Sarah wiped her hand across her eyes. No one was going to be able to save her. If the police came after them it would just make Cami crash sooner. She needed to get a hold of herself. She stared out the window searching for an out.
“I wish I could see Jonathan’s face when he realizes what he let happen to you.”
Sarah didn’t want to think about that, and she wasn’t going to validate her words with a response. “Tell me about Jack. What was he like?”
“It’s not going to work. I know what you’re trying to do, and I’m not going to change my mind. But I guess you should know what kind of person your fiancé killed.” Cami was starting to weave in and out of traffic, passing the slower cars and gaining speed. “Jack was a strong man, a good man. He wasn’t scared of anything. He had this way of talking that made you believe everything he said. He didn’t act as if he was better than anyone else. He was just who he was.”
“He sounds a lot like his brother.” Sarah wanted to remind her that there was a connection between them.
“He is nothing like Jack,” Cami spat.
The conversation wasn’t helping. Sarah took a shallow breath. It was all she could muster. Where was the highway patrol? They were here any other time someone was speeding. Couldn’t anyone else see that she was in trouble? Sarah looked around the car for something she could use to break the window. There was nothing. It was the cleanest car she’d ever seen. Cami probably had it detailed for the event.
“I heard that Jack rescued some kids from a burning car once. It sounds as if he was a good person. I don’t think he would want you to hurt me. That doesn’t sound like something he would allow.”
“You don’t know him.”
Not, ‘You didn’t know him.’ She was speaking as if Jack was still alive.
“I know he saved Liam Nordstrom’s dog from some kids who were trying to drown it. He cared about others, even dogs. Would Jack want you to kill me to punish his brother? He loved his brother. It doesn’t sound like a plan he would agree to. And I haven’t done anything to deserve this. I don’t think Jack will forgive you.” Cami had to be thinking she and Jack would reunite in…heaven? Otherwise what was the point of all this? Cami’s face scowled, but Sarah could tell she’d hit the mark. The car began to slow. Slow enough to give Sarah hope.
She glanced up to spot a sea of red lights in front of them. Maybe it wasn’t her words. Even if it was just circumstance, Sarah needed to seize the moment. She knew she had to find a way to disable the car so it couldn’t move. She reached into her bag and hit the icon for the air horn. The loud blast distracted Cami for just a second, but it was long enough for Sarah to grab the steering wheel and crank it to the left, Cami’s side of the car. Sarah hunkered down as low as she could in her seat and braced her free hand against the dashboard in front of her as they hit the cement barrier and only Cami’s airbag exploded. White powdery smoke filled the car, blasting Sarah back against her seat just as the impact of the crash propelled her body forward. Time seemed to slow as Sarah felt her seatbelt tethering her to her chair. She expected it to give way any second as Cami had described, but the sharp pain across her breastbone informed her that it wasn’t going to let her go.
Sarah waited for more vehicles to join the party as flashbacks of her accident in December flooded her head. She remembered how just as she thought it was over, she felt the jerk of another car joining the pileup and causing her to hit her head again and again on the flattening airbag. Sarah didn’t have any protection, except the strap across her chest that was holding for now.
When the pounding on the window started, Sarah finally let her body relax. A man in dark clothes wrenched on the door handle. Sarah shook her head. “I can’t open it.” She felt as if she was yelling, but the words sounded muffled in her ears.
“Stay back.” His words were muted, too. He motioned that he was going to break the window.
She looked over at Cami to gage her reaction, but she was slumped away from her and she couldn’t see her face. Sarah covered her eyes as the glass shattered into a million pieces and then crumpled to the floor. Gloved hands pulled back the rest of the window as if they were peeling a giant hardboiled egg. When the opening was wide enough, Sarah lunged for the outside without success. Then she reached over with shaking hands, pushed the release on the seatbelt, and untangled herself from it. She looped her hand through her bag’s handle just as strong arms stretched inside the car, grasping her under her arms and pulling her from her seat.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jonathan
HER LIMP BODY curled over his chest like a fitted T-shirt as he nuzzled his face into her neck. She felt so good in his arms. He was never going to let her go.
