CHAPTER SIX
TIPPY FELT HEARTSICK after Cash left. She missed him and she hadn’t really known him long enough to feel that deeply. But they’d skipped a few steps along the way. Her heartbeat accelerated every time she thought of his handsome face. She wondered how she was going to live without him in her life.
Rory went back to school after the first of the year and Tippy resumed work on the film. She began having some odd bouts of illness, and when she consulted her pocket calendar, the one she circled for her periods, she noticed that her long night with Cash had been at the worst possible time. More than that, her period was late. And it was never late, despite the very physical challenge of her job.
She worried about the stunts she was required to do. Didn’t they say that it was dangerous to do physical labor during the first trimester? Or was that just an old wive’s tale?
A month after Cash’s departure, she bought a home pregnancy kit and used it. The results were predictable, and vaguely terrifying. She couldn’t call Cash and destroy his life. She already felt protective of the tiny life inside her.
She was going to have a baby. Would it look like her, or like Cash? she wondered dreamily. Or would it look like some ancestor neither of them even remembered? She thought of diapers and formula and two-o’clock morning feedings with pure delight. Rory would love having a niece or nephew.
But she’d have to quit work. Not at once, but when she started showing. It was no big thing for a Hollywood star to have a child out of wedlock. But it was for Tippy. It would give her mother a weapon to use against her. Despite her own murky past, she could go to the tabloids and say that Tippy slept around and wasn’t a good guardian for her little brother.
There was another consideration. Cash didn’t want marriage. He was adamant about being a loner. He’d meant their encounter to be a one-night affair, despite his hunger for a child. It had probably been just as he said, something to bring the heat up between them. Men did say things in passion that they didn’t mean. Tippy had heard other women talk about it, even if she didn’t know from her own experience.
Her problem was what to do about it. She couldn’t hide it forever. At some point, she’d have to see a doctor. There were vitamins that a pregnant woman had to have. She’d have to eat properly as well—something else that would impact her career. She wasn’t allowed to gain more than five pounds during the filming of the movie, and that was written into her contract. She needed the money so badly, for Rory’s school tuition and her own rent and utilities and food bills. She couldn’t afford to lose her job.
But she wanted her child, just as much. She sat in the evenings after work and fantasized about it. She would have someone of her very own, someone of her own flesh and blood and bone to belong to. She would be a mother. It was an awesome responsibility. It was a heady joy as well. She patted her flat stomach gently and thought about the day when she would hold her child in her arms. She sighed, closing her eyes on dreams.
THE REALITY WAS A LITTLE LESS euphoric. The second assistant director, a gung ho young man named Ben, took over while the first assistant director took a break to handle a personal problem. Ben insisted that she run the length of a board between two buildings and land with a breakfall on the roof of the location set in Manhattan. There was a drop, not a big one, and the chances were slim that she’d fall. Still, she put a protective hand over her flat belly, feeling it was too risky.
“I can’t do this,” she said firmly.
“You make the jump or you’re out of work,” Ben said coldly.
“I’m pregnant,” she began. “Hire a stunt double.”
“No dice! I’m already over budget and my job’s on the line. I’m not paying for a stunt double, and there’s no need for one. The jump is perfectly safe.”
“Can you guarantee that no harm will come to me or my baby?”
“How many times do I have to say it? You’ll be fine!” he snapped.
“Well if you’re absolutely positive…” Still she made her position clear. “If this jeopardizes my pregnancy you’ll grow old paying for it. That’s a promise!” she warned.
“Yeah, yeah, like you have any pull with my boss, when he’s directing A-list actors!” he retorted. “Get to it!”
She went back to the scene, her mind far removed from the hustle and bustle of the set, from cameramen and sound men and makeup technicians and the location manager. All she could think about was what she had to lose if anything went wrong. Cash didn’t even know. She was going to have to tell him, and speak to Joel Harper about this arrogant little ape who’d caged a job with him.
For the meantime, she resolved herself to finish the scene. She closed her eyes, said a small prayer, and made the running jump. She misjudged the distance without her glasses and went down. The fall left her in a tumbled heap with a terrible pain in her stomach. She screamed.
SHE WAS AMBULATORY, but Joel Harper, just arrived on the scene in time to find her bent over double, called for an ambulance at once. They rushed her to the emergency room while Ben tried to explain his actions to Joel, who was calling him names in a steady unprintable stream all the way to the hospital.
