“And if you found Chekowsky you’d leave when I did? With me?” Her voice was wary, and he had absolutely no idea what she was getting at.
He shook his head. “We’re going different places.”
She nodded. “In that case,” she said, “try the wine cellar.”
Chapter Twenty
The self-proclaimed rat bastard was looking at her like she’d lost her mind, Sophie thought with a wistful trace of triumph. She wasn’t the complete loser he thought she was.
“What?” he thundered.
“Did you need him alive? Because I can’t guarantee that. I drugged him with Vicodin—he was more gullible than you. He was unconscious in less than ten minutes. He was too heavy for me to drag, so I put him in the wheelchair and dropped him down into the wine cellar. There was a lot of breaking glass, so if the Vicodin didn’t kill him, the broken wine bottles might have.”
He was still staring at her in disbelief. “He can be dead,” he said after a moment. “Just so long as no one else has him.”
She shrugged. “If he survived he ought to be awake by now. Do you want to go see?”
“Do you know the combination?”
“How do you think I got him in there in the first place?” She headed into the kitchen, not waiting for him to follow her. She put her ear to the door, but there was no sound from the cellar. Maybe he really was dead. At that point she couldn’t bring herself to care.
She was a fool, an idiot, even worse—she could have just kept her mouth shut and never embarrassed herself. What had she expected, protestations of undying love in return from the rat bastard? He didn’t have it in him. She was an idiot to love someone like that, and she had the sincere hope that any irrational and inconvenient feeling she might have would disappear when she didn’t have to look at him. It might take a while, but sooner or later she’d stop thinking about him. About the way his hands felt on her body. About the taste of him.
She slammed her fist against the door in sudden fury. “You alive down there, Dr. Chekowsky?”
No answer, but Mal was beside her, towering over her. She forgot how tall he was—she hadn’t been used to standing beside anyone at all. “Turn on the light,” she snapped, and bent down to the combination lock, twirling the dial expertly before slipping it free and opening the door.
There was no light down there, of course, but a quiet groan wafted up. She turned to Mal. “I guess he survived.”
She couldn’t read the look he gave her, and she didn’t care. “We better bring him up,” he said.
“What’s this we?” she said caustically. “There’s barely room for one person down there, much less three. And Dr. Chekowsky is no sylph.”
Mal gave her a look of exasperation mixed with a grudging respect. “Okay, hold the door open so I don’t get locked in.”
She considered it for a moment. “Don’t tempt me.”
A moment later he scrambled down the stairs, and she could hear more moaning and the sound of broken glass. She stuck her head down into the darkness, unable to make out a thing. “Is he still in one piece?”
“Barely,” Mal said, unmoved. “I’m going to get him to his feet and help him up the steps. You be there to catch him.”
“Have you taken a good look at him?” she shot back.
“You put him down here, so you’ll have to help get him out.”
She pulled her head back out of the open doorway, frowning. For a moment she thought she’d heard something from the living room, but the wind had been making a racket for days. She turned back to the cellar. “Okay, push him up. But I can’t promise I won’t let him fall back on top of you, and you wouldn’t like that one bit.”
“Don’t.” The one word was warning enough, and she sighed. A moment later Dr. Chekowsky’s head and shoulders appeared at the top of the stairs. He had a cut on his head, one that had bled liberally, and his beady little eyes managed to be unfocused and glaring at the same time.
“You bitch,” he spat.
“Play nice, Dr. Chekowsky, or I won’t help you out of there.” It was an empty threat. In fact, she was relieved he was in relatively good shape. She reached down for him, braced herself, and hauled him up into the kitchen, dumping him in the wheelchair as Mal leapt up behind him. He looked at the man in the chair.
“You can’t walk?” he said skeptically, and Sophie took the faint comfort that at least he was as abrupt with everyone, not just stupid women who said “I love you.”
Chekowsky fumed, pushing his little body out of the chair. “I can walk,” he said furiously, starting toward the door to the living room. “That terrible woman drugged me and then dumped me in that cellar,” he announced, heading through the door with Mal by his side, Sophie taking up the tail end of their little procession. “And she’s not even crippled.”
“No, she isn’t, is she?” said a smooth voice, and Sophie froze. Standing a few feet away from them was the ghost of her husband.