by Carole Buck
It was ironic. When he got into the cab with Lucy back at the hotel, he’d been praying that something would happen to prolong their time together. A flat tire, maybe. Or a traffic jam. Anything to defer the moment when she’d bid him good-night and walk away.
Well, his prayers had been answered, in a fashion that strongly suggested God had a rather bizarre sense of humor. But he hadn’t capitalized on their enforced intimacy. Instead, honor—and a desire to protect—had compelled him to do everything he could think of to bring it to an end.
If only he could get Lucy to cooperate!
“Maybe so, Dick,” he replied. “But the fact is, Lucy and I wouldn’t be facing the prospect of spending the next day and a half trussed up like turkeys in a dinky room with no windows if we hadn’t been able to get into this building. And we wouldn’t have been able to get into this building if you’d remembered to lock the front door!”
“No, no, no.” Dick shook his head. “Don’t you see? You’re being negative about this, Chris. You’ve got to be positive! You’ve got to regard this as...as...an opportunity!”
“An opportunity for what?” Lucy asked. “Psychodrama?”
Dick took a few steps forward and hunkered down beside them. His expression held a mix of solemnity and evangelical fervor.
“Did you two get any marriage counseling before you broke up?” he asked.
Chris stiffened. He felt his ex-wife do the same. He understood why. In the latter days of their marriage, Lucy had broached the possibility of their seeking some kind of help. He’d rejected the idea for several reasons, chief among them being his pigheaded belief that he knew what was “wrong” with their relationship and what she—not he, she—had to do to fix it.
“That’s none of your business,” Lucy said, her diction very precise.
Dick shook his head, plainly undeterred by this unequivocal instruction to butt out. He had the air of a missionary confronting a heathen horde.
“You didn’t,” he said with a sigh. “I can tell. Well, I’ve had counseling. And based on my experience with Dora-Jean—”
“This is the woman you married and divorced twice?” Chris inserted sardonically, wondering at the fact that Lucy hadn’t taken a verbal jab at him.
“Just because we got divorced and redivorced doesn’t mean the counseling didn’t take,” Dick responded serenely. “I learned a lot. Like, you have to open up the lines of communication. Which, yelling or not, you two seemed to be doing before I walked in. But you have to keep ’em humming, you know? Give-and-take. Give-and-take. Back and forth. You have to share. That’s the key. Sharing. Let me start you off. Me and Dora-Jean used to do this all the time. Lucy, why don’t you share with Chris—”
The storage room door banged open. Dick started violently, toppling backward and landing heavily on his rump. Tom stomped in.
“Butch wants to know what’s takin’ you so long,” he announced.
“Jeez!” Dick got to his feet, tugging the jacket of his uniform down. “I was having a very important conversation with Chris and Lucy!”
Tom studied him for several seconds, then groaned. “Oh, no. You weren’t startin’ in with that share baloney, were you?”
“It’s not baloney!”
“Dora-Jean hated that stuff somethin’ fierce, you know.”
“I told you not to bad-mouth Dora-Jean!”
“I’m not bad-mouthin’ Dora-Jean! But she sure as hell bad-mouthed you and your stupid ‘open lines of communication’ routine! She said she’d rather sit down on a sharp stick than go through even a teeny-tiny second of that ‘sharing’ bushwa.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“Because I don’t know where she is!”
“Well, don’t look at me,” Tom retorted with a contemptuous snort. “I ain’t the host of ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’ Besides, you’re the last one who was married to her. It’s your job to keep track of her.” He turned toward Chris and Lucy. “Dick was supposed to come in here and find out what kind of pizza you want”
Chris absorbed this last bit of information with a disturbing degree of equanimity. He wondered what his lack of response said about his mental state.
“You’re going out for pizza?” Lucy wanted to know. She, too, seemed only mildly surprised by the idea.
“We’re gettin’ it delivered,” Dick answered, then gave his sibling a baleful look. “’Course we wouldn’t have had to bother, if a certain somebody had remembered to bring the groceries I bought like he was supposed to do.”
