by Lois Greiman
“You’re an idiot,” I countered cleverly. “And wrong. I’d just as soon shoot you as look at you.”
“The gun is the weakling’s answer to all things,” he said, and tugged at my ankle. I hopped, mood deteriorating from cranky to downright mean. “What will you do now?”
“I’m going to kick you,” I said, and tried to jerk away.
“Where?”
“In the balls. As hard and often as possible.”
He released my ankle, and with a quick flip of his nubile body, tossed himself to his feet.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“The choice is yours,” he said.
“What?” I stared at him. “What choice?”
“If you wish to get yourself killed, it is your right.”
“What? What are you—”
“I do not care to waste my time.”
“I said I’d kick you in the balls. Lie down.” I flapped my hand at the floor. “I’ll do it right now.”
“How?” Anger traced a furrow between his brows. It was the first time I had seen him look truly irritated. “How…when I am holding your opposite foot?”
“Oh.” I scowled. Maybe that was something a cranky self-defense student should have thought of earlier. “Sorry. I guess I’d have to stab you or something instead.”
“Stab me?” He sounded incredulous and even angrier. It’s impossible to make some people happy.
“What’s wrong with stabbing you?”
“Do you plan to walk the streets of Los Angeles carrying a katana?”
“If that’s a big-ass knife, yeah, I do.”
He snorted, curled his hand around my arm, and tugged me toward the door.
“Fine,” I said, bracing my feet against the motion. “What should I do?”
“Move to Omaha.”
I gritted my teeth and managed to stop our sliding journey across the floor. “No.”
He deepened his scowl and opened the door.
“Okay!” I snarled, and turning slightly, managed to kick it shut. “I’ll do whatever you say.”
The room went silent. We were standing very close. His eyes were dark, insanely intense, and despicably alluring.
My stomach pitched. “You are…” The words stole from my mouth. “Gay, aren’t you?”
He snorted.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Except think, which you must do, for you are far too weak for any other course of action.”
“I’m not weak,” I growled. Anger rumbled through me, mixing with a buttload of other emotions…if horniness and pissiness are emotions.
He stepped up closer, bumping me with his chest, nipples erect, skin as smooth and firm as a caramel-coated apple. “I could take you right now.” His voice was little more than a whisper. The sound shivered through me.
“T…take me?” I think I said it like a question.
He was staring at my lips again, but in a second he jerked his attention back to my eyes. “Kill you!” he snapped. “You have been trained for weeks, and still I could end your life in an instant.”
“Then I guess you’re a sucky teacher.” I can go from cranky to testy in the blink of an eye.
“Go home,” he said.
And testy to irrational just as fast. “I wanna know what to do if someone grabs my ankle.”
“Call nine-one-one,” he said, and opened the door.
I faced him, heart pounding. “I don’t have a phone.”
Maybe he noticed the pounding organ, because his gaze dropped to my chest for a second. “Pop another button on your shirt in the morning, Christina, you will have enough in tips to buy one by lunch.”
“What if someone grabs my ankle during the breakfast rush?”
He laughed. Actually laughed. The sound was low and exotic, rumbling a little titter of something through my overtaxed system. I ignored it completely.
“Listen, I’m…” But I couldn’t quite finish the sentence. I’d rather devour a live crow than eat it in the more traditional, humiliating manner. But I took a deep breath and plunged. “Sssoo…ready to do whatever you suggest.”
Our gazes met.
His nostrils flared slightly and for a second I thought his suggestions might involve more than ankles, but then he was on the floor again, fingers wrapped around my lower leg.
His grip was firm and warm. I resisted the urge to squirm. “What now?” I asked.
“What do your instincts tell you?”
I didn’t answer; my instincts generally don’t make socially acceptable suggestions.
“Wuwai hua,” he taunted, “if you are too frightened to—”
I dropped, elbows pointed down like spikes.
The left one struck his chest, but my right stabbed him directly in the throat. His hand twitched open. I skittered out of reach, but there was no need to be so quick; he was already curling up like a dying salamander. The air wheezed through his damaged windpipe. His face was bright red, his hands like claws against the bare floorboards.
I stood off to the side, watching my handiwork with some satisfaction and waiting for him to draw enough oxygen to congratulate me on my cleverness. But his lips seem to be turning blue. Still, I remained where I was. The seconds droned on, punctuated by his tortured breathing, tattooed by his twitching body.
“Danshov?” I said finally, and moved a scant step closer.
He jerked spasmodically.
“Hiro!” I rasped, falling to my knees beside him. After that, I have no idea what happened. One moment, I was contemplating an actual apology, and the next, I was flat on my back. He was on top of me, hands pinning mine to the floor.
“Again you forget,” he said.
“Forget?”
“Never show mercy.”
“I thought you were dying.” My tone was accusatory.
“Yes?” His knees hugged the slope of my breasts. His chest all but touched my nipples.
“Sometimes the cops frown on murder.”
“That has not been my experience.” His breath was soft, his body hard.
