She's No Angel

by Leslie Kelly

  He saw Miss Baker’s eyes flare, reacting with unmistakable excitement at the prospect, as would any lady with a romantic sensibility. But as she quickly cast a sideways glance at her escort, the excitement quickly faded. Roderick’s spine had grown even stiffer. “Of course not. Picnicking is for youngsters.”

  Mortimer liked a nice picnic now and again. Especially when he was accompanied by an attractive lady who wanted to pop grapes or juicy berries into his mouth. If he’d been courting Miss Emily, an outdoor adventure is exactly what he would have proposed—she certainly looked game for one. Well, she had. Now she simply looked resigned to tea and cucumber sandwiches in a stuffy room crowded with moldering antiques and cuckoo clocks.

  Roddy had never been the ladies’ man in their partnership, but he’d still been very successful at romance. He seemed, however, to have lost his touch, along with his sense of adventure. And sense of humor. Because his date, who had been looking at the man with stars in her eyes a week ago, now appeared almost bored after only their third date.

  Something had to be done. Had. To. Be. Done.

  And he knew just what.

  Leaning over, he took Miss Emily’s hand and brought it up to his mouth, pressing a kiss on her knuckles. “I would take you on a picnic by a tranquil lake, my dear lady.”

  The lady in question blushed and stammered something, immediately glancing at her date. Mortimer had no doubt about where her true affections lay, so he didn’t worry about his flirtations stealing the woman away. But if a little competition would give his majordomo a kick in the pants, Mortimer was game.

  Roderick glared, but also stepped closer to Emily, eliminating some of the space he’d so carefully maintained between them. The man had better watch out or he might actually touch his date sometime this year. “Emily and I are much too old for such foolishness,” he snapped.

  Mortimer looked skyward, not wanting to see the lady’s response to that remark. Sometimes Roddy could be so unbelievably dense.

  “I mean,” his friend stammered, obviously having realized how his words had sounded, “our friendship is not based on silly romantic notions but rather on common intellectual pursuits.”

  Zounds, he was digging himself in deeper. Even Miss Emily was watching him wide-eyed, obviously not sure whether to be honored that he liked her brain or offended that he considered her old and unattractive. He wondered if she’d realized before now that Roderick considered their “dates” mere intellectual excursions. Judging by her visible hurt, he doubted it.

  Turning red in the face, his friend continued. “Our enlightened conversations need no such fripperies as baskets and buttercups, which would only aggravate my lumbago and threaten both of us with broken limbs. Now, if you will excuse us, Mortimer, we’ll be going to our tea.” Shaking his head, he muttered, “Picnic, indeed.”

  Another voice suddenly piped in from behind them, an excited, familiar one. “A picnic? You’re going on a picnic?”

  Ivy Feeney joined them on the sidewalk, dressed, as usual, in a summery dress that floated around her in soft waves. She wore another one of her interesting hats—which were often embellished with feathers or beads that might put one’s eye out if one got too close. This one wasn’t half-bad, looking like a flower-studded pith helmet that hugged her head and brought out the fine structure of her cheekbones.

  An attractive woman, Miss Feeney. Mad as a hatter, without a doubt, but still a looker. Mortimer quite enjoyed her company, as one also occasionally accused of being off his rocker.

  Not that he’d trust her ever again. He might have enjoyed himself when she and her sister had slipped him a Mickey Finn so they could have their way with him, but that didn’t mean he’d ever let them get their hooks into him again.

  Still, she was pleasant company. Especially when flushed with excitement as she was now. She clapped her hands together, nearly bouncing on her toes, which reminded him of her very nice legs. “A picnic. How delightful. I’d love to come.”

  Roderick harrumphed. Emily’s lips tightened. The two ladies were as similar to one another as motor oil and apple butter, but Ivy appeared ready to let that go at the prospect of a picnic.

  “We were heading toward the tearoom,” Roderick said, his chin still jutting out in irritation at Mortimer.

  Ivy’s face fell into a childish pout. “Oh, dear. And I so wanted to go on a picnic. It’s just what I need to distract me.”

