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“I did.” He was still panting.
I could see him pacing and stretching to cool down his muscles. Most of all I envisioned his gorgeous legs and muscular thighs. A warm flush washed over me, but I refused to be distracted. “Is that why you pulled that stunt with Wayne? Made up some stupid rule that I was the only passenger he was allowed to carry?”
“It is. Did I guess right? Did she end up sitting near you?”
“Right beside me. She’s visiting her sister in Lambertville, and I offered her a ride home from the airport. Imagine my embarrassment when Wayne said she couldn’t come with me?”
“Imagine your much greater discomfort if she pried some secrets from you, which I’m guessing she tried to do for the whole flight.”
“Not the whole flight. It was the red eye after all, so we slept most of the way. And I told her nothing.” I waited for him to congratulate me.
“What you say in words is only part of what she will have picked up. She’s like a highly trained interrogator; you have to tread carefully around her.” His breathing had returned to normal, and his voice resumed its usual tone of authority. “We’ve had this conversation before. I don’t know what your mother’s situation is, but if you have any free time, I forbid you to spend it with Ronnie.”
“Youforbidme?” Something inside me snapped. Too many people were pushing and pulling me in too many directions.
“I forbid you. It won’t end well for either of us if she gets too close to our private lives.”
“I’ll be the judge of who I spend my time with, thank you very much.”
“Sadie-Sarah.” Simon only used my name like that when he was annoyed with me. The syllables clanged like a warning bell.
“What?”
“I expect you to give that woman a wide berth.”
I wasn’t that keen on seeing Ronnie again but as soon as Simon said I shouldn’t, a tide of rebellion rose in me. He wasn’t going to pick my company.
“Then expect to be disappointed,” I said.
“This is not open for negotiation. I don’t want to hear that you’re spending time with her, do you understand? You are not to see her.”
I pulled a piece of paper out of my purse and scrunched it over the mouthpiece. “Sorry. You’re breaking up.” Crackle, scrunch. “Bad connection. I’ll…to…later.” I left gaps between my words like a bad cell signal might. I needed to think.
I killed the call and sat with my eyes closed, the blood pounding in my temples. The worst thing was, he was right. I should avoid Ronnie. That was clear.
Her type had ways of making a person say things they didn’t intend to reveal. But I wasn’t so gullible. Icouldget close to her without spilling secrets. Simon needed to trust me more.
I intended to show him he could.
Besides I wanted to find out why Ronnie was so eager to spill the dirt on Maddy McDonald. There was more to that story than she’d let on.
Simon
I frowned at my cell phone. Sadie had just used one of the least plausible, bad-reception ploys I’d ever heard. She had a point about making her own decisions, but I doubted she’d ever tangled with a manipulator like Ronnie before.
Sadie knew next to nothing about Ronnie Flynn, a woman who could take a single detail of a person’s life and blow it up with wildly improbable conjecture and lies, until her version of events was widely held to be true. Her victims were left trying to undo damage they didn’t even see coming. If she had Sadie in her crosshairs, damage control could consume a lot of time and energy in our lives.
No muckraking minx was going to harm my future with Sadie, not by direct attack or by nasty inference. Sadie needed to be at my side, in Vancouver, where we could stand together and present a united front.
As soon as I knew how badly Cynthia and her father were injured, I’d get Layla to arrange some home help for them.
Sadie wouldn’t be much help to them anyway. She could barely remember to take her own contraceptive pills.
10
HOLDING FAST
Sadie
