“You were, what, fifteen? Sixteen? You fixed the meal that night. It blew my uncle away that you cooked for us all yourself. He asked to meet you. That was unusual, wasn’t it?” Elijah persisted. “It was unusual and it scared you.”
For a long moment, Eli didn’t think Catarina would answer.
“He wanted to scare me. Your uncle. He wanted Rafe to know he knew who I was.” She spoke in a low tone.
Eli frowned. Catarina had grown up in Rafe Cordeau’s home. It stood to reason he’d kept her away from his business. No one really thought, even if they could get her to do it, that she could testify about anything other than April Harp’s murder. Rumor had it Catarina had been there. Something in the way she revealed that she knew Elijah’s uncle’s motivation in asking to meet her made Eli rethink his position on Catarina inside that household.
She’d taught herself to read. She’d learned how to make coffee. Not just make coffee, but became a leading barista, someone who was great at what she did. She was quiet, and she downplayed her looks. She listened. Really listened when others were talking. She looked so young. She’d learned to play to that too. Only when her body betrayed her with its lush curves was it necessary for her to run.
He swore under his breath. He’d been such a fool. They all had. Sweet little Catarina Benoit was not just sweet, fragile and uneducated, she was extremely intelligent. Off the charts intelligent. She probably knew more about Cordeau’s business than Cordeau. She’d been there, a fixture in his household, one he intended to keep, a beautiful trophy he intended to mold into his likeness.
Catarina had been Cordeau’s chosen mate. She’d been a sponge in Cordeau’s house, soaking up everything she heard, learning as much as she could. She’d learned sex education by listening to two of Cordeau’s crew’s girlfriends talking. If there’d been a wall close Eli would have been tempted to smash his head on it. He’d been so obtuse, buying into the image she projected.
He tightened his arm around her, not knowing whether he wanted to shake her, or kiss her. She was damned brilliant. But if he was right and Catarina did know everything there was to know about Cordeau’s business, that meant she knew everyone he was in bed with. His partners wouldn’t like that. They wouldn’t want anyone running around loose out of their control.
Eli understood the million-dollar price tag. This wasn’t all about getting Catarina back, it was also about protecting her. She wasn’t where Cordeau could keep her from his partners and he was letting them know she was still under his shield.
Elijah nodded his head. “Yes, my uncle needed some kind of leverage against Cordeau. Cordeau didn’t have any weaknesses.”
“With the exception of Catarina,” Eli said. “She was the one thing that made him vulnerable in a world of other sharks.”
Beside him she stirred, tension coiling even tighter. He kept his eyes on her but she didn’t look up at him, she was looking at Elijah.
“He made it clear that day I wasn’t anything to him.”
Eli’s belly knotted. Was there hurt in her voice? Of course there was. She’d been a child and back then, she had no one else but Cordeau. If he’d shown in front of company she was nothing to him, she would always feel like nothing.
“He did,” Elijah said.
“How?” Eli asked.
She flinched. Hard. For the first time she tried to pull away from him. His fingers dug into her waist, holding her still, holding her to him. Her hand slid over his, fingers trying to remove the vise-like grip he had on her.
“He insisted she read to us, and when she stumbled through a passage, everyone laughed. He laughed the loudest and said something about Catarina being an empty but decorative head.”
Eli felt the sudden heat in her body as she flushed a deep rose. She was humiliated all over again. He hadn’t expected that either, but it stood to reason. Childhood experiences shaped everyone. Catarina’s childhood had not only been traumatic, but she’d grown up thinking she wasn’t worth anything to anyone.
She was beginning to actively struggle against him, fighting, not him, but her past. Elijah had brought it too close and the dark ugly memories were flooding her mind.
Eli leaned down, his mouth a whisper from her ear. “Settle,” he advised softly. “This is all crap. It’s over. You aren’t with him, and you aren’t what he said you were.”
He transferred one hand to the back of her head, shaping her skull with his palm, pushing her face into his rib cage and holding her there. Was it possible they all had Cordeau wrong and Catarina meant far more to him that he let on? That entire time, when he was convincing everyone around him, Catarina included, that she meant nothing, that he was even embarrassed by her, was Cordeau really protecting her from his associates?
Eli didn’t want to think so. He didn’t want to see Cordeau as having any redeeming qualities, but the truth was that no one was one-dimensional. All that time, Cordeau could have been pretending indifference to protect her. He tried not to think about the incident when she’d fallen out of the tree and Cordeau had nearly lost his mind. Had that been the act of an indifferent man?
“It wasn’t even a difficult piece, that poem,” Catarina said, her voice devoid of all emotion. “A child could have read it.”
Eli’s heart bled for her. “Let’s go home, baby. It’s been a long day. We’ve still got a ways to run this evening before we’re done.”
She turned away immediately, not looking again at Elijah or the other two men. As soon as they were away from the fence, she stepped away from him and began to jog back in the direction of the ranch house.
Eli stared after her for a moment and then turned to wave at the three men. Elijah lifted his hand in salute. All three men wore somber expressions. Eli couldn’t blame them. It was impossible not to feel the pain radiating off of Catarina. She’d been cut deep more than once. How many cuts like that could a person take before their soul was ripped away?
He fell into step behind her, jogging easily, covering the ground with his longer legs to catch up to her. She’d never had a chance. Not a single chance. She was beautiful and intelligent and so sweet he wanted to eat her up like candy, but never once had she had any real choices. If he were any kind of man at all, he’d let her go and hope she came back to him, but the Han Vol Dan was too close and his leopard would never allow its mate out of his sight. Did that make him every bit as bad as Cordeau? What the hell did that make him?
It took a good half hour to get home, and that was with them making good time. Catarina set herself a grueling pace. Twice he’d tried to slow her down, but she didn’t even acknowledge his warnings. He let it go when ordinarily he would have forced her to stop. Yeah. He was that kind of a man. He controlled things. He got his way. He looked after his own. Was he just like Cordeau? Did she see him that way?
He cursed with every step he took. Darkness streaked the orange sky in long layers, stacking one on top of the other, first sandwiching the orange and then squeezing slowly until all that color was gone. He thought he had a kitten on his hands, and he’d actually acquired a little tiger. Because Cordeau had essentially taught her she was nothing, she didn’t recognize that she was a tiger, not a kitten.