Low Pressure (24 page)

“Two years, give or take. Since I had to sell my house. When I left the airline, I could no longer sustain the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed. Housing market was crap. I took a beating on the sale, but I had no choice.”

“Savings?”

“Everything went into the down payment on my plane.”

With the towel he’d used on his hair, he dabbed at the bleeding gash on his cheekbone just below his right eye. “I hope you don’t faint at the sight of blood. The son of a bitch made me a goddamn sieve.”

“We should have called the police.”

“We’d have made the front page of tomorrow’s
Statesman
. The witnesses saw me push you to the ground. I’d have probably been arrested, held while questioned, and by the time it was sorted out, we’d be news just because of who we are.”

He was right, of course, which is why she’d let him talk her out of seeking emergency treatment for him. Her father lay dying; Olivia was hanging on to her fortitude by a thread. They didn’t need to open the newspaper tomorrow and read about their daughter’s involvement in an assault-and-battery in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour pancake house.

“Would you know him if you saw him again?” she asked.

“Heavy bastard. Solid. Left arm is covered in a tattoo. A snake with fangs dripping venom. You said the guy in the pickup had a heavily tattooed left arm that was propped in the open window. Putting one and one together . . .” He left her to do the math.

During the drive here, he had related to her the details of the attack. “Except I’m skipping the dirty parts.”

“Dirty parts?”

“Nasty things he said about you.”

Most alarming, he’d told her what his attacker had threatened to do. Now she said, “He wants to kill us.”

“That’s what the man said.”

“But why? Who could he be?”

“I’m thinking. I’m also still leaking.”

“Oh, sorry.” She motioned him over to the table, where she remained seated. “Turn around.”

He presented her with his back. The shorts were riding low on his hips, revealing an oozing red line like a wide smile across the small of his back.

“Dent, you should go to an emergency room.”

He peered over his shoulder, trying to assess the damage himself. “I doubt they’d believe I cut myself shaving.”

“You could claim it was an accident.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said throwing up her hands, her voice breaking with frustration.

He turned around to face her and tipped her chin up. “Hey, you reacted with nerves of steel, then drove like Mario Andretti. You’re not going to crack under pressure now, are you?”

She lifted her chin off the perch of his fingertips and, placing her hands on his hip bones, turned him around none too gently. She emptied the contents of the sack onto the table and uncapped an ominous-looking brown glass bottle. “I hope this antiseptic burns like hell.”

It must have because he hissed and cursed as she applied it. To distract him, she passed a cotton ball doused with the liquid up to him. “Dab that on your face and hand. How is it?”

He unwound the washcloth and took a look. “The cuts aren’t deep. Fingers will probably be stiff in the morning, but he could have cut them off.”

She shivered. “That’s the least of it. But why give you warning? In the time he took to issue those threats, he could have killed you.”

“Disappointed?”

“I’m serious,” she said, speaking up to him when he looked down at her from over his shoulder.

“Maybe he was afraid that somebody was watching from inside the restaurant. Or he’s more bluff than bite. Or he’s a psycho who’s lost his powers of reason. It’s anybody’s guess until we know who he is and why he has it in for us.” He checked her progress. “About finished?”

“It’s not bleeding as much.”

“Because you damn near cauterized it with that stuff.”

She unrolled a length of gauze and gently tapped it into place over the wound. “Turn,” she said. He made three revolutions while she wound the gauze around his middle, then placed vertical strips of adhesive tape at intervals to secure it.

“You’re getting hair caught in that tape.”

“I’m trying not to, but I can’t see what I’m doing if you don’t move your hands.” He did, and she pressed a final strip inches away from the silky stripe of hair that bisected his abdomen and disappeared into the waistband of his shorts. With affected detachment, she said briskly, “There. Done.”

But when she tipped her head back and looked into his face, the intensity with which he was looking down at her stopped her breath. In a voice that was low and husky and suggestive, he said, “As long as you’re in that neighborhood, anything else you want to do . . .”

