11
The
van door slid open. A blast of cold, intensely sweet air swept in,
along with a noise that took a while to decipher. Birdsong. And
air. So clean and sweet. Lily lingered under the surface, reluctant
to come up. It had been so long. Sleep felt so good. She rubbed her
eyes.
Bruno peered in. “You OK? You’ve been
out for hours.”
“I’m fine,” she said through
chattering teeth.
“Out you come, then.” His jacket swung
open as he helped her out, showing off washboard abs, that taut
belly button, the arrowing trail of dark belly hair, bare to the
elements. He must be cold, too, but he didn’t look it. He had a
nuclear furnace raging inside him.
He set her on her feet, and she
wobbled on the unsteady ground. Icy wind lifted her snarled hair
into a wind-whipped halo. The absence of noise pollution, burnt
ozone, hydrocarbons, smoke, or particulate matter was weirdly
alien. The wind moaned. Only a jet plume proved that civilization
existed. “Where the hell
are we?” she demanded.
“About twenty miles out of White
Salmon, as the crow flies,” Bruno said. “My uncle had a
cabin.”
“I never saw anything about a cabin in
the property records!”
“Of course you didn’t,” Bruno said.
“He fixed it that way himself, thirty-five years ago. He had a
checkered past, before Vietnam. Tony wanted a place where he could
disappear, from the law or the Ranieris, whoever was out for his
blood.” He looked around. “In fact, Kev and I don’t have a clue
what the hell to do about this place. The paperwork, I mean. Who
the fuck knows whose name it’s in? Tony never told.”
“That doesn’t explain what we’re doing
here!” Lily’s voice shook.
Bruno frowned. “I told you I’d find
you someplace safe to rest, remember? Without using my credit
cards, this is the best I can do.”
“But we’re cornered here! Does this
place have Internet? Phone service, taxis? Wireless?”
His face answered her. “Oh, God,” she
moaned. “You’ve dropped me into the bottom of a well. This is just
freaking perfect!”
Aaro edged away. “I’ll be on my way.
You’ll be getting my bill soon. Not that I know where to send it,
since you’re a fucking fugitive.”
Bruno grunted. “You’ll get your
money.”
“You mean, you’re leaving us here?”
Lily’s voice squeaked with horror. “You’re driving away, and
leaving us here with no vehicle?”
“Like shit through a goose.” Aaro
sidled toward the driver’s side door. “See ya, babe. Be
good.”
“No! I’m coming back with you! I am
not staying here!”
Aaro got into his van, eyes wary.
“Keep your distance, lady.”
“Don’t you dare drive away!” She
tottered toward the van.
Aaro revved the engine and rolled his
window down an inch to deliver his parting shot at Bruno. “Never
would have thought I’d say this, man, but your girlfriend makes
celibacy look good.”
“You asshole!” Lily grabbed the handle, which
locked with an audible thunk an instant befo she touched it. Tires
spat dirt and pebbles. Aaro peered out his window, trying not to
drive over her feet.
She hung on, but Aaro did not stop.
There was no question of running in those heels. She stumbled,
sliding to her knees as the van rounded the curve, roared down the
hill, rattling over a narrow plank bridge laid over a dry creek
bed. It turned a corner and was gone.
Oh, ouch. That knee had already taken a lot of
abuse.
Bruno pulled her to her feet and tried
to hug her, the sneaky son of a bitch, but she was in freak-out
mode, arms windmilling, tottering on the useless shoes. She pitched
and swayed in the gusts of wind.
“Calm down,” he was repeating, over
and over, his tone pleading. “Calm down. Just calm down. This is a
safe place.”
He looked worried, scared, gorgeous.
She tried to breathe. Safe place, her milk white ass. She laughed
so hard it started her crying. He ended up hugging her, and she was
too far gone to fight him off.
“I just can’t be in a place like
this,” she gasped out. “I’ll go crazy.”