  “From what?” Mortimer asked.

  Ivy’s face flushed and she fluttered her thickly made-up lashes. “Nothing. Nothing. Just that man…”

  Intriguing. Usually Ivy liked men too much to want to be distracted from them. “Who?”

  “A nasty, aggravating man,” she said, her brow pulling into a tight frown. “He calls every day, asking questions about Jennifer.”

  Mortimer wondered if Ivy was aware her niece was currently staying in his home in Manhattan. Before he could ask, the woman continued, “He says he’s a reporter, wanting to talk to her about her book. Wanting to talk to me about her book.” Lowering her voice, she added, “Told that girl no good would come of it.”

  “Are you mentioned in your niece’s book?” Emily asked.

  “No, Miss Hedda Harper, I am not.”

  Meow. Ladies and their claws. For her part, Emily barely acknowledged the slight, she simply rolled her eyes. This one had spirit. Mortimer knew it was there, though she’d been hiding it from Rod. He wondered why she felt the need.

  “If I were in that book,” Ivy continued with a lift of her chin—not a good pose since it brought the sunlight directly to bear on the creases in her makeup—“I wouldn’t talk to some reporter who sounds like a ghost about it. My secrets are mine.”

  Secrets, ghosts, reporters. He wondered if Ivy had been tippling a little daisy wine.

  “Have you tried telling him to stop calling?” Roderick asked, reluctantly drawn into the conversation, knowing he couldn’t escape to the tearoom yet.

  Ivy nodded, then clenched her fists. “He kept on. Even when he doesn’t talk, I know it’s him.” Her voice shook and a shadow crossed her face. “I recognize his breathing. I recognized it the first time I heard it.”

  Stranger by the minute.

  “But he can’t call me if I’m not there.” Her brilliant smile returned. “Or if I can’t hear the phone because I ripped the cord out of the wall and threw it down the coal chute.”

  Mortimer guffawed, charmed almost against his will by the effervescent woman. A contrast to her dour sister…but then, Ida Mae had a stark charm of her own.

  It really was too bad they were lunatics.

  “Well, what say you, Rod, shall we escort these ladies on a picnic?” He fixed a flinty stare on his friend, sending him a silent message that he was losing his romantic battle for Miss Emily. “I’m sure your tea and sandwiches will still be there on a rainy day. Why waste this one?”

  Emily’s lips disappeared into her mouth as she waited, and Ivy continued to bounce girlishly on her toes. Finally, realizing he was outnumbered and outplayed, Rod sighed heavily. “Oh, very well. A picnic it is.”

  GOOD—MAKE THAT AMAZING—SEX HAD a way of making time fly.

  Jen hadn’t known it was possible to feel such intense pleasure for such an extended amount of time. Since Wednesday evening, when she’d seduced Mike on the patio, they’d indulged in every fantasy and each desire they could think of. Including spending the entire day either in bed or in the bathtub on Thursday after he’d taken the day off work.

  By late Friday afternoon, however, when he was back at work and she’d actually begun to think of something other than how much she loved having his hands on her, she realized she was bored. And suffering from cabin fever.

  Opulence was all well and good if it was part of a regular life. But to just stay in someone else’s beautiful home, waiting for her lover to get back so they could have fantasy sex, felt like being a mistress.

  She’d promised Mike she wouldn’t go back to her place
and he’d acknowledged that there was no way she could sit here all day with nothing to do. So they’d agreed that she’d stay in this part of town and let him know where she was going, and he’d stop being a pain in the ass about protecting her.

  It wasn’t as if she wanted to go back to her apartment now, anyway. The wounds and emotional pain were still too raw to walk in there and think of the way all her things had been violated. Her friend Ashley had gone downstairs and straightened up for her the other day, let in by the slimy super, so Jen supposed she could walk in and not burst into tears. But even her best friend could not remove the ugliness from the very air in Jen’s apartment. The sense of invasion. Of loss.

  “Only four,” she muttered, glancing at her watch. A shopping trip for necessities had filled her morning, but now, she was once again bored stiff.

