Free Come Lie With Me by Linda Howard Page B

best she could.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” he jeered softly. “You can pry into everyone else’s secrets, so why can’t you share a few of your own? What are your weaknesses? Do you shoplift for kicks? Sleep with strangers? Cheat on your taxes?”
    Dione shuddered again, her hands clenched so tightly that her knuckles were white. She couldn’t tell him, not all of it, yet in a way he had a right to know some of her pain. She had already witnessed a lot of his, knew what he thought, knew his longing and despair. None of her other patients had demanded so much from her, but Blake wasn’t like the others. He was asking for more than he knew, just as she was asking him for superhuman effort. If she put him off now, she knew in her bones that he wouldn’t respond to her anymore. His recovery depended on her, on the trust she could foster between them.
    She was shaking visibly, her entire body caught up in the tremors that shook her from head to foot. She knew that the bed was vibrating, knew that he could feel it. His brows snapped together and he said uncertainly, “Dione? Listen, I—”
    â€œI’m illegitimate,” she grounded out, her teeth chattering. She was panting with the effort it took her tospeak at all, and she felt a film of perspiration break out on her body. She sucked in her breath on a sob that shuddered through her; then with a grinding force of will she held her body still. “I don’t know who my father was; my mother didn’t even know his name. She was drunk, he was there, and presto! She had a baby. Me. She didn’t want me. Oh, she fed me, I suppose, since I’m alive to tell about it. But she never hugged me, never kissed me, never told me that she loved me. In fact, she went out of her way to tell me that she hated me, hated having to take care of me, hated even seeing me. Except for the welfare check she got for me, she would probably have dumped me in a trash can and left me.”
    â€œYou don’t know that!” he snapped, heaving himself up on one elbow. She could tell that he was taken aback by the harsh bitterness in her voice, but now that she had started, she couldn’t stop. If it killed her, the poison had to spew out now.
    â€œShe told me,” she insisted flatly. “You know how kids are. I tried every way I knew how to make her love me. I couldn’t have been more than three years old, but I can remember climbing up on chairs, then onto the cabinets so I could reach the whiskey bottle for her. Nothing worked, of course. I learned not to cry, because she slapped me if I cried. If she wasn’t there, or if she was passed out drunk, I learned to eat whatever I could. Dry bread, a piece of cheese, it didn’t matter. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to eat, because she’d spent all the check on whiskey. If I waited long enough she’d go off with some man and come back with a little money, enough to get by until the next check, or the next man.”
    â€œDee, stop it!” he ordered harshly, putting his handon her arm and shaking her. Wildly she jerked away from him.
    â€œYou wanted to know!” she breathed, her lungs aching with the effort they were making to draw air into her constricted chest. “So you can hear it!…Whenever I made the mistake of bothering her, which didn’t take much, she slapped me. Once she threw a whiskey bottle at me. I was lucky that time, because all I got was a little cut on my temple, though she was so angry at the wasted whiskey that she beat me with her shoe. Do you know what she told me, over and over? ‘You’re just a bastard, and nobody loves a bastard!’ Over and over, until finally I had to believe it. I know the exact day when I learned to believe it. My seventh birthday. I’d started to go to school, you see, and I knew then that birthdays were supposed to be something special. Birthdays were when your parents gave you