He glanced around at the terrifying,
appalling nothing around them. Trees, bugs, rocks, sky. “What’s
this?” he asked. “A place that’s wild, clean? Safe? What the fuck
is not to like about this place?”
“The reason I’ve survived is because
I’ve stayed on the move!” she yelled. “I’m like a shark that can’t
stop swimming or I’ll die! I can’t just look at the view while I
wait for them to come beat me to death!”
“They won’t.” His voice was low,
soothing. “I won’t let them. No one knows about it. No one saw us
come. My friends will come get us. I have a plan. We can have a
meal, a shower. A nap. Is a nap so terrible?”
“I don’t have time for a fucking nap!”
she howled.
“You needed that one you took just
now,” he said triumphantly. “And you could use another one, where
someone is sitting by the bed with a loaded gun. How long has it
been since you relaxed?”
She goggled at him. “Loaded gun?
Excuse me? You mean to say you have one of those? On your
person?”
He looked impatient. “Of course,
thanks to Aaro. More than one.”
“And you know how to use
them?”
His chest vibrated, plastered against
hers. “Spare me, Lily.”
“When pigs fly! Loaded guns are not
items that I find relaxing!”
“You are so fucking hard to please. I
don’t know if it came across in your research, but I’m actually
above average in intelligence. I can think my way out of a paper
bag, and I can handle a gun. So chill.”
“But if I’m not doing something, I’ll
go crazy!”
“So I’ll just keep you really busy,”
he said.
She wasn’t sure quite how to take that
statement, so she ignored it entirely. “I’m just so goddamn
scared,” she whispered.
“Trust me,” he said, unexpectedly, and
scooped her into his arms.
“Hey! Stop that!” She flopped and
twisted.
“You can’t walk in those shoes, and
you can’t go barefoot, either,” he said. “You’ll freeze your feet.
Stop wiggling.”
He set her down on the small porch and
fiddled with the padlocks on the doors. He’d done it again. Teased
her through a screaming meltdown and out the other side. And he’d
known her for, whaa few hours? They’d found their groove. He wasn’t
afraid of her.
Wouldn’t last long, though. It never
did. She never made it easy for guys. She eventually scared them or
intimidated them or pissed them off or threatened their
masculinity. She was a difficult proposition for a relationship in
the best of times. And this was the very worst.
Look what a prize she’d been so far.
Jerking him around, lying to him, spying on him, using him. Leading
hit men to him. Getting him attacked, almost killed. Getting him in
trouble with the law. Costing him shocking amounts of money. He was
going to get sick of it.
How depressing. It made her guts feel
sour. Hah. Like she had the requisite brain cells to stress about
her romantic prospects right now.
At least, the sex was, well,
incendiary. A point in her favor. Guys weighed sex heavily in the
balance. It was a big priority for them.
That thought perked her right
up.
Snick, the lock gave. Bruno pushed the door
open into a black, stifling cave. She was blinded as she stepped
inside to the scent of woodsmoke and dust. Bruno opened the
shutters, jerked a curtain aside, revealing a double bed swathed in
plastic. Bedding was bound up in plastic bags as well. Her eyes
adjusted to see him dragging blankets out of one of the bags.
Laying one down on top of the plastic bed cover.
“Lie down,” he said. “Cover yourself
up while I get things going. The fire, the propane water heater.
Some food.”
“I can help,” she
offered.
“It’ll go quicker if I do it alone.
I’ve got the choreography of this place down. You rest, get warm.
Relax.”
Relax, her ass. Like she ever had, in
her whole life, with her complicated baggage. And this was even
before killers closed in. She sat on the bed. Bruno plucked off her
shoes, scooping her legs up. He tossed another blanket on top of
her.
He got to work on making the place
habitable.
The blankets were fuzzy and thick, but
she was stone cold from the inside. She huddled into a ball and
watched him, teeth chattering.
Bruno kept looking over at her as he
built a fire in the stove. When the flames were crackling, he came
over to the bed, flung off his jacket, kicked off his shoes, and
slid under the blanket with her.
