You've Got Male (8 page)

“—not to mention exceptionally good at bringing in people who violate statute—” he went on relentlessly.

“Oh, no ego on you, pal, is there?”

“—then that leaves me with no choice but to bring you in for questioning involuntarily.”

“I object!” Avery shouted. Mostly because she had no idea what else to say.

“Your objection is noted.”

“Oh, well, thank you so much for that measly considera—”

She was never able to finish what she had planned to say because Santiago Dixon—or whoever the hell he was—stepped forward and curled his fingers easily around her upper arms. And that, if nothing he’d said tonight, finally shut Avery up, because where she had expected roughness, he was gentle instead. When he pulled her to standing, it wasn’t with animosity but with concern. And when he tugged her away from the couch, that was done gently, too.

And if she hadn’t been silenced already, having her body pulled flush against his like that would for sure have done it. Because instead of manhandling her like a criminal, Santiago Dixon held her the same way he might have held a woman he intended to kiss. Her mouth went dry at the realization.

But she didn’t have time to think about that. And she didn’t have time to notice, either, the way his hard, muscular torso felt pressed against her own soft one or how upon contact her own traitorous body surged forward to meet his. Nor did she have time to marvel at how her struggles this evening with Santiago Dixon were the closest thing she’d had to a sexual encounter for a decade. Her mind was too scrambled, because he wrapped his fingers firmly—intimately?—around her waist. Then she couldn’t think at all, because he lifted her off the ground and threw her over one shoulder. Then he started to walk toward the front door. Then he
opened
the front door. And then, with Avery still slung over his shoulder, he walked through it.

Or at least tried to.

But there was one potential outcome for the situation tonight that he hadn’t considered, and that moment was when it kicked in.

Santiago Dixon hadn’t counted on the fact that Avery Nesbitt was totally whack.

I
T WAS ONLY ONCE THEY
were over that Avery could really get a handle on what happened during her panic attacks. In the calm of the aftermath, she could recall the dizziness, the disorientation, the sheer, unmitigated terror. She could recall how her entire body trembled and perspired, could remember the paralysis of speech and interruption of breath. She could recollect the pain behind her eyes, the insensible workings of her brain, her certainty that she was going to die. Usually when she came out of an attack, she was curled into a fetal position on the floor of the shower stall or in the back of a closet, and she had a towel or article of clothing pressed hard against her mouth. That last, she’d always figured, was an unconscious effort to keep the psychological screaming from escaping through actual cries from her mouth.

But this latest panic attack, she realized as she gradually emerged from the fog, had been different. For one thing, she couldn’t remember ever fighting with corporeal monsters during one before. And she couldn’t recall ever shouting aloud threats to faceless menaces. Nor had she ever come out of an attack lying spread-eagle on her back, on a bare cot beneath a stark white fluorescent light, her wrists and ankles wrapped in leather restraints. Nor had she ever found herself being stared at from above by someone like Santiago Dixon, who seemed to be as breathless, as terrified and as insensate as she.

So this was a definite first.

“What happened?” she asked when she was coherent enough to manage it.

Before the question even left her mouth, though, she knew. Vaguely she remembered pounding on Dixon’s back and yanking at his hair and screaming something about how she would place certain parts of his anatomy into a variety of equipment normally reserved for torture and/or food processing. And also something about lepers and gargoyles. That part wasn’t too clear at the moment, so maybe he could help her fill in the blanks later.

But he didn’t help her out at all, only gazed at her in wide-eyed silence, as if he couldn’t quite figure out who or what she was. Then,
“What happened?”
he echoed incredulously.

She nodded weakly.

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, in clear disbelief. “You just about beat the hell outta me, that’s what happened. And you nearly gave my partner a concussion.” He jutted a thumb over his shoulder and glared at her some more. “And there are a couple of nurses out there filling out paperwork to enroll themselves in art school.”

“Oh,” Avery said. “I’m sorry.”

His lips parted marginally in surprise, but he said nothing more. His hat and jacket were gone, she noticed, and without them he seemed less menacing somehow. Until she bumped her gaze up to his face again and saw those cold green eyes and the jet-black hair spilling over his forehead. He seemed to be staring straight into her soul. And he seemed to not like what he saw there.

“Really,” she tried again. “I am sorry. I don’t usually attack people when that happens.”

