Delores Fossen - Truly, Madly, Briefly

Aidan gathered up the scattered papers and dumped them onto the center of the desk. His gaze eased to Maxine. Then to Bobbie. There was a you-didn’t-believe-me-huh? look in his eyes. Bobbie conceded his point with a shrug. So, this is what he had to deal with on an hourly, perhaps minute-to-minute basis. She actually felt sorry for him.

“Miss Varadore,” Aidan said at the end of a sigh. He picked up his pen and got back to work on the report. “I don’t do kitty rescues. And at the moment, I’m attending to Miss Callahan’s situation.”

Maxine huffed. It was enough to extinguish candles on a birthday cake at the senior citizens’ home. “You might have won the lottery, Bobbie Fay Callahan, but you weren’t supposed to start hanging around him until tomorrow morning. That was the deal.”

“I didn’t agree to the deal,” Bobbie let her know. She tipped her head toward Aidan. “And neither did he. I’m here on official business.”

“Yeah, like I believe that. You don’t even own a cat.”

Aidan stood and dropped the pen onto the desk. “But she does have a situation that requires my official attention. So, if you’ll please excuse us…”

Bobbie would have seconded that, but her pager went off. While Aidan continued his explanation, and while Maxine continued to plead her case for a full-scale kitty rescue, Bobbie rifled through her purse, pushing aside the fist-full of travel brochures, to locate the vibrating flamingo-colored device. One look at the tiny screen, however, and she pressed the green button to stop the noise. She snapped her purse shut again.

“Jasper,” she mumbled under her breath. But she obviously didn’t mumble it softly enough because both Aidan and Maxine looked at her.

“Jasper Kershaw’s back in town?” Maxine asked, her voice filled with hope.

Bobbie nodded. “He got back a couple of hours ago.”

To be specific, it was two hours and fourteen minutes. Six people, excluding Jasper himself, had already phoned to tell her about the jilting fiancé’s return. Bobbie vowed to quit answering her phone. Too bad she couldn’t turn off her pager, but she was hoping for a call from the warehouse to say they had managed to locate the case of missing thongs.

“And you’re getting back together with Jasper?” Even more hope abounded in Maxine’s voice.

“No!” Bobbie answered so fast that she risked having her teeth fly out of her mouth. And her assertion was one-hundred-percent true. Too bad Jasper hadn’t quite figured that out yet. In the past two hours and fourteen minutes, he’d called or paged her seven times.

Maxine tsk-tsked. “You’ll get back with him. You always do. Of course, that’ll cancel out the lottery so we’ll just have to have another one to figure out who gets first dibs on Aidan. But this time you can bet your britches that I’ll be the one drawing that name from the Crock-Pot.”

“This is just a guess, but I don’t think the deputy wants a lottery,” Bobbie pointed out.

Bobbie’s pager went off again. She glanced into her purse and saw Jasper’s number highlighted on the screen. She smashed the button to stop it and shut her purse in a hurry.

Darn it.

The man was obviously aiming for a round three, which wouldn’t happen. After being left at the altar not once but twice, she’d learned her lesson regarding Jasper Kershaw.

“The report?” Aidan reminded Bobbie. It was no doubt also a reminder for Maxine to vamoose because he ignored her and got to work. He studied the form a moment. “Estimated value of the missing merchandise.”

“Four hundred and thirty-two dollars,” Bobbie gladly answered.

Maxine leaned over the desk, examined the form and rolled her eyes. “Gimme a break. You’re saying someone stole a case of triple-X Gigolos? Yeah, right. Nobody, but nobody in this town wears a size triple-X.”

Apparently realizing that she’d just given away a rather intimate detail of her not-so-private love life, Maxine hiked up her chin again. “I’ll be back,” she warned, casting another glare in Bobbie’s direction.

Bobbie would have breathed a lot easier if her pager hadn’t gone off again. She didn’t even look. It was Jasper. It had to be. No one else could possibly be that annoying.

“Would you care to use the phone?” Aidan inquired.

“No, thanks. I have a phone in my purse.” Bobbie reset her pager again and sank back down in the chair across from him.

He gave her a considering glance. “Does this mean Jasper Kershaw will be coming in here to file a missing person’s report because he can’t get in touch with you?”

She shook her head. No missing person’s report. But it did likely mean that Jasper would pester the heck out of her. Why couldn’t he have just stayed on the run, and away from a telephone? The man certainly knew how to use speed dial.

Aidan turned the form around so that it was facing her. “Check to make sure I have all the facts right and then sign at the bottom—”

The phone rang, and he snatched it up while he handed her a pen.

“A Peeping Tom who drove slowly past your house and beeped his horn, you say?” Aidan asked the caller a moment later. “And you’d like me to come to your house to check out things?”

Bobbie would have tried to convey some sympathy if her pager hadn’t gone off again. This time she did look. And it was Jasper.

“Great day in the blooming morning!” she grumbled. This was past pestering and into a whole new realm of aggravation. She took the pager from her purse, stabbed the off button and tossed it in the trash can next to the desk.

“You believe I’ll have to spend the night at your house in order to catch this beeping Peeping Tom?” Aidan continued, obviously repeating what the caller had suggested. He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced.

Bobbie did the same when her pager went off again. She’d obviously not turned it off after all. The metal trash can rattled and echoed the series of annoying, pulsing beeps. It was the proverbial back-breaking straw, and she didn’t have to be a camel for it to be majorly effective. She ripped her phone from her purse and punched in the numbers. Jasper answered on the first ring, but the only thing he managed to get out was the hel-part of hello.

“Don’t call or page me again,” Bobbie warned. “As far as I’m concerned, Jasper Kershaw, you’re no better than highly contagious foot fungus, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to avoid you.”

Obviously engulfed in his own battle of wills, she heard Aidan continue with his call. “No, I’m afraid I can’t come out, Miss Martindale, since this person only beeped and didn’t come onto the premises. My advice is not to undress while standing in front of an open window.”

“Bobbie,” Jasper crooned as if she hadn’t just issued a really disgusting insult. “It’s good to hear your voice. We need to talk. Where are you? I’ll be right over.”

“No, you won’t,” Bobbie said at the very moment that Aidan concluded, “No, I can’t.”

Their gazes met. In the swirl of all those shades of tropical green, Bobbie saw the same frustration, the same aggravation, the same why-the-heck-me? look that she was sure she had in her baby-browns. Without taking her gaze from his, Bobbie clicked off the phone. Without taking his gaze from hers, Aidan placed his phone back onto the desk.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

He squinted one eye. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking?”

It seemed a reasonable request, but it could lead to a thoroughly embarrassing moment if they weren’t on the same frequency here. After all, Bobbie had been thinking something totally ridiculous.

But perhaps necessary.