Happy New Year--Baby!

by Marie Ferrarella

  Dennis looked at her over his shoulder. “Are you serious?”

  She wished. Nicole sighed. “No, not really.” She folded the cloth in half and began rubbing away at the counter top. “I can’t afford a luxury like that at the moment.” She glanced down at her swollen stomach. “This baby is going to be all the luxury I have in my life for a while.”

  Squatting on the floor, Dennis sank back on his heels and looked up at her. His expression was innocent. “I don’t mean to pry—”

  Now there was an opening line. “But you will.” She advanced to another surface, rubbing hard, waiting.

  He lifted one shoulder and let it drop carelessly. She expected him to say “Aw, shucks” next. “Call it conversation.”

  Only in the broadest sense. He was reaching. “Euphemism.”

  She wasn’t telling him to mind his own business. There was a crack forming in the wall. Dennis worked at making it larger. He grinned at her engagingly. “That too.” Without missing a beat, he began again. “I’m not a racing fan—”

  Neither was she anymore. Not for a long, long time. The thrill had dissipated when she realized what the consequences were.

  And they had all come to pass.

  Nicole looked off into space. “I won’t hold that against you—”

  Her voice was soft, distant, as if he’d disturbed something. He wondered what it was. “But your husband was pretty well-known in his class.”

  Craig and class had little to do with one another. Class meant knowing when to quit. And when to hold back. Craig hadn’t known when to do either.

  Nicole nodded. “Yes.” When Dennis hesitated, she filled the words in for him. Placing her cloth down on the kitchen table, she looked down at him. “You’re going to ask me why he didn’t leave me well-off.”

  “I wouldn’t have been that blunt, but something like that, yes.” He didn’t expect her to be stringently honest with him, but he was hoping to make a little headway. Expertly masking the curiosity he felt, he looked up at her and listened.

  Bitterness twisted her mouth as Nicole remembered how excited Craig had been when the offers had finally begun to come in. Money from endorsements and sponsorships. More money than he had ever known.

  And he had lost it all more than once.

  Abandoning dusting altogether, Nicole lowered herself into a chair at the kitchen table. “He would have if he hadn’t kept running around with men like Standish. Craig liked the thrill of gambling almost as much as he liked defying gravity and racing in that yellow-checkered car of his.”

  And just about as much as he liked acquiring groupies and making love with them.

  She thought of the almost depleted bank account. She worked part-time at the art gallery. That gave her a paycheck and there was still a little left from the money that her grandmother had left her. The largest chunk had gone to buy Craig’s first car, but she had husbanded the rest zealously, instinctively knowing that it was her security blanket. The money in the account was all hers. Craig’s was all gone, swallowed up by debts and the high life. There had been barely enough to pay for his funeral.

  Dennis pretended to be taking all this in slowly. The information he had been given showed that when he died, Craig Logan was in debt to the Syndicate by a good hundred thousand. Even if he had won the last race, he wouldn’t have been able to pay it off.

  “Even with the endorsements?”

  “Even with the endorsements.” Irony tinged her voice. She stopped toying with the dust cloth and looked at him suspiciously. “Why all the questions?”

  It was time to retreat. Nicole’s confidence had to be won slowly. If he pushed too hard, she would close up completely.

  Dennis turned his attention back to the disposal. Craning his neck, he felt around for a button at the base of the metal casing. He found it in the center.

  “It comes naturally in my line of work.” He plugged the disposal in again. Pressing the button, he tried turning the unit on one last time. There was only a faint, feeble buzz in response.

  Nicole realized that he hadn’t told her what he did for a living. But then, she hadn’t asked, either. “You’re a gossip columnist?”

  Dennis unplugged the disposal as he laughed. “I’m a tax lawyer.”

  That wouldn’t have been her first choice. He didn’t look like the shark type. “A lawyer?”

  Squatting down again, he looked at her over his shoulder. “You say that as if lawyers were only one step above lepers.” He wondered what she called Justice Department investigators.

  Watching him fiddle around with the disposal was preferable to dusting. Nicole remained seated. “No. I say that as if lawyers were one step below lepers.”

  She said it vehemently, as if it were personal. “Had a bad run-in with one?”

  She thought of the lawyer who had attached himself to Craig during his zenith. Jerome Banks had been a small, piglike man who was one step away from being an ambulance chaser. He’d looked at Craig and seen only a meal ticket. Banks had certainly sucked out his share. All his hangers-on had, she thought.

  “Something like that,” she answered vaguely. Nicole wanted the focus off her and on something else.

  She folded her hands and looked down at him. Dennis was in an awkward position beneath the sink, doing something with his wrench. What, she hadn’t the faintest idea.

  “So what’s a tax lawyer doing fixing a garbage disposal?” Dennis’s answer came to her as soon as the question had left her lips. “Wait, don’t tell me. You’re ‘being neighborly.”’ She said it the way a children’s show host would announce the answer to a group of five-year-olds.

  Her barb amused him. He studied the way the disposal had been installed. Damn, whoever put this in had all but welded it into place. And destroyed connections while they were at it. Nothing he tried made the disposal work. He snaked his way into the cabinet.

