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He let out a jerky sigh as something inside him finally relaxed.
“I still want to know how you knew about the bomb,” she said.
Sean stared down at the pink hooked rug. “It’ll sound strange.”
“Try me.”
It took a while to puzzle out the best way to describe something so intangible. “I have…feelings. When I’m in a combat situation, I get warnings. Prickles on my neck, tingling in my balls. I was trained to act on it without thinking. It only works if you trust it blindly.”
Her clear white brow furrowed. “You mean, like, intuition?”
“You could call it that,” he said. “Maybe it comes from growing up with my dad, I imagine. You know about his illness, right?”
“Yes, I heard that he was—”
“A nutcase? Yeah. He saw danger everywhere. Every place was a potential minefield. Anything, a pen, a jar of nails, a carton of milk, could be a bomb in disguise. It was stressful, living with the guy.”
“Oh. Uh, wow,” she murmured. “I see how that might—”
“Skew your perspective, yeah,” he finished, matter-of-factly. “My brothers and I didn’t have any other point of reference. Dad’s bad guys were behind every tree.” He paused, reflecting. “It’s not that far from reality, now that I think about it. Look at T-Rex. You never know.”
She was shaken. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad for me,” he said impatiently. “I’m just showing you my train of reasoning. The letter was part of it. You said T-Rex wanted to make you burn. He used the word ‘explosive.’ That made me think about Kev’s truck exploding, which reminded me of a dream I had. Kev was in it, and he was worried about your car.”
She was oddly gratified by that. “My car? Kev? Really?”
“Yeah. So I saw you and Madden walking towards your car, and it all came together. The note, the explosion, the dream.” He lifted his hands. “There it is. My convoluted mental processes laid bare.”
Her thoughtful eyes stayed on him, making him twitch. “This is the part where you tell me I’m a lunatic, right?”
“I don’t think you’re a lunatic,” she said. “Or if you are, I’m lucky that you are. I’d be blown to bits if you weren’t. So thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I didn’t have any choice.”
She looked perplexed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “It means what it means. I’m not playing word games. It’s not something I did voluntarily, so thanks are meaningless.”
Liv wrapped her arms across her tits. He got real busy trying not to think about how soft and lush and hot she must be under there, all perfumed from her various girl goops. He forced his mind back on track.
“I was wondering if you’d let me look at T-Rex’s e-mails,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
The question stymied him for a moment, but there was no reason not to tell her the naked truth. “Because I’m interested. Because I don’t want you to get hurt. Because I’m so curious, it’s fucking killing me.”
“Ah. Well. If you put it that way,” she murmured.
She pulled out a laptop out of her suitcase, sat down and tippety-tapped on it. The light from the screen lit up her face, serenely lovely in concentration. She gave him a quick smile, and laid the opened computer on his knees. “I opened the folder. There are nine of them.”
The dates ranged over the past three weeks. He clicked and read them in sequence. They were just as she had described. Pseudo-poetic slime. Clingy declarations of obsessive love, minute observations of her physical charms, comments on her clothing and activities. The last three had suggestions that grew more sexually explicit with each succeeding letter. His jaw tightened as he read them. Scumbag asshole.
He nodded, snapped her laptop closed, and handed it back to her.
“So? What do you think?” she asked, setting it aside.
“My first impression is self-conscious, artificial,” he said. “Like he’s following a template.”
