“You and your women,” I said, turning my shoulder to him and scooting farther away so he couldn’t eavesdrop.
“I don’t
have
any women,” he said in exasperation.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Mom.
“I heard it; I just don’t believe it. Ask him how long he was celibate before he met you.”
Notice my mother assumed he was no longer celibate. The fact that she was so unconcerned about my current love life told me that she thoroughly approved of him, which is a big thing. Having Mom’s approval goes a long way toward keeping our family life smooth and happy.
I looked over my shoulder at him. “Mom wants to know how long it had been since you’d had any, prior to our engagement.”
He looked deeply alarmed. “She does not. She didn’t say that.”
“Yes, she did. Here. She’ll tell you herself.”
I extended the phone to him, and warily he took it. “Hello,” he said; then he listened. I watched two spots of color start to burn on his cheekbones. He put his hand over his eyes as if he wanted to hide from the question. “Uh . . . six weeks?” he said sheepishly. “Maybe. Could be a little longer. Here’s Blair.”
He couldn’t hand the phone back to me fast enough. I took it and asked, “What do you think?”
“Six weeks is a long time to wait if you’re crazy and fixated on someone,” Mom said. “He’s probably in the clear. What about you? Have you had any former semi-boyfriends who have since hooked up with some nutcase who may have developed intense jealousy over his former relationships?”
Semi-boyfriend
means a couple of dates, maybe several, but nothing serious developed and we both sort of drifted out of each other’s orbit. Since Wyatt, I’d had a few of those, and at the moment I wasn’t certain I could even remember their names.
“I haven’t kept in touch, but I guess I can find out,” I said. If I could remember their names, that is.
“That’s the only other possibility I can think of,” Mom said. “Tell Wyatt he’d better get this settled in a hurry, because your grandmother’s birthday is coming up and we can’t celebrate if you’re still hiding out.”
After I hung up the phone, I relayed that message to him and he nodded his head as if he got it, but I’m pretty sure he was still in the dark about Grammy. He had no idea of the wrath that would come down on our heads if she felt the least slighted. She said that at her age she didn’t have many more birthdays left, so if we loved her, we’d better make the most of them. Grammy is Mom’s mother, if you haven’t already guessed. She’ll be seventy-four on her birthday, so she isn’t even all that old, but she plays on her age to get what she wants.
Huh. Genetics is a funny thing, isn’t it?
I gave him the beady eye. “So. What’s her name?”
He knew exactly whom I was talking about. “I knew it,” he said, shaking his head. “I knew you’d latch onto that like a leech. It was nothing. I ran into an old acquaintance at a conference and—it was nothing.”
“Except you slept with her,” I said accusingly.
“She has red hair,” he said. “And she’s a detective in—no, hell no, I’m not saying where she works. I know better than that. You’d be on the phone with her tomorrow, either accusing her of attempted murder or comparing notes on me.”
“If she’s a cop, she knows how to shoot.”
“Blair, trust me in this. Please. If I thought there was the slightest possibility she would do something like that, do you think I’d hesitate for a second before hauling her in for questioning?”
I sighed. He had a real knack for phrasing things in a way that left me little wiggle room, and he’d picked it up fast.
“But it’s someone who’s jealous of me,” I said. “Mom’s right. I’m right. It’s something personal.”
“I agree.” He stood up and began stripping off his clothes. “But it’s after midnight, I’m tired, you’re tired, and we can talk about this after we get the analysis on the hair. Then we’ll know if we’re dealing with a real brunette or someone who may have dyed her hair as a disguise before acting.”
He was right about the tired part, so I decided he was right about that, too. I pulled off my clothes and crawled naked between the cool sheets. He turned the thermostat down to Stage Two Hypothermia, turned out the lights, and got under the covers with me, which is when I found out he’d been lying about the tired part.