  Realizing she needed to get back to real life mentally, if not physically, she decided to get some work done. The new book, which she hadn’t yet come up with a title for, wasn’t writing itself. Especially since she’d met and fallen head-over-heels for Mike Taylor. Right now, she wasn’t sure she could come up with another eight chapters about how women should just take over the world and lock men in the basements.

  “But I’ll give it a shot,” she mumbled to Mutt, Mike’s dog, whom he’d brought over to stay with them.

  The dog hopped up next to her. He scooted so close she had to plaster herself against the arm of the couch. She should probably push him off, but the scruffy mongrel had grown on her. He had such adorable big brown eyes. Like his owner.

  Flipping on her laptop, she opened her word-processing program. She did a few deep breathing exercises, determined to get back into the rhythm of writing, despite the cacophony of thoughts going through her head.

  Within a half hour, however, she knew it was no use. She couldn’t work—this place was too unfamiliar and her mind too jumbled. At least in her apartment, she’d have had plenty of other distractions to get around the mental block. She had a stack of letters to answer…nice ones, from her fans. The crappy ones had been file thirteened right after she’d gotten back from Trouble.

  There was a mountain of laundry in her closet, food probably going bad in her refrigerator and a number of other reasons for her to go home, like her need to reclaim the place as hers. But there was also one big reason to stay away.

  Mike. She’d promised. So, bored or not, she was staying put.

  Trying to console herself, she admitted there was probably nothing dire that she had to take care of. Heck, she could have left her door unlocked and not worried—judging by her first big-city robbery, she had nothing a thief would want. The most important thing she had was sitting on the table across from her, taunting her with its empty screen. If someone had swiped her computer and she’d lost the pages she’d done so far on the new book, she’d have been in major shit.

  Suddenly, however, she remembered something else of great value that was in her apartment. “Oh, God, the knitting box!”

  Aunt Ivy’s precious box, the one she called every single week to check up on. Jen had left the other night, not even checking to see if it was still safely hidden away.

  Not that a thief would likely be interested in an ancient old box, even if he had been able to find it. Paranoid about losing it and facing Ivy’s wrath, Jen always kept the thing concealed in a tiny crawl space inside her bedroom closet.

  It seemed impossible for anything to have happened to it in the brief time Jennifer had been out with Mike. What thief would find the crawl space, see an old, frayed, worn knitting box, open it, pull out the yarn, discover the stacks of papers, photos and journals beneath it and decide they looked interesting enough to swipe, when Jen’s jewelry had not?

  “It’s fine,” she told herself.

  But she had to be sure. Ivy might very well lose her mind if she lost the box. So, reaching for the phone, Jen called Ashley.

  And one hour later, she breathed a huge sigh of relief. Her friend was at the door to the penthouse, knitting box under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. “Whew,” Ashley said with a whistle as she sauntered inside, handing Jen the bottle. “Why do I feel like I’ve stumbled onto an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless?”

  “You found it!” Jen said, grabbing the case.

  “Right where you said it was, in the crawl space.”

  Ashley walked around the penthouse, studying every piece of artwork, checking out the furniture, then cooing over the view. “You’re telling me Mr. Stud-Who-Didn’t-Stand-You-Up-After-All lives here? Is he a drug dealer or a prince?”

  “He’s a police officer,” Jen mumbled, running her hands over the precious case, dying to open it up and dig through it to make sure everything remained undisturbed. Silly, but she just had a feeling. And not only because the kid inside her was still terrified of crazy old Aunt Ivy.

  Ashley looked surprised, but took the news in stride, as she did nearly everything else. “Great view off this patio. And it’s so private, you could do just about anything out here.”

  Jen hadn’t blushed since she was ten. If then. But she suddenly felt warmth rise into her cheeks and she shifted her gaze away, not meeting Ashley’s eyes.

  Her friend, however, wasn’t stupid. “Woo-hoo! You have done just about anything out here.” Pasting a look of feigned shock on her face, Ashley added, “Oh, my goodness, was that your naked butt I saw on that undercover sex video on the Internet?”