Her glands went bananas. The bed
creaked under his weight. Plastic crackled. He smelled like salt,
sweat, the coppery tang of blood, and under that, his own special
Bruno smell. He hugged her. The release of tension in her body was
cataclysmic. It felt so good, so hot.
“You’re freezing,” he said, his voice
disapproving.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “You’re
helping.”
“Not fast enough.” He rolled over
right on top of her, squashing the breath out of her. The bed
sagged, creaked. “That better?”
A flush rose, like a hot cloud, until
her whole body felt red. She wanted to say something offhand. Sure.
No biggie, having a gorgeous sex god who held all the keys to her
destiny, squishing her onto a bed.
He propped himself onto his elbows so
that she could drag in some air. She didn’t do it consciously, but
suddenly, she’d moved so he was resting the stiff bulge of his
crotch against the vee of her opened thighs. The wind moaned,
singing of a vast empty solitude outside that made it so much more
intimate within. The last two lovers in the world.
There was no reason in the world for
him not to just open his jeans, twitch the gusset of her thong
aside and have her. She ached for it. A hot pull of mindless
yearning that actually hurt, it was so strong.
He answered her silent call, settling
into an incredibly slow, sensual pulse. Her face got hotter, her
breath shallow. They couldn’t break their eye contact. It blazed
out of her like light, how badly she needed him to press against
that sweet ache, just like that, again . . .
She lifted herself against him. He
seconded her every move with such grace, such perfect swirling
pressure and the slow . . . firm pulse and push, and oh, God, yes .
. . yes . . .
She exploded, energy pumping down to
her fingers and toes. Beyond. Extending out into infinity, fused
with him, with everything.
When she got enough presence of mind
back to be mortally embarrassed, he was kissing her. Tender,
coaxing kisses, wordlessly asking for something from her that she
didn’t even dare put a name to. Let alone grant him. She just
didn’t have it to give. She turned her face away, but Bruno was
having none of that. He cupped her face, forced her gaze back until
their eyes locked. “You warmed up?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I just meant to get you warm. I swear
to God. I didn’t mean to dry hump you. That just sort of
happened.”
He lifted himself up. Before she knew
what she was doing, she’d yanked him back down. He landed on his
elbows, wary. “Huh?”
“Don’t you want . . . ?” She couldn’t
say it. She wound her legs around his thighs and let her body ask
the question.
He gave her an are-you-kidding look.
“Of course I want it. But you’ve been skating on the edge of a
breakdown ever since those guys attacked us. You almost had one
right outside. It’s not a good time.”
“I’d be OK,” she assured
him.
He shook his head. “You can’t be sure
how you’d feel. And if I started, I wouldn’t be able to
stop.”
So? Who wanted him to stop? She wanted
to scream, slap him, force him to stop trying so hard to be a good
guy. But that would make her seem crazier. Push him further
away.
“Get warmed up,” he said. “Get on your
new clothes, get some food into you, then we can talk about
everything you know, suspect, or guess, or fear about what’s
happening to you. Then we hike up to the bluff.”
She jerked up onto her elbow. “Are you
kidding? Is this a time for a flipping nature walk,
Ranieri?”
“It’s the only place with cell
reception,” he said. “I can use the phone Aaro gave me, with
encryption software.”
“To call who?”
“My brother’s brothers. My adopted
brother Kev recently hooked up with his biological family a few
months ago. Real eventful, you might say. But you know all about
that, right?”
She dropped her gaze. “Um. Some of
it.”
His eyebrow tilted. “I figured that.
Anyhow. Once I’ve talked to them, I can make some
decisions.”
She blinked. “Um. Excuse me?
You will make the
decisions?” “Yes.” He stared her straight in the eyes. “Me. It’s
your own fault, Lily, for dragging me into this. Now you have to
deal with me.”
“Don’t get masterful on me, Ranieri. I
don’t respond well to that.”
“You need someone to make some
decisions for you, babe,” he said. “Just a few. For a little while.
Just restAnd trust me.”
