by Nancy Warren
Mrs. Peterson, like most of her female clients, was more communicative. She opened her binder without prompting and Deborah could see her neat, looping writing covering the page.
“You asked us to choose one minor area of conflict to focus on. I chose how he never helps with the dishes.”
“Huh,” said Henrik.
“Go on, Janine.”
“I did exactly what you said. I waited until we had a relaxed time with not a lot going on and—”
“Relaxed? How can I be relaxed with you nagging all the time?”
The words went through Deb like tiny arrows. Puncture, puncture, puncture… She’d heard those words, and that tone, so many times in her life. Her father yelling at her mother. Her mother yelling at her father. Her siblings adding their loud voices to the mix.
“Henrik?”
“What?” His face was red and his shoulders up around his ears with tension.
“Do you think that’s helpful?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Showing up isn’t enough. You have not been using your book. I cannot help you if you won’t use the book.”
He tried to interrupt but she stopped him with a hand in the air, rather like a kindergarten teacher, which was at about the right emotional level. “Do not interrupt me. I am suspending your session. It’s pointless to continue with counseling or with me—” She stopped to drill him with her gaze. “—until you are willing to do the work.”
He went even redder in the face, but what did he expect? He lived in emotional disorder and he’d remain in that state until he did the work.
“I suggest you go home and think about whether you want to continue with me. If you decide you do, then please fill out the workbook as I asked you and phone my office to book your next appointment. Or I could help you find a therapist who might be more suitable for you.” Then she rose. “I’m sorry, Janine,” she said, feeling that she’d let this nice woman down. The one who was willing to do whatever it took to save her marriage.
“It’s not your fault.” They both glanced at the man stalking toward the door.
“Good afternoon.” The farewell sounded formal and old-fashioned, which was fine by her. Polite behavior was governed by rules too.
The Petersons shuffled out and she thought she might use the time remaining in their slot to get ahead on some reports, when her intercom buzzed. Carly’s voice came through a little tinny. “Stephanie Baxter is on the phone for you.”
Stephanie wasn’t scheduled to see her for weeks. They’d finished regular therapy after Stephanie had made such good progress that Deborah had dropped her sessions to four a year simply for maintenance. A call from her between regular sessions could only be bad news. “Thanks. Put her through.”
“I need to see you right away,” said the shaky voice on the phone.
“Where are you?”
“At the mall.”
Deb’s heart sank. Stephanie plus mall equaled trouble.
“How soon can you get here?”
“I have to go to work.”
“Okay. Come when your shift ends. I’ll wait for you.” She and Jordan had planned to have dinner together, but she suspected she’d be too busy helping a client in crisis.
“I almost took it.” Stephanie’s hands shook. “I almost took the watch. It was in my bag. I would have—” She gazed at Deborah with naked appeal. “I would have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“He stopped me.”
“Who?”
Her eyes fluttered closed and she put her shaking hands over them. “This guy. I don’t know who he was. He was following me around the store, watching me.”
“A store detective?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t stay around to find out.”
“Okay. Let’s go back to the moment outside, in the mall, when you first experienced the urge. What was going on?” Shoplifting was an addiction, like drugs or alcohol, Deborah believed, but in Stephanie’s case it was also a cry for help. Her psyche’s way of clanging a fire bell.
“I took back the ring from Derek. We got re-engaged.”
“So, you’d broken off the engagement? I didn’t know that.” The careful neutrality of her voice was deliberately soothing. She made a note on her pad with one fluid motion. No wonder Stephanie was in crisis if she was trying to dump the most stable influence in her life.
“Yeah. Yes. We had a fight and I gave the ring back.”
“I see. What was the fight about?”
“It’s dumb.”
Silence.
“If it was enough to break your engagement over, it can’t have been dumb to you.”
Stephanie stared at the floor. “I guess. It was about my mother. He thinks she’s too demanding of me. Too clingy.”
“I see. What do you think about that?”
Her body stiffened and Deborah watched her hands clasp each other tightly, as though meeting for the first time. “I don’t know. My mom’s never had it easy, you know?”
“Yes. I do. You’ve told me before about your father’s drinking and jail time.”
“He wasn’t much of a dad, but he tried. Mom’s so happy that I found Derek. She thinks he’s the best thing that ever happened to me, so to have him talk about her like that, and to tell me that I need to create more distance between us...” She shrugged. “I guess I lost it.”
“What made you reconsider?”
“He says he loves me and he’s sorry. He never meant to hurt me. And all my friends tell me he’s the best thing that ever happened to me too.” She glanced up and her eyes were troubled. “I haven’t had great luck with guys.”
You’re not kidding. Deborah mentally went over the list of winners Stephanie had spent time with during the time she’d been in therapy. There was the drug addict, the guy who thought Keep Austin Weird was his personal one-man mission, the mechanic who’d turned out to be running a chop shop, the amateur boxer who practiced on his girlfriend when he was frustrated. No, Stephanie could not be said to have sterling taste in men.