Moving slowly, he reached out and traced the shape of her lower lip with the pad of his thumb, then brushed aside her hair and gently rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. Desire blossomed in her lower body and brought a whimper to her throat that she was powerless to contain.

While working on his back, she’d tried to remain indifferent to the shape of his buttocks beneath the thin cloth of his shorts, but now the temptation to put her arms around him and test the firmness of those taut muscles against her palms was almost too powerful to withstand.

She wanted to say
To hell with everything
and lean forward, nuzzle that enticing ribbon of hair, then follow it with her lips down to his sex that was so seductively close it made her weak with yearning. To take Dent into her mouth, to taste him . . .

Another sound issued from her, but when she moved, it wasn’t to put her hands on him, or to kiss the skin that smelled of soap and man, of Dent. Instead she pushed his caressing hand aside, stood up, and edged round him.

“Don’t be cute, Dent. This is hardly the time—”

Whatever else she was going to say—and later she couldn’t remember—was left unspoken. He reached for her as she made to go past him, pulled her to him, and closed his hand around her jaw to tilt her face up. “You grew up to be a hell of a woman, Bellamy. The way you worked that gear shift was a major turn-on.”

If last night’s kiss had been a flirtatious invitation to misbehave, this one was a lesson in mastery. It was possessive, carnal, and dominating to a degree that alarmed her. Not that she feared him. She feared her susceptibility to him, feared the forbidden wish that he would do to her at least some of what his kisses portended.

But she resisted being completely drawn in, and, sensing that, he raised his head and released his hold on her face, but only in order to slide his hand down over her breast. He plumped it and tugged gently on her nipple with his fingertips as he nudged the vee of her thighs with his erection.

“Let yourself think about something else for a little while,” he coaxed, whisking his lips across hers. “Relax and have some fun for a change.”

Then he captured her mouth again. Relax? Impossible. Not when her body was urging her to draw him in, to partner with his tongue. She wanted to drive her fingers up into his hair and hold his head steady while she lost herself in his intoxicating kiss.

Instead, she forced herself to do nothing, to respond with neither ardor nor aversion. She willed herself to go perfectly still and react to nothing.

Quick to realize that he was the only one engaged, he angled his head back and searched her face.

“Daddy said you would try to get the last laugh on us by sleeping with me.”

He let go of her immediately. “Oh,
that’s
what Daddy said. That explains the deep-freeze treatment.”

The gashes on his face had reopened and were bleeding, making him appear even more dangerously angry when he stalked to the closet and reached inside to yank a pair of jeans off a hanger. He pulled them on with abrupt, jerky motions, but when he tried to button them, he helplessly raised his hands to his sides. “This could take a while.”

Bellamy flushed hotly, but not from embarrassment. She gestured toward the rumpled bed. “Did you really expect me to get into bed with you when you haven’t even changed the sheets from the last one?”

He plowed his fingers through his damp hair. “Look, I left her here the morning I flew you to Houston. I hadn’t thought about her till we came through the door and I saw the bed. I don’t even know her name.”

“You didn’t care to ask?”

“No.”

“Just like you didn’t care that Susan had others while she was dating you?”

“Why should I have cared?”

“You didn’t love her? Even a little?”

“
Love her?
” He laughed. “Hell, no. I was a horny teenager, and she put out.”

“And that’s all my sister mattered to you?”

He put his hands on his hips. “How much do you think I mattered to
her
?”

“You mattered enough to make her furious when you showed up at the barbecue late. I think she would rather you not have come at all than to—”

All the blood seemed suddenly to drain from her head. She fell back on a wave of dizziness, but the image in her mind’s eye was crystal clear: Dent, astride his motorcycle, gesturing angrily at Susan, who was splendidly, gorgeously in a rage that matched his.

The memory had popped open like a three-dimensional greeting card, gaudy and stark in detail. Bellamy’s breathing became as rapid and choppy as her heartbeat. “You were there. At the boathouse. With Susan. Before the tornado.”

He swore and took a step toward her. “Bellamy—”

“No!” She stuck both hands in front of her, palms out, then clasped them to the sides of her head as she put words to the tumbling recollections. “Susan didn’t come back from the boathouse with the beer-drinking group. I got worried, thinking she might be sick from drinking too much. It was such a hot, muggy day, and I thought . . .”

