Do-Over

by Dorien Kelly

  “Oof,” she grunted as her hip hit the passenger door latch. Arms flailing in a losing battle for balance, she brushed her hand against the front of her hat, knocking it crooked.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a stranger heading her way. Between the sun in her face and the fact that she remained pretty fried, she couldn’t see him too clearly. She needed to escape before she had to explain why she was skulking around his car. He was too close, though.

  In a bad imitation of the already stupid Chicken Dance, she spun in a tight circle between the two cars. All the while, this little song played in her head, one with unimaginative yet heartfelt lyrics of ohcrap, ohcrap, ohcrap. Since there was no place to hide that didn’t involve crawling, she decided to take comfort in anonymity. She could just lie to him, hop in her car and drive off.

  “Cara, is that you?”

  Un-freaking-believable. Six years of peace, now this.

  Before answering, she sent a desperate plea to Olympus that this man was a hangover hallucination. “Morgan? Mark Morgan?”

  “Yeah.” He pulled off his sunglasses and smiled at her. Bastard. His looks were as killer-handsome as ever. “It’s good to see you.”

  The do-over gods had obviously had one fine party themselves last night, because today they were total zip-heads. What had happened to the part where she was supposed to magically travel back in time? Huh? Would that be too much to ask?

  Apparently so.

  Cara righted her cap, pulling it low over her eyes. “So what are you doing here, Morgan? Slumming?”

  He didn’t answer immediately, which gave her some satisfaction. He glanced up at the building, then back at her. “Were you just headed inside?”

  “Yes,” she lied. “Yes, I was.”

  “Why don’t I join you? I think we need to talk.”

  Cara froze. The last time she’d heard the phrase we need to talk given in such dire tones was back when her college boyfriend had told her he was entering the seminary.

  On top of that, even if she wanted to talk—which sounded about as appealing as licking the asphalt beneath her sneakers—the Saperstein offices remained strictly off limits.

  “I’m sure whatever it is can wait,” she said while edging past him and working her way to the driver’s side of her car. At least she’d left her keys in the ignition. “I mean, we’ve gone six years without speaking to each other, so why start now?”

  “Cara…” he said in a tone even darker than the one that had signaled priesthood.

  If she were four years old, like her sister’s youngest child, she could plug her fingers in her ears and incessantly chant, “Can’t hear you…can’t hear you.” To her deep regret, she was thirty and had already expended her dignity by snooping around his car, so she forced herself to stand tall and take it like a woman.

  “I’m joining the firm,” he said.

  With no help from her brain, which had shut down, Cara’s lips tried to form an appropriate platitude.

  “How—how nice for you,” she finally managed.

  She reached for her car’s door handle and pulled. Nothing happened. She gave it one more frantic yank.

  Why did she have to be such a pathetic creature of habit? Always come to the office…

  “I, ah, think the car’s locked,” Mark said.

  And always lock the car doors.

  She could see the beginnings of a smile he was fighting to hide, and hated him all the more for it.

  “And it looks like the keys are inside,” he added, gesturing at the ignition.

  Somewhere just beneath the low rumble of a passenger jet cutting through the cornflower-blue sky overhead, Cara was quite sure she heard a pack of gods up on Olympus, laughing their asses off. And she had only herself to blame.

  GREEN SKIN DID NOT complement a redhead. Mark debated if he should tell Cara to sit down and put her head between her knees. Since he didn’t want to think about where, in return, she might tell him to put his head, he kept his advice to himself.

  “Do you have a spare set of keys handy?” he asked.

  “Sure…in my apartment.”

  “I could give you a ride,” he offered.

  “Except the key to my apartment is in the car.”

  “Do you have a spare?”

  “In my office.”

  Thank God, an easy out. “Well, let’s go on up and—”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. You go upstairs, find a guy named Vic Mancini, tell him to come down here and then you leave.”

  That green complexion was developing slashes of red on her high cheekbones. “Are you feeling okay?”

  Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “How the hell do you think I’m feeling? First, Rory takes off, then Howard puts me in solitary confinement and now the most hideous nightmare of my adult life materializes and tells me that he’s joined the firm. I feel like hiring a hit man.”

  Mark instinctively backed away a step. He might be new to the firm, but already he’d heard bits and pieces about the Rory thing, had a sense about Howard and was damn sure he was to be the hit man’s target.

  He had liked Cara better dancing behind glass, happy and unable to harm him.

  And she’d like him better in concrete boots, anchored in the middle of the Detroit River.

  It looked as though it was time for some diplomacy…and a retreat. “So this guy’s name is Vic?” he asked.

  “Vic Mancini.” She waved a hand at him in a shooing motion that seemed kind of benign compared to the evil look in her blue eyes. “Use your fresh new pass card, go on up there and get him. When you come back down, don’t look at me or acknowledge me in any way. Just climb in your fancy-ass car and drive off.”

  Had she been this psychotic in law school? He didn’t think so, or she’d have never made it through.

  “When was the last time you had a vacation?”

  “Shut…up.”

  Clearly no time in the recent past. Mark pulled his pass card out of his wallet, ignored her low growl and went to fetch Vic Mancini. Now he knew how those Roman guards who threw the Christians to the lions had felt. But hey, better Vic than him. Which, he supposed, was exactly what the guards had thought, too.

  CARA SELDOM CRIED for the same reason she seldom drank: she didn’t do it well. She couldn’t relate to those women who produced pearly drops gently coursing down alabaster cheeks. She was more the puffy-eyed, snot-filled type, and she never, ever felt better when she was done making a mess of herself. So, for all concerned, it was a good thing that she held herself together until Vic had driven her back to the parking lot with her spare keys.

  All the way to Cara’s apartment and back, he’d exercised a level of tact she’d thought him incapable of showing. He didn’t ask about Morgan. He didn’t ask why she was curled up in the fetal position on his passenger seat. He simply drove.

  Once she was behind the wheel of her car, Cara fled the office lot as though a tidal wave were closing in on her. And in an emotional sense, one was. She could feel a horrible burning behind her eyes, and these scary sobbing sounds kept sneaking past her clenched teeth. She was scarcely on the road home before the first tears began to seep and had made it only another mile or so when the wailing started in earnest.

  When she was finally in her apartment, she removed her Spitfire hat because she was unworthy of the label, and then grabbed a fistful of tissue. Now properly equipped, she flung herself onto the black down-filled duvet covering her bed. Not even fear of a major comforter cleaning bill would slow these tears.

  She’d scarcely started when the phone rang. Cara wiped her eyes, then commando-crawled up the queen-sized mattress, toward the telephone on the nightstand. Two rings…three… It could be someone from the office, maybe even a partner who wanted to tell her that they really hadn’t hired Mark Morgan.

  She picked up the handset, pushed the talk button, and choked out, “’Lo.”

  “Cara, is that you?”
/>   Her last hope spiraling down in flames, Cara lay back against the pillows. She cleared her throat.

  “Yes, Dani, it’s me,” she said to her sister.

  “You’re not sick, are you?”

  “Not in the germ-bearing sense.”

  “Good. Matt and Sarah would have a fit if you missed dinner tomorrow.”

  She loved Dani, really she did. It was just sometimes she felt that she was supposed to show up at these weekly, multigenerational, straight-out-of-the-Waltons family dinners to be a prop. She was Cara, career girl and convenient butt of her father’s semi-jokes about bad cooking and compulsive overwork. It wasn’t as though Cara couldn’t have deflected the attention with a few “Suzie Homemaker” jabs sent her sister’s way. But Cara always kept her mouth firmly shut, or filled with Dani’s admittedly spectacular cooking. Besides, Cara adored her niece and nephew. They were worth a little suffering.

  “I’ll be there,” she promised.

  “Good. I was thinking maybe you could fix yourself up a little.”

