Page 56 of Extreme Danger

Face reality, her ass. She snorted, thinking suddenly of Justin and Kaia in the hospital. “What is it about men wanting to make me face reality these days? Justin told me a bunch of stuff about myself that I didn’t want to hear, either, but I think you take the prize, Nick.”

“Justin?” He made the connection. “Oh, yeah The asshole. The one who was banging the other girl. The one whose photo you just tossed. So I’m worse than him.”

She choked on a sip of coffee. “Ah, not exactly,” she said, coughing. “I take it back. He was worse.”

He looked perplexed. “Worse how? He was banging two chicks at one time?”

“No!” she snapped. “He—”

“Was doing a guy? Switched sides on you, huh?”

“Would you shut up and let me talk?”

He made a silent zipping motion over his mouth.

“You have to promise not to laugh,” she told him.

“I don’t laugh much,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Besides, you told me some of this already.”

She pressed her hands over her cheeks, which were heating up, despite the goose bumps on the rest of her body. “Not in detail. The night of our engagement party,” she began, “there was this girl there. Kaia. I didn’t know her. One of Justin’s college friends. Tan legs that reached up to her chin, cornrowed blond braids, pierced nose, tie-dye, Barbie goes to Woodstock. The daring adventuress. She wowed the crowd with her tales of trekking in Nepal and crewing on a yacht on the South Seas. Justin told me he’d never been involved with her—”

“He lied,” Nick interjected.

She glared at him. “I figured that much out all by myself. So anyway, I was mixing up a round of daiquiris, and Justin asks me, can he use my car to give Kaia a ride to the train station. And I thought nothing of it. Until the hours started going by.” Her voice trailed off. They listened to the wind swishing the tree boughs below the porch.

“Fucking cheating weasel,” Nick said, meditatively.

“Yup,” she agreed, her voice demure. “Well, anyway. Turns out Kaia was giving him oral entertainment in the car. As he drove.”

He twisted against the railing, his face full of wary fascination. “How did you find out? Don’t tell me he was dumb enough to confess.”

She gave him a lofty, disapproving sniff. “No, he did not. I found out when I got the call. From the hospital.”

“Hospital?” His eyes widened. “What the hell happened?”

She breathed out the tension in her chest. Amazingly, after all that had happened, the story still made her miserable. “Evidently, Kaia was so amazing at the art of fellatio, Justin forgot that he was driving a car. My car, to be precise. On a busy street. In a shopping district.”

Nick let out a low whistle, and his mouth started to twitch. “Oh, man,” he said, with evident relish. “What an asshole.”

“Yes, that he is. My car was totaled, of course. Kaia had a neck injury and a bad concussion from the steering wheel. And Justin, well.” She shrugged “That weaselly cheat is lucky he still has a dick at all.”

He sucked in a breath. “You mean she…oh, sweet Jesus.” His face contracted in a spasm of involuntary masculine sympathy.

“Chomp,” Becca said stonily. “He deserved it. The snake.”

Nick sagged, put his face in his hands. His back began to shake.

He was laughing at her after all. She jabbed him with her forefinger. “That’s not fair,” she protested. “You promised!”

He waved his hand in the air, racked by another convulsion. “You are amazing, babe. How you do this to me, I do not fucking know.”

“You said you never laugh, but you’re always laughing your head off at me,” she grumbled. “Why is that, I wonder. Am I so comical?”

That set him off again. He hid his face and vibrated.

Becca resigned herself, and waited for it to die down. She slowly realized that he couldn’t stop. He kept trying, but it was like watching a swimmer caught in the surf. The waves kept sucking him down again. Was he…God, no. He would probably rather die than let himself cry.

She laid her hand tentatively on his hot back. “Are you, um, OK?”

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