“She was pregnant, you idiot, why do you think I’ve been so careful with her for the past week?” Joel demanded. “If she loses the baby, she can sue us for every damned dime I have, and collect. And she’d be within her rights! Damn you!”
“But, sir…” Ben protested, white-faced.
“You’re off the picture,” Joel told him icily. “And you’ll never work on another film of mine! Get out of my sight!”
Ben walked away cursing his own fate. But he didn’t leave. He stood nearby, waiting for word of Tippy’s condition.
Joel Harper waited patiently until the doctor came out to speak to him.
“Is she married?” the doctor asked.
“No,” Joel said. “She has a young brother…”
“She lost the baby,” the doctor said curtly. “She was six weeks along, by the look of it. She’s inconsolable. I had to sedate her.”
Joel was shattered. He looked at Ben, who’d heard every word and was looking shaky. “You son of a bitch,” Joel said, enunciating every word as he went for the younger man and grabbed him by the collar. “She lost her baby because you forced her to do a stunt she should never have had to do in the first place!”
“She volunteered to do it!” Ben lied. “I didn’t force her! She didn’t care about the baby!”
“In a pig’s eye!”
Ben saw the intent in the older man’s face. He cut his losses. He turned and ran. Neither man noticed the man standing nearby with a pad and pen, who started scribbling excitedly and jerked out a cell phone. A reporter for one of the bigger tabloids had followed a wounded prison escapee and his captors into the emergency room in hopes of a scoop. But now he had something better. Much better.
“Give me the rewrite desk,” he said. “Harry? Take this down. Tippy Moore, goddess of models, sacrificed her baby today for the sake of a movie contract…!”
THE TABLOIDS SOLD IN EVERY grocery store in the country. Even in Jacobsville, Texas. Cash Grier had stopped by the local Jensen Supermarket to pick up some eggs for an omelet after his duty shift. The tabloid carried a photo of Tippy Moore at her most glamorous with a headline in red ink denouncing the career-minded model for sacrificing a baby on the altar of selfishness.
Cash almost choked. Tippy had been pregnant, and the child was almost certainly his. She’d been just at six weeks, the tabloid read, and it had been that long since Christmas Eve.
“Terrible, ain’t it?” an older woman said, noticing his fascination with the headline. “She was here making some movie last year. Pretty little thing. I guess women these days don’t care much for home and family. Poor little baby. But maybe it’s better off. I mean, what sort of mother would a woman like that make?”
Cash hardly heard her. He paid for his eggs, white-faced, and went home. He didn’t turn on the television or the lights. He sat there in the dark while history repeated itself.
TIPPY WAS SO BROKEN UP over her miscarriage that she couldn’t cope with going back to work, even though she was out of the hospital in less than twenty-four hours, with no other physical damage. Joel Harper postponed the additional scenes until she could return, hiring a stunt double and apologizing daily for his assistant director’s incompetence. He’d filed a complaint against the man himself, and he’d badgered Tippy to get an attorney and file suit.
But Tippy didn’t care. She was inconsolable. She couldn’t even call Cash and tell him how sick she was about the loss. He’d have seen the tabloids by now. He’d think she did it deliberately, just as his ex-wife had done it deliberately. He’d think she didn’t want his child. Maybe even that she was getting even for having him walk out on her. She wasn’t. She’d wanted the child, so badly.
In the end, Joel Harper was so concerned that he called the commandant at Rory’s military school and explained the situation to him. The commandant put Rory on the first plane for Newark on Saturday, at Joel’s expense, and Joel met him at the airport.
“How is she?” Rory asked at once.
“Have you read the tabloids?” Joel replied as he escorted the boy to a black stretch limo waiting outside in the parking lot.
“Yes,” Rory said glumly. “Actually, I should say, they’ve been read to me by the other boys.”
Joel grimaced. “I wouldn’t have asked you to come, Rory, but she’s not herself.”
“I know that,” Rory told him. “My tenth birthday was yesterday, and she didn’t phone me. That’s not like her. She always sends me something, and she always calls.”
Joel sighed as he put the boy into the limo. “She’s still in depression and she can’t snap out of it, even to work. She needs someone with her.”
Rory was trying to be stiff-lipped, but tears brightened his eyes.
“You know who the father is, don’t you, Rory?” Joel asked. “Do you think he’d come to see about her?”
“Maybe,” Rory said. “But I want to talk to her first, before I call him.”
