Jane Godman - The Soldier's Seduction

Because she kept them hidden behind her dark glasses, Bryce hadn’t seen Steffi’s eyes until just now. They had taken his breath away. The golden-brown irises had elongated downward notches that made them look like cat’s eyes. He had never seen eyes like them. What had Leon called the condition that caused it? Coloboma, that was it.

She was an enigma. Bryce didn’t care what she said; Steffi had been scared out of her wits when he broke in here, trying to hide under the bed and covering her head with her hands. His first guess had been that she was running from a bad relationship. Don’t let them get me? Them. Plural. That made it sound less like she was running from a vengeful ex. One thing was for sure; she clearly wasn’t ready to confide in him. Another thing was certain; Bryce wasn’t leaving her until he knew she was both well and safe. To hell with what his brothers might say about his knack for collecting waifs and strays. This was Steffi. She was different. He didn’t know why; it was just a conviction, solid and unshakable, sitting in the center of his chest.

Treading softly back out of the room, Bryce made his way into the den. There was a TV in here as well, but the walls were so thin he was afraid of waking Steffi. With a sigh of resignation, he picked up one of her celebrity magazines and began to flick through it. After twenty minutes of thumbing through the magazines and newspapers, he came to the conclusion that Steffi had a bit of an obsession with the very story she had interrupted when she asked him to turn the TV off so she could go to sleep. Either that, or it was a coincidence that all these journals she had stockpiled contained articles about the disappearance of Anya Moretti.

Bryce hadn’t paid much attention to the case. Celebrities didn’t interest him, and the sort of happily-ever-after romances in which Anya Moretti starred weren’t his style. He knew it was a sordid story, typical gossip column fodder. Greg Spence, Moretti’s boyfriend, had been found shot through the head. The story was that another woman had been with him at the time. She had been shot as well, also through the head. Although the woman had still not been identified, rumors were rife on social media about the compromising position in which the couple had been found. Anya Moretti had not been seen since the day of the murders. The inevitable conclusions had been drawn. Moretti, once Hollywood’s darling, had already been tried and convicted in the press as the woman who had killed her boyfriend and his lover in a jealous rage.

Bryce thought again how he just hadn’t seen Steffi as the type to enjoy this sort of trashy reporting. He started to cast aside the magazine he had been thumbing without reading the story, when one of the pictures caught his eye. Most of the articles had gone with the same photographs. Moretti in the role that had brought her into the public eye as an accident-prone speedway rider, shaking loose her waist-length curls as she sat astride a bike and removed her helmet. Or on the podium when she received her Oscar, her arm held high as she raised the statuette above her head in a celebratory gesture. One had gone with a red carpet picture of her smiling into Spence’s eyes as they held hands. He was a tall, handsome man with dark brown hair drawn back into a ponytail. The caption beneath the picture stated that they hadn’t been together long, but there was already talk of an engagement. Most articles included pictures of the crime scene outside Spence’s luxury apartment on the morning the bodies were found. Emergency vehicles converged on the building, and shocked onlookers waited behind a makeshift barrier.

This picture Bryce studied now was different. This article included a photograph of a younger Anya Moretti. Her chestnut curls were drawn back in a ponytail and there was a wistful smile on her face as she turned to look at the photographer. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but you could tell she had that special something that would always draw the camera to her. It was her eyes that held Bryce’s attention. Her golden-brown eyes with their unusual downward notches. They were cat’s eyes. They were Steffi’s eyes.

* * *

It was fully light when Steffi woke again and she lay still, blinking slightly as she recalled the events of the previous day. Turning her head, she confirmed that Bryce was in the chair where he had been when she fell asleep. But something in his demeanor had changed. The concerned look had gone. He was watching her, but there was a frown in his eyes. She didn’t need to ask why. It was obvious. He knew. Somehow, between her falling asleep and waking, Bryce had discovered the secret of her identity.

“How did you find out?” It didn’t occur to her to try to deny it. Subterfuge wasn’t Steffi’s style. It almost felt like a relief that, at last, someone knew who she was.

“There was a picture in one of your magazines. It showed a close-up of your eyes.”

Steffi sighed, pushing herself into an upright position. Although she still felt weak, the stomach cramps were a thing of the past. “I knew my eyes would give me away. I usually wear contact lenses so I don’t draw attention to them. In the early days, when I made my first films, it didn’t bother me too much. Then the comments started to get intrusive and I decided I’d rather have normal eyes. But I’d been out jogging that day and I didn’t have time to pick my contact lenses up...” Her voice trailed off as the memory of that awful morning came back to her. Swallowing hard, she focused on Bryce. “What will you do now?”

“I guess that depends on you.” His eyes never left her face. “Did you kill them?”

“No, but I don’t know how I can prove that to you.”

Although she had known Bryce Delaney for only three months, Steffi had gotten to know enough about him in that time. He was fiercely moral and totally honest. If he thought she was the person who killed Greg and the woman he was with, Bryce would hand her over to the police without hesitation. He wouldn’t accept anything less than the truth from her. But how could she convince him about her version of events, particularly when everything she had told him since her arrival in Stillwater had been a lie?

He seemed to be following her thought process. “How about you tell me all of it and let me judge for myself?”

“Can I get a shower first?” She tried out a smile, but it went wrong somewhere in the middle and ended up with her lower lip wobbling pitifully.

She saw Bryce’s dark brown eyes soften slightly. “I’ll make coffee and toast while you get ready. Then we’ll talk.”

Standing under the lukewarm water, Steffi tried not to let the flashbacks get to her. It was useless. Ever since that day, she had lived with a constant series of images playing inside her head. Bright sunlight patterning the sidewalk as she jogged up to the entrance of Greg’s apartment building on that lazy Sunday morning. The man who exited the elevator as she stepped in. The strange feeling that had hit her in that instant. She tried to conjure up his image. His shades and the cap tilted low had disguised his looks. All she could recall was the tattoo on the back of his right hand where he gripped the gym bag he carried. The tattoo was an eye. A perfect, blue, bloodshot eye, gazing up at her from the back of his hand. An eye she had last seen when she was five years old.

It was the same sign the men who had killed her parents had on the back of their right hands. It wasn’t similar, or an imitation. It was the same tattoo. There was no way Steffi could be mistaken. Not when that symbol had featured in her nightmares for all these years. Not when, as a child, she had obsessively drawn that bloodshot orb over and over. Not when she could count the number of hours she had spent hunched over her laptop, searching the internet for gangs who used that mark.