Tough Enough

Scars? For about a tenth of a second, I’m confused. What happened while I was coming for Katie, while I was ru

I don’t ask because I already know the answer. I see it on Victoria’s face. The satisfaction, the malice. I wind my fingers around her stickish upper arms and haul her up against my chest, hissing down into her face, “What the hell did you do?” She doesn’t answer me, just smiles. “You bitch!”

I’ve never hit a woman. Never even considered it, but looking down into these smug eyes tries my patience like never before.

“She’s not right for you, Rogan. She never was. You just needed a little help in seeing that.”

“If you’ve hurt her, so help me God . . .”

Victoria has the audacity to arch her back and make this into an even worse spectacle. “You know I like it rough, baby.”

I throw her away from me like the trash that she is and she stumbles backward. “You know, Tori, you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who I can truly say I hate.”

Without another word to her or anyone else, I take off down the hall, praying that Katie’s waiting for me back at the hotel.

Only she’s not.

After a twenty-minute ride because of traffic, a ride during which I’d done nothing but hit REDIAL on Katie’s cell number, I took the elevator up to an empty hotel room. I feel a pang of panic when I see that all her stuff is exactly where she left it, but she’s nowhere to be found. Where the hell could she be? If not here, where else would she go?

Fear clenches in my gut, a cold fist wrapping around my stomach. What if something happened to her? What if she got railroaded by the press somewhere else at the coliseum? What if she got hurt somehow?

Sweat breaks out on my forehead, but I push all that emotion down, deep down. I have to think. I have to find her.

Rational thought brings Kurt to mind. He’s gone, too. He was supposed to keep an eye on her. Maybe he knows where to find her.

Furious with myself, my brother, my nasty bitch of an ex-girlfriend, I dial Kurt. He answers after the first ring.

“Where is she and why the hell weren’t you keeping an eye on her?” I preempt the instant he picks up.

“I checked the hotel and she’s not there.”

“No shit. That’s where I’m at.”

“You just need to calm down. There’s—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down. She’s upset and I need to find her. I need to find her because you couldn’t do the one simple thing I asked you to do.”

“I’m at a little bit of a disadvantage, if you haven’t noticed,” he replies bitterly.

“Not this time, Kurt. I give you that excuse practically every day of our lives, but not this time. All I asked was for you to keep an eye on her. Your eyes work just fine, damn it.”

To this, he says nothing. Silence is my only answer.

“I have to find her,” I growl in frustration.

“Have you checked the airport?”

The airport. It makes perfect sense. She’s scared, upset, humiliated. She’d want safety, security, the comfort of the familiar.

“I’m on my way, but until I call and tell you that she’s okay, you get everyone you can find on her ass. I want her found and I want her found now!”

I hang up, throw on a pair of jeans and a shirt, grab my wallet from the room safe and retrace my footsteps back down to the lobby, where the bellman hails a cab for me. I’m in too much of a hurry to wait for the limo. I’d take a motorcycle if they had one, but . . .

In the back of the cab, I resume dialing and redialing Katie’s number over and over and over, all the way to the airport. If she’s not there, I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t know where else to look. I brought her here, to a city I know she mostly hates, and then I lost her. She could be anywhere.

I leave only one message for her, hoping that wherever she is, she’ll listen to it. “It’s me. I don’t know what happened, but I need to find you. You’re scaring me. Call me back. God, baby! I . . . I . . . Just call me back, Katie. Please.”

At the airport, I’m encouraged to find that the next flight back to Atlanta leaves in forty minutes. If she’s here, she’ll be on that flight to get back to Enchantment. I don’t hesitate to buy a ticket and make my way through security and on to the gate. I’m deflated when I scan the few faces I see lounging in the concourse chairs. I don’t see Katie’s. My heart is galloping as I spin and look in all the other fairly close chairs for her, too. No dice.

But then, tucked in a corner right next to the window, nearly out of sight, is a familiar head. My chest gets tight just looking at her. She’s holding her cell phone to one ear, her eyes cast down. Even though I can’t see much of her face, I can see enough of it to know that she’s still pale and that she’s been crying.

I don’t call out to her when I spot her. I just exhale, relief flooding my muscles, making me weak. Suddenly I feel like Daniels won that fight, not the other way around.

I make my way across the short carpet to where she’s sitting. When I get within a few feet of her, she glances up from under her eyelashes. Her eyes are big pools of dark blue misery. I watch them fill with tears and something that looks an awful lot like hate.

I slow down, approaching her cautiously. “Are you okay?” I ask softly.

“You need to leave, Rogan.”

“Not without you.”

“I’m going home. Alone.”

Alone. A lurch of my heart.

I gulp.

“What happened?”

Her eyes spit fire. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare pretend you don’t know.” Her voice is low and calm, but there’s venom in it. She’s livid, but I can tell how hurt she is, too. It slices between my ribs, through cartilage and muscle, right into my heart, like a scalpel.

“I swear to God, I don’t know. I don’t know what I did to hurt you, baby, but you have to know I’m sorry. I’ll fix it if you let me. Just tell me what I did. Tell me what happened.”

She glares up at me. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying. I looked up after the fight and you were gone. Then when I saw you in the hall outside the locker room, you were so pale. I must’ve missed it when I was coming for you. You have to know I’d never let anyone hurt you. Never.”

She makes a noise, a strangled noise like a wounded animal. She’s struggling to hang on to her anger, but she’s struggling hard. She wants to just be mad, but I can see that somehow I’ve ripped her heart out. Even though I don’t know what I did.

“Stop it, Rogan. Please. Don’t make me relive it. Just let me go. We don’t belong together.”

Her words cut like pieces of shattered glass. “Please don’t say that.” I knew that we might have some problems trying to make this work, but I was willing to try whatever I could. Anything. And I’d only do that if I thought we really belonged together. Which I do. But then to hear her say that we don’t . . .

I swallow hard. I search for the patience to handle this delicately, like I know she needs me to. What I want to do is pick her up and carry her out of here and then sit her down and make her talk to me, but that won’t work with Katie. In fact, if anything, it would only push her farther away. So I’m going slow. I’m being patient. As difficult as it is, she’s worth it.

“I don’t believe that,” I confess. “And I didn’t think you did either. What changed your mind?”

Her chin starts to tremble. “Haven’t you done enough? Do you really need to hear me say it?”

“I guess I do.”

She stares at me for several long seconds, a thousand emotions swirling in her eyes. But then I see her ball her fingers into tight fists and I know her anger is taking the front seat again.

THIRTY-THREE

Katie

I reach for calm. I grasp at control. I search for distance. “I shouldn’t have been with you anyway. You’re a fighter, for God’s sake. Watching you pound your fists into that guy tonight just brought back too many memories for me. I don’t need violent men in my life. I should’ve trusted my gut and stayed away from you from the first day that I met you.”