34. Stephanie
THIRTY-FOUR
STEPHANIE
Could all the men in my life stop thinking with their hearts and start relying on their brains, please?
I’m utterly boneless, a wet, limp noodle deposited inside a steaming hot tub and left to watch the swirling snowflakes fall to ground.
As perfect as that encounter was, I am left feeling a little empty when James makes excuses to be anywhere but here.
I lean my head on my hands and let my eyes flutter closed.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t immediately reciprocate?
I should have offered to... what? Am I ready for full-blown sex yet?
I wait for the usual fight-or-flight response at the thought, but it doesn’t arrive. So I have my answer, but no man.
A twig snaps, and my head jerks up to locate the culprit. Is that a goat? It steps out of the tree line, and yep, that’s a white mountain goat.
The door opens, and James appears, clutching a phone and a bottle of water. “She’s fine, just testing how long she can soak in my hot tub without turning into a prune.” He hands me the bottle. “Drink, or you’ll get dehydrated.”
“Steph?” Hunter snaps. “Why are you in a hot tub?”
I roll my eyes as I accept the bottle and take a swig. “The better question is why wouldn’t I be in the hot tub? You remember how much I love water, right?”
He sighs. “Are you safe?”
“I’m not about to drown.”
“It’s outside, so harder to defend.”
My eyes track to the goat watching us with interest. “The biggest thing out here is a goat.”
James snorts.
“Is that a metaphor for something?” Hunter asks.
I chuckle. “Please enlighten me, brother, as to what I could be hinting at? I’m up a mountain, in a hot tub, staring at a mountain goat.”
“Did you get my package?” Eleanor asks.
I lick my lips, delighting when James tracks my tongue. “Yep.”
“What package?” Hunter asks.
I am not prepared for a conversation about sex toys with my brother.
“Anything useful?” Eleanor asks, ignoring him.
“Not had the chance to figure that out yet.”
James swipes a hand down his face, and my eyes drop to the obvious bulge in his jeans. I need to get rid of our respective siblings.
“Let me know. I can recommend some more depending on what you like.”
“Recommend what?” Hunter snaps.
“Shush, girl talk,” she chides.
I snort. Eleanor Austin doesn’t entertain girl talk.
“That makes me worry more, not less,” my brother points out. “Wait, you better not be talking about what I think you’re talking about.”
I grimace. “Thanks for checking on me. I’m good, speak soon,” I say and make a slicing motion across my throat.
“James?” Hunter growls.
“Yes?”
“Look at my sister,” he demands. No need—he’s already looking at me. “You looking?”
“Yes.”
“Good, now let me reframe her. You will treat her like your daughter.”
James blinks and then grimaces. Too late for that intervention, brother.
“Got it.”
“Good. Every time you look at her, you think of her just like that.”
“Right.”
Neither of us is playing that game.
“Any news on Burnside?” Hunter asks.
“He’s unusually quiet,” James responds.
“Actually,” Eleanor interrupts. “I spoke with Honor. It looks like he’s demanding some kind of dinner, gala, or party to celebrate his substantial donation.”
“He’s trying to flush Stephanie out,” Hunter deduces.
“As if she’d be that stupid,” James mutters.
“Maybe we should let him,” I say.
Silence descends. Even the goat is staring like I’ve lost my marbles. If he’s going to have opinions about me, he needs a name. Marvin? Yes, that fits him.
“I’m not following,” Eleanor says, breaking the silence.
“Absolutely not,” James snaps at the same time Hunter growls, “Over my dead body.”
“Hear me out,” I try.
“Stay exactly where you are,” Hunter demands. “If you dare leave that mountain, I’ll have you snatched up and confined to a basement until you’re safe.”
I sigh. Why doesn’t anyone treat me like the grown woman I am? “He’s not going to kill me there and then, right? He takes women and spends weeks, if not months, breaking them down before he’s done. His sick perversion is in the elongated suffering.”
I absorbed far too much from those files, and while it terrifies me, I can’t live like this. Sacred, isolated, unable to take a trip to the local town without considering how I can disguise myself. It’s exhausting, demoralizing, and everything I’ve fought against for years.
“That’s true,” James confirms. “But it’s unacceptable for you to even think of going near him.”
The beauty of my brain is the amount of information I can process and the inferences I can make in a short period. I’m more similar to Eleanor than they realize. “Christopher doesn’t take one woman at a time.”
“How do you know that?” James wonders.
“Look closer at the timelines. He has fast-burn victims, taken for a few weeks at most. Those are the ones with the more solid connections to the world. They have families and friends who raise the alarm. He gets a rush from the power of destroying that woman’s life despite the amount of support she has.
Then he has the ones taken for months; they are the slow burn, with a lack of people who give a shit.
His adrenaline rush doesn’t come from evading the authorities with them because it’s likely the first time they’ll be missed is when their bodies turn up in a dumpster. Those are the ones he plays with.”
It hurts my heart to explain all of this.
