“The AC is dead,” she said in a grumpy voice.
“I noticed.”
“I think we’re burning oil,” she added pointedly.
“We are.”
Shit. She couldn’t afford to replace Dolores—not with a truck sturdy enough to pull Annabelle. Then again, she might never find Annabelle again. “If you drove a little slower, you might save the engine you seem determined to destroy.”
“Killing an engine isn’t something that preys on my soul, Angel,” he said. “I just need five more miles out of it and we’ll be good.”
“Her,” she corrected. “And her name’s Dolores.”
“Good to know, so she can have a decent burial,” he drawled. “And that helps. Women like to do what I tell them.”
“They just want you to believe that,” she scoffed.
This time he did look at her, and the lights from the dashboard danced across the angular lines of his face, reflected in his eyes. If she didn’t know better she’d think it was a smoky, sensuous expression that didn’t quite meet his mouth. “Oh, I don’t know. Once I got you in bed, you were pretty amenable to almost everything I suggested. Though I can still think of one thing we haven’t tried . . .”
“Shut up!” Damn, she sounded a little hysterical. He would read that as sexual interest, and she wasn’t admitting to it. It would be her little secret and she’d take it to the grave with her. She continued in the calm, flat voice she’d wanted to use. “I’m really tired of your empty sexual innuendos,” she said firmly. “They don’t frighten me. You might kill me, but you’d never rape me.”
To her surprise and annoyance he laughed at that, really laughed. “Evangeline, my darling one, I don’t think it would be possible for me to rape you. You’d give in far too easily. Fortunately for you, rape is not a game I’m interested in playing.”
“Rape isn’t a game,” she said fiercely.
His smile vanished and he looked at her again. “Did I miss something?”
She’d said too much again. “Miss what? You know everything about me, didn’t you say? Surely the great James Bishop, or whoever you are, couldn’t have missed something.”
He was watching her far too closely for the speeds he was driving. “Did someone rape you?” His voice was sharp.
“Watch the road,” she said, taking a deep breath. It was no one’s fault but her own—she’d brought it up. The sooner she got it out in the open, the sooner he’d drop it. “I was underage and the records were sealed.”
“How young?” His voice was grim.
“Don’t worry about it. I was sixteen, fully capable of making my own decisions. And no one threw me down in the dirt and had me against my will. It was more a case of . . . inappropriate seduction.” She felt a little shiver under her skin at the memory, and she had to hope he didn’t notice. But he would have—he noticed everything.
“This happened before we met.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Obviously.”
“Who was it?”
“You know, I’d really rather not talk about it. My point was that rape isn’t a joke or a game or . . .”
“Who was it?” he rapped it out, and she turned stubborn.
“None of your . . .”
He interrupted her again. “I can make you tell me. There are dozens of ways to do it, and I’ll use every one of them, no matter how unpleasant, so you may as well give it up.”
“Ve have vays of making you talk,” she said in a heavy, mock-German accent.
“I thought this wasn’t a joke.”
Shit, she didn’t want to think about this or talk about it. She took a deep breath and spoke rapidly. “He was a professor friend of my parents. He always had an eye for the freshman girls—he was notorious for it. So are most of the others, but he decided to branch out and experiment on me, and I . . . I was too in awe of him to do anything but go along with it. I didn’t like it, but he didn’t hurt me, at least not after the first time, didn’t threaten to kill my parents or any of that crap. He was just the kind of man who had that power over people. He had incredible charisma, but he was as insidious as a snake, and of course I did what I was told.”
“What about your sister?” he said in that cool, emotionless voice he used so much of the time. “Why didn’t he go after her first?”