His hands slid down to her shoulders. He squeezed the muscles gently.
“There’s a thread of truth there, of course. But I also understand that I was a kid at the time. I bear no responsibility for those criminals’ greed. Their brutality. I did feel guilty and wish I could have done more. That’s not obsession. That’s human nature. But I’m not oppressed by guilt, Alice,” he said firmly, squeezing her shoulders for emphasis. “My life choices have been the result of thought and planning, not a knee-jerk reaction of guilt toward Alan or Lynn Durand. Or you.”
His eyes blazed when he said the last. It was impossible not to be relieved by his steadfastness. She nodded once, and she felt some of the tension leave his muscles.
“Was that the thing that bothered you the most about what Schaefer told you? That Sidney argued against my suitableness as CEO of Durand?”
“Yes,” she said honestly. “I just feel so confused about . . .”
“What?”
“Who to trust.”
“I can’t make you trust me, Alice,” he said. “But you should.”
“I’m trying,” she whispered.
“I know,” he said more gently than she deserved. She felt so frayed, so pulled in so many directions. He massaged her shoulders. She sighed in relief. The miracles his touch could inspire. “Go on. You were upset by what Schaefer had said about Sidney and me. What happened next?”
“I just wanted to get away. To escape,” she blurted out, feeling a small measure of the desperation she’d experienced at that moment. “To hide. I didn’t tell myself to run upstairs, I just found myself doing it. My feet were taking me to that hiding place without my brain telling them to. And as I ran down the hallway, the memory just flashed into my brain. I distinctly remembered crouching in some dark place and hearing her voice—my mother’s voice—calling out to me. It was a game we played. I heard her calling out to me a few times, when I was in bed with you.”
“What?” Dylan asked, his brows furrowing.
“It was just my imagination,” she said quickly, recognizing how strange that must have sounded to him. “My unconscious mind spitting up some buried memory. I saw her that night you found me in the hall, too. She wore this delicate, filigreed gold bracelet; the same one she wore in the newspaper clipping you showed me. I saw it perfectly. I heard her calling out a name. My name,” she whispered.
She became aware she’d gotten lost in the sad, sweet potent memory and cleared her throat. “Anyway, as I ran down the hallway away from Thad, it hit me that this memory was different. It was connected to all these feelings, and it felt so real. She and I were playing when she called out like that. I’d hide, and I’d be so excited, hearing her voice as she moved around the house looking for me. She knew where I was all along,” Alice said with a small smile. “Or at least she knew I was in one of several spots. She was the one who had showed me all the good hiding places.”
Dylan’s hand cradled the side of her head. Alice leaned into him, instinctively craving his touch. “And it was a good memory for you, wasn’t it? You said it wasn’t scary like you were worried it would be.”
Emotion surged in her throat. She took a moment to find her voice.
“I thought it’d feel like someone else, like a stranger was taking over my mind,” she gasped. “It wasn’t, though. It felt like me. That was my memory.” His thumb rubbed her cheek, and she realized a tear had fallen. “Even if it’s the only memory of her I ever have, it was enough. Because so many feelings came with it. She loved me. She cherished me. I could feel it somehow, hear it in her voice. It was the air I breathed, the security of being loved. And underneath my excitement at playing the game, I felt so safe, so trusting that the next moment was going to be nice, and the moment after that, and after that. When I was that little girl crouching under those stairs, I didn’t know the meaning of fear or want.” She shook her head in frustration.
“What, baby?” he murmured, drying more of her tears with his thumb.
“It was incredible. I’m not saying it right,” she said brokenly, referring to her trouble containing the profundity of her experience in words.
“You’re saying it perfectly. If it hadn’t been for that memory, I don’t think you would have been ready to hear about Sissy tonight.”
“What?”
“You never once asked me how you ended up with the Reeds,” he said, his manner a little sad. “I knew it was because you weren’t ready to hear what they’d done.”
“
But after remembering Lynn, I was?” she whispered. It made a weird kind of sense. That brief shining memory was an unshakable bedrock to her identity, something no one could ever take from her.
He grasped her head in both his hands and leaned forward to kiss her mouth tenderly. Alice sought out his warmth and hardness, pressing closer, sliding and biting at his lips with her own. She made a dissatisfied sound when Dylan moved back slightly. She stared into his deep eyes.
“It hasn’t been an easy night. Let’s go to bed,” he said gruffly.
“Yes.”
SHE cleaned up in the bathroom first and emerged wearing the fluffy bathrobe Dylan had given her. He rose from where he’d been sitting at the edge of the bed, checking his cell phone messages. Their gazes locked as he passed her on the way to the bathroom. He reached out and palmed her jaw.
“You okay?” he asked in a low rumble, leaning down and kissing her temple.
She’d be a heck of a lot better once they were in bed together.