Baby Breakout. Lisa Childs

Jed had told her, as he’d leaned down to press a kiss to her forehead.

      But she’d grabbed his hand. She’d stopped him from leaving her. And she suspected she would have done that even if she hadn’t been drugged.

      “You remember more than that,” he challenged her, as he studied her face.

      It had to be flushed because her skin was hot and tingling.

      “You know I didn’t rape you,” he said, leaning down so that his mouth was mere inches from hers. “You wanted me …”

      She swallowed hard, unable to deny her desire. “I was a fool.”

      “Is that why you didn’t come forward?” he asked, his brow furrowing in confusion. “Because you were too embarrassed?”

      “I went to your lawyer,” she told him again. “Mr. Leighton said—”

      “Forget Marcus for now,” he said as if he couldn’t deal with the possibility that his friend might have betrayed him. “Why didn’t you go to the police?” he asked. “I told the investigating detectives about you, but they didn’t believe that I really had an alibi. Did they even talk to you?”

      She shook her head, and sympathy tugged at her that no one had believed him. But his sister …

      The news crews had relentlessly hounded Macy Kleyn, ridiculing her for supporting a cop killer. The young woman had always staunchly defended her brother’s innocence.

      Had he been innocent?

      “Why didn’t you go to the police?” He repeated his question.

      “I didn’t know if my testimony would help you or hurt you,” she explained. Because even then, despite what his lawyer had said, she’d had doubts about his guilt. But she’d written those doubts off as pride that she hadn’t wanted to have been so wrong about the man for whom she’d fallen. “And Marcus was adamant that it would hurt you.”

      “How?”

      “It would have shown premeditation. The prosecutor would have said that you drugged me to provide yourself with an alibi.” He had used her, just as his friend had in their rivalry against each other. But, as Marcus Leighton had said, Jed had taken their sick rivalry too far. “Once I passed out, you left me and returned to the office and killed Brandon. With as close as your apartment was to the office, you had plenty of time.”

      “Plenty of time to bludgeon him to death, carry him down to the parking garage, put his body into his car and set it ablaze?” Jed fired the questions at her as if he was the lawyer, and she was the one on trial. “Oh, and kill the police officer who caught me burning the dead body?”

      “It’s possible …” Wasn’t it?

      He shook his head. “I made love to you all night.” His voice dropped even lower so that it was just a rough whisper as he added, “Over and over again.”

      Those images flitted through her mind again—their naked bodies intimately entwined, their mouths fused together. Their hearts beating in the same frantic rhythm. So many images had haunted her over the past few years, staying as vivid as if they’d just made love hours—not years—ago.

      Would he have had time to commit those horrific crimes and make love to her so thoroughly?

      “I never left you,” he insisted. “You left me.”

      “I left you that morning,” she admitted. When she had awakened in his bed, in his arms, she’d slipped out of his loose grasp and hurriedly dressed. She hadn’t been able to believe what she’d done—how she’d given in to her desires to spite her pride. After he’d dumped her before leaving for Afghanistan, she never should have trusted him with her body or her heart. “But you’d left me first—more than a year before.”

      “I got deployed.”

      “You left me before you got deployed,” she reminded him. “You didn’t want me waiting for you.” And, haunted by all the years she’d spent waiting for someone she loved to come back for her, she had readily agreed to end their budding relationship even though—or maybe because—she had already fallen for him.

      “We’d only gone out a few times before I got called back to active duty,” he reminded her. “I couldn’t ask you to wait for me.”

      “Yes, you could have.” Then, even if she hadn’t been able to agree to wait, she would have at least known that he cared about her, too. “But you told me that you didn’t see us working out anyway. That we weren’t really compatible.”

      And she had believed him … until she’d seen his face when he had returned and found her in Brandon’s office, wearing his ring. She had been trying to give it back that day, too. She’d only gone out with his business partner a few times over the year Jed had been gone, and mostly just so she could ask about Jed. So she had been using Brandon as a connection to the man she really wanted. That was why she had let him talk her into wearing that ring to think about his proposal—because she’d felt guilty.

      “I was lying then,” Jed said.

      “I didn’t know that. I believed that you really didn’t see any future for us,” she said. And that was why she had felt like a fool when she’d awakened in his arms. What if he’d only been jealous of his friend and hadn’t really cared about her at all? Because if he had, how had he dropped her so easily?

      Just as easily as her parents had dropped her at Aunt Eleanor’s and never returned despite all their promises …

      “Is that why you didn’t come forward to offer me an alibi?” he asked. “Because you wanted revenge over my dumping you before I left for Afghanistan?”

      She sucked in a breath. Apparently he didn’t think very highly of her at all. When he’d told her that he saw no future for them, he must have been telling the truth then. And he was lying now, to try to make her feel guilty enough to help him.

      “I have told you,” she said, “again and again that I did come forward. I talked to your lawyer.”

      Jed shook his head, once again rejecting her claim. “Marcus swore to me that he never found you.”

      “Then he lied.”

      And, she thought, if Marcus really had lied to his friend and former fraternity brother, he would have had no qualms about lying to a woman he had barely known. Had Marcus lied about everything? Jed’s guilt? His violent temper?

      After that first initial jolt of fear at realizing she had let Jed into her apartment, she hadn’t remained afraid—if she had, she would have tried to get to the phone or she would have shouted for her neighbor to call the police. Of course she would have had to shout really loud for Mrs. Osborn to hear her, but the elderly lady definitely would have come to her aid.

      But instinctively she had known that she was in no real danger from Jed—that he wouldn’t physically harm her or their daughter. He may have had reason to harm her, though, had she stupidly believed lies about him …

      Jed’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand … why would he lie?”

      “He thought you were guilty,” she divulged. “He said that Afghanistan changed you—that you came back so angry and violent.”

      A muscle twitched along his jaw, as if he tightly clenched it—controlling that rage of which his friend had warned her. “Was I violent with you that night?”

      “From what I remember …?” She bit her lip and shook her head. He had been anything but violent. He had definitely been passionate but gentle, too.

      “So I didn’t rape you.”

      “No, but I was drugged. I don’t care if the results came too late. I know that something wasn’t right that night. I felt dazed or drunk, and I’d had nothing but that water at the office.” At the time, she’d thought it had just been