  “Fix myself up? Like, how?” At the moment, she’d lay odds her lips were puffy enough to look as if she’d OD’d on collagen injections.

  “You know, maybe wear something other than jeans,” Dani wheedled. “And you might put on some makeup…”

  Well, that raised a warning flag. “Hey, I thought we agreed that these dinners were off limits for matchmaking. Just who have you invited?”

  “A—a friend of John’s,” Dani said, referring to her picture-perfect husband. “This one’s from the hockey league he joined.”

  “Does the guy even have all his teeth?”

  “I think so. He’s a librarian.”

  She had to give her sister credit. It was tough to dismiss a hockey-playing librarian under the general heading of “been there, done that.” Whatever it took to deflect this guy was going to have to be original…and fast.

  “Does he speak Swahili?” she asked, thinking of a snippet she’d heard on National Public Radio while trapped in yesterday’s traffic jam.

  “Um…not that I know of.”

  “Then I don’t want to meet him. Have John tell him that I’m in the middle of a Swahili immersion course. No Swahili, no dinner.”

  “Come on, Cara. I’ve already invited Ted. I can hardly un-invite him.”

  “Fine. Tell him I’ll be the puffy-eyed, sullen chick speaking Swahili at the end of the table.”

  “Cara—”

  “Kwa heri,” she said before hanging up. If goodbye was to be the only word she’d ever know in Swahili, at least it was perfect for Ted, the hockey-playing librarian.

  She’d no sooner gotten rid of her sister than the phone rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “You’ve been crying,” Bri accused.

  Cara sniffled. “And here I was thinking that I sounded better.”

  “So what’s up? I thought you did the soggy-hankie thing only in alternating leap years.”

  That was the difference between Cara’s best friend and her sister. Bri knew her inside out, while Dani had always watched her the way one might a specimen in the zoo—with no actual, personal regard.

  Cara rolled from the bed and tossed her last tissue in the wastebasket.

  “You know how I wanted the do-over?” she asked as she wandered into the living room.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, there must have been nothing good on Olympian television last night, because the gods chose me for their viewing pleasure.” She hesitated before speaking the evil truth. “Mark Morgan is joining my firm.”

  “Right, and Robby of the wandering hands is hiding in my closet.”

  “Bri, I’m serious. I drove by to look at my office today and—”

  “I’m not even going to comment on how weird that is.”

  “I think you just did,” Cara pointed out, then continued. “He was there, in the parking lot, and…and…now he’s going to be there for good.”

  She needed aspirin, more tissue and a reason to live. Since two out of three could be found in the bathroom, she headed that way while Bri talked.

  “First question…does he still look totally hot?”

  “Better than ever,” Cara replied glumly.

  “Okay, that could be a plus.”

  Cara’s stomach clenched. “I know what you’re thinking and I’ll give you a one-word answer—never.”

  “Keep tempting those gods, Adams. See what it gets you.”

  “Now you’re sounding like a true believer. Aren’t you worried about a lightning bolt headed your way?”

  “Nah, I figure God’s busy enough dealing with your heresy. Okay, so it’s you and the Shark, mano a mano, or mano a fin, or whatever. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  “That was ‘what if’ stuff. You know, pity-party chat. It wasn’t real.”

  “So, now it is.”

  She could almost see Bri shrugging as she spoke. “You’re just a regular go-with-the-flow kind of girl, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  “I’m genetically incapable.” Cara massaged her aching temples with her free hand. “But, yeah, now I have Mark ‘the Shark’ Morgan as my daily reminder of mistakes past.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Do?”

  The empty aspirin bottle lay in the trash. Cara glared at it and then pulled open the medicine cabinet to see if she had any eyedrops. Of course if she did, they were probably long-expired. She shopped as frequently as she went to the dry cleaners.

  “Yeah, do. As in a battle plan?”

  This was why self-pity was such a stupid waste. Not only did it leave her with a nose red enough to guide Santa’s sleigh, it consumed valuable time.

