Beverly Bird - Risking It All

“There is none. I’ll only be a minute. There’s no need for you to come in.”

“He’s already as in as a bug in a rug,” Jenny pointed out.

Grace whipped back to look at her roommate and McKenna waltzed right past her. “Hey!” she shouted as he sat beside Jenny on the sofa.

“You know, I never understood that expression,” he said to Jenny.

Her head was starting to hurt again. Grace drove her fingers into her hair. “That’s because she said it wrong. Bugs aren’t ‘in.’ They’re ‘snug.’” She knew. She’d made it a point over the years to understand English colloquialisms and catalogue them in her memory. It was just another way of banishing her past. And why in the name of heaven was she discussing this anyway? Jenny always tortured analogies—it wasn’t worth the time or effort to try to set her straight.

But McKenna wasn’t willing to let the subject go. “‘In’ can be ‘snug,’” he said. “In my experience anyway.” Then he grinned wickedly.

Grace felt the heat of his look—and the innuendo of his comment—all the way to her bones. Something started to vibrate at the core of her. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” he asked innocently. Then he glanced at Jenny again. “Does she mellow out toward the wee hours of the morning? I just ask because we’re about to spend the night together.”

“She’s kind of muzzy around the edges when she first wakes up in the morning,” Jenny replied. “Sort of like—you’re what?” She gasped when his comment hit her.

“Stop! Both of you, just stop!” Grace shouted. Oh, God, she thought, he’d made her shout again. “Don’t speak to him,” she told Jenny. “Don’t encourage him. And you—” She pointed at McKenna and then at the door. “You wait in the cab.”

“You just told me to wait in here.”

“That was because Mrs. Casamento was outside. Now I’ve changed my mind.”

“Is Mrs. C outside?” Jenny shot off the sofa. “I owe her ten bucks. She let me borrow her laptop the other day.”

Grace wasn’t sure which part of that threw her off more—that crotchety, nasty old Mrs. Casamento had a laptop, which she had actually charged Jenny for the use of it, or that Jenny had borrowed it at all when Grace had one right here in the apartment. Grace settled on the latter. “Why didn’t you use mine?”

Jenny headed to the door. “Because you’re proprietary.”

“And easy to provoke,” McKenna added.

“You stay out of this!” Grace pressed her palms to her cheeks.

“No, no, that’s not true.” Jenny addressed McKenna. “Grace is unflappable. She never flaps. She’s a port in a storm.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” he said.

“I got you out of jail, didn’t I?” Grace yelled, at the end of her rope.

“That was flapped,” he said to Jenny. “As in the antithesis of unflappable.”

Jenny smiled happily. “You must have a way with her.”

Grace turned for the bedrooms then she stopped and looked back again. “You didn’t borrow my laptop because I’m proprietary?” she asked her.

“You get edgy about your things when they cost you a lot of money.”

“I believe she just called you cheap,” McKenna pointed out.

“I’m not cheap. I’m responsible. You ought to try it sometime.”

“I’m trying it right now. I’m not paying for that cab you’ve got waiting downstairs, am I?”

“Damn it!” Grace veered for the hall again and this time she made it to her room if only because visions of escalating cab fare propelled her.

Her bedroom was dove-gray and spartan. She liked things clean and neat. It was virtually impossible to misplace something without clutter to camouflage it. She’d spent too much of her life never knowing what might happen to her next. She needed order.

Jenny tended to turn the rest of the apartment on its ear. There was never any telling what she was going to bring home or what she might do with it once she got it here. But in this room, there was only a double bed with perfectly pressed pewter sheets and a comforter a couple of shades darker. There was her desk—and her needed laptop—and a single dresser with a photo of her family on the farm in Maruja tucked into the top drawer where she kept her lingerie.

Grace was tempted to reach for the photo now, a crazy effort to center herself again. She hardly ever took it out, rarely looked at it. The memories it inspired made her ache inside. She kept it because it was all she had of her past. She hated it because it was her past and something inside her keened over it because it was the present for everyone she loved.

Grace moved deliberately past the dresser and went to her desk instead. With a few deft moves, she had the modem line and the printer cable disconnected and everything ready to go. She went back to the living room.

Jenny was gone, off paying Mrs. C, and McKenna was lounging on the sofa as if he owned it. He had turned the television on.

“I’m ready now.” She kept her tone flat, her voice on the far side of tantrum.

“Got your toothbrush?”

“I’ll have no need of a toothbrush tonight.” As soon as she got his statement, she would be coming home. Safely home, Grace thought.

“Maybe, maybe not.” But at least he turned the TV off and stood from the sofa.

“There is no maybe involved in this discussion.”

For a moment he looked pensive, she thought. “There are a lot of maybes,” he said finally. “And I have a feeling that it’s going to take us all night to unravel even a portion of them.”

“I’m very good at unraveling.”

He grinned again as he joined her at the door. “I’m very good at prognosticating. And procrastinating.”

Was he using the convoluted words again on purpose? Was he still hung up on the intelligence issue? She had the feeling that he could be like a dog with a bone when it came to something that bugged him. He wouldn’t let it go.

Grace decided that the best she could do was step around the issue. “At four hundred an hour?” She yanked the door open and stepped out into the hall.

“Is that what you’re costing me?”

“I’m the new kid on the block. I come cheap.”

“Do you now?”

Her heart jerked. How many hours was it going to take her to learn that this man could twist anything she said? She headed for the stairs.

“You’re just hired?” He followed her. “I got the rookie?”

“Lutz wasn’t going to charge you at all until you acted like a five-million-a-year extortionist.”

“I acted like no such thing. So what would a veteran cost me?”

“Five hundred and up.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

Grace snorted, doubting that. “I guess you’re stuck with me then.”

“Not necessarily. There are other firms, lesser fees.”

She stopped cold in the building lobby to stare at him. “Are you trying to convince me you’re stupid?”

“Wouldn’t take much work, would it?”

His face had hardened. She didn’t like the fact that it unnerved her a little. “I never said that, never insinuated it.”

“We’ll get into what you’ve insinuated once I’ve got you locked in a hotel room.”

“I’m not going to be locked there. You are.”

“You’re very argumentative. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

How had she come to be nose to nose with him? Grace backed off. She jerked toward the lobby door and all but jogged out onto the street.

The cab was still waiting and it was probably going to cost her a hundred dollars by now. Lutz was going to have a stroke when she put this expense in to the firm. Then again, he had just given up a room at the Hyatt for this character.

By the time they landed at the hotel, the meter had steadfastly clicked its way up to $67.40. Grace didn’t have that much cash on her. She rooted through her briefcase twice and still came up short by almost ten dollars. She squeezed the bills that she did have in her fist and closed her eyes in a last-ditch effort at composure. When McKenna’s voice came from beside her, it sounded amused. “Problem?”