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“Thanks,” she said, relieved the task was over.
“Sure.” He crouched down in the open door. “You want to file charges for assault?”
She pursed her lips. “I hit him first.”
She thought he might be fighting another grin. God, she hoped he won; she didn’t want to see another one so soon. She might start thinking he was human.
“There is that,” he agreed. He stood up and started to close the car door for her. “A massage will help the soreness. And a steam bath.”
She gave him an outraged look. “Steam? You mean I had a cold shower this morning for nothing??
?
He began laughing, and she really, really wished he hadn’t done that. He had a nice deep laugh and very white teeth.
“Cold is good, too. Try alternating heat and cold to loosen up. And get a massage if you can.”
She didn’t think Hammerstead had a spa hidden anywhere on the premises, but she might call around and book one for this afternoon when she got off work. She nodded. “Good idea. Thanks.”
He nodded and closed the door, stepping back. Lifting one hand in a wave, he walked to his car. Before he even got the door open, Jaine had the Viper purring down the street.
So maybe she could get along with him, she thought, smiling a little. He and his handcuffs had certainly come in handy the night before.
Despite lingering to talk to him, she was still early to work, which gave her time to ease out of the car. Today the sign above the elevator buttons said: FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION; IT’S BUNDLED WITH YOUR SOFTWARE. Somehow she thought management would frown more on that than on the sign from the day before, but all the geeks and nerds on the first two floors probably thought it was hilarious.
The office gradually filled. The conversation that morning was exclusively about the article in the newsletter, split fifty-fifty between the contents and speculation about the identity of the four women. Most were of the opinion the entire article was the brainchild of the author, that the four friends were fictitious, which suited Jaine just fine. She kept her mouth shut and her fingers crossed.
“I scanned the article and sent it to my cousin in Chicago,” she overheard someone say as he walked past in the hallway. She was fairly certain he wasn’t talking about an article in the Detroit News.
Great. It was spreading.
Because she winced at just the thought of having to get into and out of the car several times to go to lunch, she made do with peanut butter crackers and a soft drink in the snack room. She could have asked T.J. or one of the others to bring her back something for lunch, but didn’t feel like going into explanations of why she had problems getting into her car. Saying she tackled a drunk would sound like bragging, when in truth she had simply been too angry to think about what she was doing.
Leah Street entered and took her neatly packed lunch out of the refrigerator. She had a sandwich (turkey breast and lettuce on whole wheat), a cup of vegetable soup (which she heated in the microwave), and an orange. Jaine sighed, torn between hate and envy. How could you like someone who was so organized? People like Leah, she thought, were put on earth to make everyone else look inefficient. If she had thought, she could have packed her own lunch instead of having to make do with peanut butter crackers and a diet soda.
“May I join you?” Leah asked, and Jaine felt a twinge of guilt. Since they were the only two people in the snack room, she should have asked Leah to sit down. Most people at Hammerstead would simply have sat down, but maybe Leah had been made to feel unwelcome often enough that she felt she had to ask.
“Sure,” Jaine said, trying to infuse some warmth into her voice. “I’d like the company.” If she were Catholic, she’d definitely have to confess that one; it was an even bigger whopper than saying her father didn’t know anything about cars.
Leah got her nutritious, attractive meal arranged and sat down at the table. She took a small bite of the sandwich and chewed daintily, blotted her mouth, then ate an equally small spoonful of soup, after which she blotted her mouth again. Jaine watched, mesmerized. She imagined the Victorians must have had the same table manners. Her own manners were good, but Leah made her feel like a barbarian.
After a moment Leah said, “I suppose you saw that disgusting newsletter yesterday.”
Disgusting was one of Leah’s favorite words, Jaine had noticed.
“I assume you mean that article,” she said, because it seemed pointless to dance around. “I glanced at it. I didn’t read the entire thing.”
“People like that make me ashamed to be a woman.”
Well, that was going a little too far. Jaine knew she should leave it alone, because Leah was Leah and nothing was going to change her. But some little demon inside—okay, the same demon that always prompted her to open her mouth when she should keep it shut—made her say, “Why is that? I thought they were honest.”
Leah put down her sandwich and gave Jaine an outraged look. “Honest? They sounded like whores. All they wanted in a man was money and a big … a big…”
“Penis,” Jaine supplied, since Leah didn’t seem to know the word. “And I don’t think that was all they wanted. I seem to remember something about fidelity and dependability, sense of humor—”
Leah dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “Believe that if you want, but the entire point of the whole article was sex and money. It was obvious. It was also vicious and cruel, because just think how it made men who didn’t have a lot of money and a big … thing—”
“Penis,” Jaine interrupted. “It’s called a penis.”