Frustration, and maybe a little something else, raced through me. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t aroused. That would show a certain lack of emotional health on my part.
“Why has your cop not taught you to protect yourself?” he asked.
“He’s not mine.”
“Whose, then?”
“I think he’s the property of the LAPD.”
“Whose property are you?”
“Oh…” The word was breathy, my emotions fluttery, but I wasn’t brain damaged enough to tell him the eighty-four-failed-relationships story. Or to think he was coming on to me. But for a gay guy, he could really shoot off the hetero pheromones. “I’m kind of a…” No one had questioned my sexuality since Father Pat had caught me sucking face with Blair Kase in the rectory. “Kind of an independent contractor.”
Fire blazed in his mercurial eyes. His chest touched mine, burning on contact. But in an instant he pushed away, yanking me to my feet.
“Try again,” he ordered.
Chapter 27
All I’m sayin’, Pork Chop, is a girl like you should probably learn to fight her own damn dragons.
—Glen McMullen, at the top of his diplomatic game while explaining the deplorable lack of available knights
Despite my aching fatigue, I couldn’t sleep that night. Bitching muscles kept me restless. I rose early and jogged just enough to give those muscles something to whine about, then headed toward the restaurant.
My bruises were fading, but the limp was new. I considered trying to hide it, but that would have been a waste of energy, a commodity I was sorely lacking, so I braced myself for the inevitable as I entered the kitchen. Rom quit peeling carrots long enough to step back a half pace.
“What the hell happened to you?”
I turned toward him, ready to be haughtily indifferent, but surprise caught me instead.
“What ha
ppened to you?”
He turned away. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.” His right eye was blackened, his lips split, and his nose looked as if it had encountered a blunt object at considerable speed.
“Were you and your brother fighting?”
“Remus?” He huffed a laugh. “I could stomp him like a turd blossom if I had half a mind.”
“I thought that’s exactly what you had.”
He snorted.
“Serves ya right,” I said, “for messin’ with someone else’s wife.”
“What? Whose wife?” He glanced around, as if expecting Momma Bess to come charging out of a cupboard. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I got this…choppin’ wood.”
“I was there, remember?”
For a second, I thought he might deny his ill-advised affair, but he didn’t. “Fuckin’ Re can’t keep his mouth shut.”
“He told the husband?”
“Who do you think?” he asked. “And it was him was hoisting her skirt in the first place.”
No, I thought. Remus was batting for the opposition. Thus his oh-so-heartily feigned interest in women and his fairly creative means of setting up his younger brother for a beating. What a tangled web…
“And now he’s too chickenshit to show his face,” he said, and stabbed the knife toward me.
It took all my self-restraint to refrain from hitting him in the face with a frying pan. Apparently, I was still in flight-or-fight mode, and I was way too tired to fly.
“That’s why he left,” he said, sotto voce now. “It weren’t my fault.”
I filled the salt shakers. Wiped down the pseudo tables. “That’s why who left?”
“Re don’t pull his weight. Never did. That’s why he left.”
“Your father?” I deduced, and faced him.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
I thought about that for a second, mind pinwheeling. “Where is he now?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
Sometimes the greatest lies are those we tell ourselves. The fact that I had once read that on a cereal box made it no less true. “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”
He shrugged again. If he was going for nonchalant, he should probably quit sniffling. “Fifteen years, maybe…” His gaze skittered away, dragged back. “In May.”
“So you were…what? Eight? Nine?”
“Six.”
Holy hell, he was more than a decade younger than I was. So maybe his attempted seduction should have made me proud. Instead, I just felt tired. I slumped onto a nearby stool.
“You okay?” he asked.
I rather doubted it. “What happened in May?”
He shuffled his booted feet.
“Rom?”
“Our birthday party.”
I felt the sting of rejection as if it were my own.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“No,” he said, but if I were a betting girl I could have made a killing.
“Did you have a party?”
“Yeah, presents, a hog roast.” He looked away. “One of them piñata thingies.”
I said nothing, just waited.
“It was a mule. Bright red. Stuffed to the hooves. Pa hung it from the old sycamore out front, said…” He paused, whipped up some pancake batter, and refused to meet my gaze. “Said whoever was the strongest could have the candy.”
It sounded ridiculous, but I had been motivated by less auspicious challenges.
“He liked to have us rassle,” he said.
“Rassle?”
“Fight.” He made a dodging motion with his big body.
“Oh,” I said, and wondered, not for the first time, what was wrong with men.
“I’m tougher than a bear cat. Always have been. But Remus was bigger than me.” Silence ticked around us. “And he bit. Real hard sometimes. Don’t mean I’m a sissy if I cried a little.”
“Siblings can be cruel,” I said.
“So can daddies.”
I winced, remembering my own sire’s form of fatherly love, and dug in.
Fifty minutes later, we were chopping celery in unison.
“And he’s never been back?” We were still talking about his father. I had done a lot of that at Hope Counseling. In my opinion, if Mom’s not to blame for the kiddie’s neuroses, Dad’s a pretty fair bet.
