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“I should know that,” he mused. “I guess I was afraid I’d blanked out on a few.”
“You might have picked up some Las Vegas barnacles I don’t know about, but if you don’t remember them either that would make you a bigamist. So far as I know, there have been five.”
“I’m in the clear, then, because you know all of them.”
He wasn’t the least embarrassed by his marital misadventures. Jacky felt no need to excuse his behavior; to him, if he was having fun, then that was reason enough to do whatever he wanted.
“If you aren’t about to get married, and you don’t need money, then what’s the favor?”
Another short pause. “I have met someone. I’m taking her out to dinner tomorrow night, and I want to really impress her, so I thought maybe you’d let me borrow your Jag—”
“You thought wrong,” Jaclyn said wryly, not even letting him finish the sentence. “No way.”
“I promise I’d be careful—”
“No. Your idea of careful is actually closing the door when you get out of the car. You’d either leave the keys in the ignition and it would be stolen, or you’d wreck it, or you’d have sex in it. No.”
“I wouldn’t leave the keys in it,” he protested. At least he was honest enough not to deny the other two were possibilities.
“The answer is still no. If you want to go on a date in a Jag, you’ll have to rent one.”
“In that case, I’ll need a loan after all.”
“No.”
“Jaclyn, baby—”
He was stubborn. He kept her on the phone for another twenty minutes, trying different angles of approach to the argument, but she held firm. No, she didn’t care that his hot new date might turn out to be “the one,” if only he could sufficiently impress her. No, she didn’t think he might die heartbroken from losing a great love. No, she wouldn’t do it even if he offered to have her Jag completely cleaned and detailed before he brought it back. She didn’t doubt the offer, just that he would follow through on his promise. By the time she finally got off the phone with him, she was so exasperated she was almost yelling as she shot down every new proposal he threw at her.
Now she was well and truly exhausted. If the phone rang again tonight, she’d be damned if she answered it or returned any calls—unless Madelyn called her, of course.
Or maybe Eric.
No, he wouldn’t call. She knew he wouldn’t. Next week … maybe. She had to hold to her wait-and-see decision.
The only thing that would soothe her frazzled nerves was a couple of hours of HGTV. She settled down to a string of several episodes of House Hunters, trying to guess which house each person would buy and getting the right answer most of the time, though sometimes the choice absolutely floored her.
She was immersed in the third episode when her cell phone rang. The sound automatically made her tense, because she used her cell almost exclusively for work. Warily she picked it up and looked at the window. Bishop Delaney? Why on earth would he be calling? She clicked on the call.
“Hi, Bishop. Is something wrong?”
“There’s been a murder at the reception hall,” he said baldly. “I don’t know who, but I thought, well, we did leave you there with Carnivore Edwards.”
After a blank second during which she digested the news, she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Oh my God. Do you think Melissa—” She couldn’t complete the thought. It would be so horrible if Melissa had been attacked and murdered, though she was the most likely victim, considering the location. “Are you certain there was a murder?”
“That’s what a friend of mine heard. He was driving home and tried to take that route, but the street was blocked off and he had to take a detour. He stopped and asked at the nearest service station, of course, and they told him they’d heard some woman had been killed.”
“When? What time?” There might have been a function held at the reception hall that night, though if there had been one scheduled Melissa hadn’t mentioned it. You could never predict what might happen when a group of people got together. She hoped there had been an event held at the hall tonight, because that would drastically cut the odds that Melissa had been the one harmed.
“Haven’t been able to find out. Details at eleven.”
Jaclyn hadn’t intended to stay up that long, but now she had to, to find out who had been murdered. She and Bishop spent a few minutes speculating on what might have happened, but that was unproductive because neither of them had any way of knowing. After they hung up she switched to each of the local network stations in turn, but none of them had anything showing other than regular programming, not even a news crawl at the bottom of the screen. Murder wasn’t huge news in Atlanta unless someone important was involved, or the crime was particularly gruesome.
Her doorbell rang at nine forty-five. She was so on edge that she shot to her feet, her heartbeat hammering. Who on earth—?
She glanced down at herself, and grabbed a sweater from the entry closet to cover her obviously braless state, and pulled it on as she peeked through the peephole.
Eric?
