A Profiler's Case for Seduction - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,65
he wanted to tell her what he thought of her.
Her steps began to drag the closer they got to her house. She didn’t want to hear the disgust, and she didn’t want her last vision of him to be one where his eyes were full of revulsion.
Tears stung her eyes and she quickly blinked them away. It didn’t really matter what he thought of her, she told herself. He was only temporary in her life anyway.
She didn’t care what he said to her. She’d give him all the ugly he wanted. If he couldn’t accept who she had been, and who she was now, then to hell with him anyway.
It took her two stabs to get her key into the lock of her front door. She opened the door and stalked into the living room and then turned to face him, her chin lifted in defiance.
“So, exactly what do you want to talk about? The fact that I was a drunk or the fact that I was a whore?”
He blinked twice and appeared speechless. “Dora, I don’t know—”
“You’re right, you don’t know,” she said, interrupting whatever he was about to say. “You don’t know what it was like for me in that small town where my father was an evil, hateful man and my mother was an alcoholic who bedded every man in town in the back room of the little café she owned.”
To her horror the tears she’d been determined not to shed stung her eyes once again. She swiped at them angrily and realized she had come to a place in her life where she would own what she had been, but she refused to allow anyone else to tell her what she’d been.
“You don’t know what it was like, to be branded just like your whore mother before you’ve ever kissed a boy, to let a town label you as a bad girl when you’ve done nothing wrong. I was Horn’s Gulf’s dirty little joke, along with my mother. Despite everything I was a virgin on my wedding night to Billy Cook, who was supposed to be my knight in shining armor. Instead, he beat me and told me every day that I’d come from dirt, that I was nothing but dirt.”
Mark remained standing frozen in place, his features reflecting nothing as the words tumbled out of her. “My life in Horn’s Gulf was not a safe place to be. When I finally married Jimmy I thought I’d found my safe place, a man who might respect and love me, but when he told me I was nothing more than my mother’s daughter and nothing could make me respectable or clean, I lost my heart, my soul, my very mind. I crawled into the bottom of a bottle of gin and wanted to die.”
For the first time since they’d stepped through her front door she stopped long enough to draw a deep breath. “So, I’ll ask you once again,” she said softly. “What do you want to talk about, the fact that I was a drunk or the fact that I was rumored to be the town whore?”
Mark appeared shell-shocked. “I actually came to ask you about Melinda.”
“Melinda?” Dora looked at him blankly. She backed up a couple of steps and when her legs hit the sofa she sank down. “What about Melinda?”
The anger that had sparked in his eyes when he’d first approached her on campus, before her diatribe on her past, was back. “When were you going to tell me that you and Melinda Grayson were sisters?”
“Probably never,” Dora replied truthfully. Everything was out of kilter. She felt like she’d just laid her heart, her very soul, bare for nothing, and his only response was to ask her about her sister. “It’s not something I broadcast. We aren’t close and I never wanted Melinda’s star to be tarnished by me.”
“Her star? I’m trying to take her down for the murders of those three men,” Mark replied.
Dora gasped in shock. “What are you talking about?”
“I believe she staged her own kidnapping with a partner and then while she was supposedly kidnapped she and her cohort murdered those three men.”
“You’re crazy.” Dora stared up at the man she thought she knew, the man she’d fought not to love. “Melinda would never be part of something like that. She’s the one who saved me. If not for her and my brother Micah I’d still be in a gutter somewhere in Horn’s Gulf drinking my life away.”