Free Love is Murder by Sandra Brown Page A

him, but that would only expose me for the jealous idiot I was. Not something I was ready to cop to.
    Nearly frozen by indecision and shame for even following him in the first place, I instead kept driving on, thinking enough was enough.
    I soon found myself pulling into the airport rental car facility, ready to turn in my Hyundai and catch the next flight home. As much as I wanted to comfort David, I knew I couldn’t. And if something was wrong, he would eventually tell me.
    I had to believe that.
    As it turned out, however, the revelation came not from the man I loved, but from the morning news.
    * * *
    There’s something surreal about seeing a part of your life on TV. You feel as if you’ve been launched into a dream—or nightmare, in this case—and everything around you has that gauzy, slightly out-of-focus feel.
    I had always used the television in my bedroom as an alarm clock. At precisely six forty-five every morning, it popped on, whether I liked it or not, bringing my favorite cable news network into my home, my favorite morning news anchor cheerfully chirping on about some national disaster or public tragedy. Usually that meant an earthquake or a bank robbery or train crash or, more often than not, a political or celebrity scandal. But that morning the news was considerably more personal than I had expected it to be. It took me a moment to wrap my head around exactly what was being reported.
    A photograph of David hammered it home. They’d lifted it from his Idaho driver’s license and it didn’t even come close to doing him justice—an insignificant observation in the scheme of things.
    My favorite reporter’s voice was droning on, saying something I didn’t quite understand until I forced myself to focus.
    “…after the body of his colleague was discovered in his hotel room by the night maid. The maid said she had received a call for fresh towels and was shocked to find another guest, Ms. Kim Gallagher, lying naked on Mr. Atlee’s bed, the victim of an apparent strangling. Los Angeles police aren’t talking, but a source close to the investigation claims that Ms. Gallagher’s death may have been the result of a sex game gone wrong.”
    There are no words to describe how I felt at that moment.
    Do I really need to?
    I sat on the edge of my bed just staring at the TV, hoping I’d wake up and find David lying next to me, that crooked smile of his asking me what the hell I was dreaming about.
    But, of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, I watched news footage of my boyfriend being arrested in the lobby of his hotel. Apparently, he hadn’t gone to the airport after all. Had turned around and gone back to the Traveler’s Inn and soon found himself confronted by a phalanx of uniformed and plainclothes police officers.
    He didn’t resist arrest. Just stood there, looking stunned, as they cuffed his wrists and escorted him away.
    And I didn’t speak to him again until after the trial.
    * * *
    I did, however, speak to my mother. More or less.
    My favorite cable channel was in the midst of looping the arrest footage for about the hundred and forty-seventh time—the phrase “sex game” repeated ad infinitum—when my phone rang and that piercing nasal whine filled my right ear.
    “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh. My. God. Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me I’m having a terrible, terrible nightmare.”
    I don’t know why I answered the damn thing. I’d known it would be her. And the last person in the world I wanted to talk to was mommy dearest. But for reasons that will always escape me, I had grabbed my cell phone by the fourth ring, and now I not only had to find a way to respond, I had to do it in a way that somehow didn’t make me sound as humiliated as I felt. Humiliated by David’s betrayal and by the dreaded realization that the woman on the other end of the line had been right all along.
    I was devastated, no doubt about it, but I’d be damned if I’d show it.
    Not to her.
    She would be