Judith McNaught (42 page)

"Excuse me," she said, trying to walk around him without giving him the courtesy of looking up.

His voice was as implacable as his stance. "It's my fault you've had to wear the same clothes for the past three days. I just wanted you to have something else to wear so I wouldn't feel guilty every time I looked at your jeans." Wisely leaving out the fact that he'd also been longing to see her in something beautiful and

fine that was worthy of her face and figure, he said,

"Would you please look at me and let me explain."

Julie had more than enough stubborn courage to withstand the force of his persuasive tone, but she wasn't so angry that she couldn't understand his logic, nor was she unmindful of the idiocy of spoiling

what little time they had with a pointless argument.

"I hate it when you ignore me and stare at the floor like that," he said. "It makes me feel like you think my

voice is coming from some cockroach down there, and you're wondering where it is so you can step on it."

Julie had intended to graciously look up at him in her own good time, but she was no match for such humor, and she ended up collapsing against the clothes behind her and shaking with laughter. "You are

completely incorrigible," she said, giggling and raising eyes swimming with mirth to his.

"And you are completely wonderful."

Julie's heart missed a beat at his solemn expression, but he was an actor, as she'd just been forcefully reminded, and it would only hurt her more later if she started treating what were only casual pleasantries

to him as if they were avowals of deep affection.

When she didn't respond, Zack smiled and headed for the bedroom. Over his shoulder, he said, "Let's put on jackets and go outside if that's what you still want to do."

She gaped at him in utter disbelief, followed him, and spread her arms out wide, looking down at her clothes and making him look too as she said, "In these clothes?! Are you crazy? These cashmere slacks

must have cost … at least two hundred dollars!"

Recalling some of Rachel's charge account bills, Zack gauged the price at more like six hundred dollars,

but he didn't say that. In fact, he was so intent on getting her to go outside, which he knew she'd very much wanted to do, that he put his hands on her shoulders, gave her a little shake, and said much more

than he'd meant to tell her. "Julie, these clothes belong to a woman who has department stores full of beautiful clothes. She wouldn't care in the least if you wore some of them—" Before he finished the sentence, he couldn't believe he'd been foolish enough to reveal so much. Julie's eyes were wide with

shock, and he could see her mind working even before she said, "You mean you know the people who

own this house? They're letting you use it? Isn't that a terrible risk for them to take, I mean knowingly harboring an escaped—"

"Stop it!" he ordered more roughly than he intended.

"I didn't mean anything of the sort!"

"But I'm only trying to understand—"

"Damn it, I don't
want
you to understand."

Reminding himself of the injustice of taking his anger at

himself out on her, he raked a hand through the side of his hair and said with only slightly more patience,
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"I'll try to explain this as clearly and succinctly as I can, and then I want the subject dropped." She gave him a look that made it plain she thought his attitude and his tone were unreasonable and objectionable, but she kept silent. Shoving her hands into her pants pockets, she leaned her shoulders against the bedroom wall, crossed her ankles, and watched him with unnerving absorption.

"When you go back home," Zack began, "the police are going to question you about everything I said and did while we were together, so that they can try to figure out how much help I had escaping and where I'm going next. They'll make you go over it and over it and over it until you're exhausted and can't

think clearly any more. They'll do it in the hope you'll remember something you forgot that's significant to

them even if it wasn't to you at the time. As long as you can tell them the truth, the whole truth—which is

exactly what I'm going to advise you to do when you leave here—you won't have anything to worry about. But if you try to protect me by hiding something from them or if you lie, you'll eventually contradict

yourself, and when you do, they'll catch it and they'll tear you apart. They'll start thinking you were my accomplice from the very beginning, and they'll treat you as if you were.

"I'm going to ask you to tell one small, uncomplicated lie that should help us both without tripping you up

during questioning. Beyond that, I don't want you to lie or conceal anything from the police. Tell them everything. At this point you don't know one thing that could harm me or anyone involved with me. I intend to keep it that way," he finished emphatically,

"for my sake and for your own. Is that clear? You understand why I don't want you to ask any more questions?" His brows snapped together when she asked a question instead of acquiescing, but when he heard it, he relaxed: "What lie are you going to ask me to tell?"

"I'm going to ask you to tell the police that you don't know exactly where this house is. Tell them I blindfolded you after you nearly got away from me at that rest stop and that I made you lie down in the back seat for most of the rest of the trip, so that you couldn't try to get away from me again. It's believable and logical and they'll buy it. It will also help to neutralize that damned truck driver's version of

what he saw; he is the only reason the police would ever suspect you of aiding and abetting my escape.

I'd do anything in the world to avoid asking you to lie for me like this, but it's the best way."

"And if I refuse?"

His entire face instantly became hard, shuttered, and aloof. "That's up to you, of course," he said in a chillingly courteous voice. Until that moment, as she witnessed the change in him when he thought his trust

in her was misplaced, Julie hadn't fully realized how much he'd truly softened toward her since yesterday.

His teasing nonchalance and tender lovemaking weren't merely a convenient and pleasant way to while

away their time together—at least some part of that was actually real. The discovery was so sweet that she almost missed what he was saying: "If you choose to tell the police where this house is, I would appreciate your remembering to also tell them that I did not have a key and intended to break into it if I couldn't find one. If you don't emphasize that, then the people who own this house, who are as innocent as you of collaborating in my original escape plans, will be subject to the same unjust suspicions that you're being subjected to because of what the truck driver said."

He wasn't trying to protect himself at all, she realized. He was trying desperately to protect whoever

owned the house. Which meant he knew them. They were, or had been, friends…

"Would you care to tell me which choice you intend to make?" he said in that same coolly detached voice that she hated. "Or would you prefer to think about it?"

