“No. I mean, every once in a while—”
“Once in a while doesn’t count unless they’re so debilitating you can’t function.” I raise my brows at her in a silent question and she shakes her head. “How about nightmares? How often do you have those?”
She shrugs. “It depends. I’ll be honest, I have a lot more now that I’ve read the collected works of Ian Sharpe. Dude, it must be terrifying running around in your brain. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t understand how you can spend so long immersed in minds that sick. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful that you can, and that there are people like you around, but I don’t think I could do it. The six months I spent as Celeste were more than enough for me—and she only killed one person.”
“A violent sociopath is a violent sociopath, whether they’ve killed one person or a hundred.”
“I’ve heard you say that before,” she tells me with a nod. “It was actually key to how I portrayed her and how she viewed her world. Her husband’s mistress might have been the only person she actually murdered, but her whole life was one big sociopathic incident. Everything in it was designed to further her own agenda, to help her get what she wanted. People who got in her way became collateral damage of one kind or another. It’s why she was such a brilliant politician’s wife.”
“And such a brilliant murderer,” I agreed. “You know her well.”
She inclines her head ruefully. “Maybe too well. Maybe if I didn’t know her this well, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”
“All things considered, I’m kind of happy about where we are at this particular moment.” I bring a hand down to cup her ass, using physical touch to help ground her as well as myself. And also, just copping a feel, because she has a fabulous ass and it’s been too long since I touched it. Two birds, one stone.
She wiggles around in my lap a little, trying to get comfortable. But every shift of her body has her sex pressing against my cock. I’m doing my best not to get hard—that’s the last thing she needs right now—but Veronica isn’t exactly making it easy.
At least until she continues talking about the Belladonna. Then any hint of arousal I have goes right out the window. There’s nothing about Celeste Warren that I find sexy. “I spent the year leading up to the filming watching every interview with her I could find, reading every single thing about her that exists. I even visited D.C. and her hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut. I talked to everyone I could find who ever knew her. I walked where she walked, saw what she saw every day.”
That’s news to me, and particularly interesting news considering I had done exactly the same thing when I was writing the book. “You know, it’s not surprising that you have nightmares. Immersing yourself that completely in the head of a psychopath—”
“Do you have nightmares?” she interrupts, eyes wide and shadowed. “You go deeper than I ever did.”
If only she knew. I close my eyes for a second, try to banish the thought. “Sometimes, yeah. Less now than I used to when…”
“When you were an analyst.”
“Yes.”
She nods, falls silent. I take her silence as an opportunity to continue on with my last line of questioning. “How about any tingling in your extremities? Your hands and feet? When you’re not hyperventilating, I mean.”
She looks startled. “No. Of course not.”
“Do you know what day it is? And what street you live on?”
“It’s Saturday and I gave you this address only a few hours ago!”
“Hey, don’t get all defensive on me. I’m just covering the bases so I can prove that what’s happening here isn’t on you.”
She freezes then, her whole body going so still that for a moment I’m afraid that she’s actually stopped breathing. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean you’re not crazy. And while I’m not a medical doctor, you don’t seem to have any symptoms that might indicate a serious neurological problem—”
“So not sick and not crazy,” she breathes with a sigh of relief. “At least according to you.”
I lift a brow at her. “For someone who wanted my opinion so badly, you don’t seem very ready to believe it.”
“It’s not that. It’s just…how can you say for certain that I’m not losing my mind? Or that I don’t have another personality running around in my head somewhere?”
“Because no conversation I’ve ever had with you has ever given me the idea that that’s the case.” I pause, let my words sink in. “Why? Do you think you have another personality?”