“Pizza’s better than your old groceries any old day of the week.”
“Says who?”
“Says me, and I’m bigger!”
“Yeah, well—”
“I’ll eat anything but anchovies,” Chris said, in no mood for another round of Spivey squabbling. He twisted, looking back at his ex-wife. “Do you still go for double cheese and pepperoni?”
She twisted around, too. Their gazes connected for a moment. He saw a strange combination of emotions flickering through the depths of her dark eyes. His heart missed a beat. A powerful sense of longing suffused him.
Did you think I’d forget something like that? he wanted to ask. Oh, Lucy. Lucy! I remember everything about you. And I want you back, sweetheart. I want you back so we can make that happily-ever-after resolution come true.
“That’s fine,” she said huskily, then turned away.
“Okeydokey,” Dick responded.
“Thirty minutes or less,” Tom promised.
The Spiveys trooped out of the storage room, elbowing and shoving each other as they went.
“Lucy—”
The door swung open again. It was Tom.
Chris almost lost it. “What?”
The bearded man blinked several times and scratched his chin, then produced a sheepish grin. “Do you have some, uh, money we can borrow so’s we can pay for the pizzas?”
Seven
What the former Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Dodson Banks might have chosen to “share” during the thirty minutes that followed was destined to remain a question mark. Barely a second after the storage room door clicked shut behind Tom, a high-pitched drilling sound rent the air. It was soon joined by the heavy thud of a sledgehammer hitting something. The mind-numbing cacophony—punctuated by an occasional crash or curse—was not exactly conducive to meaningful conversation.
The noise ended abruptly, leaving behind what Lucy could only have described as a deafening silence.
“Do you hear that?” she asked Chris, her ears ringing so badly she wasn’t able to gauge the volume of her voice.
“What?” her ex-husband practically shouted.
“Nothing!”
“Yeah.” He laughed. “Doesn’t it sound terrific?”
The storage room door opened a moment later. Butch stepped in. He was covered with flecks of paint and smears of grayish powder. There was a pair of what appeared to be headphones slung around his muscle-corded neck and a vicious-looking knife in his right hand.
Lucy felt herself pale. She also felt Chris go rigid.
“Oh, jeez,” the balding ex-convict growled, plainly put out by their reaction. “Don’t start with that. I’m here to cut you loose, not slit your damned throats.”
“Y-you’re letting us go?” Lucy tried not to flinch as Butch squatted down and inserted the blade between her wrists.
“No” He sliced through the duct tape. “I’m letting you get up to eat pizza.”
The “getting up” part proved to be a tad problematic, at least for her. The portions of her anatomy that hadn’t gone numb were badly cramped or inclined to wobble. Chris, apparently less affected by their ordeal, had to help her stand.
“Easy,” he said when she tried to take a step forward and ended up staggering against him like a drunk. He gripped her forearms in much the same way he’d gripped them when they ran into each other outside the office building. Only this time, all that separated
his fingers from her flesh was a single layer of finely woven wine-colored wool.
She could feel the warmth from those fingers clear down to the marrow of her bones. The temptation to sag and cling was very, very strong.
Lucy looked up at Chris, as she had after their earlier collision, staring searchingly into his compelling face. What she was looking for, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t even certain that this was the right place to find it.
She caught a flash of emerald green in the depths of his hazel eyes. Then, by some strange trick of the lighting, she glimpsed a reflection of her own visage. Her stomach fluttered. Her breath caught briefly at the top of her throat, then escaped between her lips in a shaky rush as her mind suddenly replayed part of the remarkable tribute he’d given her before Dick’s precipitate reappearance in the storage room.
Give me a little credit, he’d said with untrammeled intensity. Or if you can’t manage that, give yourself some. Heaven knows, you deserve it.