Joel was amazed at the sensibility of the young man, who seemed so mature for his age. “Okay,” he agreed. “We’ll wait.”
Tippy had been sitting around in a T-shirt and sweat pants in her apartment, watching an old movie. But she stood up at once when she heard Rory’s voice, and ran to the buzzer to let him in. She held out her arms when he reached the door. She cried like a child, while Rory patted her back and tried to sound comforting. Joel paused long enough to say hello, and then he left, promising to return the next afternoon to put Rory on a plane back to Maryland.
Rory sat down on the sofa beside his sister, worried now that he could see how haggard and strained she looked. Her eyes were so full of pain that he could hardly bear to look into them.
“Joel wants me to call Cash,” he began slowly.
“No!”
“But, sis—” he pleaded.
She cut him off. “Listen to me. Promise me you won’t get in touch with him. Promise me!”
“But it’s in all the tabloids,” he protested. “He’s going to know already…”
“Rory, this will be hard for you to understand,” she said huskily, “but he was married and his wife…got rid of their child. He’s never gotten over it. He doesn’t want to get married again, and he doesn’t really want a child. But he’ll blame me for losing it, just the same. He’ll…hate me.” She closed her eyes on a wave of pain. “I wanted my baby. I wanted him, so much! Cash will never believe it. He’ll hate me forever, Rory, because I didn’t refuse to do the scene. He’ll think I did it deliberately, don’t you see? We can’t call him. It would only make things worse. I expect he’s hurting, too, now that he knows, even more than me.” She sighed. “We can’t hurt him anymore.”
Rory didn’t think Cash would blame her. The man he’d briefly gotten to know was bigger than that. Of course he was.
So it came as a shock that Cash refused to speak to him when he called the Jacobsville Police Station while Tippy was in the shower. Rory hung up, feeling alone and scared. He never said a word to Tippy about the phone call.
CASH WAS BACK AT WORK after a day’s absence at home just after he read the tabloid account. He seemed not to be fazed by it all, but he was suddenly quick-tempered and hard to talk to. Not that anybody knew why. They didn’t know that he was the father of Tippy Moore’s child.
Judd Dunn suspected, of course. But he didn’t want to risk a knock-down-drag-out fight with Cash by asking him.
Just the same, he was surprised days later when he overheard one of the men telling someone that Cash had left orders not to put through any calls from anyone named Danbury.
Danbury was Tippy’s real last name. She’d told Judd, when she was making the movie out at the ranch he shared with his wife Christabel.
“Who was that?” Judd asked, concerned.
The officer shrugged. “Some kid named Danbury.”
“Did Cash tell you not to accept calls from kids, too?”
The officer glared up at him. “If you want to tell him and risk having him put a fist through your nose, go ahead. He’s already had one bite of me today, and I’m covering my rear!”
Judd walked into Cash’s office without knocking and studied the older man quietly before he spoke.
“You look white in the face,” Judd told him.
Cash didn’t look up. “I’m busy.”
Judd closed the door and perched himself on the corner of the desk. “She wouldn’t have done it deliberately.” Cash’s eyes were terrible. “Why not? My ex-wife did!” Judd’s surprise widened his eyes.
“Women don’t want babies, they’re too damned much trouble. They want careers!”
“Sure,” Judd said, losing his temper. “That’s why Tippy took her little brother in and raised him.”
Cash stared at him without speaking. But something touched his face.
“It’s not the boy’s fault, whether or not she’s responsible,” Judd said coldly. He stood up. “You shouldn’t take it out on him.”
“I haven’t said a thing to him,” Cash said defensively.
Judd scoffed. “Your desk sergeant just hung up on him and said you told him to,” he said, nodding at the dismay on Cash’s face. “Try calling him back, why don’t you, and see if he’ll listen to you. If he called you, it can only be because he’s worried about his sister.” He glared at his friend. “I guess she got pregnant all by her self.”
He turned and strode angrily out the door. Cash felt sick at his stomach. It had been a shock to learn that Tippy was pregnant and hadn’t told him. He’d had to read about it in the tabloids. It had been a bigger shock to read about her deliberate stunt work leading to the miscarriage. He’d told her that he’d take responsibility for anything that happened, but she hadn’t even called him.
And why would she, he asked himself miserably, when he’d done everything in the world to make her think he didn’t want either her or a child. He couldn’t have made his distaste for their intimacy more evident. Tippy had low esteem already, and his attitude hadn’t helped. Rory must have been worried to take a chance on calling him at work. Apparently Rory wasn’t angry, and certainly he suspected that the baby’s father was Cash.