  His voice drifted out to her. “I was about to say that I had a life before I became a lawyer. That life included knowing how to do some things for myself—and my mother.”

  There was undisguised love in his voice. For a moment, without knowing any of the circumstances of his life beyond the fact that he had had a mother to bond with, she envied him.

  “Only child?”

  Rather than crawl out again, Dennis stuck his hand out. “Hand me that screwdriver, will you? I have a sister,” he answered.

  “Me, too. Older?” Moving to the edge of her chair, Nicole looked down into the toolbox. There were several screwdrivers on the top. Which one was “that” screwdriver?

  “Younger. Yours?”

  “Older.” She saw him wiggle his fingers expectantly. “Which one do you want?”

  “The Phillips head.”

  He might as well have been speaking a foreign language. “And that would be—?”

  He tried not to laugh. Moira would have been severely disappointed with Nicole for sounding so hopelessly “female” about tools. Moira knew how to take a car apart and put it back together. And how to hot-wire one as well.

  “The one that looks as if it has a starburst on its tip.”

  So why hadn’t he said so in the first place? Pushing a few tools aside, she located it. “The short, stubby one.”

  “The short, stubby one,” he confirmed. His arm was beginning to ache.

  Nicole slapped the screwdriver into his hand before he could ask her for it a second time. “My sister just had a baby three weeks ago.”

  He edged out from beneath the sink. Looking at her, he grinned. It came effortlessly this time. “Must be something in the water.”

  “Speaking of water, will I have any today?”

  Dennis scooted back under the sink. “Patience, Nikk—Nicole,” he amended. “I’ve only been working on this for a few minutes.”

  And from what he could see, this job was going to be at least a couple of hours long. It didn’t look as if the disposal could be resurrected. Which was good. It gave him the excuse he needed to hang aroun
d and work his way into her trust a little more.

  She had let her eyes travel up the length of his torso as he laid there on her floor. Even lying down, the man looked as if he were as hard as rock. Not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. Nicole bit her lower lip, then roused herself.

  “Seeing as how plumbers all get paid by the hour, I have a feeling that if you were a plumber, I couldn’t afford you.”

  Grasping the base of the disposal, he tried moving it to see how solidly it was inserted and how difficult it would be to remove. Nothing budged.

  “Lucky for you I’m a tax lawyer.” He kept his voice casual. “Have you figured out what you’re going to do about Standish?”

  The mention of the man’s name had the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. “Yes.”

  She said the word with finality. He waited, but nothing followed. Working with the screwdriver, he loosened a screw on either side of the disposal. “Well?”

  He asked her questions as if he thought he had every right to the answers. She frowned. “Do you interrogate everyone you know?”

  Dennis’s voice echoed from beneath the sink. “Only women with great legs whose garbage disposals I happen to be working on.”

  The compliment secretly pleased her. She’d been feeling particularly dumpy this morning. “How can you see them under the sink?”

  “I don’t have to see them now.” His laugh curled around her like a warm scarf tucked around her shoulders on a cold winter night. “Your legs were the first thing I noticed about you.”

  She found that almost impossible to believe. “Not my stomach?”

  “Nope. Your legs. They happen to be a weakness of mine and yours are gorgeous.” He said it simply, as if it were a given fact. His answer required no creativity on his part. They had been the first thing about her he’d noticed.

  It was hard keeping the smile from her lips. She didn’t want to encourage him, but at this stage of the game, she was hungry for compliments.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He left the screws where they were. He’d finish unscrewing them when he had another disposal to replace this one. Dennis slipped out again. Sitting up, he let his screwdriver clank into the toolbox.

  “So, you were saying—?”

  She noticed that he had managed to have the tool face in the same direction as the others. She had a feeling that when his cleaning lady came, she didn’t have all that much to clean.

  “About what?” she asked innocently.

  She didn’t like answering questions unless her back was to the wall, he mused. He was going to have to dismantle that wall. “What are you planning to do about your friendly neighborhood shakedown artist?”

  Friendly. That word kept coming up in his conversation. She wondered if his life was really as uncomplicated as it sounded.

  Nicole shrugged. “Look around the apartment and see if there really is something that might have belonged to him, although I can’t imagine what he’s looking for.”

  Nicole exhaled a short, exasperated breath. She wasn’t looking forward to going through Craig’s things. “I’m surprised he didn’t come here asking for money. Craig owed everyone at one time or another.” He had even tried to borrow money from Marlene, but she had put a stop to it. Craig was her problem, not Marlene’s. “It never seemed to come in fast enough for him.”

  Dennis sat looking up at her from the floor. Damn, but she did stir protective feelings within him. He had to keep that in check.

  “But if a cleaning lady is a luxury that’s out of reach, how do you manage to keep up the apartment—?”

  She was tired of questions. And even more tired of the answers she had come up with. They trapped her. “I’m going to sell my favors on a street corner to weirdos in downtown L.A.”

  His light, easy smile defused her temper. “I’m sure you’d have takers. Sorry, that wasn’t any of my business.” Then his expression grew more serious. Though he was unaware of it, a slight note of concern entered his voice. “What will you do if you can’t find whatever it is?”

