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He blinked. “Now, there’s a new one.”
“Don’t try to be clever! Driver, throw this man off the bus!”
The driver—short, balding, sixty if he was a day—blanched. Emma was so furious she could barely contain herself. Why hadn’t she been born tall and muscular and male?
“Don’t you think we should talk about this?” He advanced on her down the aisle. “Whatever it is?”
“Now you want to talk.” Suddenly, her knees would no longer support her, and she sank into one of the cushioned seats. “How could you have done it? How could you have betrayed me like this?”
His face grew stony as he stopped beside her. “I don’t betray my friends.”
Not only was that blatantly untrue, but hurtful as well. Was that how he regarded her? As just another one of his friends? “I know what you did. The moment Hugh said it, I should have realized what he meant, but I was too distracted by everything that had happened to pay attention.” As she gazed up at him, she was filled with outrage. “You were Hugh’s spy.”
He took a deep breath, then sat in the seat across the aisle. She waited for him to deny it—wanted him to—but he didn’t. “Somebody had to watch out for you.”
She felt as if she’d been ripped open. “I was watching out for me! I didn’t need you to do it.”
“Now, there’s a lie!” He sprang back up again. “Of course I fed him information. I sure wasn’t going to let him find out that you were buying lice shampoo and kissing your escort in the middle of town, not to mention getting tattooed.”
“I w
anted him to find that out.” She jumped to her feet, too.
“Well, now, that just goes to prove my point.”
A new thought struck her. “My tattoo! Of course it’s fading. It’s not permanent, is it?” She shoved up the sleeve of her T-shirt and looked at the tattoo with fresh eyes. Sure enough, it was fading. “You—God!” She jerked down her sleeve. “You must have put something in my margarita. I wasn’t drunk! I was drugged! And the tattoo wasn’t done with needles. It’s some kind of dye.”
He splayed one hand on the back of the seat in front of him and leaned in to her. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re upset that you won’t have to spend the rest of your life with my name tattooed across your arm! If I don’t hear a thank-you in the next thirty seconds, we’re going to have a serious argument.”
Her skin was burning. “You drugged me!”
“Some knockout drops I got from one of my acquaintances in the medical profession. And the wife of an old friend did the artwork. She has a background in textile design.” He acted as if that made it all right, as if the details somehow mitigated the depth of his duplicity.
“What else have you done that I don’t know about?”
“Not enough, that’s for damned sure, or we wouldn’t have been forced to get married!”
She froze.
His voice softened. “Your plan was crazy from the start; you know that. And since I was supposed to be looking out for you, I felt responsible. All I wanted to do was make sure you still had a job when you got home.”
“Well, that didn’t work out, did it?” she managed.
“I’m not the one who French kissed Torie in the middle of the damn parking lot!”
“I didn’t French kiss her!”
“Close enough.” He took a deep breath. “Will you just let your brain work here for a minute instead of your emotions?” He pushed her back down, then once again took the seat across from her, sitting on the edge, so his long legs blocked the aisle. She felt the full voltage of those violet eyes. “I tried to get you to listen to reason from the very beginning, but you wouldn’t do it, and I couldn’t just stand by and watch you throw your whole career away over some idiot who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“It wasn’t your decision.”
He ignored her. “The day you told me about Hugh, something clicked in my mind. I remembered my father mentioning to Shelby that he was a big investor in TCS. After that, it was easy to get his phone number. I called and told him somebody needed to watch out for you, and after he huffed and puffed for a while, he let it slip that he’d already hired a Dallas PI to do the job. I told him that his PI wasn’t watching you nearly close enough, but that I’d volunteer for the job out of respect for his long relationship with TCS. He took me up on my offer, and that was pretty much it.”
She regarded him stonily. “Hugh acted as if he didn’t know you when you were introduced.”
“He’s arrogant, not stupid. I’m sure he realized you wouldn’t be too happy to learn that he’d set a spy on you. And it’s not like we were old school chums. We only talked once. After that, I gave my reports to his flunky.”
“Now I know why you rushed me into getting married,” she said bitterly. “You did it out of guilt.”
