The Complete Novels of the Lear Sister Trilogy

by Julia London

  At the employment office, she filled out all the paperwork to request assistance in finding a job, then handed the paperwork to a woman who never made eye contact, and proceeded to pass the time waiting for an employment counselor to see her by perusing a list of jobs posted at the bulletin board.

  Wanda Dennard called her name after a wait of almost an hour. She introduced herself, showed Rachel into a tiny cubicle, and invited her to sit while she looked over Rachel’s paperwork.

  Rachel sat. Wanda read. And read. And read so long that Rachel wondered if she maybe hadn’t fallen asleep.

  Wanda’s desk was very neat. She had a half-dozen pictures of children around her desk, and her screen saver was a picture of a row of sleeping kittens. The binders on her shelves were obscured with various plastic green plants and one very odd-looking marble sculpture of some sort.

  Rachel was trying to figure out what that sculpture was when Wanda looked up over her reading glasses. “You’re overqualified for our jobs,” she said. “There’s nothing here to fit you.”

  That was not what Rachel wanted to hear. “But I need a job, I really do. I’ll do anything,” she earnestly assured her, inching up on her orange plastic chair.

  Wanda frowned, looked at her paperwork again, then sighed and punched a button on her computer, instantly bringing up a listing of jobs. “Let’s see . . . there’s a position for a short-order fry cook.”

  “Is there?” Rachel asked with a wince. “I’m not really overqualified for that, am I?” she asked with a laugh.

  Wanda did not laugh. Wanda gave off another sigh that sounded like she thought this was going to be a very trying task. “Sacking specialist?”

  “Sacking specialist?”

  Wanda gave her a sidelong glance. “Grocery sacker.”

  A grocery sacker? Was this woman for real? Didn’t those jobs usually go to teenage boys? She could just imagine herself on checkout nine between two sixteen-year-old boys who amused themselves by hurling lugies at her when the boss wasn’t looking. Just the image made her shudder.

  Wanda frowned. “I told you you’re overqualified.”

  “What about teaching jobs? Do you have anything like that? I really like teaching. Even an assistant position would be okay. Do you have that?”

  “Oh, sure! Why didn’t you say so?” Wanda said with a bright smile.

  A ray of light! “Really?”

  “No, not really. Are you crazy? This isn’t a placement program at Brown, Rachel. We have the jobs that no one else will take. Now, if you want me to sit here and rattle off all the jobs no one else will take, I’ll do it. But if you think you will be underqualified for them all, why don’t you do us both a favor and just say so now and we can each get on with our lives?”

  Wanda had no idea how badly Rachel wanted to do just that. And she came very, very close—but she had to go and think of her bank balance, and the utility bill, and the tree on Mr. Valicielo’s fence, and then Dad, and smiled meekly. “I won’t say that anymore, I promise.”

  Wanda rolled her eyes, sighed again, only a lot louder and longer, and turned back to the screen. “How do you feel about cleaning downtown offices at night?”

  Frankly, not that great, but she forced a smile for Wanda’s sake all the same.

  Chapter Seven

  When Rachel arrived home that afternoon—undetected by the Valicielos—she found a note from Dagne stuck in the door. Hi. Stopped to find something. Call me later.

  Probably a toad’s wart or something.

  She let herself in the front door, dropped her tote bag in the living room, and still holding the referral sheet from the employment office, she walked into the kitchen—and shrieked.

  Myron was sitting there, his head in his hands.

  “Jesus, Myron! You scared me!” Rachel exclaimed, her hand and referral sheet clamped over her heart as she sagged against the countertop. “Couldn’t you have said something when I came in?”

  “Sorry,” he said, without bothering to look up.

  “I didn’t see your car outside.”

  “A friend dropped me,” Myron said, and lifted his head. He looked, Rachel thought, like he hadn’t slept well in days. “Sorry I scared you.” With a heavy sigh, he got up and walked to the fridge and opened it wide. He stood there for a long moment, his frown going deeper as his fingers impatiently drummed against the door. “You don’t have much of anything, do you?”

