I blinked my eyes at him, and put on my most innocent expression. “I mean, he knows he got the negative.”
“Uh-huh. Does he know he got all of the copies?”
“Um… he thinks he did, and that’s what’s important, right?”
“So you blackmailed him, then double-crossed him.”
“I look at it more as insurance. Anyway, I’ve never needed to use the picture and he doesn’t know it still exists. I haven’t had any contact with him since our divorce was final, and that was five years ago. That was why I knew Jason wasn’t trying to kill me, because he wouldn’t have any reason to.”
“Except he does have reason to.”
“Well, he would if he knew, but he doesn’t.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if I’d given him a headache. “Where are the copies?”
“In my safe deposit box. There’s no way anyone saw them by accident, and no one else knows I have them, not even my family.”
“Okay. I strongly suggest that, when this is over and you can come out of hiding, that you get those copies and destroy them.”
“I can do that,” I allowed.
“I know you can. The question is: Will you? Promise me.”
I scowled at him. “I said I would.”
“No, you said you could. There’s a difference. Promise me.”
“Oh, all right. I promise I’ll destroy the pictures.”
“Without making any extra copies.”
Sheesh, he wasn’t the most trusting guy in the world. It pissed me off that he’d thought of that, too. Either Dad had been giving him advice again, or he had an unnaturally suspicious mind.
“Without making any extra copies,” he repeated.
“All right!” I snapped, and made plans to maybe accidentally drop his television remote in the toilet.
“Good.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Now, are there any other little secrets you’re keeping from me, anyone else you’re blackmailing, any revenge thing going on that you neglected to mention because you didn’t think it was relevant?”
“No, Jason’s the only person I’ve ever blackmailed. And he deserved it.”
“He deserved worse than that. He needed to have his ass kicked up around his shoulders.”
Slightly mollified by those sentiments, I shrugged. “Daddy would have done it, so we didn’t tell him why Jason and I got divorced. That was to protect Daddy, not Jason.” No way was stomping Jason worth my dad spending even one minute under arrest for assault, which is what would have happened, because Jason is the petulant type and he’d have filed charges.
“Agreed.” Wyatt watched me for a moment, then gave a rueful little shake of his head and pulled me into his arms. Comforted, I slid my arms around his waist and laid my head on his chest, and he rested his cheek on top of my head. “Now I understand why you need so much reassurance,” he murmured. “That was a big hit you took, finding your husband kissing your sister.”
If there’s anything I hate, it’s people feeling sorry for me. In this case, there was no need. I’d moved on, and left Jason in my dust. But I couldn’t say, “Oh, it didn’t really bother me,” because that would have been a big fat lie and he’d have known it and thought I still hurt so much I couldn’t let myself admit it. So I muttered, “I got over it. And I got the Mercedes.” Except I didn’t have my Mercedes now, because it was just a hunk of crushed and twisted metal.
“You may have gotten over the hurt, but you didn’t get over the experience. It made you wary.”
Now he was making me sound like some poor wounded bird. I pulled back and scowled up at him. “I’m not wary; I’m smart. There’s a difference. I want to be sure there’s something solid between us before I sleep with you-”
“Too late,” he said, and grinned.
I sighed. “I know,” I said, and laid my head back on his chest. “Gentlemen don’t gloat.”
“What does that tell you?”
It told me he was way too cocky, and I needed to shore up my defenses. There was a big problem, though: I didn’t want to shore them up; I wanted to tear them down. Common sense said I might as well abandon my stance on not sleeping with him, since I was doing nothing but wasting my breath. On the other hand, it went against the grain to let him have his way in everything.
“It tells me I should probably go stay in a motel in another town,” I said, just to wipe the smile off his face.
It worked.
“What?” he snapped. “What gave you a harebrained idea like that?”
“I should be perfectly safe in another town, right? I could check in under a fake name, and-”
“Forget it,” he said. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you run away.” Then he realized that I now had wheels, and he had no control over what I did during the day while he was at work. He didn’t anyway, because if I wanted to leave, all I had to do was pick up the phone and call any of my family and they would come pick me up. For that matter, his own mother would, too. “Ah, shit,” he finished.
He was so eloquent.
Chapter Twenty-five
I had a nightmare that night, which isn’t surprising considering all that had happened. Probably I should already have had several nightmares, but my subconscious is as good at ignoring things as my conscious is. I don’t have many nightmares; my dreams are usually about everyday stuff, with weird little details, because that’s what dreams are for, right? Like I’d be at Great Bods trying to take care of a mountain of paperwork, but the members would keep interrupting me because half of them wanted to be able to ride the stationary bikes in the nude, and the other half thought this would be a total gross-out, which it would. Stuff like that.
I didn’t dream about being shot. There was nothing to dream about that, except the sound and then the burning in my arm, which isn’t very much to build on, but the auto accident had a wealth of details for my subconscious to resurrect. I didn’t dream about going through another stop sign; instead I was in my red Mercedes, the one I had got when Jason and I divorced and had since traded in for the white one, and I was driving over a high, arching bridge when all of a sudden the car went out of control and started spinning. Car after car kept hitting me, and each hit knocked me closer and closer to the rail, and then I knew the next one would push me over. I saw that last car coming at me, in slow motion; then there was a horrible jolt and my red Mercedes hit the guardrail and tipped over it.
I woke with a start, my heart pounding, and shaking all over. I was shaking, not my heart. Maybe my heart was, too, but I didn’t have any way of knowing; all I could feel was pounding. And Wyatt was leaning over me, a big, protective shadow in the darkness of the room.
He stroked my belly, then gripped my waist and eased me into his arms. “Bad dream?”