“Sir. Sir. We need to check her over. You are going to have to let us do our job,” a woman’s voice to his left demanded. It was like a broken record in his ear, and he just wanted it to stop.
Sarah’s head began to slowly shake no, and he squeezed her tighter in his arms, if that was possible, ignoring the woman.
“Jonathan, the EMT just wants to make sure she is all right. And we need to get out of this fish bowl, sir.” Craig’s voice cut through the haze as his hand touched Jon’s arm.
Jon looked up at the parking lot of cars on the expressway, spotting at least five cell phones sticking out the windows of various vehicles. He followed Craig to the ambulance and climbed into the back, before seating Sarah on the gurney. She was safe; that was all that mattered. Her hand clutched his arm as he pulled back. “I’m not leaving.”
“I’m fine, Jon. I just want to go home.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“I’ll take you home as soon as we know you’re not damaged.” He was trying to be cute, but the second the words left his lips, he realized what he said. Whether her body was injured or not, this experience had damaged her. What was wrong with him? Why had he taken this innocent girl and turned her into a circus attraction. He watched as the EMT ran through her checklist. His hand dropped slowly to his side when Sarah was asked to extend her arm for one of the tests. He wanted her hand back. He needed it back.
“Sir, are you all right?” Craig asked. He was just outside the ambulance, and the expression on his face said, “You should sit down.”
Jon was in a haze. He hadn’t slept for two days, not since before the last e-mail from the stalker. Camille Moss, or whatever her name was now, was the stalker. Why hadn’t he thought of her? She’d been in the guesthouse when Jack lived there. She knew about the soundproof walls because Jack told her. He thought she had moved on, left Hollywood, and gone back to Michigan after Jack’s death. He didn’t know Sarah’s Pilates coach Cami was really Camille. No wonder she disappeared when he intercepted Sarah at the house. She didn’t want him to recognize her. Then he left for his tour, leaving Sarah alone with the one woman she feared the most. He shook his head.
“Jonathan, do you need to sit down?”
After he got the stalker’s e-mail and watched the video of Sarah in the pool, he assumed that the stalker had been in the house and Sarah wasn’t afraid of her, but he wasn’t sure. The video could have been filmed with a high-powered lens. He called Raul right away and told him not to allow anyone into the house. He told him to make sure that he or Craig stayed with Sarah at all times. Jon shared the stalker’s e-mail and asked who’d been in the house. He gave him a list—just her friends from Minnesota, Remi, the cleaning lady, the pool guy, and Cami. He’d never dated a Cami. How would she know about the soundproof qualities of his bedroom? It just didn’t register. Sarah was already so scared of the stalker he couldn’t tell her about the video. He got on the first flight out. He needed to be with Sarah. He needed to protect her. His entire flight he imagined finding Sarah floating in the pool facedown—a swirl of red water trailing from her body. He’d seen it in the movies a hundred times.
Since his flight got in early, instead of going back to the house to wait for Sarah, he decided to go straight to her workout class
to meet her. He was waiting with Craig outside the studio for her to finish when Craig got the text that she was heading to the Caboose Juice with Cami. He figured this was his chance to meet Cami. He’d walk in on them as they sipped their juice and surprise Sarah. That’s not what happened, though. Everything quickly turned ugly, and as he listened to every horror forced on Sarah broadcasted from Craig’s phone, he sat powerless to save her. He knew if he made his presence known, Cami would just act that much faster to complete her plan. So after he and Craig caught up to Cami’s car, they hung back waiting for the right moment. He hadn’t thought about crashing the car as a solution, but when he saw Sarah reach for the steering wheel, he knew his brilliant fiancé had a plan of her own. She saved herself.