  She could either seize the opportunity presented, or once again turn belly-up for Morgan. Cara tried to ignore an unacceptable tingle down low in that belly as another, more intimate meaning for belly-up for Morgan drifted through her mind. It was Bri’s fault. Bri and her talk of “totally hot.”

  She needed to think mean thoughts. Killer thoughts.

  “I’m going for the jugular, Bri. And this time, put your money on me. I swear I’ll win.”

  Bri cheered, Cara winced at the noise, and up on Olympus, Zeus and his buddies began to tally the odds.

  4

  Cara’s Rule for Success 4:

  If you’re on the losing side of a battle,

  manipulate it until

  you look like a winner.

  TWO MINUTES PAST NINE on Monday morning, Mark walked through the front doors of Saperstein, Underwood.

  “Good morning,” he said to the person he knew from some prior groundwork to be Annabeth Kielman. Of course, he hadn’t expected that she’d be wearing a broad metal choke chain usually seen on a rabid Rottweiler, or that she’d be humming “Taps.” “I’m Mark—”

  She glared at him. “Can’t you see I’m in the middle of a ceremony?” With a militarily precise turn, she faced the wall of names behind her. She took two steps forward, the edgy American version of a Buckingham Palace guard.

  Intrigued, Mark watched as she slid the plate bearing Rory McLohne’s name from its holder. With a turn, she faced him. Brass plate held between thumb and index finger, she brought her hand to shoulder height, then released. Mark raised a brow at her cannibalistic smile when Rory’s nameplate landed with a thud in what he assumed was a wastebasket. She dusted off her hands and then returned to her desk.

  “I take it you weren’t a fan of Rory’s?” he asked.

  She toyed with the metal ring at the end of her chain, brushing her fingers against the upper curves of what looked to Mark to be manufactured—or at least rearranged—cleavage.

  “Big ego, small…hands.”

  Nibbling on her lower lip, she made a show of sizing him up. For about a tenth of a second he was startled, but then he had her pegged. Mark settled his palms on the smooth granite surface of the desk. Look all you want, Lolita, he t
hought.

  Leaning forward, he gave her an intimate smile…a knowing smile.

  Her smug expression wavered just enough that he knew his instincts were dead-on. “You like your little kingdom, here, don’t you, Annabeth?”

  “It sucks.”

  Spoken like a true postmodern man-eater. “Ah, but here you’re safe. Here you’re in control. It’s so much better than that big, mean world out there, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied in a venomous voice.

  “Sure you do, and here’s my deal for you… If you don’t play me, I won’t play you. Straight-up and honest between us.”

  Her black-eyeliner-rimmed eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

  He held out one hand to shake hers. “My name is Mark Morgan and I’ll be moving into Rory McLohne’s old office. I won’t call you demanding coffee and I won’t expect you to run personal errands for me. I will expect you to greet my clients politely and to take comprehensible messages when calls for me land up here. And in exchange, Annabeth, your little secret will be safe with me. You can pretend to hate this place worse than Jackson State Prison.”

  Her flat stare from eyes so pale gray they were almost void of color might have made some guys question their judgment, but not Mark. He dropped his hand and shrugged. “Okay, have it your way.”

  In what could be interpreted as an act of capitulation, she shoved a pile of pink message slips across the counter at him.

  He smiled. “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Eat shit,” was Annabeth’s succinct reply.

  Mark shrugged. “Close enough.”

  CARA SAT BEHIND her desk, door closed, deep in a mental run-through of her shark-baiting strategies. She half wondered whether he was late just to jerk with her. Okay, so he was late only by her standards, she conceded with a glance at her watch. As she practiced her calm smile, the one that said, “I’m in control, as I should be,” the interoffice line on her phone rang.

  Cara glanced at the caller ID, then picked up. “Hey, Annabeth.”

  “They were doing it in the file room.”

  Cara blinked. “Is this code-speak or something?”