanied by more pounding.
Caleb.
She was so numb and dazed that she didn’t even wonder what he was doing here when they hadn’t arranged to meet up again tonight. She still didn’t move.
She didn’t want to see him. Didn’t even care why he was banging on her door.
“Kelly!” he called out again. He sounded angry—she could hear it even through the door. “Damn it, Kelly! Let me in. I know you’re here. I’m not going to leave.”
He was very angry, but the intensity of his voice bounced off her, unable to penetrate through the frozen shield of her numbness.
She let him pound on the door for a while until he was practically roaring for her to open it.
Finally she stumbled off the couch. Over to the front door. Unlocked it. Then trudged back to the couch and curled up defensively again.
After she’d done so, she wondered why she had. She had just wanted him to stop yelling at her, but now he was going to come in.
Which meant she was going to have to talk to him.
He was inside now. He’d pushed through the door immediately and was right on her heels. Looming over the couch.
He was simmering with something. Hot and powerful. But he wasn’t screaming anymore. He’d reined in whatever was boiling inside him, at least for the moment.
Despite the intensity, he looked as sophisticated and composed as ever in his dark gray business suit and shiny shoes. Except his face was more flushed than it normally was, and his eyes…
She closed her own eyes against them and tried to curl up even tighter, as if she could somehow close him out.
“So what have you been doing this evening?” he gritted out, his voice a mockery of the conversational words. “Anything interesting?”
She ignored him. She couldn’t even begin to understand what might be wrong with him.
Caleb paced over to the table where Kelly had tossed her purse as she’d come into the apartment. He picked up the stack of pages she’d printed off at the library—an article from a professional art journal—so her visit wouldn’t look suspicious.
“Been to the library?” The words were an attempt at a silky purr, but he wasn’t in control enough to make it effective.
Kelly blinked, starting to have an inkling about what he might be so angry about.
“See anyone interesting there?” Caleb asked, his murmur edged with something rough and grating. He moved back over to the couch until he was looming above her again. “Do anything interesting there?”
Kelly just blinked up at him again. Like everything else, his rage at this point seemed utterly ludicrous, and she was too frozen to even respond to it.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Caleb roared, her disinterest finally pushing him out of his attempt at bitter coldness.
She squeezed her legs more tightly against her chest and hid her face. Not because she was afraid of his anger but because his voice was just too loud.
Caleb must have dropped down beside her. She suddenly felt his hand on her shoulder. It was surprisingly gentle, given his mood the moment before. “Kelly?” His voice was different now—hoarse, almost tender. “Kelly? Are you all right? Did he… hurt you?”
There was a strange sensation in her chest. If she hadn’t been so numb, she would have probably recognized it as a pang in response to the sudden concern in Caleb’s voice, so incongruously juxtaposed with his enraged defiance earlier.
She should have just gone with the excuse he’d unintentionally given her. It would have given her a way out of this situation at least.
But for some reason she wasn’t able to. She just mumbled, “No. He didn’t hurt me.”
Jack hadn’t hurt her. She had hurt him.
“So you were there by choice.” Caleb’s momentary flash of urgent concern erupted into bitter resentment again. “So you liked it. So you wanted a cheap fuck in the library.”
His anger still wasn’t affecting her. His words felt like innocuous pings against the impenetrable numbness of her heart.
Caleb must have realized this too because suddenly he was hauling her to her feet. His hands were forceful and bruising on her upper arms, and her knees buckled as he tried to position her upright in front of him.
She was a rag doll. It wasn’t even worth the trouble of standing up.
“Damn it, Kelly,” Caleb muttered, his face flushed again and his eyes blazing with the kind of pure, visceral wrath she’d rarely seen in him before. “What’s wrong with you? Was the fucking so good you can’t even stand now?”
He was in complete control of her body—she was only resisting him through her involuntary limpness—and he ended up pushing her back against the wall in her living room.
Her head connected with the wall, and she instinctively tried to blink away the sharp dizziness from the sudden shift in position.
