“No,” I told her with a firm shake of my head. It felt like a collective sigh of relief dropped over everyone in the room.
The officer nodded as she wrote a few things down in her notepad. “I still recommend you go to a doctor to check out your injuries and make sure you don’t have a concussion. We’re going to have security send us all of their footage and if you have any other videos, we can take a look at, it would help our investigation.”
“Is there anything else you need from her?” Colt asked the officer. I felt the rage burning off of him. When the officer gave us the all clear to leave, he grabbed my bags and led me out of the condo I’d called home for the past four years.
“I should take my car,” I mumbled as we left the building.
“The one you don’t like to drive?” he asked me with a cute grin.
“Yes! I just hate driving downtown. Why pay for parking when I alreadypayfor parking?” I motioned toward the two-story parking garage next to the building. There was an additional parking lot in the front for guests and tenants who enjoyed moving their cars around. I was not one of them.
“You want to drive my car?” He grinned widely and held the keys out to me.
I nodded with joy. Happiness stifled the rage inside of me, even though I knew I’d have to deal with the emotions of tonight at some point. However, that point would be in the future after I drove Colt’s fancy ass car.
The black coupe on the curb with its butter soft leather, red interior roared to life like a tiger before it purred like a kitten after I hit the remote to start it. It was small, fast, and expensive. Colt opened the door to the driver’s seat for me and walked around to the other side. I leaned over to open the door for him, and he eyed me with a curious look.
“What?” I asked while adjusting the seat and familiarizing myself with the controls of the car.
He shook his head and laughed. “You’re an amazingly resilient woman, Nina Wilkins.”
I was ready to pull off when Colt put his hand on mine. He hooked his finger under my chin and turned my face toward him. I felt his thumb touch gently around the swollen area of my lip and he leaned over to kiss me.
“I don’t want you to say anything about what I’m going to tell you right now. Not yet,” he warned me. I watched him touch the screen in the center console to input his address into the GPS. “That’s where you’re driving. Get there however you want as fast as you want.”
“Really? I can go as fast as I want?”
He inhaled sharply and attempted to relax in the passenger seat, “Go as fast as you want, just don’t hit anything or kill anybody.”
I pushed the gas and revved the engine. “Is that what you wanted to tell me that you didn’t want me to say anything about?”
“No,” he sighed. “I love you.”
I went to speak, but he held a finger up to silence my reply. It was one hell of a bomb to drop on me, especially after the night we had. Maybe he didn’t believe I felt the same way, which is why he wanted the words to linger between us. It’s as if he were giving me time to get comfortable with the idea of him being in love with me. I left the silence and love between us hanging in the air while I let his beautiful car take us for a ride.
What did that feel like?
Was this it?
I drove his sports car to the outskirts of Broad City where we hit a long stretch of road that seemed to lead into darkness. The only lights available were a few posts every half mile or so. The lights of the city didn’t carry so far out as I opened this bad boy up and pushed the gas pedal as far down as it could go. We went from 30 to 80 within seconds.
Colt kept his cool as I broke the speed limit nearly three times over. When the GPS announced a turn approaching, I slowed down and pulled into a driveway
The driveway continued and circled around a massive pine tree. The home was lit beautifully from ground lights along pathways that traveled around the home. It was very square, angular, black, grey, and glass. A modern home with a void of emptiness behind it. Even though I’d been here before, it seemed like the first time all over again. Perhaps, seeing it with his love in my head and buzzing around my heart made me look at it differently.
It wasn’t until I stepped outside of the car that I recognized that void of darkness behind the home. The saltiness of the air, coupled with the breeze, told me there was water back there.
“It that Lake Prentiss?”
“Yeah, it’s beautiful in the mornings.”
I laughed as he laced his fingers around mine. “I didn’t get to see it much the last few times I was here.”
He kissed my knuckles and then I saw his, battered and bloody from where he beat the shit out of Ray. His voice was low as he told me, “We were busy. You know the best part is that because it only leads to the canal, no one has access to it but city officials and me.”
“Private and all alone out here?” It made me worry about him.
He pulled me into his arms and kissed me softly. The sting of my busted lip didn’t matter. I felt safe in his arms and knew he’d never let me go.
