“What?”
“I just broke the law, okay? At least I think I did, but I’m not really sure.” She turned round to face front again, but scooched down into the seat so that her knees were jammed up against the dash.
“You broke the law?” he said in disbelief as he waited for the electronic gate to slowly slide open. She must have done, for she looked dangerously close to tears. And then there was the blood on her hands. Streaks of it.
“I had to!” she said frantically. “You wouldn’t believe what those people do! Is anyone following us?”
Flynn looked in the rearview. “No—”
“Good! Okay, okay, turn left,” she insisted as he carried on through the gate. “Turn left, turn left—left!”
Flynn jerked a hard left and sped down the street until he came upon a stop sign. He hit the brakes hard, got hold of his senses. “Whatever you think you’ve done, Rachel, it will be much easier to face it than to run from it,” he said sternly. “Tell me what you’ve done and I’ll help you.”
“I set their cat free. Come on, let’s go,” she said, gesturing for him to drive on.
“You did what?” he asked again as he peered at the blood on her hands.
“Those people chain their cat to a tree! Can you believe that? Of course I had to let it go!”
He still wasn’t certain she hadn’t perhaps pick-axed someone to death as the blood on her hands would indicate. “Let me see if I have this—you set their pet cat free?”
“Yes! Yes, I did! It’s not right to keep a cat chained. It goes entirely against their nature! I couldn’t stand to see it, so I let it go. In fact, if you’d really like to know, I was going to steal it, but the damn thing had a different idea,” she said, looking at her hands for the first time. “Oh my God,” she said.
“You’re bleeding rather badly.”
“The cat had some claws,” she said with wonder.
“Most felines do.” He put the car in gear, turned right, heading for Blackstone Boulevard.
“Wait—my car is back there. Where are you going? And why are you here?”
“We must clean your hands. No telling what sort of ugly kitty germs you have there, and as to why I’m here, I am asking myself the very same thing.”
“But my car is just around the corner and you can just drop me there—”
“I rather think not,” he said calmly. “I have something that should do the trick.”
“Where?” she asked, her voice full of suspicion.
“My place.”
“Your place! I can’t go to your place.”
“And why not? Have you committed to trawling the city and freeing more cats tonight?”
“No! It’s just that . . . Don’t you have a blonde waiting for you somewhere, Charlie?”
“Actually, I prefer Flynn instead of Charlie, and if you must know, I can hardly be held responsible when a drunken woman attaches herself to me and refuses to let go.”
Rachel did not look convinced.
“Honestly, Rachel, I intend to bandage your hand. I’m not the sort to bring a girl home under false pretense and shag her,” he said firmly, although the thought of shagging her did indeed cross his mind, as it had several times since meeting her. And was it a cruel hoax of his imagination, or did she seem slightly disappointed by that declaration?
Rachel wasn’t disappointed, exactly. She was absolutely mortified.
First, the thought of shagging the English guy had crossed her mind plenty of times, but that little premenstrual water retention problem she was having was out of control, building up like a dam in her, and if she didn’t get out of this skirt soon, she was certain the dam would, literally, break. And she couldn’t put her pants back on because she had wadded them up and stuffed them in her bag in order to free the cat. She’d look like a bag lady if she tried it.
Second, in the event the dam did break, she was wholly unprepared for it, in spite of owning an enormous box of tampons that took up half her bathroom. Honestly, she could have sworn she put a couple in her giant bag, but for the life of her, she couldn’t find any in there.
And third, she was starving, because Mary the caterer had stated, pretty emphatically, that the food was bought and paid for by the Feizels, and as they hadn’t invited anyone to eat it, she certainly wasn’t going to invite them to eat it.
The upshot was that Rachel had hardly had a bite today, save a couple of shrimp, and was starving so badly that her stomach was making really weird and frighteningly gluttonous noises that Flynn couldn’t hear over the car’s engine, but would most definitely hear at his place. “I can’t,” she said again, sliding back up to a sitting position to get some oxygen to her brain.
“Of course you can.”