He looked over to Sarah, and she reached her hand out to his. Her touch seemed to bring him out of his daze. The EMT’s radio buzzed several times, but Jon didn’t hear what was being said. Then the woman assessing Sarah announced, “I’ll be there by the time you get her out.” She turned to Sarah. “If you have a private physician.” Then she looked to Jon. “I would suggest getting checked for a concussion. I don’t see signs of it, but that doesn’t always matter. Since we’re the only ambulance able to get through the traffic out there and the helicopter is tied up further down I-10 at the accident that caused this one, I have to go help with the driver. She’s in worse shape. You’re welcome to stay in here, or if you have another vehicle, you can try to make it out of this parking lot.”
Jon nodded, and the woman left, grabbing a black duffel bag as she jumped out of the vehicle. He bent down, kissing Sarah on the top of her head. “Are you ready?” He didn’t ask if she wanted to stay. He knew the answer.
“Jonathan Williams. Someone said that they saw you pull a woman from the crash, and I just thought it was one of those fake celebrity sightings. But you Williams boys must have hero in your blood.”
Jonathan glanced over to the uniformed officer standing next to Craig. The man extended his hand and added, “I’m Chip Nelson, highway patrol. I met your brother once in a very similar situation, when he pulled those kids from that burning car. If he hadn’t helped them, they surely would have died of smoke inhalation.”
Jon met his hand with a smile and shook, the man’s grasp firm.
“I’m sure you heard that story a hundred times.” A sincere smile beamed from the officer’s face. “Now let’s get your story.”
Jon’s expression fell. Did he really need to do this now?
“If you want I can give a statement, and you and Sarah can go sit in the car,” said Craig. He apparently was learning to read Jon’s mind.
“No. I am going to need a statement from all three of you. But if you have a vehicle, we can do it in there.”
When they finally got off the freeway and made it home two hours later, Jon had fallen asleep with Sarah tucked against his chest. The sweet tinkle of her voice saying his name woke him. It was the most beautiful sound. She looked up at him with her sweet smile, and he couldn’t help but wrap his arms tighter around her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sarah
TO SAY SHE WAS traumatized by what Cami had done to her was putting it mildly. The first two days following her fallout with the Pilates instructor Sarah couldn’t leave the house. She couldn’t walk out the door, not even into the courtyard, without a paralyzing fear erupting from her stomach and spreading to her limbs. She’d never experienced that kind of irrational anxiety until then. Jon had shown her the e-mail with the video of her in the pool, and the thought of Cami filming her and using it as a tool to terrorize them ruined the tranquility of the pool area for her. It was no longer her favorite place. She hated that someone she considered her friend could turn out to be so evil. Sick, she reminded herself. If she thought of Cami as being ill, it was easier to handle.
As the weeks passed, it got easier emotionally for Sarah to leave the house. With Jon constantly glued to her side, she knew that if someone tried to hurt her, they would have to answer to him and Sam, or Raul, or Craig. She didn’t see the downside to having an entourage anymore; the more the merrier. She worked through her anxiety quickly because she could see the pain on Jonathan’s face every time she hesitated in a doorway. Not wanting to add to his insurmountable guilt, she pushed through her fear, and it got easier.
Now Sarah’s problem wasn’t leaving the house, it was escaping the press when she and Jon left. The paparazzi were unyielding. The very public crash and rescue on I-10, along with the impending wedding, placed her and Jon on the top of every entrepreneur with a camera’s priority list. Because they didn’t live in a gated community, yet, and there was no foolproof way to escape the paparazzi at the end of the driveway, except wearing a disguise or hiding on the floorboards of the car—which they had done last week—when Leslie offered to pick up a few groceries on her way over, Sarah graciously accepted.
Sarah sat at the breakfast bar in the guesthouse, trying to mentally file all that had happened to her in the past year and all that was ahead with the wedding. Cami survived the accident, but Sarah didn’t know how severely she’d been hurt. Jon said Cami had been hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation in Michigan, near where her father lived. Sarah was still working to figure out her feelings about the whole nightmare. She’d stayed off the Internet and avoided the E! network, hoping to miss the tabloid analysis of it all.
