Page 68 of Dark Lover

The pain was finally easing.

“Sir, is that any better?” Gerard asked softly.

Tears moistened his face. He had the ability now to swipe at them. He hated himself.

But the pain had receded to mere tremors. He hadn’t been flayed until he was more dead than alive, or electrocuted, or ripped apart on a rack. He wasn’t in a dungeon, a cellar or a cage. He was in his twenty-million-dollar Park Avenue town home. He lay on a beautiful Oriental rug surrounded by works of art and antiques, with his majordomo kneeling beside him.

“It’s better,” Ian gasped. Then he rolled onto his stomach and vomited.

Then, somehow, he sat up, with Gerard’s help. It always shocked him to find out that his body wasn’t broken after all, that he could still function. Gerard pressed a glass to his lips. He swallowed aged scotch whiskey. As he did, the panic and fear finally rolled away, as the ocean did at low tide. He breathed deeply.

Sam.

Ian stiffened in disbelief. He’d left her alone in the vault. “Gerard!” He struggled to stand; Gerard helped him.

“Sir, you should rest. Whatever possessed you to leap? You cannot withstand the reminder!”

He met Gerard’s concerned gaze. “Bring my car around. Now.”

He should leap back to her. It would take less than a second.

He simply wasn’t brave enough.

SAM WAS in disbelief.

Ian had leapt into time, leaving her a prisoner in the vault!

And Hemmer could come back at any time!

She would have laughed, because it was so absurd, so unbelievable, for him to abandon her that way, except that nothing that had just happened was funny. He had panicked.

In that moment, there was absolute comprehension. Ian Maclean came across as an arrogant self-centered jerk, at once wealthy, seductive and powerful. Most people would think he had the world at his fingertips. He sauntered about the city as if he had no cares.

It was a facade.

He’d just become unglued by being locked in a vault, when he had the power to leap through time and space and free himself. Of course he had. They’d put him in a cage. That much she knew. They had probably locked him up a hundred different ways. Being locked in the vault had triggered reactions he couldn’t control.

Just the way he’d come unglued when he’d destroyed John. Facing that demon had brought another kind of reaction. He’d gone berserk in the process of destroying it, and broken down afterward. He’d shed tears. And she didn’t know what those tears had meant, either.

She’d never forget what she’d just seen a moment ago—or what she’d seen in his apartment the other night.

But there was so much more. Maclean was unbelievably complicated. He hadn’t been careless or indifferent when he’d been trying to bargain with Nick over his file. He’d been angry and desperate. The facade had been shattered then, too.

Ian Maclean was badly fractured. Beneath the surface arrogance and nonchalance, the indifference and who-gives-a-damn attitude, she couldn’t imagine what really existed. She’d seen glimpses. There was fear, anger, pain. Just possibly, there was shame. He certainly was determined to keep his past covered up and she didn’t blame him. The bad-boy image was only the tip of the iceberg.

Sam told herself that if she started giving him the benefit of the doubt, she was done. Compassion was bad enough, but trying to make him into someone okay was not. He wasn’t okay. He wasn’t kind or caring—not at all. In fact, he was ruthless and selfish. But she didn’t feel better. Because now she knew why.

She’d be ruthless and self-centered, too, if she’d been locked up for sixty-six years by one of history’s greatest demons.

He’d come all the way downtown to Hemmer’s because he’d thought she was there and in trouble.

“Get it together, Rose,” she warned herself. The Sam of old would be furious at being abandoned in such a cowardly way. She’d have no respect for anyone who turned tail and ran. But she wasn’t angry at all. She was shaken by what she’d seen and what she was starting to comprehend. Very few human beings, mortal or not, could survive what he’d survived with any degree of sanity.

What if he wasn’t half as bad as he made himself out to be?

What if a real person was buried beneath the bad-boy facade?

Sam couldn’t believe herself. She shouldn’t be thinking about him. None of this was her business. Her business was recovering the page.