When she was eleven years old, Julie had vowed never to lie again, and she'd not broken that vow in fifteen years. Now she looked at the man she loved and said softly, "I intend to tell them I was
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blindfolded. How could you think I'd decide anything else?"

Relief flowed through her as she watched the tension drain from his face, but instead of saying something sweet, he gave her a scathing glare and announced,

"You have the distinction, Julie, of being the only woman alive who has
ever
managed to make me feel like an emotional yo-yo dancing on a damned string from the end of your finger."

Julie bit down on her lower lip to stop her smile because it seemed wonderfully significant to be able to

affect him in a way no other woman ever had. Even if he didn't like the way she did it at all. "I'm …

sorry," she finished lamely and dishonestly.

"The hell you are," he retorted, but the edge was gone from his voice and there was a tinge of reluctant

amusement in it. "You're doing your damnedest not to laugh."

Swallowing a giggle at his discomfiture, she lifted her forefinger and inspected it closely, turning it left to

right. "It looks like a pretty ordinary finger to me,"

she teased.

"There's nothing ordinary about you, Miss Mathison," he said with that same combination of irritated

amusement. "God help whoever marries you because the poor bastard's going to grow old and gray long before his time!"

His obvious and unconcerned conviction that she was going to end up with someone besides

him—someone who he pitied, to boot—doused Julie's spurt of happiness and jerked her back to earth.

Vowing to keep things light from this moment on and never again to read more into his words and actions

than there really was, she smiled, nodded, shoved away from the wall, and switched to jaunty tennis jargon: "I think that last point you scored gives you the game, set, and match. I concede this verbal victory to you along with all our others."

Despite her casual attitude, Zack had the uneasy feeling he'd somehow hurt her feelings. A few moments

later, he walked out of the bedroom and joined her at the hall closet where she was putting on the snowmobile suit she'd worn yesterday. "I'd forgotten about this outfit," she explained. "It will protect what I'm wearing. I got the other one out of my closet for you," she added, nodding toward the larger snowmobile suit hanging on the door.

Reaching for it and starting to pull it on, Zack decided their conversation in the bedroom still needed

some clarification. "Look," he said with quiet sincerity, "I don't want to quarrel or spar with you, that's the

last thing in the world I want to do. And I most definitely do not want to discuss my future plans or present concerns with you. I'm trying my damnedest not to worry about them myself and to simply enjoy the surprise gift of having you here. Try to understand that these next few days, here in this house with

you, are going to be the last "normal" days of my life. Not that I have the slightest idea of what normal really is," he added bluntly. "But the point is, even though we both know all of this is a fantasy that's going

to come to an abrupt end, I'd still like to have it—an idyllic few days up here with you to remember and look back on. I don't want to spoil it with thoughts of the future. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

Julie hid the sympathy and sorrow his words evoked behind a warm smile and nodded. "Am I allowed to know how long we're going to be here together?"

"I—haven't decided. No more than a week."

She tried very hard not to think of how little time that was and resolved to do exactly as he asked, but
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she voiced the question that had been unnerving her since she left the bedroom: "Before we can drop the entire discussion about the police and everything, there's something I have to ask you. I mean, clarify."

Zack watched a gorgeous blush creep up her cheeks, and she hastily bent her head, concentrating fiercely on shoving her heavy hair into a blue knitted cap. "You said you wanted me to tell the police everything. You can't honestly mean you expect me to tell them that we—you—I—"

"You've given me all the pronouns," Zack teased, guessing exactly what she was getting at, "could you toss me a verb to go with them?"

She pulled on her gloves, plunked her hands on her slim hips, and gave him a look of comic disapproval.

"You're entirely too glib, Mr. Benedict."

"I have to be to keep up with you."

She shook her head in mock disgust and turned toward the back door at the end of the short hall.

Regretting his timing, if not his reply, Zack caught up with her just as she stepped outdoors. The sky was

a bright, blinding blue overhead, it was cold but not bitterly so, and the world outside looked like an arctic wonderland, with high snow drifts and low craters created by the wind. "I didn't mean to treat your

last question with indifference," he explained, closing the door behind him, pulling on his gloves, and

stepping carefully onto a wind-created path with a five-foot-high drift next to it. She turned and waited for him to walk the few paces to her and he lost his train of thought at the sunlit wonder of her face.

With

all her hair tucked severely under that cap and no makeup on except lipstick, she was a breathtaking marvel of clear porcelain skin and huge, jewel-bright sapphire eyes framed with dark lashes and graceful brows. "Of course I didn't mean you should volunteer the information that we've been intimate; that's no

one's business but our own. On the other hand,"

Zack added, recovering his composure, "considering the

fact that I was convicted of murder, they're going to assume I wouldn't hesitate to coerce or force you to have sex with me. Given the gutter mentality of most cops, when you deny I forced you, they're going to

ponder and pry and try to get you to reveal that maybe you wanted me to screw you, and so I did."

"Don't say it that way!" she said, looking like a prim, outraged virgin, which, Zack realized with an inner smile, she was.

"I'm saying it the way they'll think of it," he explained. "They'll come at the subject from a dozen different,

seemingly unrelated ways, like asking you to describe the house I used for a hideout, ostensibly so they

can locate and identify it and search it for clues.

Then they'll ask about the bedrooms and then the decor

of all the bedrooms. Who knows how they'll get at you, but the minute you reveal too much

knowledge—or too much feeling—about something that concerns me personally, they'll assume the worst and pounce. When I brought you here, I never imagined they'd have such good reason to think you might have become an ally. And they wouldn't have if that damned truck driver hadn't—" He broke off and shook his head. "When you nearly got away at that rest stop, I didn't think about anything beyond the immediate need to stop you. I didn't think the truck driver got a good enough look at us to recognize