But his helpful colleague out there, put off by Cash’s ongoing bad mood, had told Rory that Cash wasn’t accepting any phone calls from him. So now Rory would think Cash had deserted him, too.
He didn’t even bother phoning back. He didn’t want to talk to Tippy, or about her, not just yet; not until he could come to terms with his horror at what she’d done. He knew her career was important to her. He hadn’t realized that it was the most important thing in the world.
Now that he knew, he could stop hating himself for what had happened. He’d actually thought about going back to her a time or two, of trying to make a relation ship work between them. But it had come to nothing. He couldn’t force himself to take a chance. Maybe that was a good thing, considering how it had worked out. She obviously placed her career before any relationship, even before a child. It was graphic proof that she didn’t want anything more to do with Cash Grier.
IT TOOK A COUPLE OF WEEKS for Tippy to get herself back in any sort of shape to go to work. She was drinking, for the first time in her adult life, to stop the memories and the pain. She was hiding it from the people she worked with—and from Rory. She hadn’t seen him since the weekend Joel had brought him to see her. He’d finally confessed that he tried to call Cash and that Cash had told his men that he wasn’t speaking to anybody named Danbury. Tippy was even more depressed after that.
Her mother had read the tabloids and phoned her at once, just after Rory’s visit. “Now you’re going to see what I can do,” she told Tippy, slurring her words—obviously she was using again. She never seemed to stop. “I’m going to get my son back, or you’re going to pay through the nose to keep him!”
“I’m between jobs,” Tippy lied. “I don’t have any money. You’ll have to wait until I get a royalty check from the first movie.”
“Which will be when?”
“I don’t know. Next year.”
“No good. I need money now. You listen to me, girl, I’m not going to sit down here in Georgia starving while you ride around in limousines and eat at fancy restaurants! I deserve something for all the hell you put me through, you and that little brat!”
Tippy clenched her hand on the phone. “You deserve to burn in hell, you witch!” she raged. “You did nothing for either of us but help your sick boyfriend abuse us.”
Her mother laughed. “I was just helping you grow up,” she drawled. “You’d have gotten to like it eventually.”
“I’d have killed you both, eventually,” Tippy said coldly.
“Sam’s a loser, just like you.”
“You’ve got money and we need some. You give it to us, girl, I’m warning you, I’ll do something desperate!”
“Why don’t you go to the tabloids and tell them how your boyfriend raped me when I was twelve years old?” Tippy asked harshly. “Maybe I’ll tell them myself!”
There was a pause, as if the other woman was trying to think through a fog of drugs. “You were older than that….”
“I was not,” Tippy choked.
“I want some money!” came the harsh reply. “I shouldn’t have to work, when you’re rich! You owe me. I gave you that boy!”
“You sold him to me for fifty thousand dollars!” Tippy screamed into the receiver.
“That was just a down payment. I want more. I need money. You don’t know what it’s like,” she rambled drunkenly. “I got to have it. I got to. You better send me some money, or I’ll tell Sam to get it however he can. Sam’s got connections in Manhattan. He can make a lot of trouble for you. You’ll see.”
“You miserable excuse for a human being,” Tippy said under her breath. “How can you live with what you are?”
“You just send me a check, or else.” The line went dead.
Tippy had been furious for days after that phone call. What must it be like to have a parent love you, want you, protect you, she wondered. Surely in the world there were good women. She only wished there had been one, just one, in her life.
Now her mother wanted more money and she didn’t have any to spare. She was out of work, and no paycheck would becoming in until she went back on the job. But in the meantime, she didn’t have enough for Rory’s tuition or money to pay rent and utilities.
She began to laugh hysterically. She was going to starve and Rory would end up in a foster home, while her mother went running to the tabloids to tell everyone on earth how her ungrateful daughter was mistreating her.
She took a whiskey bottle out of the cabinet and filled a tea glass with it. It was the weekend. She wasn’t working and she could do what she pleased, she told herself. If she was going to lose everything, maybe she could numb the hurt just a little…
SPRING BREAK CAME IN EARLY April. Tippy had pawned some of her jewelry to pay Rory’s fees through until the summer, and he came home on the train to spend his week off with her. But it was a changed Tippy who met him at the station.