  Jen groaned. “Oh, God.”

  “Kidding. Are you going to open that wine?”

  Nodding, Jen headed to the open kitchen, which adjoined the huge, step-down living area. She called over her shoulder, “Did Frank give you any trouble about getting into my place?”

  Ashley plopped down on the sofa. Lifting her long, exmodel’s legs, she crossed them and put her feet up on the table. “No, he was much too busy ogling your stuff.”

  Jen stiffened, staring at her friend across the expansive counter. Bad enough that the creepy super was in her apartment; had he really gone through her things? “What?”

  “Don’t worry. He insisted on coming into your room with me, for ‘security’ and he couldn’t stop staring at your bed. But he didn’t actually touch anything.”

  Wow. Alone in a bedroom with Mr. Icky and Brainless. Ashley was a very good friend, indeed. “Thanks so much,” Jen said as she returned to her task. Grabbing two glasses, she filled them and carried them out. “I’m sorry you had to be in there alone with him—he didn’t try anything, did he?”

  “Nope, he didn’t get the chance. I made sure we left the apartment door open and beelined for it the minute I had the box. I think Mr. Jones and that lawyer from 3B got a little freaked out about the door standing open. They were hanging out in the hallway to make sure you weren’t being robbed again.”

  “Lucky for you—they’d have been nearby in case freaky Frank tried anything. Not that Frank couldn’t blow Mr. Jones down with a warm breath or scare that lawyer with threats of leaky pipes.”

  Ashley sipped her wine, then studied Jen over the rim of the crystal glass. “Enough chitchat. Spill. Tell me all.”

  She should have known an interrogation was coming. No way would Ashley come all the way uptown without wanting to know details. Jen had disappeared for the past few days with the guy she’d labeled as scum a week ago. Her friend deserved to know the truth.

  So Jen gave it to her. As carefully as she could, she explained how she and Mike had met, some of the things that had happened, and how…well… they were getting along now.

  She also, however, voiced aloud the words that had been whispering in her mind for the past few days, ever since she and Mike had settled into this opulent love nest together. “It’s not going to go anywhere. We’re totally wrong for each other.”

  Ashley grunted. “Girl, you are so far gone around the bend, you can’t even see the exit signs behind you. The time to jump off this highway was before you moved in here with him. Now you’re go
od and stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Yeah. Emotionally stuck. You’re in love with him.”

  Jen began to shake her head. She put her glass on the table, noticing some wine had sloshed out because her hand was shaking.

  Shaking because of how ridiculous Ashley’s claim was. Not because she was right. Oh, God, please let her not be right.

  “We are totally wrong for each other.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you’re wrong for each other in bed.”

  “True. We’re absolutely right there,” she conceded grudgingly. “Jeez, I didn’t know it was physically possible to have so many orgasms in a thirty-six-hour period.”

  Ashley glared. “Screw you. Considering I haven’t had a date in eight months, I don’t want to hear it.” Then she shrugged. “Though, if you must share details…is he big?”

  Oh, yeah. Not that Jen was going to share that tidbit. She ignored the question. “I can’t be in love with him. He’s bossy and pushy and has almost no sense of humor.”

  “Then how could he possibly like you?”

  Good question. How could he?

  “I saw the laughter on his face when I let him in last Saturday. Boyfriend obviously knows how to smile and he’s about the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.” As if giving her permission for Jen to have feelings for Mike, Ashley added, “Any woman would fall for him.”

  “I’m not any woman,” she insisted. “I’m the ex–Single in the City girl who’s been holding the Down with Men banner for every unhappy woman in the country for the past two years.”

  “That’s not you, Jen. That’s a role you play, like when I was a lingerie angel. It was never me, it was a character on a page of a catalog.”

  She hadn’t thought of it like that. For so long, her work had been such a huge force in her life that she’d almost come to identify it as a defining part of herself. It wasn’t until recently, when she’d let down her guard with Mike, that she’d remembered how much more there was to her, Jen, the person, than the snarky persona she presented on the page.