She shook her head. “Don’t ask me to
trust you, because I can’t. It’s nothing personal, I swear to God.
I just don’t have the equipment.”
“You don’t have a choice,” he
said.
It was true, she realized. She’d put
herself smack-dab in someone’s else’s power. Alone in a cabin in
the armpit of the universe, with a guy who could pick her up and
twirl her on his pinkie if he felt like it. But there was no
reasoning with her urge to micromanage.
“They’ll be listening to the
McClouds,” she said stubbornly.
“The phone calls will be encrypted,”
he repeated. “These people run a security company, Lily. They’re
ex-military, ex-special forces, ex-everything. Plus, they were
raised by a paranoid survivalist freak with global conspiracy
theories.” He blinked. “You know, your kind of guy.”
She bristled.
“Smart-ass.”
He got back to work. Lily stared at
dust motes dancing in the beam of light that sliced through the
window, determined to stay alert.
Next thing she knew, the smell of
coffee and frying onions was dragging her out of sleep. She forced
herself up onto her elbow, trying not to wince. The shoulder hurt,
a lot. The room was warm. The angle of the light had changed, moved
up the wall.
Bruno stood over a gas range, stirring
onions that sizzled in a cast-iron skillet. They smelled amazing.
He looked different. A fresh black sweatshirt. Wet, clean hair, no
bloodstains. He looked yummy.
She rubbed her eyes.
“Hey.”
He gave her a smile that would bend
metal with its sheer charm load. “Water’s hot in the shower tank.
You like steak?”
“Wow.” Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t
been able to afford anything with that much protein in it since
D-day, and rarely enough before that, either. The rich scent made
her dizzy. “Where did all this food come from?”
“Aaro got some groceries for us, in
Bingen. I call it ten minutes to sit-down. Can you shower in that
time?”
“I’ll try.” She got to her feet, took
the battered terrycloth bathrobe he offered her, and closeted
herself in the miniscule bathroom.
The shower was heaven. She stayed
under until it turned tepid, then chilly, then glacial. It took
that much scrubbing to get the makeup off. But afterward, the face
in the mirror was her own. Not Mata Hari. Or the mascara-smeared
hell-hag.
When she came out, the table was set
for two and loaded with fragrant, steaming food. “Sit,” he
said.
She was intensely conscious of her
nudity under the damp terrycloth. “Shouldn’t I dress?”
“The room’s warm. And the food’s hot.
And it’s just me.”
True enough. She sat down and dug in.
The steak was pan seared, pink and juicy and melting, and heaped
with caramelized onions. He’d done cheesy buttered noodles, some
sort of long pasta with frilly edges, dripping and rich. A heap of
peppery coleslaw. Slices of hothouse tomatoes. Crisp, warty sour
pickles. Fresh sourdough bread to sop up drippings. Mmm. He kept
refilling her plate. She kept eating.
“I’d offer you a beer, but it’s not a
great idea,” he said. “It would take the starch out of you for the
hike. So it’s water, for now.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “I don’t
drink.”
“Oh?” He buttered a hunk of his bread.
“Not ever, or not now?”
“Not ever.” She looked down, wishing
she hadn’t said anything.
“Any reason for that?”
“Does there have to be?”
His shrug was elaborately casual.
“You’re the one who was flapping it in front of my
face.”
She sighed. It was relevant, she
supposed, in a painful, oblique sort of way, so whatever. “My dad
was an alcoholic, and a junkie.”
He took it in, his face impassive.
“This would be the father who—”
“Yes. The father who was murdered six
weeks ago, by those guys who attacked us, I assume. Or whatever
organization hired them.”
“Ah.” He got up, rummaged on the
shelves. He found a plastic box and knelt in front of her, pushing
the robe open over her knees.
She shrank away. “What the hell are
you doing?”
“Disinfecting the scrapes on your
legs. While I do that, you talk.”
“I’ll do it myself! Just give me the
stuff! I can take care of it!”
“Shhh.” He batted her hands away. “Let
me.”