Caleb was still gripping her ruthlessly by her upper arms, holding her up now with the support of the wall and with the press of his hard, hot body.
“Was it that good?” he snarled, the cold, calculating man he’d always been swallowed completely by his wild, primitive rage.
“Can he give you so much more than I can?” He used one of his knees to part her legs so he could push his pelvis against her more forcefully.
He wasn’t aroused though. He was trying to get her attention.
And Kelly didn’t even react to the angry push of his body against hers.
“Do I leave you so unsatisfied that you have to sneak off and screw some?—”
Kelly couldn’t seem to feel anything. She was just so tired. And she wanted him to go away.
“I didn’t—” she began, wondering why she was even bothering to explain.
“Don’t lie to me. What kind of a fool do you take me for? You’ve done nothing but lie to me—the whole time we’ve been together—and you think you can get away with it. And now you can’t stop yourself from cheating on me.”
Kelly just blinked at him. She wondered if you could cheat on someone you were never really in a relationship with.
“They sent me pictures,” Caleb went on roughly, taking hold of her chin with ungentle fingers.
His eyes crawled almost cruelly over her face.
“You tried to slip away, but I had more than one man following you since I knew you couldn’t be trusted.
And now I can see for myself. I know how you look after you’ve been fucked. ”
The ironies were coming thick and fast today, but Kelly didn’t have it in her to appreciate them.
“What does it matter?”
Caleb made a strange sort of choking sound, and his face almost twisted with the intensity of his emotions.
“What does it matter?” he repeated, loud, uncontrolled.
He hauled her up so that she was higher against the wall since her knees had been buckling again.
“It matters because I have been faithful to you. I haven’t fucked anyone but you since we got together.
Even after I found out who you are and what you were really doing with me, I still didn’t…
I thought we were…” He cut off his words, giving his head a brief, jerky toss.
“I haven’t even thought about cheating on you. Why the hell shouldn’t I be angry?”
The part of Kelly’s mind that was still working beneath her blank haze recognized that Caleb wasn’t just angry. He’d been wounded and was lashing out instinctively, like a bleeding animal.
She would have been pleased by this sort of victory had she been capable of feeling anything at all.
It seemed like she should be experiencing a whole storm of emotions, like her feelings should be burying her alive.
But she wasn’t. They weren’t. They must be there inside her somewhere, but they were sealed off at the moment, leaving a blankness as hard and unyielding as stone. And not even Caleb’s rage or jealousy or pain was capable of breaking through.
Not even the faint realization that he somehow seemed to know who she was.
She weakly tried to shrug Caleb off, not in anger or fear but in empty annoyance.
He wouldn’t let her go. Gripped her harder. “Look at me, damn it!”
And that did it. Kelly snapped.
“Bastard!” she hissed, unable to find a word that came anywhere close to expressing the depth of her hatred. Her limp body suddenly tightened into fury, and she shoved Caleb with all her strength away from her.
He stumbled back. Stared at her in astonishment.
She didn’t give him enough time to process the shift in dynamic.
Advanced on him a white-hot rage barely held in check by the cold momentum of her will.
Suddenly slammed with the entire weight of her grief, hatred, betrayal, and confusion from the past seventeen years of her life, Kelly lashed out with her voice.
“You’re mad at me for lying to you! You’ve lied about everything every moment of your life! Nothing about you is real. You fuck me, act like you care for me. When you have no heart to begin with. Why the hell should I be faithful to a monster like you?”
She hadn’t been planning to confront him like this, as it would put her in a very dangerous position, but at this point it didn’t really matter. She didn’t care, and she was incapable of stopping herself.
Caleb’s expression was incomprehensible. It twisted with effort and surprise and something far deeper as he tried to contain her flailing arms.
“I was starting to believe you…” She was almost strangling on the furious words. “Despite everything. Everything. I was starting to… I knew better. I knew better. But still…”
At the horrifying realization of what she’d almost started to believe—about this man who had murdered her father—her vision actually whited out.
“ You’re angry with me? ” It finally all came out. “You killed my dad. You don’t get to hate me for anything.”