Then she bolted from the apartment, spattered with blood, leaving her assailant pinned to the wall with Wyatt’s Parisian chef’s knife, bestowed upon her as a parting gift.
“Take it,” he’d said with a smile. “I don’t want to come home next weekend to find that you’ve chopped off a finger with your dull one.”
She had thanked him, never knowing, as she tucked it into her purse, that it was about to save her life.
There was no traffic on the FDR Drive at this hour on a Sunday morning. Wyatt would be at JFK Airport with plenty of time to spare before his flight. Too much time.
Wyatt was wistful as he gazed out the window at a barge on the East River, realizing that he could have lingered at least another fifteen, twenty minutes, with Lindsay.
Yeah, but so? What’s fifteen minutes? he asked himself, feeling vaguely foolish.
It’s damned significant, he answered his own question. Particularly when you hadn’t seen someone in twenty years and weren’t going to see her again for an entire week.
There were plenty of things he could have told Lindsay in fifteen minutes.
Yeah, and you probably would have regretted all of them the second you left.
Wyatt Goddard was no stranger to morning-after ardor. It had led to his moving in with Allison and making doomed commitments to a couple of other women in the past.
Maybe it was better that their good-bye had been so hurried.
He’d kissed her, at least, and given her that chef’s knife she had coveted in his kitchen.
Someday soon, I’ll take her to Paris and buy her a whole set, he vowed-then shook his head.
Morning-after ardor again. Making plans, making promises. Good thing they were only to himself this time.
It was a good thing he was going to be an ocean away from Lindsay for the next six days.
That would keep him from saying or doing anything rash, would give him enough space to figure out whether his feelings for Lindsay were rekindled infatuation…or something more enduring.
“Stay back,” the burly NYPD officer cautioned Lindsay as he and his partner, guns at the ready, prepared to enter her apartment with the key they’d quickly retrieved from Bob, the building super.
The door had swung shut and locked after her when she bolted. Ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, had passed since the ordeal in her bathroom, but her heart was still racing, every breath painful in a constricted chest.
She had insisted on coming back up here with the cops, needing to face her incapacitated attacker.
I have to get a glimpse of her face.
That it had been a woman had caught her entirely off guard, but there had been no mistaking the feminine pitch of the voice as it screeched in agony.
The sound still echoed chillingly in Lindsay’s head.
This wasn’t a typical crime. She knew that, even before she had seen the passing expressions of surprise on the officers’ faces when she told them.
They asked if she was positive that it hadn’t been a man lying in wait for her in the darkened apartment. She knew what they were thinking: that the notorious masked East Side rapist had ventured a dozen or so blocks south, into new territory.
She assured the police that she was a hundred percent certain it had been a woman.
She could tell they weren’t convinced, even now.
Weapons poised, they crept into the apartment as Lindsay and Bob hung back a safe distance down the hall.
Lindsay hugged her aching rib cage, still trying to catch her breath, beginning to feel the physical evidence of the struggle. Her head throbbed where it had slammed against the tile floor, her elbows stung where the skin had been scraped away, and she suspected that her face, which felt raw, was covered with scratches. But she’d survived.
Thanks to Wyatt.
From inside the apartment, she heard one of the police officers curse loudly.
They reappeared in the hall moments later.
“What is it?” Lindsay asked, but she already knew. It was obvious from their disheartened expressions.
“There was blood all over the bathroom, and on the wall where you said you left him-I mean, her. But whoever it was got away.”
“Are you upset with me, Mom?”
Betty Cellamino looked up at Leo, startled, as though she had been lost in thought. She had spoken very little as he spilled his story, and her expression had been impossible to read.
“Am I upset with you?” She leaned across the kitchen table and pulled Leo close to her, stroking his head as she held it against the soft terry cloth of her robe. “Oh, honey, no. I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me what was going on. When I think of what could have happened-”
“I’m fine,” he pointed out quickly. “No harm done.”
“We should call the police.”
“I knew you were going to say that.” He shook his head. “No, Ma.”
“This woman might go after somebody else-and who knows what’s going to happen then? Maybe the next person won’t be as lucky.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how the police would find her anyway. It’s not like I had a license plate for the car or anything. And I didn’t even get a good look at her face. Plus she was wearing a disguise.”
“What about the phone number you called? And the e-mail? She can be tracked that way.”
“No,” he said, realizing he had done something stupid. Really stupid. “When I got home yesterday I deleted the number from my phone’s incoming calls log, and I deleted her e-mails, too. I was just so…disgusted with myself.”
“Don’t be disgusted with yourself. Be disgusted with her. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I was trying to meet my biological mother behind your back. And father, too.”
“I know, but I don’t blame you. Maybe we shouldn’t have kept you in the dark about all that for as long as we did. Maybe we should have been more open about it.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t.” She took a deep breath, sipped her coffee. Then she said, “Listen, I’m going to help you find your birth parents if that’s what you want.”
Was it?
He wasn’t so sure now.
“Can I think about it?” he asked.
“Sure you can.” She looked at the clock. “I’ve got to go get ready for church.”
“Mind if I go with you?” he asked, and she looked at him in surprise. “I owe someone up there a big thank-you,” he explained.
His mother grinned, leaned over, and kissed him on the head.
He found himself inhaling her familiar scent: coffee and talcum powder and…
Her.
That was what it was.
Just her. His mom.
She might not have given birth to him, but she had been there for everything else. Everything that mattered most.
“I’m making extra sauce tonight,” she said, patting his arm, “if you wanted to invite anyone over for dinner.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Did you see the message I left for you the other day? From someone named Sarah Rose?”
He had seen it-and ignored it, too caught up in everything else in his life.
Now he grinned.
“Maybe I will invite someone over for dinner. Thanks, Ma.”
“And what can I get for you, ma’am?” asked the flight attendant, smiling as she looked right through the passenger in seat 15F.
“I’ll have a ginger ale, please.”
Her stomach was still roiling from this morning’s ordeal, but nausea was the least of it.
Thank God the wound in her side had been superficial, nothing more than an agonizingly deep cut. Another fraction of an inch over, and she’d have been in serious trouble.
The same was true with her hand. The blade had stabbed through the fleshy skin and tendon between her thumb and forefinger, and it hurt like hell. It was all she could do not to pass out on the spot when she pulled out the blade, but she managed to keep her cool.
And she got away.