She pressed her hands over her face. “I don’t know.” Her voice broke on a sob. “Eric, I don’t know.”
He couldn’t do anything but hold her as a terrible swirling helplessness fed a cold, quiet rage. He’d never leave her side again. He’d stay beside her no matter what or where.
He waited for her to cry, but she didn’t. The only sign of distress was her unsteady, cracking breaths.
“Shouldn’t I know?” She pushed up, still in his arms but no longer limp. “I would…wouldn’t I feel it if he’d raped or otherwise assaulted me?”
Rage boiled inside him, a terrible primal monster. But Nikki was here, in his arms, and her presence held the rage at bay, kept him calm enough to kiss her cheeks, her forehead, her mouth.
“I have to know,” she said finally. “We have to listen to the recordings. Zoran’s software might not have flagged anything if there weren’t really… If I didn’t say ‘no’ or…”
Her face was calm, but there was terror at the back of her eyes.
“Or we wait and see if they get the Spaniard tonight.” He liked that idea, because if they got him, and it was Gus, he could first beat the information out of the man, then kill him slowly.
“I don’t want to wait,” she snapped, and her shift from scared and stiff to angry was a relief. Nikolett gathered herself. “I’m tired of having no idea what’s going on. Of not knowing if I was drunk or drugged.”
He was watching her closely enough to see the slight frown when she said “drunk.”
“You said you remembered some things, right?”
“Yes. I know…I know I said your name.”
“Said my name or called him by my name?”
Nikolett’s head snapped up and she stared at him wide-eyed.
“Nikki, do you think you were… Were you asking for my help? And I wasn’t—” His words cracked, broke.
“No. No, Eric, this isn’t like your nightmare. Please don’t think that. Please don’t get stuck in your head.”
She gripped the sides of his head as if she could physically prevent the bad thoughts.
“I don’t remember being scared,” she assured him, almost desperately. “I remember being sleepy and horny.”
They both relaxed at that, and he didn’t think she realized the implications until she actually said them out loud.
“Tired and horny sounds like wine,” he said slowly, well aware it might be wishful thinking on his part.
She nodded, but it was hesitant, as if she too were afraid of clinging to the least terrible option. “We need to listen to the security recordings. Or read the transcripts. If Gus is the Spaniard?—”
Eric was a fan of jumping to the worst-case scenario because in his experience, that’s normally what ended up happening, but there were a few things that didn’t add up. “Why would a man named Angus McAngus go by the Spaniard? Only someone completely deranged would put those names together.”
She paused, head cocked. “That’s true. And confusing. But the timing…”
“Walk me through it. If Gus is the Spaniard, what does it mean?”
“It means it wasn’t a chance meeting at that coffee shop. He was there to meet me.”
“Why? Why meet you instead of kill you?”
“He’s never tried to kill me, not really,” she said slowly. “Well, maybe the time I was shot.”
Now that she was focused on the puzzle of it, she was no longer vibrating with emotion. Eric gripped her thigh, squeezingto ward off the panic at the idea both that she’d been shot and that he hadn’t known about it until she was healed.
“Maybe there was poison in the cookie he tried to give you. He wanted to watch you die in person.”
“Risky. He ate half of it before offering it to me. Also, even if I did take a cookie from a stranger, at the first sign I was sick or something was wrong, my security team would have moved me. He probably would have missed my actual death.”