Lily stared down at the top of his
dark head and fished around for a starting point. “Well, my name is
Lily Parr, not Torrance,” she began. “I guess I’ll start when my
dad fell apart. I was ten. Which would have made it
1993.”
His eyes flicked up when she mentioned
the year that his mother had died. “Fell apart how?”
She clenched her teeth as he swabbed
with the alcohol-soaked wad of cotton. “Like I said, he started
drinking heavily. Then he started in on the opiates. Heroin,
mostly, I think, although one white powder looks pretty much like
another to me. Ouch, goddamnit, that hurts!”
“Hold still.” He leaned in with the
tweezers. “There’s grit in here.”
She hissed and cursed as he tortured
her with tweezers. He was unmoved, intent upon his task. “What work
did he do?” he asked.
“He was a fertility specialist,” she
said. “A researcher, in IVF technology. He got early retirement not
long after his breakdown. He was barely fifty, but he got a
pension. A good one, but not generous enough to fund a drug habit.
I started swiping the checks before he saw them. I paid the bills
so they wouldn’t turn off the lights, the gas. So we could eat. Not
that he was that interested in food anymore.”
He nodded, frowning in concentration
as he taped gauze over her knees. His eyes flicked up, waiting
while she struggled for words.
It sounded so sad, and flat, when she
laid the facts out. Howard’s string of suicide attempts. The
decision to commit him to an institution. The search for the
perfect clinic that would keep him alive. And then, that last,
awful visit. Howard’s cryptic warning, and his message, about Magda
Ranieri and her son. The mysterious thing that needed to be locked,
whatever it might be. Miriam’s interruption.
Then the call from Dr. Stark, and
Howard’s so-called suicide. And the guys waiting outside Nina’s
apartment with knives. And that was it.
It wasn’t enough for him. She could
feel that in the air. Strongly.
“I tried to research you, while I was
on the run,” she told him. “I tried to find out more about the
nurse, Miriam Vargas, too, but she seemed to check out. At least, I
found records of her going to nursing school in Baltimore. I tried
to find out more about Magda, but I got nowhere with that. Just
statistics, the newspaper articles, he obit. The only next step was
to talk to you. So, um. I made my way here.”
He placed his big, warm hands gently
over her knees. The soothing warmth felt good, over the stings and
scrapes and booboos.
So, at last. Here it was. The question
that had been burning in her mind for six weeks. The one she’d
almost given up hope of asking.
“Do you have any information?” she
asked. “Any insights?”
He met her eyes. Her heart tumbled,
thudded, three stories down.
“Babe, I haven’t got a fucking clue,”
he said.
She shivered and tugged the robe
tighter. “But I . . . didn’t you—”
“It was exactly like I told you,” he
said. “I didn’t misrepresent what happened at all. My mamma was
killed. It was a banal incident of domestic violence. She had
really bad taste in men. She didn’t give me instructions to lock
anything. She didn’t give me anything, or tell me anything. She put
me on a bus to Portland one night to keep me from getting killed.
That’s all there is to that story.”
Lily nodded. Her throat was too tight
to speak.
Bruno went on. “The only big question
is why she didn’t climb on that bus with me. That’s what I will
never understand.”
She brightened. “Well, maybe that’s
it. Maybe this is the answer to that question. If we could figure
out what she was—”
“No.” His voice cut her off. “Don’t do
it, Lily.”
“Do what? I’m just
speculating—”
“Don’t speculate,” he said. “Don’t try
and lay your crazy agenda over what happened to my mamma. It won’t
hold the weight.”
Oh, shit. She’d hit a nerve. She
backpedaled, nervously. “Bruno, I’m only trying to—”
“There is no mystery to solve. I faced
that, a long time ago. It was bad enough the first time. I’m not
going back to do it again.”
She twisted her hands in the damp
terrycloth and tried to face it.
“So, looks like you tracked me down
and lured me into your honeyed trap for nothing,” he said, after a
while. “I’m sorry I don’t have any better recompense to offer you
for all that effort.”