Chapter
Twenty-seven
I dreamed about my red Mercedes again that night. There wasn’t a bridge in this dream, just a woman standing in front of the car pointing a pistol at me. She didn’t have black hair, though. Her hair was a light brown, the shade that is almost blond but doesn’t quite get there. The weird thing was, I was parked at the curb in front of the apartment where Jason and I had lived when we first got married. We hadn’t lived there long, maybe a year, before buying a house. When we divorced, I was happy to let Jason have the house and the attendant payments, in exchange for the capital to start Great Bods.
Even though the woman was pointing a pistol at me, in my dream I wasn’t very frightened. I was more exasperated with her for being so stupid than I was scared. Finally I just got out of the car and walked away, which shows you how silly dreams can be, because I would never have abandoned my Mercedes.
I woke up feeling puzzled, which is a strange way to feel when you just wake up. I was still in bed—obviously—so nothing had happened yet to puzzle me.
The room was so cold I was afraid my butt would get frostbite if I got out of bed. I don’t know why Wyatt liked to turn the air-conditioning so cold at night, unless he was part Eskimo. I lifted my head so I could see the clock: five oh five. The alarm wouldn’t go off for another twenty-five minutes, but if I was awake, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t be awake, too. I poked him in the side.
“Uh. Ouch,” he said groggily, and rolled over. His big hand rubbed my stomach. “Are you okay? Another bad dream?”
“No, I had a dream, but it wasn’t a nightmare. I’m awake and the room feels like a meat locker. I’m afraid to get up.”
He made a half-grunting, half-yawning noise, then got a look at the clock. “It isn’t time to get up yet,” he said, and burrowed back into the pillow.
I poked him again. “Yes, it is. I need to think about something.”
“Can’t you think while I sleep?”
“I could, if you didn’t insist on putting a layer of frost on everything at night, and if I had a cup of coffee. I think you should turn the thermostat up to, say, forty, so I can start thawing out, and while you’re up, you could get one of your flannel shirts or something for me to wear.”
He groaned again, and flopped over on his back. “Okay, okay.” Muttering something under his breath, he got out of bed and walked out into the hall where the upstairs thermostat was located. Within seconds, the blower stopped. The air was still cold, but at least it wasn’t moving around. Then he came back into the bedroom and reached deep into his closet, coming out with something long and dark. He tossed it across the bed, then crawled back under the covers. “See you in twenty minutes,” he mumbled, and just that easily went back to sleep.
I grabbed the long dark thing and pulled it around me. It was a robe, nice and thick. When I got out of bed and stood up, the heavy folds of fabric fell to my ankles. I belted it around me as I tiptoed out of the bedroom—I didn’t want to disturb him—and turned on the light over the stairs so I wouldn’t break my neck on the way down.
The coffeemaker was set to come on automatically at five twenty-five, but I didn’t intend to wait that long. I flipped the switch, the little red light came on, and the thing began the hissing and popping sounds that signal help is on the way.
I got a cup from the cabinet and stood there waiting. The floor was cold beneath my bare feet, making my toes curl. When we had kids, I thought, Wyatt would have to get out of the habit of turning the air-conditioning so low at night.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach, just the way it happens when you go over that first steep hill in a roller coaster, and a sense of unreality seized me. I felt as if I were occupying two planes of existence at the same time: the real world, and the dream world. My dream was Wyatt, had been from the moment I met him, but I had accepted that I’d lost my chance. Now, all of a sudden, the dream world was also the real world, and I was having a hard time taking it all in.
In a little over a week’s time, everything had reversed. He said he loved me. He said we were getting married. I believed him on both counts, because he’d told my parents the same thing, and his mother, and the whole police force. Not only that, if his feelings for me were anything like my feelings for him, I could understand getting cold feet at first, because how do you deal with something like that?
Women can handle those things more easily than men, because we’re tougher. After all, most of us grow up expecting to get pregnant and have kids, and when you think about what that really means to the female body, it’s a wonder any woman ever lets a man within a country mile of her.
Men feel put upon because they have to shave their faces every day. Now, I ask you: In comparison to what women go through, is that wussy, or what?