“Nah. And I don’t care,” he hurried to add. “Only…”
I waited.
He clenched his hands. “She used to cry. After he left…we could hear her.”
“Your mother?” I probably shouldn’t have sounded so shocked, but honest to God, I didn’t know wolverines could shed tears.
“Don’t know why,” he said. “The way they was together, I didn’t think she’d care if he up and croaked.”
“They argued?”
“Argued.” He snorted something between laughter and tears. “If there weren’t blood involved it wasn’t even a tussle. Half the time, I thought she’d kill him outright. But she didn’t hit him that day.”
“The day of your birthday party.”
“Just said…” He blew out a breath. “Just said I weren’t no sissy and if he couldn’t see that he should up and leave.”
It almost made my family seem normal. “And he did?”
“Next morning, he was gone. I thought she’d be happy.”
“Maybe she was.”
“She weren’t. She ain’t.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Cuz of me.”
“Did she say that?”
He didn’t answer.
In this case, I suspected, the parents could probably share the blame.
“You were just a kid,” I said.
“She stuck up for me and now she’s alone.”
“Maybe that’s best.”
“She don’t think so.”
“Sometimes mothers are wrong.”
He thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “If I hadn’t been such a pansy-assed weakling—”
“Rom!”
He shifted his watery gaze to mine.
“You were a child. Above reproach. She has no right to make you think otherwise.”
His eyes were round, his expression a quixotic blend of hope and despair. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Damn! You’re right!” he said, and slammed the cleaver into the cutting board. “It’s Re’s fault.”
“It’s not his fault either, Rom.” My tone was steady and sensible…not like me at all. “But if you two don’t quit sniping at each other, there’ll be more trouble to come. More and worse. I’ll promise you that.” Pivoting away before I slapped him upside the head, I left the room.
Rom was mostly silent for the remainder of the day, making me think he might actually be considering my words. It was almost like being a therapist. Almost as if the whole psychology thing might make sense.
The entire day went better for it. Despite Hiro’s eventual arrival, a million hours of labor, and my own decline back into Hillbilly Hell, I still felt pretty good during the dinner rush.
“What can I get for ya, honey?” I asked, employing my very best southern discomfort.
William Holsten sat at door two. He glanced up from a tattered paperback written by Aimee L. Salter. Concern was a warm balm against my bruised skin. “How are you doing, Ms. O’Tara?”
“I’m just hunky. How about you?” I asked, and nodded toward the novel. Every Ugly Word was not exactly a train ride through Happyville.
“Just a little”—he shrugged—“light reading. Are you okay? It almost looked like you were limping.”
I didn’t glance toward the kitchen, where Danshov was marinating strips of beef, but I felt his gaze on my face. Truth to tell, he didn’t look much better than I did. And wasn’t that a kicker. Turns out there’s nothing like landing a good solid palm strike to a guy’s nose to put a little spring in a girl’s step.
“Ran into a door,” I said.
&n
bsp; “Really?” He sounded doubtful.
“Yup. Came out of the kitchen too fast and wham…”
“Most doors aren’t so antagonistic.”
“If it makes ya feel any better, I smacked it right back,” I said, and gave him a cheeky grin. “What’ll ya have?”
He ordered a beer and a hot beef sandwich au jus.
Half an hour later, things had wound down considerably. The trio at the car hood had left a pretty decent tip, while Gizzard Manks, true to his miserly nature, had left nothing. But at least he had had the good graces to leave several minutes before closing. Only Professor Holsten remained, nursing his second glass of vino and probably contemplating the mysteries of the universe.
“Anything I can do for you before I take off?” I asked.
He examined my face. I couldn’t help but wonder if he could still see the bruises or if he was looking deeper…into my soul, maybe. “No, I’m good. Thank you.”
“No problem,” I said, and turned away, but he spoke again.
“Unless you’d let me walk you to your car.”
“That’s real nice of you,” I said, “but I’m just headin’ over to the big house.”
“Through the dark woods all by yourself?”
I gave him a brave smile. “I’m a big girl.”
“With all those nefarious doors between here and there?”
I laughed. At that point in my life, big words made me all but giddy.
He flashed his perfect smile. It was full of intelligence and caring, but maybe there was a sliver of sadness. “What do you say?”
I could feel Danshov’s attention on me. There was a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that he didn’t give a rat’s ass whether I lived a long and fruitful life or was run over by an intoxicated hippo on my way home. But maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t quite as cavalier as he seemed. “Well, if you’ll promise to fend off all them ill-mannered windows, too…”
“Cross my heart,” Holsten said, and rose to his feet.
It was a beautiful night. The moon was nothing more than a golden sickle hung in an ebony sky.
Silence stretched between us, but he spoke finally. “If you’re wondering, I’m trying to properly compose the ‘what’s a nice girl like you’ question.”
Tempting as it was to show my true PhD nature, I stuck to character. “Ya mean how’d I end up in bumfuck nowhere?”