She bristled. “What do you mean by
that?”
He shrugged, without meeting her eyes.
“Just wondering if you regret having gone through with
it.”
“With what?” she asked,
apprehensively.
“Fucking me,” he said. “You know, now
that you’ve discovered that the cupboard is bare. Does that kill
the buzz?”
Oh, ouch. She got up and backed away
from him. “Is it necessary to make me feel like a
whore?”
“You said the word, not
me.”
She tried to marshal her argument, but
it kept slipping apart in her head like a wet paper bag. To her own
ears, her story now sounded preposterous, ridiculous. A pack of
overheated, disconnected lies.
“But what about what Howard said?” she
asked. “Why would he mention you and your mother if there wasn’t a
connection?”
“I’ve never heard of a guy named
Howard Parr,” Bruno said.
“But why would they kill him, right
after telling me if he—”
“Because they didn’t,” Bruno said. “By
your own account, your father had severe mental health problems.
Don’t ask me to rip my life apart based on the ramblings of a
suicidal heroin junkie who’d been confined to a locked ward for,
what, how many years now?”
“Almost six, when I add them all up,”
she said. “But you don’t understand. I know he was
murdered.”
He shook his head. She wanted to
scream at him. To slap that sad, sad look off his face. “Face it,
Lily,” he said quietly. “Get real.”
“Goddamnit, it is real! I knew him! He
was terrified of blood! He would never have cut himself, not in a
million years!”
“Depends on how much pain he was in,”
Bruno said. “Maybe you can’t even imagine how bad it was. It might
have been worth it to him to face his fear. He saw his opportunity,
gritted his teeth, and took it.”
“No, it’s not possible. Not him.” She
hid her face. It hurt, so bad, that he didn’t believe her. Even
though she’d never really hoped that he would. She still felt so
betrayed. Hurt to the depths of her being.
“Nobody knows better than me how much
it hurts to swallow this down,” he said. “But sometimes stupid,
random, bad things just happen. They have no meaning. There’s no
mystery, no explanation. Just shit luck. I’ve accepted mine. I’m
not going to redo the work I did.”
Lily kept shaking her head. She
couldn’t stop shaking it.
“I’m very sorry about what happened to
you,” he said. “It’s awful. Terrible. But it’s not connected to my
mamma. Or to me.”
“Then how did they find me? They found
me because they were watching you. Why would they if there’s no
connection?”
“They found you because they found
you.” His voice was harsher now. “You slipped up. It’s that shit
luck again. You’ve had a stinking big dose of it. I understand your
desire for company, but don’t pin your shit luck on me. I’ve
already had my share.”
“Then why?” she yelled. “What the hell
do they want with me?”
He just gazed at her, looking
miserable and uncomfortable.
A horrible realization began to
unfold. “Oh, my God.” Her belly clenched. She regretted having
eaten so much. “You think I’m a liar?”
He stared into her eyes for a long
moment. Trying to read her mind. “No,” he said softly. “I don’t
think that. God help me, but I don’t.”
She pressed both arms against her
belly. “Well, that’s good, at least. But then how do you justify .
. .” Her voice trailed off, as it slowly, painfully sank in. “Ah. I
see. So you think I’m crazy, right?”
His mouth was a flat, unhappy line. “I
think you’re confused, and scared, and sleep deprived. And stressed
to the fucking max.”
It was the truth, but his gentle tone
and careful word choice were still offensive to her. “I see,” she
said, bitterly. “So, I’m a couple cans short of a six-pack,
right?”
Bruno dropped his face into his hands,
shoulders slumped. “Fuck if I know,” he muttered. “But those
killers are real.”
The silence was unbearably heavy. Lily
straightened her shoulders. Time to suck it up and move on.
“Fortunately for you, it’s no longer your problem.” She sidled past
him to the bed, where he’d piled the shopping bags. “I apologize
for wasting your time. And I’ll just, ah, get the hell out of your
way now.”
“You can’t do that now, Lily,” he
said.
