"It tells me I should probably go stay in a motel in another town," I said, just to wipe the smile off his face.
It worked.
"What?" he snapped. "What gave you a harebrained idea like that?"
"I should be perfectly safe in another town, right? I could check in under a fake name, and-"
"Forget it," he said. "There's no way in hell I'm letting you run away." Then he realized that I now had wheels, and he had no control over what I did during the day while he was at work. He didn't anyway, because if I wanted to leave, all I had to do was pick up the phone and call any of my family and they would come pick me up. For that matter, his own mother would, too. "Ah, shit," he finished.
He was so eloquent.
Chapter Twenty-five
I had a nightmare that night, which isn't surprising considering all that had happened. Probably I should already have had several nightmares, but my subconscious is as good at ignoring things as my conscious is. I don't have many nightmares; my dreams are usually about everyday stuff, with weird little details, because that's what dreams are for, right? Like I'd be at Great Bods trying to take care of a mountain of paperwork, but the members would keep interrupting me because half of them wanted to be able to ride the stationary bikes in the nude, and the other half thought this would be a total gross-out, which it would. Stuff like that.
I didn't dream about being shot. There was nothing to dream about that, except the sound and then the burning in my arm, which isn't very much to build on, but the auto accident had a wealth of details for my subconscious to resurrect. I didn't dream about going through another stop sign; instead I was in my red Mercedes, the one I had got when Jason and I divorced and had since traded in for the white one, and I was driving over a high, arching bridge when all of a sudden the car went out of control and started spinning. Car after car kept hitting me, and each hit knocked me closer and closer to the rail, and then I knew the next one would push me over. I saw that last car coming at me, in slow motion; then there was a horrible jolt and my red Mercedes hit the guardrail and tipped over it.
I woke with a start, my heart pounding, and shaking all over. I was shaking, not my heart. Maybe my heart was, too, but I didn't have any way of knowing; all I could feel was pounding. And Wyatt was leaning over me, a big, protective shadow in the darkness of the room.
He stroked my belly, then gripped my waist and eased me into his arms. "Bad dream?"
"My car was knocked off a bridge," I muttered, still half asleep. "Bummer."
"Yeah, I can see where it would be." He had his own technique of comforting, and it involved tucking me under him. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him close.
"Do you feel okay enough for this?" he murmured, but he was a tad late with the question because he was already sliding inside me.
"Yes," I answered anyway.
He was careful, or tried to be. He kept his weight braced on his forearms and his strokes were slow and even-until the very end, when there was nothing slow or even about it. But he didn't hurt me, or if he did, I was too turned on to notice.
The next day was sort of a repeat of the one before, except I did more stretching and yoga and felt lots better. My left arm still hurt if I tried to pick up anything and put strain on the muscle, but I had pretty much full use of it if I kept the motions slow and didn't do any jerking around.
The bush Wyatt had bought for me was going to live, I thought, though it needed a full week of TLC before it would be able to stand the shock of being planted in the yard. Wyatt might not understand the concept of houseplants, but he had bought it for me and I treasured the poor thing. I was getting cabin fever from my enforced inactivity, so I walked around outside and selected the spot where I wanted the bush planted. Because of the age of the house, the landscaping around it was mature and lush, but it was all shrubbery and no flowers, so it would benefit from some color. It was too late in the season now to plant flowers. Next year, though...
The heat and sun felt good on my skin. I was bored with being an invalid and craved the high of a good workout. I wanted to go to work so much I ached, and it made me angry that I couldn't.
The dream from the night before kept nagging at me. Not the part about going over the bridge, but the fact that it was the red Mercedes, which I had traded over two years ago. If you believe in the prophetic nature of dreams, that probably meant something, but I didn't have a clue what it could be. That I regretted not getting another red car, maybe? That I thought white was too boring? I don't, and anyway white was more practical in the south because of the heat.
In terms of coolness-the quality, not the temperature-I would even rank red third, with white second, and black first. There's just something about a black car that makes a statement of power. Red was sporty, white was sexy and elegant, and black was powerful. Maybe my new car would be black, if I ever got a chance to shop for one.
Because I was bored, I rearranged the furniture in the family room, pushing the furniture around with my legs and my right arm, and just for the hell of it moved Wyatt's recliner from its place of honor in front of the television. There was nothing wrong with the way he'd had it arranged and I didn't care if his recliner took the prime spot, but like I said, I was bored.
Since I'd opened Great Bods, I seldom had the time to watch much television, except for maybe the eleven o'clock news at night, so I'd gotten out of the habit. Wyatt didn't know that, though. I might be able to have some fun whining about missing my favorite shows, which of course would be on the channels like Lifetime, Home and Garden, and Oxygen. The bad part about that was, if I won the battle for the remote, I'd have to watch the shows, too. There's always a catch.