She was thin as a reed and shaky. She smiled and hugged him, but her eyes were blank and there were deep, dark shadows underneath them. She looked like the walking dead.
“Are you back to work?” he asked worriedly.
She nodded. “We finish up next week,” she said dully. “Joel got me a stunt double. Too little too late.” She laughed huskily. “Well, what the hell. Better late than never!”
“Tippy, are you okay?” he asked.
“Of course I am!” she said enthusiastically. “We’re going to have a great time together. I made a cake with a happy face on it.”
“I’m just a little bit too old for happy cakes,” he ventured.
“Nonsense. We’re going to have fun. We’ll be just like a…like a family.” She swayed a little on the way to the cab.
“You’ve been drinking!” he accused softly, and with evident surprise. “Tippy, you know you shouldn’t drink. Look at our mother!”
That comment made her uneasy, but she laughed it off.
“There’s a tendency toward alcoholism,” he pointed out.
She laughed again, this time a little wildly. “Rory, I just had a couple of drinks to unwind, for God’s sake. Don’t start lecturing me.” She hugged him. “There’s my sweet boy… I’m glad you’re home.”
“Me, too,” he said. But he didn’t smile.
There was a phone call on Rory’s first night home. He answered it and the caller hung up at once. Tippy had Caller ID, but the number had been blocked. It might have been Cash, he thought optimistically. He hadn’t tried to call the man back, but perhaps Cash had been thinking about them and decided to check on them.
“Have you heard from Cash?” he asked her abruptly.
Her face closed up. “I have not!” she said angrily. “And I do not want to hear from him! If he’d given a damn about me, he’d have called here weeks ago!”
“You haven’t phoned him?”
She glared at him. “Why would I want to? He hates me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said with utter certainty. She poured a little whiskey into a glass and tossed it back. “And I don’t care.”
But she did. It was killing her. Rory winced at the look on her face, at the thinness of her body. He wished he were older, that he knew what to do. But he had no idea.
She had another drink and just as she did, there was a knock on the door.
Rory answered it. His friend Don was there, looking puzzled. “Rory, we just came back from the store, and there’s a guy waiting downstairs who says he knows you. He wants you to come down and talk to him.”
“Cash!” Rory exclaimed. “Is it Cash?”
The boy shrugged. “I couldn’t tell. I only saw your sister’s friend once. This guy had a hat pulled down over his eyes and he’s wearing a long coat…”
“It must be Cash!” Rory said excitedly. “I’ll go down and meet him. Don’t tell my sister, okay?” he added quickly.
“Whatever you say. Want to come over and go to the ice rink with me and mom tomorrow?”
“We’ll see. Thanks, Don!”
“No problem.”
Rory paused at the door. “I’m going next door for a minute,” he called to Tippy. “Be right back!”
“Okay. Don’t go off anywhere without telling me!” she called after him, belatedly remembering her mother’s threat of trouble.
“I won’t.”
He closed the door and went down the stairs.
AN HOUR LATER, Tippy noticed that his few minutes had stretched too long. She put down the liquor glass and tried to get her mind to work. He’d said he was going over to Don’s apartment. She phoned the apartment next door and spoke to Don’s mother.
“But he was never here,” came the shocked reply from the other woman. “Did he say he was coming over?”
Tippy felt her heart sink. “Yes!”
“Wait a minute.” She called her son and there was a mumble of conversation. “I just asked Don,” the other woman said worriedly. “Tippy, he says that a man came to the door downstairs and asked for Rory to come down. Rory thought it was that friend of yours, Cash isn’t it? But Don didn’t recognize him. He said the man had on a coat and hat and he looked mysterious.”
Tippy thanked her and hung up. Terror lodged in her throat. She knew at once, without being told, that her mother’s vicious boyfriend had Rory. She knew it! But her mind was foggy and she couldn’t think. What must she do?
The phone rang again and she picked it up.
“We’ve got Rory,” came a familiar, terrible voice from the past. “We want a hundred grand by morning. Or you get a dead body back. Don’t call the feds. We’ll phone you in the morning with instructions. Sleep tight, sweetie,” he added sarcastically, and hung up.
Tippy was scared to death. She knew it was Sam, and she knew he meant what he said. There had never been a time when she wasn’t afraid of him, long after she’d run away from home. The man was Rory’s father. Rory didn’t know that. But she couldn’t let him hurt the boy. And he would. He had no paternal feelings for anyone.