  Yes, well, she was having a bit of a financial crisis. Enough of one that she was screwing up the courage to ask him to repay the money he owed her.

  “I thought you just went to the store a couple of days ago.”

  “Listen, Myron, I really need to ask you something.”

  “Okay, so ask,” he said as he shut the fridge and headed for the pantry. He flung that door open and stood, hand on hip, studying the shelves.

  “I am really, really broke—”

  “Join the crowd,” he snorted.

  Right. Well, at least he had a job—two, actually. “Okay . . . so I’m really broke, and I was wondering if you might be able to, ah . . .” Man, this was harder than she thought. Why couldn’t she just open her mouth and make the words come out? Myron looked over his shoulder. Rachel winced, said in a rush, “Maybe pay back the money you borrowed?”

  His expression immediately went dark and she instantly felt like a bitch for asking. “Not all of it,” she quickly said. “Just some of it. Enough so I can get by. Like maybe . . . a hundred?” Okay, that was good. Some of what he’d borrowed couldn’t be too hard for him.

  But Myron said nothing, continued to stare at her, as if he could not believe she was asking him for even that.

  “It would really be great if you could pay me just a hundred, or even fifty,” she said, her voice noticeably weaker.

  Myron sighed and stared at the floor for a moment. “Look, Rach, I know I owe you some money. But you could not possibly have chosen a worse time to ask me for it.”

  “I couldn’t?”

  “I’ve been dealing with some stuff that I wasn’t going to burden you with, but since you asked, I guess I’ll have to.”

  “What stuff?” As far as she knew, the only “stuff” Myron ever dealt with was his lack of tenure.

  “Something happened at work. A forklift jammed and damaged a pre-Revolutionary hutch and some china. So we filed a claim. But I guess the claim wasn’t done right, so now the insurer has come down to investigate.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said, still waiting for the “stuff” that stood in the way of him paying her back.

  “Okay? That’s all you’re going to say? Rachel, I am the one who prepares the estimates of loss. I am the one who works with the insurance company. I have the whole administration crawling up my ass over some stupid forklift accident.”

  “Why?”

  “You just don’t get it,” Myron groaned, rolling his eyes dramatically. “The bottom line is a person can’t just do their job anymore. The slightest thing goes wrong and everyone from the janitor on up is a suspect,” he said, making giant, invisible quotation marks with his fingers.

  “Suspect!” Rachel exclaimed. “That sounds like there was a crime or something!”

  “Whatever the word is,” he said dismissively as he returned to the breakfast bar and fell onto a stool. “What I am trying to say is that bureaucracy can get so huge that there’s nothing personal in a job anymore. They might as well line up a bunch of robots!” His face was beginning to turn curiously red.

  “I didn’t know you were having such a rough time at work.”

  “That’s because I didn’t want to bring you down,” he said miserably, then exhaled a long and weary sigh again. “But you sort of forced my hand. God, I feel like a beer. You wanna go get a beer?”

  Hello? Had he heard anything she’d said? “I can’t, Myron. I’m really broke.”

  Myron smiled then. “It’s on me,” he said, and stood, shoving his hands into his jeans. “Let’s go down to Fratangelo’s
and see what’s going on.”

  What she really wanted to know was why the forklift accident had anything to do with the money he owed her, but before she could ask, Myron asked, “What’s that?”

  She glanced down at the paper she was still clutching. “Oh! I went to the employment agency today. It’s a job referral.”

  “A job. Really?” he said, his face brightening. “So you’ll get yourself a job! There you go—problem solved.”

  “It was just a temp agency—part-time work.”

  Myron shrugged. “It’ll at least give you grocery money.”

  Yeah, and if he’d repay the loan she’d made him, she could pay her utility bill. Which reminded her . . . “By the way, Myron—do you have my cell?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, and laughed sheepishly. “I meant to bring that back. I don’t know where my head’s been! I’ll bring it back, I promise,” he said, and walked to the door. “Hurry up, will you? After what I’ve been through today, I could really use that beer.”

