Page 53 of The Hacker
He chuckled—a warm, rich sound of amusement. Even more, it sounded relaxed, almost carefree. That wasn’t a mood she associated with Leland.
He returned with a thick white towel wrapped around his waist and an armful of extras. Dropping the pile on the adjacent chaise longue, he shook out the oversize terry cloth and wrapped it snugly around Dawn’s upper body. “Lean back,” he commanded before he tucked another towel around her legs as she lay on the lounge.
“May I dry your hair?” he asked, a third towel already in his hands.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Not with you around.” He lifted the towel in a questioning gesture.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about the hair-drying thing. She wasn’t used to being touched that way by a man. But this was Leland. “Sure,” she said.
He walked behind her and gently peeled her hair away from where it clung wetly to her shoulders and neck so he could drape it over the back of the lounge. Then he began to wrap the towel around a small section at a time, soaking up the water before moving to the next tress. The gentle tug and shift of his movements sent tingles of delight dancing over her scalp. She gave a little moan of pleasure.
The tugging stopped. “Did I pull too hard?”
“No, it feels so good. Almost as good as pool sex.”
The chuckle sounded again, sending a different kind of tingle through her.Shehad made him sound this way. “I might be insulted,” he said. “Except I feel too good myself.”
He continued with his drying and she hummed her approval. “I may have to dive back in just to get my hair wet again.”
“Go ahead. I like doing this for you.”
It was a strange thing for a man to offer, and she wondered what had made him think of it. But she wasn’t going to risk stopping him by asking.
When he finished, he stretched out on the lounge chair beside her, reaching across the space between them to take her hand, resting it on his bare chest and idly playing with her fingers.
The golden autumn sunlight poured down through the glass roof. It bathed Leland’s skin and hair in a soft glow so that she felt as though he radiated warmth. He closed his eyes, his face without his glasses looking vulnerable and at peace. A slight smile curled his lips so that he looked like a cat who had just lapped up a bowl of cream.
His touch on her fingers sent little zings of heat through her so she had to kick off the towel tucked over her shins and feet.
For long, blissful minutes, they lay side by side in silence, although she could swear that their bodies exuded a low hum of satisfaction that was nearly audible.
“I want to tell you what happened to me,” she said, surprising herself. But she needed him to know the gift he had given her.
His fingers tightened around hers and he sat up, swinging his legs off the chaise longue to set them on the cement floor so he was at right angles to her. “You don’t need to do that.”
She rolled her head to look at him. The angles of his face were taut, as though he was bracing himself, but his eyes were soft with concern. “Yes, I do. You’ve changed something in me in a good way. You should understand how important that is.”
He sandwiched her hand between his palms and took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m ready.”
“I was a sophomore at Glenn State University. First semester.” She used her free hand to clutch the towel tighter around her shoulders. “It was late on a Saturday afternoon in the fall but I’d been in the library all day because I had a paper due on Monday.” She tossed a wry grimace at him. “I was a real nerd. Studied all the time. Had to make dean’s list every semester.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. You give every job your best.”
Her heart began to pound as she pushed herself to describe what occurred next. “I had left my cell phone in my room and decided to go get it before I met some friends for dinner. So I packed up my stuff and left the library to walk across campus to my dorm.” She closed her eyes, remembering how blue the sky was; how the trees were scarlet, gold, and russet; how crisp and clear the air smelled as she drew it into her lungs after being shut up in the stuffy library. She even remembered thinking how lucky she was to be in this beautiful place. Which made everything worse. “There’d been a football game. I think we won but it doesn’t matter. As I was walking past a building that was under construction, three guys were walking toward me, laughing loudly, yelling cheers for the football team, and chugging from water bottles that it turned out held straight vodka. They asked me if I wanted a drink but I said, ‘No, thank you.’ For some reason, that made them angry. I tried to keep walking but they surrounded me and started yelling insults at me. I pushed by one of them and kept going.”
Terror seeped into her gut, twisting her stomach, as she relived the moment when one of the men had shouted, “Get that stuck-up bitch. We’ll teach her a lesson.” Then the rough seizure, an arm snaked around her waist and lifting her nearly off her feet while a hand slammed over her nose and mouth, making her lips bleed where her teeth cut into them.
“But one of them grabbed me. He put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream. I bit him.” She’d sunk her teeth into the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb, kicked at him with her sneakers, and tried to twist out of his grasp. But back then she didn’t know how to use leverage against a man so much bigger than herself. Now she did. “He was too drunk to care. He just squeezed harder against my nose and mouth.”
She’d thought she was going to suffocate. Now she dragged in a ragged breath.
“Dawn, you don’t have to tell me any more,” Leland said. She felt him ease his hold on her hand. She’d just noticed how tight it was.
“You should know this about me. It’s made me who I am now,” she said. If anything was going to move forward between them, it was important for him to understand fully the event that had damaged her.
“Nothing will change how I feel about you.”