  “Reason with him.” There was nothing else she could do. “He can’t get what I don’t have.”

  But he could try, Dennis thought. And Standish would. “He didn’t look like the type of man who could be reasoned with.”

  Nicole sighed, rising to her feet. If she sat too long, she began to feel like a blob. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  He tried one more time before he let go, testing just how much she knew. “What do you think it was that he thinks your husband had?”

  Nicole looked into the toolbox. “Do you need me to hand you another tool?” she asked sweetly. Bending, she picked up a torque wrench and held it aloft.

  The message was received, loud and clear. Dennis grinned. “And I’ve got a clear image of just where you’d like to hand that to me.”

  Satisfied that she’d gotten her point across, Nicole let the wrench fall back into the toolbox. “You catch on fast.”

  He rose, dusting off his hands and then turned to the sink. He tried the rubber drain cover to see if it could be easily removed. It was. “Beatrice Lincoln didn’t raise any stupid children.”

  Nicole supposed that would be his mother. She wasn’t in the mood to talk about mothers. She had no stories to offer in trade.

  “I’m sure she’d be happy to hear that.” She picked up her dust cloth again. The dust wasn’t going to get rid of itself. “Well, if you don’t need my help, I’ll get out of your way.”

  He turned. His eyes stopped her before he said anything. “Don’t.”

  She looked at him uncertainly. “What?”

  “Don’t leave.” He crouched down again, checking his tools to see if he had everything he needed to properly remove the disposal and install a new one. He was going to have to pick up some plumber’s putty. “I like the company. Lately, I haven’t had a chance to just talk to anyone if it didn’t involve business.”

  Which was true. It had been a long time since he’d had a conversation that didn’t revolve around his job. For a moment, Dennis could pretend that this really wasn’t about work.

  He paused, attempting to apply his own feelings to the man he was supposed to be. “I’ve gotten caught up on a treadmill and it almost feels as if I can’t step off without getting dragged under.”

  He was a workaholic. To look at him, Nicole wouldn’t have placed him in the same category as her sister, but obviously, looks could be deceiving. “Today’s Saturday. Why aren’t you out now, doing something interesting?”

  Dennis smiled at her. “I am.” His eyes teased her as he held up a wrench and a screwdriver for emphasis. Retiring them to the toolbox, he looked at her seriously. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  His face was so solemn, she had no idea what he was going to say. “What is it?”

  “I’m afraid your disposal is terminal.” He wiped his hands on the back of his jeans. She took the time to notice that though they were faded and frayed, they adhered to his body like a well-worn second skin. “You’re going to need a new one.”

  She sighed. Was that all? “Isn’t this something the management is supposed to take care of?”

  “Yes, if you can find them.” He gestured elaborately at the telephone. “Want to try?”

  He was right, that was futile. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, she thought, annoyed. Nicole left the room, heading toward the bedroom where she kept her purse.

  “Never mind. I’ll go to the hardware store.” She stopped abruptly. She had no idea what she was looking for. Were there different types? Did you have to order them ahead of time? God, she hoped not. “What kind do I need?”

  “The kind that works.” He saw the annoyed look intensify on her face. “Don’t worry, I’ll take a run down to the hardware store myself.” She opened her mouth, to protest no doubt. “I’ll know which kind to buy.”

  So would she, if he told her. Why was he being so nice to her? S
he was no one to him. “Are you trying to earn a merit badge?”

  He grinned in response. It was the most guileless grin she’d ever seen. But Nicole knew that in reality, there was no such thing as guileless. Still, looking at Dennis, she could almost believe that there was.

  “You found me out,” he admitted solemnly. “How’m I doing?”

  On the outside chance that he really was as nice as he seemed, Nicole amended the sharp retort that rose to her lips. She glanced at the disconnected disposal. “Halfway there.”

  “I’ll be back soon,” he promised.

  Halfway there. It would be interesting, he mused as he left, purely on a theoretical basis, to see what it would take to get the rest of the way there.

  If he didn’t have a job to do.

  Replacing the disposal took him a great deal longer than she knew he had anticipated. According to Dennis, the disposal had turned out to be a real challenge to remove. He told her that whoever had initially installed it had wedged it in at just enough of an angle to defy prying it out easily.

  Finished with her dusting, Nicole had hung around the kitchen, feeling as useful as a fly on the wall. Dennis had spent most of the time tugging and grunting, and making conversation. Though she had meant to remain closemouthed, she found him incredibly easy to talk to.

  She still couldn’t figure out why he had volunteered to do this in the first place.

  Dennis spent the duration hunkered in a position equivalent to early Christian martyrs doing penance. He was on her floor almost longer than Craig had remained in the apartment on any one of his stops as he passed through to yet another race. Another party.

  When Dennis finally scooted out from beneath the sink and unfolded his body to stand beside the counter, she looked down into the sink uneasily.

  “Is it done?”

  He thought it was, but he knew the danger of being overly optimistic. About anything. It always paid to have backup. When he had left for the store, his partner Winston had maintained surveillance on Nicole’s apartment in case she left, or someone else came in.

  “That remains to be seen.” Dennis turned on the water over the sink with the disposal, then switched on the disposal.