  Fratangelo’s, near the Brown campus at the edge of the Blackstone neighborhood where Rachel lived, was a place Myron had always liked because of the cheap happy hour and even cheaper eats. Tonight, as usual, it was packed with an odd mix of the hip young urban crowd and the graduate student–professor crowd.

  They had a seat at the bar and Myron ordered a couple of beers. He then proceeded the regular rant of his tenure problem—same song, louder refrain. “I just need time to research the theory I’m working on,” he explained for at least the thousandth, millionth time.

  Rachel absently nodded—she had learned a long time ago it was best just to zone when Myron went down the gotta-get-tenure path. He rarely heard anything she said, and if he did, it typically made him mad. So as he continued to drone on about it, she let her gaze wander the crowded bar, and saw Dave Stolanski, a permanent fixture at Fratangelo’s. Dave had been in school almost as long as she had, which wasn’t a particularly comforting thought. Rachel frowned at her beer, then at Dave—but noticed someone behind him who looked an awful lot like Flynn.

  She froze, the beer halfway to her mouth, squinting across the smoke-filled room.

  “What are you looking at?” Myron asked, shifting his gaze in the direction she was looking. “Oh,” he said, seeing Dave Stolanski. “Don’t get your heart set on him, Rach. The guy’s a loser. He’s been in the program five years now and still hasn’t made any progress toward finishing his doctorate.”

  Rachel gave him a withering look, but Myron took a swig of his beer, completely oblivious. “I’ve been in that long, too,” she reminded him. “Does that make me a loser?”

  Startled by the question, Myron quickly shook his head and tried to laugh it off. “No, of course not. It’s different with you.” He laughed again, only a little higher.

  “How so?”

  “Because!” he insisted nervously. “At least you’re at dissertation, right? Dave’s not even at dissertation,” he scoffed, waving a hand at Dave, who was intently studying something atop the bar. Myron took another long swig of beer, then held up two fingers to the barkeep to signal another round. “Listen, don’t misunderstand. It took me a couple of years to get my dissertation out of the way, too. And you know, back then, I was the bomb. The profs loved me! They thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and my work on pre-Revolutionary American history?” He paused to sigh loudly and shake his head. “Golden.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes, put down her beer. “I’m going to the ladies’ room.”

  Thanks to Myron, all she could see as she made her way around the crowded bar was the word loser. And it was that word that prevented her from seeing Flynn at all until she turned down the little corridor that led to the bathrooms and practically collided with the wall of his chest.

  Somehow, she managed to stop herself before doing that, and stared for a moment at the Oxford shirt, the silk tie . . . the square chin, the sexy five o’clock shadow, and the dancing gray eyes framed in very thick and dark lashes. And when she had made it that far, he smiled and said, “Hello, Rachel.”

  Her pulse jumped up a couple of notches. “Hey.”

  His smile was dazzling, all pearly white and gorgeous, just like in the James Bond movies, and he unabashedly let his gaze drift the length of her. “How fortunate—I thought it was you.”

  “You did?” she asked, still blinking up at him, still trying to reconcile that gorgeous smile with the fact that it was aimed directly at her. Again. Again.

  “Yes, of course,” he said with a laugh. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been working a bit to gain your attention.”

  “Where—here?” she asked, confused, and unthinkingly glanced over her shoulder into the crowded bar area. When she turned around, she started—Flynn had casually braced himself with an arm to the wall, one hand on his trim waist, and had blocked her way to the ladies’ room.

  “Here, there, and everywhere, really. But I’m rather beginning to believe I’m invisible.”

  Oh nooooo, he wasn’t invisible, he wasn’t even remotely invisible. More like a peacock, gorgeous and impossible to miss, even in a crowd.

  “It’s been rather bruising to the ego, actually, so if you might possibly shake your head a bit to indicate that I’m really not so invisible after all?”

  Rachel shook her head a bit.

