He winced, but it was a rehearsed reaction. “I see you’re still carrying a grudge. Better watch that, Jade. Bitterness will make you old before your time, put lines in your face. Besides, what’s the point? Lamar’s dead and buried. Hutch is as good as. Me—I’m coming to you as an old friend, offering a peace pipe, hoping you’ll forget our little misunderstanding.”
To reduce her rape and Gary’s suicide to a little misunderstanding was grotesque. It took every ounce of willpower she possessed not to claw the complacent smile off his face. “You’re coming to me as a man running scared, Neal. My company is a threat to the feudalistic economy around here. You stand to lose your ruling power, and you know it. Better yet, I know it.”
“Don’t count us Patchetts out yet, Jade.”
“I never have. Only this time you’re not going to win.”
She got back into her car and shut the door. He bent down and stuck his head in the open window. “Are you sure about that?”
“I’m going to make damn sure.”
His eyelids lowered to half-mast. “You know, Jade, I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard you had a son, seeing that you don’t even have a husband. So I moseyed over to your house the other day, and lo and behold, there he was—a teenage boy, shooting basketballs in the driveway just like I used to do.”
She couldn’t conceal her panic. Seeing it, Neal continued in that same soft, unruffled tone. “He’s a good-looking kid, Jade. Reminds me of myself when I was that age.” He leaned in closer. “I was just wondering if maybe Georgie didn’t take a baby out of you that day we watched you go into her house.”
“We?”
“Why, Gary and me. We went to buy some moonshine from her. Damned if we weren’t shocked to see you tiptoeing up her sidewalk with your fifty dollars clutched in your tight little fist.”
“You didn’t go there to buy moonshine. Patrice Watley told you I would be there. You took Gary so he would see me.”
“He went plumb crazy,” he said with a soft laugh.
She was shaking uncontrollably and so enraged that she could barely speak. “I thought that killing you was better than you deserved. I was wrong. I should have killed you fifteen years ago.”
He snickered with unconcern. “Know what I think, Jade? I think you came out of Georgie’s house with your fifty dollars still in your hand and a baby in your belly.” He reached into the window and twined a strand of her hair around his fingertip. “I think I put that baby there. I think your boy is mine. And what we Patchetts consider ours, we take.”
She jerked her head back at the same instant she dropped the gear shift into reverse. The car lurched backward, almost tearing Neal’s arm off before he got it out of the open window. Jade shoved the car into drive and depressed the accelerator. The Cherokee shot forward, missing the rear end of his late-model El Dorado by a hair. Jade’s fingers flexed around the steering wheel. She gritted her teeth to keep from screaming. Damn them! Why was it that the Patchetts were endowed with the power to terrorize her?
Fear and suspicion were still gnawing at her when she arrived at the site and parked in front of her portable office. Inside, the building was already stuffy. Agitated and afraid, she switched on the air-conditioner and removed her jacket. As she was hanging it on a coat tree, the door behind her opened.
Dillon’s silhouette was large and stark against the bright morning sunlight. “Good morning,” she said.
“Morning.”
It was difficult to look at him after what had transpired the night before. She quickly diverted her attention to making coffee. Her hands were still shaking from what Neal had said. She was clumsy and inefficient, scattering coffee grounds everywhere. “I didn’t have a chance to ask you last night about your trip. How was it?”
“It was productive, I think.”
“I wasn’t looking for you to get back before Thursday.”
“I got around to seeing everybody on my list faster than I expected.”
“Did you award the contract?”
“I wanted to discuss the main contenders with you first.”
“Good. We’ll do that as soon as the coffee’s ready.”
“Then I still work here?”
Jade turned to him suddenly. Although he was dressed in his customary workclothes, he hadn’t moved inside. He was poised on the threshold as though waiting for permission to enter. “Of course you still work here. And please close the door. You’re letting out the cool air.”
He moved inside and shut the door. “After what happened last night, I wasn’t sure I still had a job. I thought you might send me packing this morning.”
Sometimes she wished he would wear more than a tank top. She especially wished so now. It was hard to look at his exposed chest, but even harder to meet his intense eyes. “Firing you wouldn’t be fair, would it? Over something as silly as a mere kiss?”
She deliberately minimized the kiss’s significance because that was the only swift, safe, and sane way to approach this situation—in other words, she was copping out. If she didn’t dismiss its importance, she must take him to task. In doing so, she would be forced to grapple with her own ambiguities about it. That, she wasn’t prepared to do.