Rachel Caine - Windfall

Well, fine. Then I felt no guilt in listening, and besides, who the hell did Mr. Sexy English Guy think he was, calling up my sister at oh-dammit in the morning? I had to get up in an hour! And it was my apartment!

Miss Manners woke up a little more and reminded me that I’d be pretty damn pissed if she’d picked up the phone and listened in on, oh, say, me and David having intimate moments. I debated about it long enough to hear Eamon say, “No more trouble from the ex, though? Not got anyone else looking for you, has he?” He sounded genuinely concerned. “I just worry, you and your sister all alone. It’s a dangerous town, for two beautiful women on their own.”

Trouble? What trouble? There’d been trouble with Chrêtien? From the version Sarah had given me, the trouble had been with the lawyers. Nothing about physical danger.

But then Sarah sometimes omitted facts. Such as the initial significant detail about two-timing Chrêtien with his business partner. That hadn’t exactly been up-front information.

“You’re sweet,” Sarah said, in that half-asleep, breathless tone. I heard sheets rustling. If I could hear them, Eamon was hearing it, too. Sarah always had known how to work the flirt better than anyone I’d ever met. “No, I think he’s given that up. He just calls me, when he can find me. And says… cruel things.”

“I’m sorry.”

“At least he isn’t actually doing the cruel things anymore. Just talking about them.”

Chrêtien? Cruel? New idea to me. I mean, he’d always been shallow and supercilious; I just couldn’t see him as abusive. And she’d have told me, right?

Even if I was a total bitch. My sister would have told me if she’d been married to someone who hurt her.

Right?

“Sarah, he has money and a grudge,” Eamon said. “Bad combination. Does he know where you went?”

“He can guess. I haven’t got a lot of family.”

“Still worried, then?”

She sighed. “A little. About Jo. She’s—she doesn’t know when to quit, sometimes. I’m afraid if he does send someone, she might get hurt.”

“It may sound forward, but… you know that you can call me. Any time. Day or night. I’ll come right over,” Eamon said, and it was delivered in a half whisper, low in his throat. And yeah, I had to admit, my instant answer might have been Oh, yes, please, come on over right now, baby. But that would have been my silent internal answer. Right before I calmly told him no, thank you, right out loud.

Right , I reminded myself from the lofty moral high ground. Because you’ve never done anything like that. Hell, I’d picked up David as a hitchhiker on the side of the road. The lofty moral high ground and I were the proverbial slippery slope.

Sarah gave a low-voiced laugh. “You’re an awful flirt.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m an honorable man. I’d sleep on the couch, love. Completely platonic. Pure as the driven snow.” His voice dropped even lower. “Sarah. I know all of this is really sudden—but I like you. And I want to get to know you better. I hope you don’t think that’s inappropriate.”

“No.”

“Good.” I could almost hear the smile through the phone. “Then you don’t mind if I call again? Or see you in person?”

“Not at all,” she purred.

Not at all , I mocked silently, making a face at the phone. And held my breath as I slid it into the cradle and hung up, finally convinced that maybe I was a little out of line.

As I did, warm lips touched my shoulder, and David said, “What are you doing?”

I yelped—loudly—and twisted around in the sheets, ending up wrapped like a mummy, and saw him up on one elbow, stretched out in the moonlight. Gorgeous as a midnight dream, with those eyes burning like low-banked fire. “What are you doing?” I demanded breathlessly. “Hey! You should be—”

He put two fingers on my lips to hush me. “I should be here,” he said, and replaced fingers with his mouth, a warm, liquidly intimate kiss that melted me into butter-warm contentment from the inside out. There was tongue, and hands sliding under the sheets, and oh my God, it was nice. My sleepy nerve endings came awake with an electric hum.

Outside, the rain was still falling, a steady whisper against the glass, and it reminded me that I had an hour before I had to shower and drive to the studio to be humiliated again by Marvelous Marvin and his horse’s-ass predictions that seemed way too lucky to be true.

“I have to get up soon,” I said, and worked my way down his bare chest with slow, damp circles of my lips and tongue, over the trembling, velvet-warm planes of his stomach…

I heard the breath come out of him in a slow, moaning rush.

“Then we should hurry,” he whispered, and stroked the curls from my hair.

In the morning—well, the predawn darkness—the rain finally stopped just in time for me to pull into the parking lot. My carefully straightened hair looked glossy and gorgeous when I checked it in the mirror; I did makeup fast, forbade Genevieve to backcomb anything on me, and then got a look at the outfit she had hanging on the rack next to the door.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. She shrugged massive, muscular shoulders.

“Oh, God, I’ll pay you money if you say you’re kidding.”

“You can’t afford me, darling,” she said, and lit up a Marlboro. There was no smoking in here. She never had cared. I held my breath and got out of the chair to take my costume off the hanger, and held it up to the light.

Apparently, Marvin’s prediction was going to be sunny and warm. I was going to be wearing a huge, clownish, foam rubber yellow sun, with a hole cut in it just big enough for my face. Armholes and legholes, and yellow tights.

“No,” I said. “I’m not wearing this. Tell Marvin—”

“Tell me what?” Marvin walked up and threw a heavy arm around my shoulders, leaned in, and looked down my shirt. He smelled like bad cologne and breath mints and a sour aftertaste of alcohol left over from the night before. His hair implants still looked like seedlings, but he’d cover them up with the toupee before going on the air, Visine the reddened eyes, and do a quick white-up on his teeth. Marvin knew television the way other, better meteorologists knew their way around a satellite graphic. “What’s wrong? Don’t like the outfit? Should have come to breakfast with me yesterday, heh heh.”

I forced a smile and reminded myself that I needed a job, and this one paid better than working the register at the 7-Eleven, with a slightly smaller chance of being robbed. “I’d rather not wear it,” I said. And tried to sound professional about it. “How about something else? Something less—”

“Kids love Sunny,” he said, and squeezed the foam rubber, right about where my chest would be. “She’s just so huggable. C’mon, Jo. Be a sport.”

The jovial tone wasn’t fooling me; his eyes were mean and bright, and he wasn’t taking no for an answer. The news director, a harried young guy by the name of Michael, wasn’t going to be taking any moral stand against foam rubber, and so far as I knew, there was no Weathergirl Union to protect me from this crime against fashion.

“Fine,” I said, and forced a smile. “No problem.”

He winked, swear to God. He did.

I had to sincerely fight the impulse to channel a lightning bolt.

The segment went about as badly as I could ever hope. My lines were stupid, the foam rubber sun suit was hot, Marvin was obnoxious, and Cherise was notoriously absent from the moral support trenches. They threw more water on me, this time to warn of some unusually big waves. One of the stagehands giggled.