“Listen. Let me explain.”

“I went to look for her, didn’t I?”

He said nothing.

“You know I did. Because . . . because you saw me watching the two of you, didn’t you?
Didn’t you
?”

“Bellamy—”

“All this time,” she cried, “you could have told me! Why didn’t you tell me that I was remembering wrong? Why didn’t you—” The answer became obvious in a lightning bolt of clarity. “You weren’t flying with Gall. You didn’t have an alibi. You were in the state park, and you were fighting with Susan.”

For several moments, neither moved, then she lunged for the door and pulled it open.

“
Fuck
! Bellamy!”

She bolted through the doorway with such impetus that the only thing to break her fall from the second-story breezeway was the metal guardrail. She landed against it hard, banging her pelvic bone painfully. She gave a cry of pain, then another of fear as Dent’s hands closed around her upper arms.

Her sharp cry caused the two men on the parking lot below to look up. They’d been lounging against the hood of a car, but Rocky Van Durbin came instantly to life. He shouted, “There!” and pointed her out to his photographer, who was at the ready. The flash on his camera exploded in bursts of blinding light.

Dent wrenched Bellamy’s gripping hands off the guardrail and hauled her back into the apartment, then kicked the door shut.

He vented his frustration on the door, beating his fist against it to emphasize each eruptive, foul word. His impulse was to tear down the stairs and make Van Durbin sorry he had ever heard of Denton Carter, then go to work on the photographer and destroy his camera.

But when he’d suffered similar ambushes following Susan’s death, and again during the NTSB’s investigation into the near crash, Gall had been there like a flea in his ear, warning him against impetuous reprisals. “Reporters thrive on angry reactions. You want to beat ’em at their game? Ignore ’em.”

The gash on his cheekbone was throbbing like a son of a bitch, and when he wiped his face the back of his hand, already bleeding from the cuts on his knuckles, came away streaked with brighter, fresher blood. He figured the cut on his back had reopened as well.

When he turned into the room, Bellamy flinched, which made him all the madder. “If you’re more scared of me than you are of them, you know the way out.”

He left the path to the door clear for her as he retrieved his blood-soaked jeans from the bathroom floor and fished his cell phone from a pocket. He then strode into the kitchen and consulted the telephone number for the complex manager, which a previous tenant had penciled onto the faded wallpaper.

Viciously he punched in the number, and the call was answered almost immediately. “Yeah, that notice you put in everyone’s mailbox last week? About the guy who exposed himself to a woman in the North Unit? Uh-huh. Well there are two guys in the parking lot of South. They’re taking pictures through people’s windows with a telephoto lens. I’m almost sure it’s the same two I saw talking to some little girls on the playground this afternoon. You’d better call the police. Okay. Bye.”

He disconnected and looked over at Bellamy, who hadn’t moved or taken her wide gaze off him. “That ought to keep Van Durbin and his sidekick busy for a while.” He buttoned up his jeans and ripped off a length of gauze, which he folded and used to stanch the bleeding on his cheek. “I’m going to have a beer. Want one?”

She didn’t respond.

He took a can of beer from the refrigerator, opened it and sucked up the suds that spilled over the top, then took a deep swallow. He sprawled in the only easy chair in the apartment and calmly sipped at his beer, while Bellamy stared at him as though he was an exotic and potentially dangerous animal that should be caged.

The rings around her eyes were so dark they looked like they’d been put there by punching fists. Her face had been leached of color, but that might have been caused by the glare of his unforgiving overhead light. She looked completely done in, but his ire was such that he didn’t go easy on her.

“Well?” he said.

“What?” Her voice sounded rusty from disuse.

“You’re not going to ask?”

“Wouldn’t you just deny it?”

“Yes. But think what a great plot twist this would make for
Low Pressure: The Sequel
. You could shock your readers right out of their socks. The boyfriend was the killer after all. He, a sexual deviant if ever there was one, got away with murder.