An image of Uncle Harry popped into her head, and the thought of his angry face and stale breath made her squeeze her eyes shut. She had nightmares about that man all the time. When he came to her bed. When he died. His blood hot on her skin. So hot. So red. “Sometimes I still do,” she admitted.
But now I also have nightmares of waking up to find that you’re gone.
“I’m sorry,” he replied, and she wished the wealth of concern in his timbre didn’t affect her like it did.
“Andrew.” She pushed up to sit, all of a sudden too desperate to know. She hated to bring up a topic that would cool down their afterglow, but the urge to know the truth was slowly murdering her. If he didn’t trust her, she wouldn’t be able to ever trust him back.
The note was burning in her little clutch purse while a thousand questions burned in her mind.
“All this time, were you in the Middle East?” she asked.
He groaned, and dropped his head back with a bang o
n the headrest. “Ah, shit.”
“Come on. Were you?”
“Whitney,” he said tentatively, then he reached around her shoulders to pull her back down to his chest. “I’d love to discuss this at another time. I’m dying to have some normal time with you.”
She squirmed free and sat back up, unable to bear this any longer. No matter how strong she wanted to be, she just couldn’t do this alone.
“Look, I’d love some normal time with you, too, if it weren’t for the fact that I got this.” She stretched out to the end of the bed and reached for her purse, then she crawled back to him and handed him the note. “Somebody knows, Andy.”
“Knows what?”
“Somebody knows what I did.”
She watched as Andrew read the blackmail note, his face turning into a mask of rage. Her stomach cramped, and suddenly it felt like she’d swallowed a pack of live bugs. Her eyes burned with the anger she could feel roiling off him in waves, which only increased her feeling of helplessness.
He lowered the note slowly. “Where did you find this?”
“On my office desk. There’s no stamp so someone must have dropped it off.” She remembered Uncle Harry again and still couldn’t believe that someone else knew what had happened. “I don’t understand who could know. Why now? It’s been five years. Five, since he died. Why now . . . why . . . ?”
Andrew pushed himself off the bed, went to the window, and ran all five fingers of his hand through his hair, gloriously naked, and unapologetic about it. He expelled a breath and started pacing.
Whitney wondered what she’d do if the FBI or police came knocking right now and arrested her. Now. When Andrew was back. Oh, God.
Scowling, he snatched up his cell phone and, after punching in some numbers, he locked himself in the bathroom. Whitney could only hear his muffled voice.
She was more than slightly panicked when he emerged. “What are you doing, Fairchild? You can’t call the police or they’ll know what we did!”
“You didn’t do anything, Whitney. All right? You weren’t there. Do you understand me?” Exasperated, he tossed his phone onto the bed and sat down next to her, taking her by the arms. “Do you?”
“But it’s not true.”
“It’s the truth I put out to the police when I spoke to them.”
She fell quiet, loathing the wavering sensations under her feet. She didn’t like feeling helpless again. She had struggled to get control for years, and now she felt undone.
“Let’s just stop lying. We began with them and then you continued lying just to me.” She shot him a helpless glance and then grabbed his jaw in both her hands. “Andrew, it was an accident. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Did you tell your therapist about this accident?” he asked.
She hesitated, then dropped her arms and admitted, “Parts of it. I had to tell someone.”
“What parts?”
“Only that . . . well, that my uncle died in my home. That he tripped and got killed. I didn’t tell her I was holding the knife.”