“He’s just so different. That’s what attracted me to him in the first place. I decided I was finished with losers and creeps, and when I met Derek it was like a sign. He wears a suit and tie to work, he doesn’t drink, he never borrows money off me.”
Hardly a list of qualities in the perfect husband, but still, for Stephanie, it was a big step forward.
“Why do you think you got that urge to shoplift right after you got engaged again?” she asked quietly.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. This woman had been sitting beside us at the food court—”
“You got engaged at the food court?” She never interrupted a client, and she’d heard some strange things, but getting engaged at the food court was about as wretched a story as she could ever imagine having to tell one’s grandchildren.
“Well, re-engaged. The first time it was at a fancy restaurant and the waiter served the ring on a silver platter.” She mimed a dome with her hand. “You know, one of those with the round lids you lift off?”
“How original.”
“Yeah. It was sort of embarrassing because everybody in the restaurant started clapping, and the waiter popped a bottle of champagne, and… I never said yes.”
“But you said yes this morning.”
There was a pause. “Not really. I don’t think he asked me a question.”
Controlling fiancé, or just a nervous one?
“Then this woman at the next table came over to mine to congratulate me after Derek left. I was pretty stunned. I guess I wasn’t acting very happy. She said I shouldn’t marry him. And she offered me a job.”
“A complete stranger told you not to get married?”
Stephanie nodded.
“And offered you a job doing what?”
“Secretary at this agency she owns.”
“What sort of agency?”
“She breaks up relationships for money.”
<
br /> Deb was starting to get a headache. “What?”
“It’s what she said. She’s like the opposite of a matchmaker.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Here’s her card,” Stephanie said, digging the white rectangle out of her bag.
She handed it to Deborah, who read it carefully, pursed her lips with annoyance, and placed it on the glass-topped coffee table.
“Chloe Flynt sounds like a very destructive person.”
Stephanie gazed at her in mild astonishment. “You always tell me not to make snap judgments about people.”
Something tight pulled from beneath her scalp, like a fine wire. She wanted to snap, “Don’t argue.” Instead, she repeated her mantra. Calm, cool, collected. The three Cs that kept her functioning.
“Normally, I wouldn’t judge someone based on a business card, you’re right.” What was it about this particular card that made her arteries vibrate, as though she could actually feel her blood pressure rising? She picked up the card and studied it for clues as to why something so frivolous and beneath her notice should make her react this way.
“This woman has no letters after her name. No degree, no designation whatsoever. What training does she have for this work?”
“Do you need training to break up relationships?”
“You need the sense to stay out of other people’s business,” she snapped.
Stephanie didn’t argue, simply looked at her with those big brown eyes. She didn’t need to speak; it was obvious what she was thinking. Deborah made her living getting involved in other people’s business. It was unlike her to get so rattled over something so trivial. She made a note to herself to consult with Jordan. “Why would she want to hire you? A perfect stranger?”
“Well, first she wanted me to hire her to break up the engagement, but I told her I, um, wasn’t interested. So then she asked if I’d like to come and work for her.”
“And what did you say?”
“I turned her down.”
A puff of breath Deb hadn’t known she was holding released in a sigh. “I’m very glad you did that. This woman does not sound like a good influence for you.” She could see a mulish expression around Stephanie’s mouth. “Tell me what you’re feeling right now.”
“I feel like if one more person tells me who is or is not a good influence, or a good boyfriend or mother or husband, I will scream. When am I going to be allowed to make my own decisions?”
“Thank you for your honesty. Can you imagine why people who care about you might want to help you reflect on some of your own impulses?”
The younger woman nodded miserably.
“All right, Stephanie,” Deborah said. “Would it be fair to say you’re confused right now?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Do you think your confusion caused you to relapse to behavior you know is counterproductive?”
“I guess.”
“Why don’t you try doing one of our pro and con lists? What is good about marrying Derek? What are the negatives?”
“Okay,” Stephanie replied, sounding anything but excited at the prospect.
An increasingly familiar spurt of irritation gurgled up into Deborah’s throat—scalding words she wanted to blurt out and couldn’t. Pull yourself together, you stupid twit. You’ve wasted years of your young life on losers. Here’s a decent guy, finally, and you want to break up and go on a shoplifting spree? Marry him, settle down. Have some kids. Quit wasting my time.
She didn’t say that. She never said what she was thinking. Instead, she smiled her calm, cool smile, reached for one of her copyrighted pro and con lists, and passed it to her client along with a fresh pen.
“I don’t know what to put first.”
We’ve done about twelve of these. How hard is it? “Well, why don’t we start with a positive, like we usually do?”
Chapter 7
Chloe returned home late that afternoon with a pleasant feeling of accomplishment. She had brochures and cards in quite a number of salons as well as a really nice manicure.