  He laughed low, a sound that tingled down her spine. “That’s a relief,” he said, shifting closer. So close that she thought she could detect the pleasantly spicy scent of his Calvin Klein cologne. And he was still smiling at her, his gaze sort of dancing between her eyes, her lips, and her bosom. “So now that we’ve established that I’m not entirely invisible, perhaps we might move on to discussing what it will take to get you to agree to have a drink with me . . . unless, of course, it’s too complicated. The ketones, or the schedule, you know.”

  She loved the way he said schedule. Okay. All right. Now there was a fire building in her belly and spreading to her limbs, to her face, and she smiled, her face practically splitting open with it. “A drink,” she repeated, and wished to God she could make more use of her tongue than to repeat everything he said.

  “A drink. A cocktail,” he said, moving closer, “a nightcap, or a belt, if you prefer, a nip . . . whatever you desire. If you’d only nod your head or otherwise indicate your consent that yes, it is indeed within the realm of possibility.”

  With a soft laugh, Rachel self-consciously folded her arms across her middle. He smiled, lifted his hand from his waist and touched a curl at her temple. Rachel froze, absolutely paralyzed by his touch. A real man’s touch.

  A fire-breathing dragon could not possibly have made her hotter than that single touch.

  “Ah . . . you know?” she stammered, seeing as how he was very casually fingering the curl at her temple and that fire-breathing dragon was setting her shorts on full-blown inferno. “You, really don’t have to do this. I wasn’t offended that day at the phone.”

  “Quite happy to hear that you weren’t, yet I don’t believe I am making myself entirely clear. I don’t have to do this—I want to do this.”

  Okay, hats off to Dagne. Rachel would never say a disparaging word about white magic again. Never. But still . . . this was so improbable, so unreal—men never looked at her like that, never stalked her for a drink, and she had never, ever melted under the intensity of a man’s gaze like she was melting this very minute. That, naturally, sent up all sorts of red flags, and she suddenly blurted, “Are you making a film?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Or maybe a documentary? Like a reality show where you maybe go around asking American women out to see what they’ll say or do?”

  “Clever idea, but not the case. And if it were, I’d be the bloke whose face was flashed across millions of tellies with the caption, Horribly unsuccessful thus far.”

  “So you really want to have a drink with me,” she said, her voice full of incredulity as his hand dropped to the
braid that hung over her shoulder, calmly feeling the weight of it.

  He smiled, stooping a little so that he could look her directly in the eye, and she could see the glimmer of amusement in his. “I really want to have a drink with you. It’s all quite simple, really. Where I come from, if a man is interested in getting to know a woman, he asks her out for a drink. In fact, I think it is a common practice all around the globe. Yet you do not seem entirely familiar with it.”

  “That’s an understatement,” she muttered.

  “So what, then, is the proper protocol on your planet?”

  “Luck. Pure dumb luck.”

  “Hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “I find that dumb luck might be fun, but not always effective. So as it stands, and without much luck thus far, you really leave me no choice,” he said, and took her braid fully in hand, using it to pull her a little closer, “than to declare straightaway that I find you terribly attractive. And as it would be frightfully inappropriate to jump your lovely bones in this horrid little corridor—not to mention that hardly being the most romantic gesture in the world, and fantastically presumptuous as well—I’m hoping for at least the chance to chat,” he said, and let go of her braid. His hand drifted across her jawline, then down her neck.

  “Ooh,” she whispered.

  “Rachel?”

  Myron’s voice was no less startling than a screech of tires, and startled Rachel so badly that she actually bumped into Flynn as she jerked around. “Myron!” Why did he have to choose that moment of all moments in the universe to show up? It made her feel angrily flustered that he even existed.

  Myron was staring at Flynn, and idiot that he was, unabashedly sizing him up. “What’s going on here?”

  “I ah . . . this is ah . . . Flynn.”

  “Flynn Oliver,” Flynn said, extending his hand.

  Myron reluctantly took Flynn’s hand and dropped it quickly. “Is everything okay?” he asked Rachel, still staring at Flynn.

  “Yes, of course,” she exclaimed a little heatedly.