“When what happens?” he demanded gruffly. “Just what the hell was that anyway? You were totally out of control.”

She hesitated, not wanting to share any part of herself with a total stranger she didn’t trust. Most especially she didn’t want to share the damaged part. Not that there were many parts of Avery that weren’t at least a little impaired. But he wasn’t the sort of person who would understand any of that. He was handsome, savvy, intelligent, confident. He wasn’t damaged at all. To try and explain to someone like him what it meant to be terrified of what he would consider nothing would only make her look crazier than she must already seem.

Still, she supposed she owed him an explanation. If nothing else, it might make him stop looking at her as if she were some kind of freak.

“It was a panic attack,” she said softly.

“A panic attack,” he repeated evenly.

Again she nodded. But she said nothing to elaborate. What else was there for her to say?

He shifted his weight to one foot, hooked his hands on his hips in challenge and flattened his mouth into a tight line. “Peaches, that was no panic attack. That was transglobal, thermodynamic warfare.”

She made a face at him. “Oh, stop it with the hyper-bole.” Although, now that she studied him more closely, she realized there was a big red spot on his cheek. “Look, I said I was sorry,” she said again. “It’s not like it’s something I can control. And usually it’s not that bad.”

“Just what is it then?”

She sighed. She wished she could tell him. At least in terms that wouldn’t make her sound weak and timid and nuts. Unfortunately, over the past several years, Avery had pretty much come to the conclusion that she
was
weak and timid and nuts. Which made her even more reluctant to tell him the truth.

In spite of that, she told him, “I wasn’t trying to be coy or uncooperative earlier when I told you I couldn’t go anywhere with you. I was telling you the truth. I can’t leave my apartment. Not without some serious preparation first.”

“What, like you need to make sure you have your wallet and house keys and a token for the subway?” he asked sarcastically.

“No. I can’t go out, because…” She sighed, resigned to revealing more of herself than she wanted him to know, because there was no other way to make him understand. “Because I have agoraphobia.”

He eyed her dubiously, “Which is what?” he asked. “Fear of the outdoors, right? But you weren’t outside yet when you went psycho.”

She tried to sit up, remembered that she was strapped down, so fell back against the cot with an exasperated sound. Honestly. Talk about overkill. So she’d roughed him up and called him a leper. So she’d nearly given someone a concussion. So she’d taken a couple of nurses out of commission. Like that didn’t happen every day in some boroughs of New York.

She tugged meaningfully at her restraints. “Let me up, will you?” she pleaded. “I’m fine now. I swear.”

“What you are is completely whack,” he countered. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Once or twice,” she said softly. Then, more forcefully, “I’m fine,” she repeated. She jerked at the restraints again. “Get me
out
of these things. Let me
up.
Please.”

Although he obviously didn’t believe her, he bent over her and, after a moment’s hesitation, cautiously unfastened one of her wrist restraints. But he waited before loosening any more, apparently wanting to take this thing slowly, in case she was still a little, oh, homicidal. After another moment, evidently satisfied that she wasn’t going to go all Hannibal Lecter on him again—probably—he carefully freed one of the ankle restraints, too. Then the other. Then finally the last, on her other wrist. Then he took a giant step backward and positioned himself near the door.

Where was she anyway? she wondered as she folded herself into a sitting position on the edge of the cot. It wasn’t
quite
a padded cell, but it was a tiny white room, empty save the cot on which she had been restrained, and there was a window in the door for observation from the other side. He’d mentioned nurses, so she must be in a hospital of some kind. God, she couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten here.

“What time is it?” she asked.

He flicked his wrist to glance at his watch, returning his attention to Avery in less than a nanosecond. “It’s ten after two.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“It’s two-ten in the morning,” he said. “You’ve been here for about an hour. But it took me and my partner almost an hour to get you here.”

Avery nodded, waiting for the panic to rise again, because she wasn’t in normal surroundings where she felt safe. Not that she ever really felt entirely safe in her normal surroundings. But nothing happened. She was a bit edgy, to be sure, but who wouldn’t be upon one’s discovery that one was in a strange place and couldn’t remember how one had arrived there? Not to mention when there was a man like Santiago Dixon staring at one as if one had just emerged from a pea pod from outer space?

“And just where is here?” she asked.

