Chase, but you leave me no choice. There's the matter of the money."
That took him aback. For a moment he merely stared at her blankly, then, drawing a frown, he growled,
"Money? What money?"
"The money it took to admit you to this hospital and get treatment. I didn't think you would want to be admitted as a charity patient, so I paid for everything."
"You what?"
"You had no insurance card in your wallet.
We didn't find a significant amount of money there either, so I footed the bill."
He gnawed on his lower lip, his agitation plain. "The entry fee was several hundred dollars, but if I hadn't put it up, I couldn't have ridden in the rodeo. I was low on cash."
"Then it's lucky for you I happened along, isn't it?"
"You'll get your money."
"That's right, I will. As soon as we get to
Milton Point you can withdraw it from your bank account or borrow it from your brother."
"Marcie," he said, ready to argue.
"I'm not leaving you to your own devices,
Chase. According to sources who know you well, you've been drinking too much. How can your body heal if you take no better care of it than that?"
"I don't give a damn whether it heals or not."
"Well, I do."
"Why?"
"Because I want my five hundred seventy-three dollars and sixty-two cents back." Having said that, she marched to the door and pulled it open. "I'll send a nurse in to help you get dressed." She lowered her eyes pointedly, reminding him that he was indeed naked except for the white swathe of bandaging around his rib cage.
"What about my truck?"
Marcie kept her eyes on the road. Pellets of ice were falling intermittently with the rain.
"I took care of it."
"Are we towing it or what?"
He had refused to lie down in the backseat of her car as she had suggested. But ever since leaving the hospital, his head had been reclining on the headrest. Her car was roomy and plush because she used it to drive clients around in. Soft music' was playing on the stereo radio. The heater was controlled by a thermostat. Chase was surrounded with as
much comfortable luxury as possible. His eyes had remained closed, though he wasn't asleep.
They were only half an hour into a two-and a half-hour car trip. Morning rush hour was over, but the weather, deteriorating by the minute, was making driving hazardous.
Precipitation had increased, a nasty mix of rain and sleet that frequently plagued north Texas during January and February. The Fort
Worth Livestock Show and Rodeo always seemed to herald it in.
Marcie had her eyes glued to the pavement just beyond her hood ornament and kept a death grip on the steering wheel while maintaining minimum speed as she navigated the labyrinth of freeways that encircled downtown
Dallas. Unfortunately it fell directly in the path between their starting point and their destination.
"I hired someone to drive your pickup to
Milton Point later this week," she said in answer to Chase's question. "By the time you're able to drive, it'll be there."
"You hired someone to drive my truck?"
"Uh-huh," she replied, concentrating on the eighteen-wheeler whizzing past her at a speed that set her teeth on edge.
"Still competent, aren't you?"
"The way you said that leads me to believe you don't mean it as a compliment."
"Oh, I commend your competency. It's just that most men are intimidated by self-sufficient, overachieving women." He rolled his head against the cushion so he could look at her.
"Is that why you never got married? Never could meet your match in the brains department?"
She didn't feel inclined to discuss her private life with him, especially since she detected a derisive quality to his seemingly harmless question.
"You ought to try to sleep, Chase. You're fighting the pain medication they gave you before we left."
"What do they call that?"
"Demerol."
"No, I mean when a woman wants to be a man. Some kind of envy. Oh, yeah, penis envy."
Despite the traffic and glazed highway, she looked across at him. His smug expression was intolerable.
She longed to come back with the swift and sure retort.
Marcie turned her full attention back to the road. She swallowed with difficulty. "Actually, Chase, I was engaged to be married once."
His snide smile faltered. "Really? When?"
"Several years ago, while I was living in
Houston. He was a realtor, too. We worked out of the same office, although he was in commercial real estate and I was in residential."
"What happened? Who broke it off, you or him?"
She evaded the direct question. "We had dated for several months before becoming engaged.
He was very nice, intelligent, had a good sense of humor."
"But you weren't compatible in the sack."
"On the contrary. We were very compatible."
He tilted his head to one side. "It's hard for me to imagine you in the sack."
"What a nice thing to say," she remarked, her tone implying just the opposite.
"I guess because you didn't date much in high school."
"It wasn't because I didn't want to. Nobody asked me."
"All you were interested in was getting straight A's."
"Hardly."
"That's what it looked like."
"Looks can be deceiving. I wanted to be beautiful and popular and go steady with a super jock just like every high school girl."
"Hmm. Back to the guy in Houston, why didn't you marry him?"
She smiled sadly. "I didn't love him. A week before the wedding I was trying on my gown for a final fitting. My mother and the seamstress who was doing the alterations were fussing around me. The room was filled with wedding gifts.
"I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to relate that bride to myself. The gown was gorgeous. My parents had gone all out, but it wasn't me.
"I tried to imagine walking down the aisle and pledging undying love and devotion to this man I was engaged to. And in a blinding instant I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't be that dishonest. I was fond of him. I liked him very much. But I didn't love him.
"So I calmly stepped out of the white satin
creation and informed my mother and the flabbergasted seamstress that the wedding wasn't going to take place after all. As you can imagine, my announcement created quite a commotion. The next few days were a nightmare.
All the arrangements, flowers, caterer, everything had to be canceled. The gifts had to be returned to their senders with notes of apology."
"What about him? How'd he take it?"
"Very well. Oh, at first he argued and tried to talk me out of it, passing off my reservations as prewedding jitters. But after we had discussed it at length, he agreed that it was the right thing to do. I think he realized all along that… well, that I didn't love him as I should."
"That was a helluva thing to do, Marcie."
"I know," she said with chagrin. "I'm certainly not proud of it."
"No, I mean it was a helluva thing to do. It took real guts to break if off at the eleventh hour like that."
She shook her head. "No, Chase. If I'd had any guts, I would have admitted to myself, before involving an innocent man, that it just wasn't destined for me to get married."
They were silent for a while, which suited
Marcie fine since the road had gone a stage beyond being glazed and was now like the surface of an ice rink.
Before long, however, Chase moaned and laid a hand against his ribs. "This is hurting like a son of a bitch."
"Take another pill. The doctor said you could have one every two hours."
"That's nothing but glorified aspirin. Stop and let me buy a bottle of whiskey."
"Absolutely not. I'm not stopping this car until I get to your place in Milton Point."
"If I wash the pill down with whiskey, it'll go to work faster."
"You can't bargain with me. Besides, it's stupid to mix alcohol and drugs."
"For godsake, don't get preachy on me. Pull off at the next exit. There's a liquor store there. It won't take a sec for me to go in—"