Snapped (33 page)

But then, maybe Woods had given the guards special instructions about how to handle her.

“Sophia Barrett.”

Sophie glanced up, both mortified and insanely relieved to hear her name called. It was the guard from earlier, standing on the other side of the bars. Her brother must have come,
finally
.

Sophie jumped to her feet. Dozens of bleary eyes turned to look at her as she picked her way through the sea of bodies. They were holiday revelers, mostly—women who’d either had too much to drink on the river
or gotten into trouble at one of the local pubs. Sophie stood beside the bars and watched the dour guard open the cell. She wore latex gloves again, and Sophie shuddered to think where her hands had been recently as the door slid open with a heavy
clink
.

Sophie followed the woman down a dim hallway, and her jail-issued rubber-soled shoes made squishing noises against the concrete. More foul smells. More drains. Sophie’s legs felt stiff and sore, and she didn’t know whether it was from hours of sitting or aftereffects of the car crash. She didn’t even want to think of what she looked like. Ted was going to be appalled. He’d grill her endlessly. But she was so desperate to get out of here, she didn’t care.

“This way.”

The next room was lit by a painfully bright fluorescent fixture. Sophie blinked up at it. Her eyes adjusted, and she noticed the man standing across the room, leaning against the wall.

Not her brother, but Jonah.

Tears stung her eyes, and she quickly blinked them away.

She followed the guard to a counter, where a man was making notes on a clipboard.

“Sign these.” He didn’t look up, and Sophie thumbed through the papers, signing beside the X marks. A large brown envelope appeared on the counter in front of her, and the man emptied it out.

Her personal effects.

“One pair silver earrings,” he droned. “One belt, leather. One tote bag. One pair sandals. One Visa credit card. One prescription bottle, codeine. One tube antibacterial
ointment. One cellular telephone. One package contraceptive pills. One bottle Unisom—” She felt Jonah ease up beside her, but she didn’t look at him. “—one bottle sunblock. And one envelope containing … five hundred eighty-six dollars and sixty-two cents.”

Sophie’s cheeks burned as she snatched up the tote bag and dropped the items inside.

“Sign here, ma’am.” He slid a receipt of some sort in front of her, and once again she scrawled her name.

Then she bent down and slipped off the shower shoes. She handed them across the counter and dropped her sandals onto the floor.

“And my car keys?” she asked.

“Scott has them.”

She turned to look at Jonah, making eye contact with him for the first time. He looked calm, cool.

“He picked up his truck earlier.” Jonah glanced at the man behind the counter. “We good here?”

“That’ll do it.”

“Hey, what’s the score on that game?” Jonah nodded at the small TV on the desk behind him.

Sophie’s vision blurred with fury as she bent down to buckle her sandals. They were talking sports.

“Eleven-ten, Rangers,” the man said. “Top of the ninth.”

“Good to hear it. Thanks again, Phil.”

Sophie cast one last glance around the room. The guard had disappeared, and Sophie hoped she never saw her again. She headed for the door marked with an Exit sign. Pretending to know exactly where she was going, she walked briskly down a corridor and took the first stairwell she spotted.

Jonah’s footsteps echoed behind her. When they got to the bottom, he reached around her to push open the door. Another institutional-looking hallway, this one with linoleum flooring instead of concrete. Sophie made a beeline for a set of double glass doors.

“Would you wait up?”

She plowed through the doors and found herself outside the police station. It was hot and humid and smelled much less like a urinal than the room where she’d spent the past eight hours.

She was at a side exit. Jonah’s pickup was parked beside the curb, and she took a deep breath. She was going to have to ride in it. With him. And she was so angry right now, she couldn’t see straight.

She jerked the cell phone from her bag.

“Who are you calling?”

“My brother’s on his way down here from Dallas.”

“Not anymore. I called him.”

She snapped the phone shut and glared at him.

He’d contacted her brother. He’d contacted Scott. He’d taken care of everything, and now he planned to drive her to some plot of dirt in the middle of nowhere where he probably expected to talk her down from the tower of rage she was standing on so he could get her naked tonight.

She dropped the phone back into her purse and walked to his truck. The locks chirped, and she jerked her door open before he could help her. She tried to pull it closed, but he caught it.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“No.”

“It’s pretty late.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Shaking his head, he went around and hitched himself behind the wheel. He started up the truck and steered out of the lot.

“You know, a little thanks would be nice.”

She turned to look at him. He glanced at her and had the nerve to look irritated.

“You want
me
to thank
you
.” She could practically feel the steam coming out of her ears.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. I called in a crapload of favors to get you out tonight.”

Her eyes widened with outrage. “You
told
Woods to bring me in! I
heard
you on the phone with him! He was out looking for me!”

He glowered at her. “Yeah, and it never occurred to me you’d assault a police officer. What the hell were you thinking? The man has a shiner, Sophie. You know how hard it was for me to get him to drop the charges and forget about this?”

She clenched her teeth and looked away.

“Not to mention the D.A. I had to call her up at a freaking baseball game. Let me tell you how happy she was to hear from me.”

Sophie bit her tongue and focused on looking out the window. If she opened the floodgates on her emotions, she doubted she could stem the tide. No way in hell did she plan to add crying in front of this man to her list of humiliations today.

She dragged her tote bag into her lap and found her sunglasses. She shoved them onto her face and leaned her head against the door.