“I’ll need the stuff you boughtumped
clothes onto the bed, pawed through them. “I’ll reimburse you. What
did Aaro say? Four hundred?” She rifled through the panties, picked
out the least offensive of the lot. Peach lace. She pulled them on.
Struggled into the jeans.
“I don’t give a shit about the money,”
he said.
“I don’t really care what you give a
shit about. How much did you spend on gas? You’ll have to let me
know whatever Aaro bills you, too.”
“How about my legal bills, when
somebody gets around to charging me with murder two?”
That was way too big a bite to chomp
down on right then. “Let’s stick with simple stuff for now.” She
pulled out the T-shirt, the sweater. She couldn’t put them on
without getting naked, and she hesitated to do that in front of a
guy who thought she was a lying opportunist. But he’d seen it all,
so what the hell. Off with the robe.
She wrenched on the tee. The sweater
was huge, sleeves flopping sadly off her shoulders. She sat on the
bed and got to work on socks, shoes. She felt so stupid.
Embarrassed to exist. She shrugged on the coat. The clothes were
comforting in their stiff bulk. Like armor.
“I’ll just hike down to civilization
now,” she said. “This stuff should keep me plenty warm. Thanks for
everything.”
“It would take a day to walk down from
here, even if you knew the terrain and could take shortcuts, which
you don’t. Don’t be stupid.”
“It’s crazy, not stupid, buddy. Crazy
has a better ring to it. And like I said, no longer your problem.
Please forget I ever bothered you.”
“No,” he said. “You’re in
danger.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Let
me out of here before I die of embarrassment.” At the moment, death
by exposure or being eaten by a cougar was preferable to having
Bruno look so sorry for her.
She wasn’t even to the door before he
grabbed her from behind. He pulled her against his body, which
reminded her of a lot of things she would rather forget right
now.
“Sunset is two hours away,” he said
roughly. “Please, Lily. Don’t be both crazy and stupid. Just
don’t.”
“You can’t stop me.” She immediately
wished she hadn’t said it. Because of course, he could.
Easily.
To his credit, he didn’t say it. She
was very glad she was facing away from him. He didn’t have to watch
the crazy girl start to snivel.
So damn stupid. After all those dire
warnings to herself, all her stern pep talks, she’d suckered
herself into the fantasy of Lily and Bruno, the intrepid team. Lily
and Bruno together, pitted against ultimate evil, had been a way
different vibe than Loser Lily, pitted against it all by
herself.
Bruno released her cautiously, like he
was afraid she was going to bolt. “Let’s hike up to the bluff,
since you’ve got your coat on already,” he said brusquely. “I have
to make those calls.”
She shook her head. “You’ve
established my status as a lunatic. So cut me loose! Focus on your
own problems!”
“I still have to figure out what to do
with you. Just because your bad guys aren’t connected to me doesn’t
mean they’re not deadly.”
“Oh, no!” She shook a frantic finger.
“No, you don’t have to ‘do’ anything with me. I can take care of
myself.”
He pulled his jacket on, ignoring her.
It pissed her off to the point of screaming. “Look, I’m mentally
ill, right? Cut me loose! Simplify your life! If I get killed, it’s
not your fault! You don’t even have to feel guilty! I release you
from all responsibility! I’ll sign a fucking waiver!”
“I need you as a witness, for what
happened outside the diner.”
It was a good try, and a convincing
argument, but she didn’t buy it for one second. “It’s because you
had sex with me, isn’t it?”
Hah. She’d nailed it. She could see
it, all over his face.
“Shut up, Lily,” he
muttered.
“Ah, yes! I get it! You feel guilty,
right? So sorry for the stressed-out crazy girl who can’t keep
straight why people are trying to kill her? You feel bad, for
taking advantage of a vulnerable, deeply disturbed person in her
hour of need? You feel like bottom-feeding slime for abusing the
handicapped? Well, fuck you, Bruno Ranieri. Fuck you.”
He shoved her grimly toward the door.
“Shut up and walk.”