AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Tina.” I sighed. “I would really like to be Tina again.”
He kissed the nape of my neck, sending a pleasant warm tingle down my spine. “I like Tina, too.”
I woke up to the sound of Caleb whispering, “You’re kidding me!”
I rolled over to see his bare back as he hunched over the edge of the bed. He was talking into his cell phone, muttering furiously under his breath.
“You’re kidding me,” he said again.
I sat up in bed, swiping at my face. I padded toward the bathroom to brush my teeth as Caleb continued muttering into his phone. He wrapped up the phone call by sighing and saying, “She’s going to be hell to live with after this.”
I arched an eyebrow and spat out the excess toothpaste. He ended the connection and flopped back on the bed, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What?”
Caleb sat up, rolling his eyes. “That was Merl’s office. Mort showed up at the airfield last night, just like you said he would. He checked in to the hospital this morning for presurgery testing. Merl is expressing his gratitude with a rather large check.”
My lips wanted to twitch into a grin, but I tamped it down. “Gloating would be an ugly thing to do even when I was insanely right, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, yes, it would,” he said, giving me an exasperated look.
He hauled himself out of bed and helped me gather up our bags. We completed our various packing-up chores side-by-side, organizing the files, securing the equipment, checking under the bed and in the bathroom for forgotten items. Caleb was sulking, but it was a quiet kicking my own ass sort of self-flagellation to which I was not accustomed. He wasn’t throwing things around the room, breaking my stuff, or sending me wounded-baby-deer looks because I was so very cruel. He just silently worked through the moving-out checklist with his mouth clenched shut. As we walked out of the motel room, I bumped him with my hip. His lips quirked, but he actively suppressed the smile. Walking toward the truck, I bumped him again. He laughed, throwing his arm around my shoulders.
“We did the right thing, Caleb. We let Mort make the choice for himself. I’m sorry I went about it in a dishonest way, trying to sneak him out of the gas station. But it all worked out in the end.”
“But what if it hadn’t?” he asked.
I smiled in what I hoped was a winsome, nonobnoxious manner. “Well, then, I would owe you a rather large apology.”
“I know you don’t agree with what I do.”
“Not in all cases,” I protested. “But I think that you should check into backgrounds and circumstances a little more before you agree to look for someone. There are people out there who deserve to be left alone.”
He nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
It was probably the maximum amount of progress I was going to make, so I would take it and run. “Who was right?” I asked, preening just the tiniest bit.
“You were right,” he said, standing up.
I fairly skipped to stand in front of him, bouncing on the balls of my feet. “Who is smarter than you?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “You’re smarter than me.”
I kissed his chin, because that was as high as I could reach. “Don’t you forget it.”
“Was that last bit really necessary?” he grumbled.
“Hey, I had a whole ‘I Told You So’ dance choreographed. You’re lucky I’m sparing you that,” I told him. He harrumphed as he helped me climb up into the truck. “It was set to the tune of ‘Single Ladies.’â??”
Caleb narrowed his eyes at me. “You are evil. Pure evil wrapped up in a tiny pixie package.”
“But I was a correct evil pixie package,” I said.
8
From Some Senders, All E-mails Are Red-Flagged
I celebrated the arrival of Merl’s very large check by finding the world’s only Laundromat-slash-Internet café and checked my e-mail while our delicates spun dry. Caleb was meeting with someone about a case that was “too preliminary” to discuss with me. He’d asked me to stick close to the motel, but I needed to check my private e-mail address, and we were running low on clean socks. I was more comfortable with using the café’s computers to check the secure server I used for Red-burn’s e-mails. I hoped that she’d sent some update on my paperwork.