“That’s it?” he asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“How ‘bout explaining why you hauled off and hit a police officer?”

Her throat tightened. She remembered his hands clamping around her wrists. It had triggered something, some inner terror she didn’t know she still had, and she’d panicked. Jonah knew about her kidnapping. She would have thought he, of all people, would understand. For him to be so dense made her feel physically sick. She’d been so wrong about him.

She closed her eyes and rested her cheek against the cool glass.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Wake me up when we get there.”

She drifted off. For a long while she floated in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of the vibration of the truck and the changes in speed. It wasn’t all that restful, but it kept her from having to keep up a conversation.

She thought of the waves crashing against her skin. She thought of the stench of that cell. She thought of Jonah, leaning against the wall and watching her shuffle out in those hideous shoes.

Her head jerked up and she turned to look at him.

“What baseball game?”

He glanced at her, obviously surprised by her sudden question after hours of silence. “Huh?”

“You said you called the D.A. at a baseball game. What game was it?”

“Rangers–White Sox. Why?”

She stared at him through her sunglasses, and the fury was back. She was fully awake now. She looked out the
windshield as the truck bumped over a gravel road. It was pitch dark, and the headlights illuminated only a narrow swath.

“You waited
six hours
to call.” She could hardly say the words, but she knew they were true. “You told my brother not to come get me and then you made me sit in that jail.”

His silence confirmed it.

Sophie took off her shades and slid them into her tote bag. She hadn’t thought it was possible to be angrier than she was leaving that police station, but she was learning all sorts of things about herself today.

Like she couldn’t bear to have her hands bound.

Like the most shameful moment of her life was having her mug shot taken.

Like she was incapable of peeing in front of strangers.

She wished she’d never met Jonah Macon.

“We’re here.”

He drove past a grove of trees and pulled up to a camper. It was white. Old. Big, too, and Sophie was surprised to see it. She’d pictured a tiny silver Airstream, like her dad kept at his deer lease.

Sophie got out. She ignored Jonah as she stretched her legs and tried to get her bearings.

He came around the truck and stood in front of her, hands on hips. “You’re still mad.”

“You’re perceptive.”

“You want me to be honest with you?”

“No, lie to me.”

He looked annoyed. The headlights on his truck switched off, and they stood there, staring at each other in the dark.

“I thought about getting you out right off the bat, but you were in the safest place you could be. And with your track record—”

“My
track record
?”

“Yeah, your track record. I tell you to stay at work, you go apartment hunting. I tell you to stay at the ER, you head for the beach. You’re a flight risk, and there’s a very dangerous person looking for you, and I’ve got too much fucking work to do to go chasing after you again if you take off. So,
yes
, I left you in jail for a few hours before moving heaven and earth to get you out. And this is the thanks I get!”

He stomped up the steps to the camper and opened it with a key. She followed him inside, fuming.

“
Thank you
, Jonah, for telling one of your buddies to arrest me! For having my gun confiscated! For having me strip-searched, and fingerprinted, and humiliated in front of a department full of police officers who
know
me, not to mention my entire family, who’s going to hear about this. Thank you for treating me like some common criminal, like some
hostage
, after I agreed to come out here
voluntarily
!” Her hands were fisted at her sides as she glared up at him in the dim light of the camper. “I wasn’t fleeing anywhere! I was returning Scott’s truck to him, with a full tank of gas, like I said I would. Because when I tell someone I’ll do something, I do it. I’m trustworthy, Jonah. If you ever took the slightest interest in getting to know me instead of just screwing me, you would
know
that, and none of this would have happened!”

She stood there, chest heaving, as he gazed down at her with a steely expression. The side of his jaw twitched. He was extremely pissed.

Well, so was she.

She turned away from him.

And suddenly she felt exhausted—more tired than she’d ever been in her life. She slumped into the nearest chair. It was a worn armchair, avocado green, and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to move from it.

Jonah closed the door and locked it. For a few minutes, he moved around the camper, slinging groceries, opening and slamming cabinets, showing her just what he thought of her little speech.

Sophie glanced around. The place was spacious, for a camper. At one end was a living room with a built-in table and a U-shaped bench. There was a cramped kitchen and what looked to be a tiny bathroom. On the far end was a queen-size bed with an army-green blanket on it.

Sophie closed herself in the bathroom. She turned on the water and stripped naked for the third time that day. Then she stood under the spray and tried to wash away the stress. It didn’t work. She got out just as tense and furious as she’d been when she stepped in. Of course, there was no towel, so she stood in the little room drip-drying and squeezing water from her hair into the sink. Finally, she wrestled herself back into her T-shirt and panties and stalked out of the bathroom.

The camper was dark, and Jonah was a massive lump on the left side of the bed. She stared at him and tried to tell whether he was asleep.

He sat up and looked at her. The light from the bathroom fell across his face, and she saw his eyes linger on her damp T-shirt.

She walked over to the empty side of the mattress, and he watched her warily.

“You coming to bed?”

She snatched the pillow up and took it across the room, where she tossed it down on an empty patch of carpet.

“I’d rather sleep in hell.”

Sophie awoke with a crick in her neck and a large man scowling down at her.

“My dad’s here.”

She sat up and brushed hair from her eyes. She tried to move her neck and winced at the pain.