“You’re in an OPUS facility,” he told her.

Well, at least it wasn’t Bellevue.

“An OPUS
psychiatric
facility,” he clarified.

Oh. So it
was
Bellevue. Only without all the glamour and accountability.

She looked down at her attire, at the loud pajama bottoms and ragged purple sweatshirt. There was a rip in one sleeve that hadn’t been there before. One of her socks was missing, and the toenails of her one bare foot were painted five different colors. No telling how that had happened. The lost sock, she meant, since she had painted her toenails herself. One of her braids had come almost completely frayed. She looked at Dixon again, at the mark on his face for which she was responsible. She was lucky they’d only put her in restraints. Any other place would have performed a full frontal lobotomy by now.

Still, she wasn’t panicking here. The small, bare room didn’t frighten her the way most new surroundings did. And neither did Dixon’s presence in it. That had to be significant somehow, but she was too exhausted at the moment to try and figure it out.

“So tell me about this agoraphobia you have,” he said.

Avery reached for the unraveling braid and freed what little of it was still intact, then finger-combed her hair as best she could before going about the motions of plaiting it again. “Clinically,” she said as she wove the strands back together and avoided his gaze, “it’s defined as anxiety about being in a place or situation from which escape might be difficult or in which help may not be available in the event of having an unexpected panic attack or paniclike symptoms.”

“In layman’s terms?” he asked.

“It means I’m terrified of being someplace where I don’t feel safe,” she said simply. “And the only place I feel safe is my home. So anytime I have to leave my home, I am literally crippled by fear.”

What Avery didn’t add was that her agoraphobia had appeared after her release from prison and was a direct result of her incarceration. As bad as it had been to have her freedom revoked, in prison, for the first time in her life, she’d felt oddly safe. Strangely content. There was a strict system and regimen to life inside that had appealed to her. Everything was scheduled and everything went according to plan. Everyone was equal. The only thing that had been expected of her was that she stay out of trouble. And living in a place like that, Avery had felt no desire to get into trouble.

Not as she had growing up in East Hampton, where society’s strict rules—which had never made any sense to her—had dictated she behave in ways she didn’t want to behave. Growing up in the Hamptons, she had never felt like a worthwhile part of society, and because of that she had rebelled. Constantly. To her family she had always been a troublemaker. Behind bars, though…

As crazy as it sounded, behind bars Avery had felt free for the first time. Free to be herself. Free to say and think and feel what she wanted. Her activities had been curtailed, to be sure. But her mind and her emotions had been liberated. No one had censored her for her feelings or her thoughts or her dreams or her desires. No one had been disappointed by what went on in her head or offended by the things that came out of her mouth. On the contrary, she’d had friends inside, people who liked her because of who she was. And who she was was one of them—a person who wanted the world to work the way it was supposed to, and who had been disappointed by the workings of the world.

Not that there hadn’t been bad people in prison. Certainly there were a lot of women at Rupert Halloran who deserved to be behind bars and who were a genuine menace to society. But the ones to whom Avery had gravitated had been like her—victims of circumstance, women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, women who had gotten involved with men they shouldn’t have. They’d understood Avery. Even when they discovered she came from a privileged background, they still understood her. And they liked her. And they considered her their equal. Prison was the only place where she had felt like a useful part of a meaningful society. Maybe it hadn’t been the kind of society that society appreciated. But Avery had appreciated it. And she’d been happy there.

Upon her release, though, once she returned to “acceptable” society, she discovered that where before she had felt uncomfortable, now she was genuinely frightened. In fact, she was terrified of acceptable society. Not just of all the rules, but of all the people, too. There were so many people on the outside, and there were so many different ways to go and be and live. Too many expectations on her. Too many societal dictates to follow. Too many choices. Too much freedom. Too much everything.

And Avery was completely alone in the world once she left prison. Her family had stopped speaking to her the minute they learned of her arrest, had turned their backs on her throughout her trial and incarceration. They’d made it clear—through their attorneys—that she would never,
ever,
have contact with them again. She was still entitled to her trust fund—alas, there was nothing they could do about that, since Great-Grandfather Nesbitt had set it up in a way that no one but Avery could touch it after she turned eighteen. But she must take her money and run, her family’s attorneys told her, and never return to her family. Because they’d made clear, too, that they weren’t her family anymore.