“Not now,” Hank said tersely, following Callie down the hall.
Callie guessed what was on his mind. “Hank, this was not your fault.”
“I’m being paid to watch you,” he argued. “It wouldn’t have happened if I had been.”
“You can’t help it if I slipped out while you weren’t looking.”
“If I hadn’t been all caught up with my hormones, you’d never have slipped out,” he insisted. “Sometimes I wonder...”
He hesitated, looking about as miserable as anyone Callie had ever seen. “If Lisa is deliberately— No, that can’t be it,” he said with more wistfulness than conviction. “At any rate, it won’t happen again.”
Callie thought she could guess what he’d been about to say. He was worried that Lisa might be part of the plot. Lisa’s innocence was one of the few things Callie was certain about, but reassurance from her wouldn’t convince Hank. She didn’t even try.
“Look, detective, stop beating yourself up over this. I’m a big girl. I should have known better.”
He scowled at her. “Yeah, you should have. Whose idea was it to go over there, anyway?”
“Terry’s. He thought some soup would perk me up.”
“From now on you don’t go anywhere with Terry unless either Mr. Kane or I are along.”
Callie started to form a protest, but something in Hank’s expression told her his patience was at the breaking point. “I promise,” she said dutifully. She stood up and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To makeup. I have a call in fifteen minutes.”
Hank stood up. “Let’s go, then.”
“Do you really think you need to watch them put my makeup on?”
“From now on I need to watch if you decide to catch fifty winks all by your lonesome.”
“This is really going to get tedious, isn’t it?”
“A lot of police work is tedious.”
“I was talking about for me,” she said. “Come on, Shadow. I’ll try to keep you posted when I’m about to change directions.”
“Believe me, from now on, you couldn’t lose me if you tried.”
* * *
For the next week and a half Hank was true to his word. The only time he let Callie out of his sight was when he handed her off to Jason like a football in midplay.
And it really was tedious. Callie didn’t have a single minute to seek out Paul Locklear to try to determine where he’d been at the time of the accident. More and more, though, she couldn’t imagine why he’d want to kill—or at least put the fear of God into—a man he supposedly had a thing for.
By the time the Thursday night before the softball game rolled around, she was feeling the effects of the almost nonstop surveillance and even more constant tension. When Jason offered to take her and her mother out to dinner, she declined.
“She’s probably not even home yet. I don’t know where she’s been going lately, but she’s been getting home later and later.”
“Maybe she has a lover,” Jason suggested. “Something you used to have, too.”
“My mother?” Callie said incredulously, ignoring the comment about their own recent lack of privacy. “I don’t think so.”
“You never know. It’s been my experience that the Gunderson women are quite provocative.”
“Jason, you have never met a woman you didn’t consider provocative.”
“They all pale by comparison to you, though.”
She regarded him curiously. “You sounded as if you meant that.”
“I did.”
“You also sounded surprised.”
He sighed. “I am. One of these days I suppose we ought to talk about what it all means.”
He looked so bemused, she almost felt sorry for him. After seeing him with his mother and gathering that his childhood had not exactly been filled with a textbook example of marital bliss, she could understand why the thought of commitment made him jumpy.
She’d had her own sorry example of marriage to overcome, but she’d leaped at the chance to marry Chad, anyway. She had vowed she wouldn’t be so foolish a second time, but Jason had a way of making her doubts vanish like wisps of smoke. Love was amazingly sneaky that way.
“I’ll walk you up,” Jason said, following her out of the limo.
“You don’t need—”
He cut off the protest with a kiss. “I’m hoping I can steal a few more of those before I go home to my cold, lonely bed.”
“An intriguing notion,” she agreed, her blood pumping a little faster at the prospect. Maybe she wasn’t quite as tired as she’d thought.
The minute she turned the first key in the lock, though, the door flew open. Her mother practically tugged the two of them inside.
“Let me look at you,” she demanded to Callie’s confusion. She circled her as she might a Michelangelo statue, slowly and with great care.
“Mother, what on earth?”
“I have to see for myself that you’re okay. Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded accusingly.
“About what?” Callie asked.
“The accident.”
“Oh, hell,” Callie murmured. She had made a deliberate decision not to tell her mother about that, and as far as she knew, everyone had kept the promise to keep Jason in the dark, as well. She winced when she caught his expression. He definitely did not look happy.
“What accident?” Jason demanded, his tone deadly.
Callie didn’t want to deal with him, so she concentrated instead on her mother. “How did you find out?”
Her mother looked very put-upon. “The same way the rest of the world did, I suppose. From one of those sleazy tabloids. Eunice called asking all sorts of questions I couldn’t answer. She finally told me what she’d read. I went down to the supermarket and picked one up for myself.”
She gestured to the open newspaper, which had used a publicity shot of Terry and Callie to accompany a splashy headline: Hit-and-Run Stalker Endangers Daytime’s Hottest Duo.
Jason had the phone in his hand and was jabbing in numbers before Callie could close her gaping mouth.
“We agreed there would be no publicity,” she whispered as much to herself as to