It wasn’t just his words that had been new to her. His tone had been unfamiliar, as well. The only times she’d heard him speak with anything approaching such raw emotionalism had been in bed, in the heat—at the height—of passion. And whether the shattered syllables and inarticulate sounds he’d uttered then could honestly be described as “speaking” was open to debate.
You were all potential the first time we met, he’d gone on. Now you exude accomplishment. Achievement. I recognized that long before you did your routine about the files.
Lucy discovered that she’d lifted her newly freed hands and placed them against her ex-husband’s chest. She lowered them quickly, the movement causing the outer swell of her breasts to brush against the backs of his thumbs. She felt her nipples begin to stiffen beneath the fabric of her bodice and bra.
Chris’s fingers tightened. “Lucy?”
“I’m okay,” she managed, trying to ease back. “Thank you for... c-catching me.”
“Anytime.” He released her, but stayed close. Under normal circumstances, Lucy would have balked at this seeming protectiveness and asserted that she was perfectly capable of standing on her own. But these were not normal circumstances. Besides. Fundamental honesty forced her to acknowledge that the odds of her walking out of the storage room without her former spouse’s support were no better than fifty-fifty.
“Pizza’s getting cold,” Butch informed them gruffly. “You about done dancin’ around with each other?”
Lucy felt her cheeks grow warm. She began fussing with her dress, smoothing wrinkles and brushing off bits of lint.
“For the moment.” Chris’s tone was enviably—and irritatingly—calm. “I don’t suppose you have a couple of extra pairs of ear protectors we could use after we finish eating.”
Lucy stopped fussing. She shot a questioning look at her ex-husband, then glanced toward their balding captor.
“Now you’ve gone and disappointed me, Chris,” Butch said. “I’d been given to understand that you two were engaged in openin’ up your lines of communication. Kind of hard to do that wearing earplugs, don’t you think?” He gave a gravelly chuckle. “Dick’s gonna be crushed. He was sure you were in here sharing.”
“Dick will survive. But another half hour of that noise you were making and the only thing Lucy and I will be ‘sharing’ is permanent damage to our auditory nerves.”
Butch looked startled by this acerbic assertion. Then he frowned.
“Damnation!” he exclaimed after a moment, sounding genuinely upset. “I never thought about that. It was pretty bad, huh?”
Lucy felt Chris’s gaze flicked toward her. For reasons she couldn’t have explained, she took it as a cue. “What was that?” she asked loudly, cupping her right ear.
“Okay. Okay.” Butch grimaced. “I get the point. Don’t worry. The worst is over.”
If there’d been a window in the storage room, Lucia Annette Falco would have taken a look outside. Because instinct told her that if the worst of this mess was over, there’d be pigs in the sky...flying.
They dined in a circle, sitting on the floor. Lucy and Chris were side by side. The erstwhile robbers of the Red Treasure sat opposite them, blocking quick access to the door that opened into the hallway.
“Somethin’ wrong with your pizza, Lucy?” Tom Spivey asked, through a partially masticated blob of underbaked crust, gloppy mozzarella and watery tomato sauce, about twenty minutes into their meal.
“I’m just not very hungry.” Suppressing a small shudder of distaste, she set aside the pepperoni-studded slice she’d been nibbling at. She kept her eyes lowered, not wanting to look at the damage that had been done to Gulliver’s Travels’ main—and recently redecorated—work area.
She’d seen more than enough when she walked out of the storage room. Every surface in the place had been dusted with what appeared to be a mixture of pulverized paint, plaster and cement. And that X-marked spot she’d wondered about? Well, that had been obliterated. So, too, had the portion of wall it had appeared on.
“Lucy’s accustomed to a higher quality of food than this,” Chris commented, taking a swig of soda. He’d been right behind Lucy when she stepped into the work area and registered the mess. She’d felt him place a hand on her shoulder. The touch had conveyed a wordless message of both sympathy and support:
“How’s that?” Butch wanted to know.
“Her family runs one of the best pizza places in Chicago.”
“The best,” Lucy corrected automatically as she picked up a can of soda.
“The best.” Chris matched her inflection perfectly. “That’s where we met.”