Wyatt had wasted two
years
because he thought I was high maintenance. I’m not high maintenance.
Grammy
is high maintenance. Of course, she’s had a lot more practice. I hope I’m just like her when I’m that age. What I am now is a reasonable, logical, adult woman who runs her own business and believes in a fifty-fifty relationship. It just so happens there’ll be times when I’ll have both fifties, such as when I’m shot or when I’m pregnant. But those are special occasions, right?
Enough coffee had dripped into the carafe to fill my cup. Thank heavens for the automatic cutoff on coffeemakers today. I pulled out the carafe, and only one little drop escaped to sizzle on the hot pad. After pouring the coffee, I slid the carafe back into place and leaned against the cabinets while I began to mentally worry at what had been puzzling me in my dream.
My feet were freezing, so after a moment I went into the family room and got the notebook in which I’d been listing Wyatt’s transgressions, then curled up in his recliner with the robe tucked around my feet.
What Mom had said last night—well, a few hours ago—had triggered some chain of thought. The problem was, the links weren’t connected yet; so technically, I guess, there wasn’t a chain, because they have to be linked to make a chain, but the individual little chunks were lying there waiting for someone to put them together.
The thing was, she had said pretty much what I’d already been thinking, but phrased it just a little differently. And she had gone way back, all the way to my senior year in high school when Malinda Connors threw a screaming hissy fit because I was voted Homecoming Queen even though I was already Head Cheerleader and she thought it wasn’t fair for me to be both. Not that Malinda would have gotten Homecoming Queen anyway, because she was, like, the poster girl for Skanks Unlimited, but she had a real high opinion of herself and thought I was the only obstacle in her path.
She hadn’t tried to kill me, however. Malinda had married some moron and moved to Minneapolis. There’s a song in there somewhere.
But Mom had started me thinking that the roots of this could go back quite a while. I’d been trying to think of something recent, such as Wyatt’s last girlfriend, or my last boyfriend, which didn’t make sense at all because
Wyatt
had been the last one who mattered and he hadn’t even technically been a boyfriend, because he got cold feet so fast.
I started writing items down in the notebook. They were still the individual links, but sooner or later I’d hit on the one thing that turned them into a chain.
I heard the shower running upstairs and knew Wyatt was up. I turned on the television to check the local weather—hot, fancy that—then stared at the notebook some more while I pondered what I was going to do that day. I’d had enough of sitting in the house. The first day had been great; yesterday had been not so great. If I had to stay here all day again, I might get into all sorts of trouble, out of sheer boredom.
Besides, I felt fine. The stitches in my left arm had been in for seven days and the muscle was healing nicely. I could even dress myself. The soreness from the car accident was mostly gone, taken care of by yoga, ice packs, and general experience with sore muscles.
After about fifteen minutes Wyatt came down the stairs and saw me sitting in front of the television. “Making another list?” he asked warily as he approached.
“Yeah, but it isn’t yours.”
“You make lists of other people’s transgressions?” He sounded a little insulted, as if he thought he was the only one who deserved a list.
“No, I’m making a list of the evidence.”
He leaned over and kissed me good morning, then read the list. “Why is your red Mercedes on the list?”
“Because I’ve dreamed about it twice. That has to mean something.”
“Maybe that the white one is a total wreck and you wish you had the red one back?” He kissed me again. “What would you like for breakfast this morning? Pancakes again? French toast? Eggs and sausage?”
“I’m tired of guy food,” I said, getting to my feet and following him into the kitchen. “Why don’t you have any girl food? I need some girl food.”
He froze with the coffee carafe in his hand. “Women don’t eat the same things that men eat?” he asked cautiously.
Really, he was so exasperating. “Are you sure you were married? Don’t you know anything?”
He finished pouring his coffee and set the pot back on the hot pad. “I didn’t pay that much attention back then.
You’ve
been eating what I eat.”
“Just to be polite, because you were going to so much trouble to feed me.”
