“I thought you said he threatened to trash your car. To me, this is definitely in the same ballpark.”

“But that was five years ago. And he threatened to trash my car if I went public about him cheating on me. He was running for the state legislature at the time, so that would definitely have hurt him. And to be fair, he only did that when I threatened to go public on him if he didn’t give me everything I wanted in the divorce settlement.”

Wyatt tilted his head back and surveyed the ceiling. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Because you’re a smart man,” I said, and patted his butt.

“Okay, if you don’t think it’s your ex-husband-I’m going to check him out anyway-do you have any other ideas?”

I shook my head. “Dwayne Bailey has the only reason I can think of.”

“C’mon, Blair. Think.”

“I am thinking!” I said in exasperation.

He was getting exasperated, too. He put his hands on his hips and looked down at me. “Then think harder. You’re a cheerleader; there must be hundreds of people who’d like to kill you.”

My resultant shriek stopped the hum of voices that came from outside his closed office door. “You take that back!”

“All right, all right. Pipe down,” he muttered. “Shit. I take it back.”

“No you don’t. You meant it.” As a rule of thumb, you never let a man take something back on the first attempt. Section three, paragraph ten, of the Southern Women’s Code states that if one (meaning a man) is going to be a shithead, one must pay for it.

“I didn’t mean it. I’m just frustrated.” He reached for me.

I drew back before he could touch me, jerked the door open, and swept out. Just as I had thought: everyone in the big, busy open room was staring at us, some openly, some pretending not to. I stalked silently to the elevator, and let me tell you, various aches and pains were making themselves felt, so stalking hurt. Creeping would have been better, but there’s just no way to creep with attitude. My feelings were hurt, and I wanted him to know it.

The elevator doors opened and two uniforms got out. Well, the uniforms had men in them, but you know what I mean. Silently Wyatt and I entered the elevator, and he punched the button.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said as soon as the elevator doors closed.

I shot him a dirty look but didn’t say anything.

“I’ve seen you get nearly killed twice in four days,” he said raggedly. “If Bailey didn’t do it, then you have an enemy somewhere. There has to be a reason. You know something, but you may not know that you know it. I’m trying to dig out some information that will point me in the right direction.”

I said, “Don’t you think you should check out Bailey’s alibi before assuming there are ’hundreds’ of people who want to kill me?”

“Maybe that was an exaggeration.”

Maybe? An exaggeration? “Oh? Just how many people do you really think want to kill me?”

He shot me a glittering glance. “I’ve wanted to strangle you myself a time or two.”

The elevator stopped, the door opened, and we stepped out. I didn’t respond to that last statement because I figured he was trying to get me mad enough to say something rash myself, like maybe accuse him of tampering with my brakes, since he admitted having wanted to kill me, and then I’d have to apologize because of course he didn’t really mean that, either, and I knew it. Rather than surrender the high ground, I played dirty and kept my mouth shut.

When we walked out into the parking lot, Wyatt caught me around the waist and turned me to face him. “I really am sorry,” he said, lightly kissing my forehead. “You’ve been through a lot these past few days, especially today, and I shouldn’t have teased you, no matter how frustrated I am.” He kissed me again, and his voice roughened. “When you spun into the intersection and that first car hit you, I thought my heart would stop.”

Well, hell, there was no point in being petty, was there? I leaned my head against him and tried not to think about the sickening terror I’d felt this morning. If it was that bad for me, what had it been like for him? I know how I would have felt if I’d been behind him and watched him get killed, which is what I’m sure he thought had happened to me.

“Your poor little face,” he murmured, stroking my hair back as he examined me.

I hadn’t been just sitting in the police station all day waiting for my face to swell up and my eyes to turn black. One of the cops had given me a plastic sandwich bag, and I’d filled it with ice and applied it, off and on, to my face, so however bad I looked wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I’d also put an adhesive strip across the cut on the bridge of my nose. I thought I looked like a boxer who’d just finished a fight.

“J. W.,” someone said, and we both looked around as a gray-haired man in a gray suit approached. With his hair, I personally thought he should have worn a suit with more color in it, or at least a nice blue shirt, so he wouldn’t have given such a blah impression. I wondered if his wife had no fashion sense. He was short and stocky, and looked like a businessman, except that when he got closer, I could see he had that distinctive sharp gaze.

“Chief,” Wyatt said, from which I deduced (duh!) that this was the chief of police, Wyatt’s boss. If I’d ever seen him before, I didn’t remember it; in fact, at that moment, I couldn’t even remember his name.

“Is this the young lady the entire force is talking about?” the chief asked, studying me with great curiosity.

“I’m afraid so,” Wyatt said. “Chief, this is my fiancée, Blair Mallory. Blair, this is William Gray, chief of police.”

I resisted the urge to kick him-Wyatt, not the chief-and instead shook hands. Well, I would have shaken hands, but instead Chief Gray just sort of gently held my hand as if he were afraid of hurting me. I was afraid I looked a lot worse now than I had the last time I’d checked myself in a mirror, what with Wyatt’s “poor little face” and now the chief treating me like a piece of fragile glass.

“It was a terrible thing that happened this morning,” the chief said solemnly. “We don’t have a lot of homicide in this town and we want to keep it that way. We’ll get this solved, Miss Mallory; I promise you.”

“Thank you,” I said. What else could I say? Hurry up? The detectives knew what they were doing, and I trusted they were good at it-just as I was good at certain things. I said, “Your hair is a really great color. I bet it looks fantastic when you wear a blue shirt, doesn’t it?”

He looked startled, and Wyatt surreptitiously pinched my waist. I ignored him.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Chief Gray said, giving the laugh that men do when they’re both flattered and a little uncomfortable.

“I do,” I assured him. “French blue. You probably have ten shirts that color, don’t you, because it looks so good on you?”

“French blue?” he murmured. “I don’t-”

“I know.” I laughed. “To a man, blue is blue is blue, and don’t bother you with all those fancy names, right?”

“Right,” he agreed. He cleared his throat and took a step back. “J. W., keep me up-to-date on how the investigation is going. The mayor is asking about it.”

“Will do,” Wyatt said, and hurriedly turned me toward his car while the chief continued on into the building. Wyatt hissed, “Were you actually giving the chief of police fashion advice?”

“Someone needed to,” I said in self-defense. “The poor man.”