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“Whom to trust,” she said automatically. “Why did you come halfway across the world to get me?”
“Unfinished business.”
“Who? Me or Harry? Or both of us?”
He closed down on her, his face that cool, enigmatic mask once more, and he didn’t answer. They were moving away from the city, into the massive suburban sprawl, and she didn’t want to think anymore. About her stomach, about her future, about him. She just wanted everything to go dark and stop moving for a while.
She opened her eyes with a start. He’d finally found a motel that suited him—the M in the sign had burned out, one of the streetlights was broken, the building looked as if it wouldn’t withstand the next minor earthquake. The paint was cracked and peeling, but they’d have beds, and that was all she cared about.
“This’ll do,” he said, getting out of the car.
“Get two rooms. I’m not spending the night in the same room as you.”
“Yeah, right,” he drawled. “Stay put, or next time I’ll use handcuffs.”
How did he know she’d considered running the moment he went into the motel office? Without a purse, decent clothes, money or identification, her one instinct had been to get away.
But then, he had a wretched tendency to know what she was thinking. “I don’t have the energy to move,” she said. It was a lie.
She waited until he’d gone into the motel office, and she opened the car door slowly, carefully, rolling out and onto the cracked pavement as she closed the door again. The light in the car would have only been on for a second, and his back was to the parking lot. He wouldn’t know she was gone until he came out.
She didn’t make it very far. He caught up with her two streets over, in the darkness, coming up over her like a dark, silent bat, knocking her to the ground. He hauled her up, and even in the darkness she could feel the fury vibrating from him. “If you make one sound I’ll strangle you,” he said in a cold, deadly voice. “It won’t kill you—it will shut you up and knock you out long enough for me to get my ‘drunken wife’ back to the motel room. The problem is, it’s a technique that’s hard to master, and sometimes you cut off the oxygen to the brain for too long and there’s some permanent damage. Though you’d be a lot easier to take in a semivegetative state.”
He’d do just that, and not give a damn if he killed her, she believed it with all her heart. He pulled arm around hers in a show of husbandly concern that concealed the iron-hard grip of his hand on hers, and marched her back to the Sleepy Time ’otel.
It was a corner room on the second floor—she had a pretty good idea it hadn’t been a random assignment, but she was too tired to ask why. The room was small and dingy, with two double beds taking up most of the space. He closed and locked the door behind them, then jerked his head toward the back of the small room. “Bathroom’s over there—you might want it.”
She went in, slammed and locked the door. At least this was one place where he hadn’t been able to tamper with the locks—she’d have at least a modicum of privacy.
The second thing she did was look for a way of escape. There was a window, but it was small and high, and even if she was able to get through it there was no telling where it led except straight down. She washed her face and did her best to wash her mouth out, then looked up at her reflection.
She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or cry. She looked like a ghost—pale, frightened, lost. Like someone just released from a mental hospital, she thought, in her black silk pajamas.
And suddenly she needed to be clean, washed free of anything left from Harry Van Dorn. “I’m taking a shower,” she called through the door.
The only response was a grunt.
The tub was small and stained, the flimsy shower curtain had mildew along the bottom, the bar of soap was not much bigger than a book of matches and the shampoo was mostly water. She didn’t care. She stood under the hot water, letting it scald her, and she soaped herself, over and over again until the bar was not much more than a sliver. She used up the tiny bottle of shampoo—too damn bad if Peter Jensen had the sudden desire to get clean.
No, his name wasn’t Jensen, was it? She couldn’t remember what it was, and she didn’t care. In a short time it would never matter again.
The hot water finally ran out. She didn’t think that was possible, even in the cheapest of motels, but she must have overburdened the system. She turned the water off and stepped out of the tub. Her skin was red from the scalding water and her scrubbing, her hair was a mass of tangles, and the entire room was filled with fog. The Sleepy Time ’otel didn’t come equipped with an exhaust fan, so she opened the tiny window a crack and wiped the mirror with the edge of her towel. She’d left the black silk pajamas on the floor of the bathroom and they were now crumpled and wet, and she picked them up with all the enthusiasm of someone picking up a dead rat, then dropped them again.
A sheet had worked before, it would work again, and too damn bad if it made Peter think of the night they’d spent together. He’d already informed her it was nothing special; he would hardly be swept away by uncontrollable lust at the sight of a tangle-haired ghost in a bedsheet.
She opened the bathroom door a crack. “Could you hand me a sheet?”
No answer, the son of a bitch. He probably wanted to force her to come out in a towel, not for any prurient reason but just to humiliate her. Well, she wasn’t going to let that happen. Humiliation was a state of mind, and she’d already reached the pinnacle, or was it the nadir, an hour ago when she lost the entire contents of her stomach while he held her. Traipsing around in a towel was nothing compared to that.
Except that in such a cheap motel the towels were incredibly skimpy, and she was a tall woman. She’d been knocked out for God knows how long—weeks if what Harry said was true—long enough to lose the extra weight? She looked down at her body and it still looked the same—smooth and curvy. Clearly running for her life and almost dying hadn’t gotten rid of those fifteen pounds. The universe must want her that way.
Besides, it was the least of her worries. She wrapped the towel around her as best she could, opened the door again and announced, “I’m coming out.”
There was no snotty rejoinder. Because he wasn’t there. The room was empty.
She yanked the top sheet off one of the beds and wrapped it around her, refusing to think about Harry’s island, and went straight to the door. Locked, of course. He’d somehow managed to secure it from the outside, and no matter how she fiddled with the door it wouldn’t budge.
The room had one small window next to the door, and she pulled back the curtains, ready to pick up a chair and crash it through the glass. Unfortunately the Sleepy Time ’otel didn’t believe in chairs—apparently people came there to use the bed and not much else. The bedside table was fastened to the wall, and the TV was bolted in place. There was nothing to break the window with.
