One Foot in the Grave - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,29
pulled out a carton of eggs. “I’m hungry too.”
“What’s a blood price?”
“Nothin’ you need to worry about.”
“Look,” I said in a cold tone. “If I ask you a question, you can do me the courtesy of giving me a straight answer. No more bullshit. Is that clear?”
He turned back to face me. “I’ll answer what I can.”
I slid off the stool. “Good luck to you.”
“Carly,” he called after me. “At least stick around long enough to find out what I won’t answer. You might fill in some blanks along the way.” When I stopped with my hand on the doorknob, he added, “If you leave now, who knows what information you’ll miss out on.”
At that moment, I hated him. I hated that he was playing me with his dangled carrot, and we both knew I wasn’t going to walk away, no matter what my pride was telling me to do.
I turned back to face him. “What’s a blood price?”
“It means if anything happens to you while I’ve sworn to protect you, Hank has the right to seek his own revenge.”
“As in kill you?” I asked in shock.
“If that’s what he chooses.”
“It could be something else?”
“Anything of his choosing. Anything.”
“Why would you agree to that?” I demanded.
“Because I wouldn’t let anything happen to you anyway. It was an easy oath to take.”
I struggled to catch my breath, daunted that Hank would ask for such a promise and that Wyatt would agree to it so willingly.
He cracked an egg and dumped it into the bowl. “I’m sure you want to know more about my history with Heather. I suppose that seems like a good place to start.”
“Hm,” I said noncommittally, then sat back down and pulled out my notebook again. I hadn’t used a notebook before, but looking back, I realized that had been foolish. And since I didn’t have Marco with me as a backup memory bank, the notebook seemed the best way to keep track of everything.
“You know, I was with Marco when I was looking for Lula,” I said. “I wasn’t investigating on my own.”
“I’ll be driving you around,” he said in a gruff tone as he whisked the batter, and I couldn’t help thinking what a contrast his domestication was to his burly frame and tone.
Nope. Not going there.
I had other issues to think about, especially since I had no intention of letting Wyatt play chauffeur, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.
“When did you first start dating Heather?”
He turned on the water faucet, collecting a small bit of water on his fingertips before flicking it into the pan he’d set on the burner. The beads of water sizzled and danced, and Wyatt turned down the heat. “We’d known each other since grade school. Her family moved to the area when she was in third grade, but I didn’t pay much attention to her then. It wasn’t until middle school that she caught my eye.”
I couldn’t help noticing the soft smile on his face.
“So you two became a thing in middle school?”
He released a chuckle as he poured batter into the skillet. “No. Believe it or not, I didn’t get up the nerve to ask her out until our sophomore year. I asked her to the homecoming dance.”
“And she said yes, of course,” I said, writing down sophomore homecoming dance.
He laughed again. “Actually, she said no. She’d already agreed to go with Herbie Metcalf, but she told me she would have chosen me if she could have. So she went to the dance with Herbie and I went with some friends, but she ditched him before it ended and asked me to take her home.”
I blinked hard. “She ditched him?”
“We were kids, Carly. Stupid kids.”
“And how did Herbie take it?”
Wyatt gave me a long look. “At the time, he seemed to take it okay.”
“You were popular, right?” I asked. “You were on the football team. You were good-looking.”
“You’re forgettin’ the part about my father havin’ money.”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten that part at all, but that’s a given.”
He scowled. “What are you getting’ at?”
“That you were big man on campus. Where did Herbie place in the high school pecking order?”
“That’s not fair, Carly.”
“What’s fair or unfair is irrelevant. I’m looking for facts.”
“What the hell does a high school dance have to do with the fact that Heather was buried out there in that field for nine years?” His voice rose then broke, and I realized he wasn’t angry with me. He was grieving Heather’s murder.