Page 21 of Healing Hazel
“Bullshit! Maybe not until it was verified by Dr. Lake, but you had to know or else you wouldn’t be in the same fucking hospital they brought me to! Had to know how stupid I was to trust a man I barely knew. Trust him to not only tie me up, but to gag me. To chain me to a fucking wooden cross and then proceed to… to…”
“Oh, Zellie,” I said, my heart breaking as the woman broke before me. Broke into a million pieces. As she collapsed against me, I wanted to shield her from ever being hurt again while at the same moment, I wanted to find the guy who’d shattered her trust and put him in the fucking ground.
She sobbed until she was hoarse, her body shaking like a leaf even with my arms tightly around her, holding her so close yet not close enough. I wanted my very body to envelop hers in warmth and safety that she could wear like a cloak. I rocked her, the only sounds her sobs and my murmurs of reassurance that she was safe, to let it out, that I had her, that no one was ever going to hurt her again.
The office got brighter and shadows shifted as the sun rose higher outside where the world continued to rotate on its axis. But inside, in this room, time had zoomed back to whenever the woman that Hazel had been became the woman she was. My sole goal was to help her move forward again and become the Hazel whose future held nothing but love and warmth and the knowledge that she was safe.
Chapter Ten
Hazel
I had not yet lived a quarter of a century but felt as if I were a hundred years old. Exhaustion threatened to pull me under and perhaps never let me wake again. I might have accepted that promise of darkness to shield methatnight but now I wanted to fight, to scream. To punch and kick, scratch and claw, but most importantly, to become the woman Nigel thought I was. After a last shuddering breath, I pushed myself off the welcoming warmth of his chest and sat back.
“Still have that hanky?”
“Always,” he said and produced it, once more wiping my face and waiting until I blew my nose before smiling and leaning forward to press a kiss to my forehead.
“You know, you’re making it very hard not to fall in love with you, Dr. Berringer.”
He frowned. “Then I’m not doing a very good job because my goal is to make it impossible, Miss Waltman.”
Perhaps the reason I felt so much lighter was because I’d cried what had to be, if not a river, at least a tributary full of tears. Or more likely, it was because this man had held me as I’d shed every one of them.
“So, if you didn’t come to ask Dr. Lake about me, why did you come here?” I asked.
“I did come to ask about you, but not in the way you think.”
His arm briefly tightened around me as if he feared I was going to jump up, but I shook my head. “You can relax. I’m not going to flee. I’m so tired of running. It hasn’t done me a damn bit of good, has it?”
“No, it hasn’t,” he agreed, his arm loosening but his hand beginning to run lightly over my back.
“In what way then?”
He didn’t need more, easily picking up where he’d left off. “I actually didn’t even come to consult with him. I wanted to ask if he thought Mira might be willing to talk to me.”
“Mira? Why?”
“Because I knew she’d battled with her need to submit. Maybe not in the same way you have been but battled just the same. I know there are countless submissives I could speak with at the Ranch but thought that if I could get some insight from one I knew personally and knew a bit of her history, then perhaps I could help you. Maybe even see if she thought speaking to you herself would help.”
I thought about that and had to agree it not only made sense, it was a good idea. I knew Mira from school as we’d taken some of the same classes. We’d become friendly, but not close enough to share such intimate details. Though a great deal of that was on me as I’d not shared my history with anyone really. The closest I’d come to that was to Master Derek when I’d interviewed with him and Dr. Nelson after deciding that I wanted to be more than the receptionist at the clinic. They and Beverly MacIntosh had convinced me that I could become the nurse I aspired to be.
“I heard you say ‘Little girl,’ and saw you holding those folders?—”
“Folder, singular, not plural,” Nigel cut in to say. “And no, it was not from anyLittlelooking for a Daddy. It was that of a certain someone whose mind is almost as quick to convince her of something that isn’t true as her feet are to run away from that very truth. Care to guess who?” His brow arched and I felt my cheeks heating.
“Um, me?”
“Yes, you. And no, it does not contain anything about your past or your trauma. It simply holds the forms that every guest or staff member of the Ranch or Ridge completes.”
I considered that information as well and nodded. “So that’s how you knew I’m not a Little?”
He chuckled and reached up to tuck a strand of hair that had come loose back behind my ear before sliding his fingers along my jawline. “No, and I have no clue why it seems everyone finds it shocking that I never considered you as a Little. Even when Sadie pointed out that I met you while you were attending a tea party full of Littles, I never saw you as one. Hell, I have a lot of friends who are submissive or switches, and I’ve attended a lot of conferences where vanillas outnumber us spice-lovers ten to one. That doesn’t mean I haven’t always and will forever be a Dominant. We are who we are and you, Hazel Christine Waltman, are a natural-born submissive.”
“Practicing or not?” I said with a strangled laugh.
“Babygirl, if you ask me, you’ve got one hell of a good reason for taking a break. I’m hoping to give you reason to shake off the past and go forward.”
I felt the warmth of an ember beginning in the pit of my belly as his hand moved from my jaw to slip behind my head and cup the nape of my neck. The ember began to flare when his fingers tightened just the barest bit and he used that hand to pull me forward until our breaths mingled.
