Confessing to the Cowboy - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,82
feel wooden and difficult to move.
“You busted my spleen, left me with a compound fracture of my leg, busted four ribs and smashed my nose.” His voice was calm, the eerie calm before a storm erupted. “It was a year before I could even start to think about finding you, but in that year you never left my mind. In the past nine years you’ve been all I’ve thought about.” He cocked his head and smiled, Jason’s smile, not Brandon’s. “I guess you didn’t believe me when I told you that I’d make you pay, that I’d kill you if you ever left me.”
“Jason...please,” Mary started as her back hit the wall. Her gaze shot left and right, seeking something she could use as a weapon, something she could use for defense. But there was nothing.
“Jason please what? Please don’t hurt you? Please don’t kill you? You brought this all on yourself, Samantha. I haven’t spent all the money and time of the last nine years hunting you down not to make you pay.”
“Haven’t you done enough?” she cried. “You’ve already killed three innocent women.”
“And with each throat I slit I thought about you.”
Trapped.
She was trapped between the wall and the man who wanted her dead, and escape appeared impossible. Her terror gripped her by the throat not just now, but also in memory, a regurgitation of the sensations of fear she’d suffered while married to the man.
She was lost in those moments of his torment, the anxiety of never knowing when an attack might come or if the next one was the one that would kill her.
At that moment the back door opened and Junior rushed in, his coat covered with a fine layer of ice. “Mary, I forgot my phone,” he said and she raised a trembling finger to the phone on the counter next to the register.
“Thanks,” Junior said as he grabbed the phone. It was only then he focused on Jason. “Mr. Williams...you can walk. It’s like a miracle!” Junior’s childish smile quickly doused as he spied the knife in the man’s hand. “Mr. Williams...what are you doing with that knife?”
Before he could utter another word, Jason slammed his fist into Junior’s jaw. Junior whirled around with the force of the blow, bounced off the counter and fell to the floor, not moving again.
Mary screamed her outrage. “You didn’t have to hurt him. He liked you, he wouldn’t have said anything if you’d just played it cool.”
“I’m tired of playing it cool, besides, he’s not dead, he’s just unconscious. Once he’s conscious and I’m finished here he can tell anyone he wants that Brandon Williams killed Mary, because Brandon Williams doesn’t exist.” He smiled at her with pride. “The honorable injured vet will disappear forever after tonight.”
“You won’t get away. They know it’s you, Jason.”
His smile widened, the gesture not even beginning to warm the cold of his eyes. “Knowing and proving are two different things. I have dozens of people who will swear that I never left Switzerland, that I’ve been there every day in my offices for the last year.”
He seemed to be in no hurry to finish what he’d come here for, what he most wanted to do. “I spent a lot of money over the years trying to find you. It took seven private investigators and years before we finally hunted you down.”
“Just let me go,” she replied, hating the begging tone in her voice. “Like you said, nobody knows you were here. You could just walk away now and nobody would know what you’d done. Even if I told, it would be your word against mine and all of your alibi witnesses.”
Just like before, she thought. She’d been afraid to tell anyone about his abuse because it would have been his word against her own, and he’d held all the power, just like he did now.
He laughed, the deep sound clenching Mary’s stomach with dread. “And deny myself what I’ve dreamed about for all these years?” His eyes narrowed. “You’ve forgotten, Mary. I own you and I don’t let go of what’s mine.”
“You beat me.” She clenched her fists at her sides, remembering all the pain she’d experienced at his hands. “You choked and kicked me, you beat me black and blue.”
“It wasn’t my fault you couldn’t figure out how to be a good wife. You had to be taught. You needed to be taught to be exactly what I want you to be and I have to say, you were