“Oh, no you—”
“And since I’m going to be sitting here for hours, you’ll have to pick up the kids, even though it’s my turn to take them. I’m sure you don’t have any plans for this evening.”
“Come on, Crys. Get somebody from the school to help you. Lily. Get your buddy the schoolteacher to help. Maybe she can help you more than she has Charlie.”
“Oh, don’t start.” Crystal acknowledged to herself that this wasn’t really about getting a jump for her car. This was about getting Derek to jump for her. “Quit trying to hand off your problem to someone else.”
“There’s got to be a maintenance worker at the school, or—”
“Derek. In the time it takes to have this argument, you could drive back here and give me a jump. Then you’ll be a free man.”
“You’re pissing me off, Crys. You are really pissing me off.”
She smiled. “See you soon.”
The phone went dead. Crystal took it away from her ear and looked at the screen. It said Call Ended, not Signal Lost. The bastard had hung up on her.
She thought about what to do next. In a raging storm, with darkness falling all around, in a dead car, no one could hear you scream.
She opened the door and threw out the stale cigarette. Then, through the rain-blurred windshield, she saw a pair of headlights approaching. Friend or foe? she wondered. The day seemed darker than ever. The headlamps blazed, blinding her in a blue-white flash of lightning. The vehicle approached fast, coming straight toward her. Crystal was too surprised to scream. She clutched the steering wheel and braced herself for impact.
The vehicle stopped mere inches from her front bumper. She blinked at the strong stream of light stabbing right at her. And saw a flash of cobalt blue.
Derek. Bless him, the bastard had come back for her.
chapter 5
Friday
3:55 p.m.
The bitch just sat there like a queen, barely acknowledging his presence. Derek had the high beams on intentionally, and left them on, glaring straight at her. Take that.
He offered her a steady stream of opinion in terms so foul it would curl her ears if she could hear him. But she couldn’t, of course, which made him wonder why he bothered.
He stuffed his arms into the sleeves of his Gore-Tex jacket and shrugged the hood up over his head. He reached down and popped the hood of the truck. Without acknowledging Crystal or even glancing in her direction, he went to the back of the Chevy and got out the cables.
He felt her watching him and knew damned well what she was thinking. This was a power play. They both knew it. And by getting him to come back for her, she’d won the first round. But the fight wasn’t over. They both acknowledged that, too.
Propping open the hood, he felt the first cold trickles of rain pouring into his shoe. He looked down to see that the water was ankle deep.
“Fuck,” he said, wishing she could hear, because she hated that word so much. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He clipped the cable to the corresponding battery terminals, hoping like hell he got it right. Then he turned his attention to Crystal’s car. Correction, his car. The one she’d stolen from him, along with the house and everything else in the divorce settlement.
At least she was smart enough to pop the hood release without being told. He found the battery terminals caked with corrosion and had to chip the flakes off with his pocketknife. Then he connected the jumper cables and stepped out from under the hood. With a flick of his wrist, he signaled for her to try the ignition. It was raining so hard he couldn’t hear the engine engage.
She opened her door and shouted, “It’s not working.”
“Try it again.”
She shot him a look and turned the key. With the door open, he could see her do it. Nothing happened—no panel, no dome light, no nothing. Complete failure.
“Try again,” he yelled.
She shook her head. “Still not working.”
Out of patience, Derek motioned for her to move. She had to clamber over the console, and he was treated briefly to a flash of beauty queen leg. Even standing in a puddle in the midst of a storm, even knowing all the reasons he had divorced her, Derek felt a jolt of such irrational sexual hunger that he groaned aloud.
This of course was Crystal’s great power. This was why he’d stayed with her fifteen years instead of fifteen minutes. She was the sexiest woman he’d ever known.
And now she sat next to him, silent and ungrateful, smelling of designer perfume and…He glared at her questioningly. “Smoking, Crys?”
She offered him a skinny, flat package of cigarettes that had seen better days. “Join me?”
“Those things will kill you.”
“We all have to die of something.”
Derek shook his head in disgust while he confirmed what he’d known since he saw the condition of her battery. “It’s dead,” he said.
Rainwater dripped from his hooded jacket to the cloth upholstery.
She said nothing. She didn’t have to. Her tight-lipped, pale-faced, narrow-eyed expression said it all.
“Fuck,” he said, banging the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
She used to wince when he talked that way. That was, actually, his primary reason for talking that way. Now that she had no reaction, he shut up. Then he took a deep, cleansing breath to clear his head, filling his lungs from the top down the way his breathing coach had taught him.
Yes, he had a freaking breathing coach. He had coaches and trainers for every possible angle, physical or mental. If he didn't watch out, one of these days he’d find himself with a coach for taking a piss.
The car was littered with carelessly strewn effluvia. A clump of sodden Kleenex told him she felt as lousy about the teacher conference as he did. A pair of earrings he didn’t recognize lay in the ashtray. Crystal had a way of littering herself throughout the car, stamping it with her presence. It was littered with memories, too. This had been a brand-new car the day they’d driven Charlie to school for the first day of kindergarten. She’d sobbed miserably while big brother Cameron looked on in disgust.
Then, realizing the nest was truly empty, they’d driven to Lovers Lane, a private cliffside parking spot off the coastal highway. It was a place Derek remembered from high school, an outcropping so lofty and sheer that an ordinary car felt like the cockpit of a spaceship. That day, with both their children in school for the first time, he’d made love to her in the back of the station wagon on the scratchy gray carpet littered with golf tees, scorecards, plastic Happy Meal toys and lost pennies. He could’ve taken her home that day, to their own bed, but at home, phone calls and work awaited him.
Back then, she’d wrapped her strong bare legs around him and sighed with satisfaction. Now she handed him her cell phone. “Call your auto club.”
He snatched it from her, got the number from his wallet and made the call. The rain came down harder. The dispatcher said the first available assistance would arrive in three to four hours. When Derek told Crystal this, she said, “I’m not waiting here.”
“Go inside the school and wait.”
“That’s ridiculous. Cameron needs to be picked up in an hour and a half. And then Charlie after that. She’s playing at her friend Lindsey’s house. I don’t know how long you told the sitter to keep Ashley.”
The baby wasn’t with her usual sitter, but