He thought about that for a minute, then said, “Let me drink my coffee and I’ll get back to you on this. In the meantime, I’m going to cook breakfast, and you’ll eat it because that’s all I have and I refuse to let you starve yourself.”
Man, he gets testy over the least little thing.
“Fruit,” I said helpfully. “Peaches. Grapefruit. Whole wheat bread for toast. And yogurt. Sometimes a cereal. That’s girl food.”
“I have cereal,” he said.
“A
healthy
cereal.” His taste in cereal ran to Froot Loops and Cap’n Crunch.
“Why worry about eating anything healthy? If you can eat yogurt and live, you can eat anything. That stuff’s disgusting. It’s almost as bad as cottage cheese.”
I agreed with him about the cottage cheese, so I didn’t leap to its defense. Instead I said, “You don’t have to eat it; you just need to have girl food here for me to eat. If I’m going to stay, that is.”
“You’re staying, all right.” He fished in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out something, which he tossed to me. “Here.”
It was a small velvet box. I turned it over in my hand but didn’t open it. If this was what I thought it was—I tossed the box right back at him. He fielded it one-handed and frowned at me. “Don’t you want it?”
“Want what?”
“The engagement ring.”
“Oh, is that what’s in the box? You
threw
my engagement ring at me?” Boy, this was such a big transgression I would have to write it in block letters on its own page, and show it to our children when they grew up as an example of how
not
to do something.
He cocked his head while he gave this a brief consideration, then looked at me standing there barefoot, dwarfed by his robe, waiting narrow-eyed to see what he would do. He gave a quick little grin and came to me, catching my right hand in his and lifting it to his mouth. Then he went down gracefully on one knee and kissed my hand again. “I love you,” he said gravely. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes, I will,” I replied just as gravely. “I love you, too.” Then I threw myself at him, which of course knocked him off balance, and we sprawled on the kitchen floor, except he was on bottom, so that was okay. We kissed for a while; then I sort of came unwrapped from the robe and what you might have expected to happen, happened.
Afterward he retrieved the velvet box from near the door, where it had skittered when he dropped it, and flipped the top open. Taking out a simple, breathtaking solitaire diamond, he took my left hand and gently slid the ring onto my ring finger.
I looked at the diamond and tears welled in my eyes. “Hey, don’t cry,” he cajoled, tilting my chin up to kiss me. “Why are you crying?”
“Because I love you and it’s beautiful,” I said, and gulped back my tears. Sometimes he did things just right, and when he did, it was almost more than I could bear. “When did you get it? I can’t think when you would have had the time.”
He snorted. “Last Friday. I’ve been carrying it around for a week.”
Last
Friday
? The day after Nicole was murdered? Before he followed me to the beach? My mouth fell open.
He put a finger under my chin and pushed up, closing my mouth. “I was certain then. I was certain as soon as I saw you on Thursday night, sitting in your office with your hair up in a ponytail and wearing that little pink halter top that had all the men’s tongues dragging the ground. I was so relieved to find out you weren’t the one who’d been murdered that my knees nearly buckled, and I knew right then that all I’d been doing for two years was avoiding the inevitable. I made up my mind right then to get you corralled as soon as possible, and I bought the ring the next day.”
I tried to take this in. While I’d been busy protecting myself until he decided he loved me the way I knew he would if he just let himself, he’d already made up his mind and had been trying to convince
me.
Reality altered once more. At this rate, by the end of the day I wouldn’t have a real good grasp on what was real and what wasn’t.
Men and women may belong to the same species, but this was proof positive to me that we are Not Alike. That doesn’t really matter, though, because he was trying. He bought a bush for me, didn’t he? And a gorgeous ring.
“What are you doing today?” he asked over breakfast, which consisted of scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage. I ate about a third of what he did.
“I don’t know.” I twined my feet around the legs of the chair. “I’m bored. I’ll do something.”
He winced. “That’s what I was afraid of. Get ready and go to work with me. At least then I’ll know you’re safe.”
“No offense, but sitting in your office is even more boring than sitting here.”