Her hands trembled. She grabbed her purse and thumbed through the numbers in her appointment book for Cash Grier’s. He probably wouldn’t speak to her, but she had to try.
She punched in the number of his cell phone, that he’d given her long ago when she left Jacobsville for New York after the film shoot. She wasn’t certain that it was still current.
It rang once. Twice. Three times. Four times. Her lips moved in a silent prayer. Be there. Please be there!
It rang five times. Six. Her heart sank. He wasn’t going to even answer…!
“Grier,” came a cold, deep voice over the line.
“Cash!” she exclaimed. “I have to talk to you. I need help!”
“Help? You need help? Damn you, Tippy!” he burst out.
“Just listen,” she said firmly, trying to get a grip on herself. “Please. This is serious!”
His voice was icy. “I have nothing to say to a woman like you, Tippy. Don’t you ever call me again as long as you live.”
“Cash, for God’s sake…!” she choked desperately.
The line went dead. She punched Redial but nothing happened. He wasn’t going to answer. And she knew it would do no good, no good at all, to try other numbers, like the police department’s there. Cash didn’t know about Rory, and he wouldn’t let her tell him. She knew he would have tried to help, if he’d known. But he wouldn’t listen.
She cursed roundly, grasping at options. She had to save Rory! On a sudden whim, she tried Judd Dunn’s number, but nobody answered, not even Christabel.
Those options gone, she poured a cup of cold coffee into a cup and drank it down quickly, hoping to clear her mind. Her only other hope was to raise the ransom money. Joel. Joel Harper! If she could get in touch with him…!
She tried his home number, but the answering ma chine turned on. She tried the studio. None of his staff was there, she was told. They’d gone with Joel on location to set things up for his next film, now that Tippy’s was almost in the can. The location was in the wilds of Peru, and even his cell phone wasn’t accessible right now. Apparently the group was in some location where there were no relays.
Tippy tried an officer of the studio, but was told that he was out for the week. It was fate, she told herself miserably. She couldn’t get help. She was on her own. She thought about calling the police, but how did she get in touch with someone who wouldn’t jeopardize Rory’s life by rushing in with guns blazing? She had no idea what to do next.
She put the phone down with a dead sigh. She couldn’t possibly get the amount of money Sam wanted by morning. She had no more than a thousand dollars in her savings account, and her credit cards were maxed out. She’d pawned her jewels to pay Rory’s fees. There was nothing left. She had nothing left to borrow money on.
There was only one possible way to handle it. She had to offer to exchange herself for Rory and tell Sam to contact the motion picture company about the ransom. They wouldn’t know that Joel was out of the country. If she played her cards right, she could convince them that she was worth more to them than Rory. She’d convince them that her studio would pay handsomely for her release.
Her company wouldn’t pay it, of course, because they wouldn’t have any more luck than she’d had trying to find someone with the authority to raise the ransom. But the subterfuge would save Rory.
She got another drink and sat by the telephone all night, waiting for Sam to call her back. She thought about willingly putting herself into Sam Stanton’s hands again. She remembered all too well her fear and pain and anguish when the man had raped her, all those years ago. She was still terrified of him, of his violent tem per. He would be uncontrollable when he found out that he couldn’t get money from her or her bosses. He would kill her, if she was lucky. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about. She had another drink and wondered how things might have been if she hadn’t seduced Cash, if she hadn’t risked her child, if, if, if…
The bottom line was Rory’s safety. Her little brother was still a child, and she loved him. He deserved to live. She poured out the last of the whiskey. “Okay, kid, you can do it,” she told herself. She raised her glass in a toast. “To more guts than brains, and going down in a blaze of glory,” she murmured.
When the phone rang, she made her suggestion to Sam in cold blood and with mock confidence. He thought about it, talked to someone, and finally agreed, giving her an address.
“Get a cab, and don’t call anybody,” he threatened. “I can still kill the kid before anybody gets to me. You got that?”
“I’ve got it, honey,” she drawled in her best sarcastic manner.
“Don’t waste time.” The line went dead.
She mentally reviewed all the martial arts she’d learned. As an afterthought, she picked up a balisong knife she’d had for the part she played in the movie. She didn’t really know how to use it, but it had a long and lethal blade. If she got a chance, any chance at all, she was going to make Sam Stanton pay for everything he’d done in his miserable life. Cash could read all about this in the tabloids, she thought coldly. And she hoped his conscience tortured him every time he thought of her!