Linda Howard - To Die For

“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.

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?