Explosive Attraction - By Lena Diaz Page 0,62

Once I’m myself again. But...during...it’s like I’m frozen, paralyzed, unable to move, or even really think.”

“This has happened before, even before the hospital?”

She nodded. “And before you ask, yes, I’ve had therapy. Years of therapy. It’s why I became a therapist myself, so I could help others the way someone once helped me.”

“Looks to me like whoever ‘helped’ you didn’t finish the job.”

She tried to yank her hands back. He let her have one of them, but he kept her right hand anchored securely in his left, entwining his fingers with hers and resting their joined hands on the mattress between them.

“What happened to you?” He rubbed his thumb in slow circles back and forth across her knuckles and waited.

Finally, she swallowed, and met his gaze again. “I was seven, on summer break from school. My mom and dad took us kids to my grandma’s for a visit. She lived in an old farmhouse outside of town, on farmland that wasn’t farmed anymore. There were run-down chicken coops and barns, trees to climb. Paradise for five young kids. When the weekend was over, everyone else went home, but I stayed. Grandma had always favored me, the oldest grandchild. She wanted me to visit a little longer. Mom and Dad were supposed to pick me up the next day.”

She shuddered and closed her eyes. Rafe released her hand and ran his fingers through her hair, feathering it back from her face.

“Go on,” he urged.

“My parents didn’t come back for me the next day. Or the day after that. They didn’t call, either. I was getting bored. Granny didn’t do a lot besides watch TV. So I went outside to play. I followed a trail into the woods, found an old shack out there, played house. I...was walking in the clearing beside the shack and I found this old, abandoned well. I was leaning over the edge, looking down, when...”

Rafe kept stroking her hair, waiting, giving her the time she needed.

“I fell,” Darby continued. She squeezed her eyes shut. “It was so dark. The water was cold, ankle deep. And there were rats...and bugs...and I screamed, and screamed, and...” She swallowed again, making a whimpering sound in her throat. “But no one came for me. No one came. No one answered my cries.”

She opened her eyes, and the bleak look had Rafe’s heart aching in his chest.

“I climbed out of that well all by myself. No one ever came for me. They abandoned me. It took me three days of trying to climb out, but I did it. I don’t remember what happened after that. I just... I don’t remember anything until months later.”

“Did you ever find out what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your grandmother must have been worried sick. She must have searched everywhere for you. She—”

Darby shook her head. “I never saw my grandmother again after that. I don’t know what she did, or didn’t do. Everyone pretended nothing had happened. My brothers and sisters gave me strange looks, tiptoed around me. Mom and Dad never spoke about it, either.” She shuddered. “I left the day I turned eighteen. And I’ve never been back.”

Rafe stroked her upper arm. Something about her story sounded familiar, as if he’d heard it before. “When did all this happen?”

The corner of her mouth quirked up and some of the sadness left her eyes. “Are you trying to find out how old I am?”

He responded to the playfulness in her tone. “Caught me.”

“I’m thirty-three.”

That meant her accident was about twenty-six years ago. He would have probably been in fourth grade. Had he read something, seen something on the news about what happened? Why did it sound so familiar? Maybe he’d call Buresh about it, see if he could dig something up.

“What about you?” Darby asked. “You can’t ask a woman her age and not give quid pro quo.”

The fear in her eyes had completely faded. Some of the pressure in Rafe’s chest faded as well, and relief took its place. “Do you want that in people years, or guy years?”

“Guy years?”

“My sisters insist men mature much slower than women. According to them, I’m about twenty-six—no longer the partying frat boy, but not long enough out in the real world yet to attain real maturity. Apparently I need some gray running through my hair to be considered mature.”

Darby smiled, and this time the smile made it all the way to her eyes. “I think I’d like your sisters very much. So what does that make you in