He turned to her, a pulse throbbing along his jaw."Petted. Yes, the word fits, I think. What else would you call it when a man's hands are all over you?"
Bryn stared at him for a minute, wishing she could strike him, hoping she wouldn't burst into ridiculous tears. The attack was unfair. "I didn't want to be where I was!"
"You were smiling away a mile a minute at the golfer. Seems to me you were quite happy where you were."
Bryn hopped out of the front seat, slamming the door behind her. Her van was parked in front of the garage, and she started walking toward it, her heels clicking sharply against the gravel driveway.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?" he called after her, crawling from the driver's seat and staring after her.
"Home," she said briefly, fumbling in her bag for her keys. "I'll get things ready for Adam to come back tomorrow.With or without your help. And I'll be here to get the boys before they wake up."
"No you will not, because you're not leaving."
"Oh? Because I'm 'the woman you're sleeping with'? You don't own me, Lee. You don't even have a lease on me. And since I've already been 'petted' for the night, I think I'd prefer to sleep in my own bed."
Her fingers locked around her keys and she pulled them from her small clutch purse.
He started to swear softly, and his shoes crunched loudly as he strode across the gravel. Bryn felt her heart begin to pound viciously in her chest. Had she wanted him to stop her in her anger? Or had she believed that he might deny his own words and say that she was much, much more than just the woman he was sleeping with?
She wasn't sure; she just knew that she was suddenly frightened. She turned to the van, but she knew that she'd never get the door open before he got there.
She didn't. She felt his hand on her shoulder, his grip painful as he spun her around.
He spoke softly, enunciating each word carefully. "Bryn-- even if I hated, loathed and despised you, and if your feelings for me were exactly the same, I wouldn't let you get into that van and drive away. Not tonight. Now act reasonably and turn around and get in the house]"
"Reasonably?"Bryn shrieked. It was a foolish thing to do. His lips compressed and his eyes seemed to Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
sizzle in the moonlight with white fire.
"Have it your way," he told her.
He ducked with a fluid movement, catching her about the midriff and flinging her over his shoulder. She swore at him violently as he headed for the door and carefully punched out the code for the new security lock. As soon as they were inside, he flicked on the hall light and set her down. Shaken and feeling as if her own temper possessed her entire body in a reckless grip, Bryn clenched her hands into fists at her sides and tossed back the tangled waves of her hair to meet his gaze with a fiery one of her own.
"I'll walk out of this house any time I choose." "No, you will not. Not while we're involved with all this."
"Involved? It's over tomorrow, and the hell with the damn pictures! What are we going to find? What are we going to prove? All I want is Adam. I'd rather just drop the whole damned thing here and now."
"But you won't Miss Keller.Because I won't. I'm in on this too. And I don't like being threatened and manipulated. So we won't forget about the pictures. And--" with his arms crossed over his tuxedoed chest, he began to move slowly toward her, stopping an inch away "--you won't walk out of this house. I have no intention of aiding and abetting murder or suicide. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life wondering if I might have been able to do something the night I found you splattered all over the road!
Don't act like a child, Bryn, or I'll treat you like one."
There seemed to be no dignified way out of the situation. She would be a fool to fight him; she could feel his strength when he wasn't even touching her. All she could do wassalvage her pride with as calm a demeanor as possible.
"All right, Lee. You've been helping with...with Adam. I need you tomorrow, and you are in on the pictures. We'll get Adam--" Please make that be true!she silently prayed. But she had to believe it, and so she kept talking to Lee. She was so tautly wound inside that she was ready to fight. "We'll keep playing with the pictures. But it will all end there. I do realize that I should be ready to jump, beg, and roll over when the great star speaks, but I've already been that route once. It's not for me. Now, I'm going to bed. Alone."
He had watched her silently through the entire speech; when she finished he was still watching her.
Rigidly.
The only signs of the intensity of his anger were his narrowed eyes and the pulse furiously ticking a vein in his corded neck. Bryn smiled bitterly and turned, heading for the stairway. She walked quickly, purposefully. She could feel his eyes piercing through her back, as if they were rays of heat and her flesh was naked.
She started up the steps.