I know I was in the former category, and while I wasn’t kidnapped, my gang rape was a bunch of mini Christophers, boys with power who got off on breaking a girl with connections, with a high-profile family.
They loved the danger and the rush of getting away with it.
Well, they did at the time of the attack—before I snapped back.
There’s an extended period of silence as everyone processes what I’ve said. Not just a pretty face, my professor had once said to me in my criminal psych course. Pity that pretty face attracts evil men.
“How is putting you in his path a plan?” Hunter asks. I can hear how he’s trying to hold himself in check.
“Because it’s highly probable those women are kept in the same place.”
“Nope,” James snaps, following my line of thinking. “Not a chance.”
“Let me get this straight,” Hunter says. “You want Burnside to take you so we can what? Track where you are and then do some kind of bust? I think he’s smart enough to ensure you don’t have your phone on you before kidnapping takes place.”
“I’m not dumb,” I growl. “I was thinking of a tracker.”
“That still involves you being taken, and fuck knows what he’ll do to you before we can reach you,” Hunter interrupts.
I purse my lips and pinch the bridge of my nose. Send help. I’m surrounded by cavemen only thinking with their lizard brains. “No, that’s not what I’m suggesting.”
“Let her speak,” Eleanor advises.
“Fine,” Hunter growls.
“He’ll let me get close. In fact, he’ll force the issue. But we’ll have every exit covered, so I won’t be in any real danger, and I can slip a tracker into his pocket.”
“And then we can see where he goes,” James mumbles. “What if he’s keeping these women somewhere inside his home?”
“Then we’ve lost nothing, and Camryn knows she needs to demand a warrant to raid his home.”
“I don’t like it,” Hunter says. “There are too many variables.”
“You don’t like anything that doesn’t involve wrapping me in cotton wool,” I snap.
“It’s not a crime to want to protect my sister. You’re fragile, Stephanie.”
I’m so pissed at people telling me I’m weak when I fought long and hard to find my way back to a world I wanted to continue to live in. That doesn’t make my foundations fragile; it makes them hard earned.
James’s jaw clenches. “I agree with your brother.”
I tilt my head. “Is that so?”
He narrows his gaze. Careful, Mr. Austin, I can fuck up your world with a few words.
“Got to go,” James says. “There’s a bear on the border I need to scare away.”
I shift my eyes to the goat. That’s a funny-looking bear.
“Don’t do anything stupid, Stephanie,” Hunter growls.
Ugh, spare me the testosterone.
James ends the call and wraps his hand around my throat. He’s not hurting me, not even restricting my air, but it makes everything inside me clench.
I boldly hold his stare. “You don’t scare me, James.”
His fingers twitch. “I should.”
“Try me. You really consider me to be fragile after kissing me like a hurricane and making me come harder than I’ve ever done before?”
“No, not in that respect. It takes courage and strength to admit your desires. But you can be vulnerable in other ways.”
“I’m not na?ve. I know the horrors the world offers, but I chose to stop being terrified of them many moons ago.
The night you held me in your arms to keep me in this world, the one where you chose to save me over yourself, was when I realized that even in the darkest of moments, there is always a light to be found.
You were that light, James.” I push against his hand and rise to my feet, standing naked, scars on show, heart on my sleeve.
“So, no, I’m not fragile. Perhaps, given the hard shell you wear, the one that refuses to bend, you are the one with brittle defenses. ”
I cup his face and press my lips against his in a soft kiss I don’t deepen.
I pull back but keep our faces close. “Whatever this is between us, it’s not just about sex, need, and desire.
It’s connection, and that is more powerful than anything our bodies provide.
It was forged under the worst of circumstances, and no one can touch that.
You can’t taint it by pretending you are the worst humanity has to offer. ”
His hand drops, and he studies me like I’ve just been introduced to him for the first time.
After climbing out of the tub and grabbing the towel he brought out, I drag in a long breath and pause beside him.
“I saw you that night, the real you. You can lie to yourself, but that was the night I stopped being afraid. It showed me what we could be when you stop running from us. Until then, I’ll keep seeing the real you.
I’ll have that strength for the both of us, because make no mistake, I’m not fragile.
I’m not a heroine about to learn how to wield a sword.
That’s not my story, not my calling. But a man who hasn’t seen the dark can’t begin to understand what I need or how my mind works.
And if you pause and take a closer look, maybe you’ll see that I too once did something bad for the right reasons.
The difference between us is the fact I understand that act for what it was—retribution, a reckoning deserved, and I never lost a moment’s sleep because of it. ”
“You deserve more,” he murmurs in a hoarse voice.
I square my shoulders. “I deserve to get the love I want.”
“I can’t love.”
I shake my head and a soft, sad smile tilts my lips as my fingers tangle with his. “You’re an idiot, James.”
I turn and stride inside the lodge and into my bedroom. I’ll make him see what I see. He once saved me, and now it’s time for me to repay the favor.