“You’re both from Chicago, huh?” The query came from Dick. Although he had made only a few comments during the meal thus far, Lucy was uneasily aware that he’d been scrutinizing her and Chris with a peculiarly expectant expression.
“That’s right.”
Tom took another huge bite of pizza, then asked, “So how come you’re here?”
“Duh, ” Dick responded sarcastically. “This is where Lucy works!”
“Umph.” Tom chewed several times, then gulped. “Yeah. Right.”
“What about you, Harvard?” Butch inquired. “What are you doing in our fair Peach State?”
“Duh-huh.” It was Tom. “He’s bein’ with Lucy!”
Lucy’s pulse jumped. Her fingers spasmed against the soda can she’d been sipping from, denting the condensation-hazed aluminium.
“Chris is not with me,” she disputed, trying to ignore a sudden, treacherous warmth between her thighs. She told herself she was tired. Upset. Vulnerable. Still shaken by some of the things Chris had said to her in the storage room. Her physical responses were suspect in the extreme. They were no indication of how she really felt. What she truly wanted.
“Yeah, he is,” the bearded Spivey brother argued. “And you’re with him. I mean, you even said!”
“I did not—”
“Uh-huh, you did. When you yelled about not letting us let you go. You said you were gonna stay here with him. ”
Lucy looked at Chris. He looked back, his expression enigmatic to the point of being unreadable. Her pulse jumped a second time. After several shaky moments, she tore her gaze from his and turned toward Tom, saying, “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Sounded like you did.”
“Look.” She leaned forward, wanting to make certain everyone understood the situation. Including her. “Chris flew into Atlanta from New York for a job interview, and he couldn’t fly back because of bad weather. We just happened to run into each other.”
“Fate,” Dick stated smugly.
“An accident.”
“Lucy—” It was Chris. His quiet invocation of her name was accompanied by a touch to her upper arm. She jerked away, appalled by the electrified tingling the brief contact set off.
“What happened between the time you ran into each other and the time you came back here?” Butch wanted to know.
“Nothing!”
“W
e had one drink. No strings attached. Lucy picked up the tab.”
There was a long pause. Lucy spent it staring at the floor, trying to get a grip on herself.
“You must be a real good cook, huh, Lucy,” Tom suddenly remarked. His tone suggested he’d been giving the matter considerable thought.
Lucy started and brought her head up, thrown by this seeming non sequitur. “Excuse...me?”
“You must be a real good cook.” Tom paused, fishing a morsel of sausage out of his beard and popping it in his mouth. “With your family havin’ a restaurant and all.”
Lucy glanced toward Chris once again. She didn’t even think about it. She just did it. But somewhere in the back of her mind, she was uneasily aware that she was reverting to a habit formed during their courtship.
This time, her ex-husband’s expression was very easy to decipher. He looked amused. And no wonder. Aside from an uncanny knack for being able to judge the exact instant when a boiling pot of pasta was about to achieve the perfect stage of al dente doneness, she was a washout in the kitchen.
“Actually, Lucy was more involved in the business side of Falco’s Pizzeria,” Chris said smoothly. He held her gaze a heady half second longer than was strictly necessary, then turned his attention toward Tom, Dick and Butch. “She worked out front all through high school. Pretty much a full-time job, but she still graduated with high honors. Same thing while she was in college. Which she attended on a National Merit Scholarship.”
“Wow.” Tom contemplated Lucy with something akin to awe. “I didn’t even graduate eighth grade. I kind of flunked attendance.”
“I dropped out of high school,” Butch confessed, then muffled a carbonation-induced belch. “But I got my GED in prison.”
“I learned security guarding through one of those courses you see on TV,” Dick volunteered. “Dora-Jean enrolled me.”
Caught up in trying to stem the rush of pleasure she’d felt at her ex-husband’s very complimentary condensation of her educational record, Lucy almost missed the significance of the next to last sentence. Then the phrase security guarding clicked in her brain.