Leslie plopped a magazine down on the kitchen table next to Sarah. For a second Sarah thought it might be the French periodical with the article about her, but when she noticed how thin it was, she knew it had to be a weekly. She rolled her eyes in disgust. “Why would you bring that rag into our house? Don’t you think that we’ve seen it all?”
“Just thought you might be interested in this one, and don’t hate the messenger,” she replied as she began unpacking the canvas grocery bag. “I’ll put the groceries away. I didn’t get much, just a couple of things to tide us over until we leave.”
Sarah flipped the magazine over and scanned the cover. It was a picture of her and Jon kissing at Cannes. It looked like it had been taken with a high-powered lens. “Oh god!” She stared at the headline in disbelief: JONATHAN & SARAH EXCLUSIVE: AN INSIDER SHARES ALL THEIR SECRETS FROM THEIR FIRST DATE TO THE AISLE.
“Has Jon seen this?”
Leslie shrugged.
Sarah said a little prayer as she opened the glossy pages of the magazine. As long as the wedding’s location wasn’t leaked, it would be OK. More pictures taunted her from the colored spread—a picture of Jon singing on stage at the concert, another one she hadn’t seen before from her private graduation party. There was one of the Pilates studio and a fourth picture of her family’s cabin. Sarah examined the photos carefully. Damn it!
She settled onto her stool and began to read. The article claimed a source close to the couple revealed that the two first met on the Internet and that Sarah didn’t even know Jon’s true identity until the night of the concert where Jon sang her the infamous birthday girl song. The couple spent the night of the concert together in a posh Minneapolis hotel, but the pair didn’t consummate their love that first night. They waited until the week after the concert, when the couple disappeared to Sarah’s family’s cabin in northern Minnesota.
Sarah stared at the article, shaking her head in disbelief. No one knew this. It had never come out before, and now the world knew. Her parents would see it. She was sure they suspected she and Jon slept together at the lake, but to have it printed in a magazine for all their friends to read…that was a whole new level of embarrassment, for both Sarah and her parents. Even Pastor Brian and Nana would see it. A lump formed in her throat and tears clouded her eyes.
“Oh god!” she said again as she brought her hands to her head in frustration. It had to be one of her friends leaking the information. They were the only ones who knew, besides Jon. Her instinct was to call her friends and ask for their advice, but it was one of them that leaked it. Who could she trust? Not them. She didn’t
want to call her mom, either, not yet, though she knew she would have to give her parents a heads up about the article if they hadn’t already seen it. She turned to Leslie and asked, “Did you read this?”
“Yep,” she answered quickly as she put the last bit of groceries into the refrigerator.
“Jon always said this would happen, but I didn’t believe him. How could this happen?”
“It’s not that big of a deal, Sarah. It didn’t mention the wedding’s location. So the world knows you and Jon had sex. Oh, how shocking,” Leslie said sarcastically. She flipped her hair back and rolled her eyes as she spoke.
“That’s not the part that bothers me. It bothers me that the article specifically states we didn’t on the night of the concert. That bothers me.”
“Why? You wanted people to think you did?”
“No…Only three people knew we didn’t on the night of the concert…four people.” She shook her head. “Only four people—Jessica, Megan, Alli, and my brother, Jeff.”
“You and Jon knew,” said Leslie, “and I knew.”
“Really? Jon’s got a big mouth.”
“Jon told one person and you told four. Who’s got the big mouth?” Leslie chuckled as she opened the fridge again and took out a bottle of juice.
“You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” asked Sarah.
“Nope. I signed a contract. I can’t say anything, or Jon can sue me. He would probably just kill me, though. Then he wouldn’t have to hassle with the lawyers.”
Between the Lies (Between the Raindrops #2) Page 33