If she spread out all her cosmetic needs, she hoped she’d be able to support all the spas and salons that carried her promotional materials. She was also toying with the idea of some sort of commission, or gift, for other professionals who steered business her way. She’d have to talk to Gerald about that, she decided, stopping to make a note.
She’d almost reached her front door when, with a sudden shake of the head, she changed direction and crossed the lawn to her neighbor’s house, where she rapped on the front door.
She could hear music inside, and she waited. She had to rap a second time before the door opened. The man was dripping wet, a thick blue towel wrapped around his waist. Chloe tried not to notice that his torso was mouthwateringly buff. Muscles where a woman liked to find muscle, nice lean middle, exactly the right amount of chest hair, wet and dark.
“What?”
“You were in the shower, I see.”
“That detective business must be doing real well, with those skills of yours.” His eyelashes were clumped together with water and she’d never noticed the amount of green in his hazel eyes.
Her own spur of lust made her snappish. “You took long enough to answer the door—could you not have grabbed a robe?”
Amusement gleamed in the depths of his eyes, along with the sexual awareness that flashed between them more than it should. He glanced down at his rather delicious self and then at her. “Is this bothering you?”
Realizing she was in danger of letting him know exactly how much his half-naked body was bothering her—and therefore playing intolerably into his already Texas-sized ego—she rolled her eyes and said, “Please. A hand towel would have done the job.”
Instead of looking horribly offended, his eyes crinkled. “What can I do for you?”
Oh, she felt like pulling on the all-too-accessible knot, throwing the blue towel to the floor, and showing him exactly what he could do for her. However, she was here for work and besides, the coffee-cake-baking Brittany was between them, which meant that shagging him on the living room floor was probably not a great idea just at the moment. Sad, really.
The towel left his knees bare and she noticed a nasty-looking network of scars over his left knee.
“I wonder if you followed that tedious young man?”
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. His eyes lost their amusement and hardened. “It’s generally not a real good idea to go around following strange men.”
She smiled at him. “I know. That’s why I asked you to do it. Did you?”
He nodded briefly.
“And?”
“You’d better come in.”
“Ooh, good. That must mean it’s juicy.”
“It means I need to put some clothes on and then you and I are going to have a little talk.”
She stepped inside a house that was very similar to hers, only larger. “Have a seat,” he told her, pointing into the living room. “I’ll be right back.”
She paused in the doorway to watch him pound up the stairs, enjoying the sight of a muscular back sparkling with water drops, a bottom that was deliciously round and firm, and long, hard-muscled legs. All right, so she couldn’t touch. Didn’t mean she couldn’t look.
Once he was out of sight, she ignored his suggestion to sit and gave herself a tour of his downstairs. It was surprisingly tidy, almost as tidy as she herself liked to keep things. He’d refinished all the inside doors to a satiny, dark wood. There were bookshelves on either side of a stone fireplace, stuffed with an enticing assortment of books. Lots of construction and home handyman books, and novels in a range that surprised her, from literary authors to gory thrillers. The rest were science books.
She’d planned to speed around the entire downstairs, but his books had stalled her for too long, and he dressed faster than anyone she knew. Likely he’d hurried because he didn’t trust her, she thought with a slight smile as she heard his footst
eps pounding down the stairs. His furniture was rather chunky, mission-style pieces that were lovely, but also comfortable, she found when she finally sat.
He emerged still damp of hair and bare of foot, but with everything in between covered by jeans and a dark green polo shirt.
“So? Where did he go? That young man you followed?” she asked quickly, determined to forestall the talk he wanted to have with her until after she’d got the info she wanted.
Matthew took the chair opposite hers. “He went to work. He’s got a job in a jewelry store in the mall.” Not terribly surprising, since Stephanie had told her about his job, and this was absolutely none of her business since the newly engaged woman had turned down her offer. Still, for some reason she couldn’t quite let it go. “I don’t trust him. I don’t think he’s good for Stephanie.”
“The girl in the food court?”
She nodded.
He still looked far too serious. “Look, Chloe, I don’t know what your game is, but it’s got to stop. You can’t hassle people in a public place and follow guys to work. That may be how you do things in England, but here in Texas you’re going to find yourself in trouble.”
She heard his words but she ignored them, naturally. He didn’t know that there was an important purpose behind her actions and she didn’t intend he should know until she was good and ready to tell him.
What she did listen to was the subtext of what he was saying. She nodded her head in satisfaction. “You didn’t trust him either.”
“I didn’t—” His lips firmed and she could have sworn he was counting in his head before his mouth opened again and he said, “You’re not listening to me. You can’t do this.”
“Admit it, you enjoyed being a detective again.”
“I did not—” He stopped. Glared at her once more. “How do you know I was a detective?”
How had she known? She puzzled over that as a drop of water trickled lazily from his still-wet hair, down his neck, to slide beneath the shirt that she now knew covered a very broad, nicely tanned shoulder. “I didn’t know. You seem like a detective.”