Hadley & Grace(52)
As he drives past, he waves, and Grace manages to lift her hand to wave back.
Hadley climbs in, a cat-ate-the-canary grin on her face as she wipes the wetness from her cheeks. “Eight for nine,” she says, raising her hand for Grace to high-five.
Grace leaves the hand hanging there, her heart clattering in her chest.
Mattie says, “Eight for nine what?” as she reaches over to slap her mom’s hand.
Hadley says proudly, “Your mom has been pulled over nine times, and the only time I got a ticket was when I tried to hit on a woman cop, and she really didn’t appreciate it.”
Grace is irrationally upset, her blood pumping with residual panic and inexplicable anger. She should be overjoyed with Hadley’s perverse talent for flirting, acting, and concocting convincing fiction on the spot, but instead her vision is red and her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Great lesson you’re teaching your daughter,” she snarls.
Hadley looks at her, her head cocked to the side. “What’s your problem?”
“What’s next—you going to teach her how to lap dance her way to a free drink? Or maybe you should just move on to the ultimate lesson and teach her how to marry for money?”
Hadley blinks, and Grace turns from her, throws the truck in gear, and pulls onto the road.
“Seriously,” Hadley says, “what’s your problem?”
Grace looks at Mattie again, her skin on fire, uncertain what her problem is, only certain of her rage. Finally, she spits, “It’s not right,” the only words she can think of to describe what she is feeling. “Sex is not a bargaining tool, or at least it shouldn’t be. And for most of us, eight out of nine times it doesn’t work out. You hear that, Mattie? Unless you look like your mom and master the art of rendering men stupid by sticking your boobs in their face—”
“I did not stick my boobs in his face.”
“You kind of did, Mom,” Mattie says.
Hadley harrumphs, her arms folded over the aforementioned boobs. “I stopped us from being arrested is what I did.”
Grace yanks the wheel to steer the truck onto the shoulder and barely gets the door open in time to hurl her dinner onto the street. The gun tumbles to the ground beside the retch, and she stares at it, her breath coming in gulps and gasps.
Hadley is beside her. She holds Grace’s hair from her face as Grace spits the vile taste from her mouth.
Mattie steps from the car and holds out a bottle of water.
“Get her a wipe,” Hadley says, her voice full of concern as she rubs Grace’s back.
Grace’s eyes fill. Too much, she thinks. Between yesterday and today and what just almost happened, it’s too much. She squeezes her eyes shut and sucks air through her nose.
“No more flirting my way out of tickets. Very upsetting to Grace. Note taken,” Hadley says, and Grace manages a weak smile, then bends down to pick up the gun.
“You were going to shoot him?” Hadley says; then, reverting to her fake French accent, she adds, “Perhaps flirting work better, no?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Grace says, and she hoists herself back in the truck. And as they continue on, she imagines herself standing in front of a judge with Hadley beside her—the judge smiling down at Hadley as he dismisses all the charges against her, then his gavel coming down hard as he sentences Grace to life.
38
MARK
It’s cold now, seriously cold. The wind rattles through the window, along with other night noises. The sun went down an hour ago, and the wind picked up, sending creaks and howls and whipping dirt and sage against the trailer. Mark is too far from the heater to turn it on and, humiliatingly, too far from the bathroom to use the toilet. Herrick left him a bucket, and the stench of his waste beside him makes his stomach curl. He survived worse in the marines, but that was a long time ago, when he was a lot younger, dumber, and tougher.
The fingers on his left hand are raw from sawing at the zip ties for the past six hours with the edge of the zipper pull of the sleeping bag, which he’s repeatedly sharpened by filing it on the edge of the desk.
He has managed to cut through two of the three links Herrick tethered to his wrist, the only part of the chain not braided into an impossible rope. But now the tab is ground to a nub and barely makes any headway against the thick plastic.
As he works, his mind wanders, not able to get her out of his thoughts—her scent, her touch, her laughter—mostly her laughter, so much of it, the two of them giggling like schoolkids. He shakes his head to clear it all away, unable to believe he did what he did. Twenty years with the agency, and he’s never even come close to crossing that line.
What possessed him?
She did. She possessed him with those catlike eyes, those lips, those hands, and those breasts—silk flesh flowing from the white satin of her bra. His skin prickles with the memory, and he shakes his head against it and presses the heels of his hands to his sockets to blot it away.
When he blinks his eyes open, he returns to his task, sawing frantically, his frustration at critical mass. The blade slips and slices the skin above his wrist, creating a fresh wound around the dozen that already exist. He drops the tab and presses the cloth of the sleeping bag against it, then leans his head back against the wall. Damn her. She knew exactly what she was doing, that mischievous grin on her face as she hopped toward him. Then she kissed him, and he wanted to say no; he tried.