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Marci stood blinking as Brick stormed out of the house and slammed into his truck. He slung gravel as he peeled out of the driveway.
She was astounded. Brick, hurt? Whoever would have thought?
Well, either he would be back or he wouldn’t. She gave a mental shrug and opened the box containing her new answering machine, deftly hooking it up. As she recorded an outgoing message, she wondered how many calls she had missed because Brick had thrown the other answering machine against the wall. Even if he had bothered to answer the phone, he wouldn’t
have taken any messages for her, not in the mood he was in.
If there was anything important, she thought, they would call back.
She had barely completed the thought when the phone rang. She lifted the receiver. “Hello.”
“Which one are you?” whispered a ghostly voice.
thirteen
Jaine cracked open one eye and glared at the clock, which was emitting an extremely annoying high-pitched beeping sound. Finally recognizing it as the alarm—after all, she’d never heard it at two A.M. before—she reached over and slapped it. She snuggled down in the renewed silence, wondering why in hell the alarm had gone off at that ungodly hour.
Because she had set it to go off at that ungodly hour, that was why.
“No,” she moaned to the dark room. “I can’t get up. I’ve only been in bed four hours!”
She got up anyway. She had had the presence of mind before going to bed to prepare the coffeemaker and set the timer for 1:50. The smell of coffee drew her, stumbling, to the kitchen. She turned on the overhead light, then had to squint her eyes against the glaring brightness.
“Television people are aliens,” she mumbled as she reached for a cup. “Real humans wouldn’t do this on a regular basis.”
With one cup of coffee in her, she managed to make it into the shower. As the water poured down on top of her head, she remembered that she hadn’t intended to wash her hair. Since she hadn’t factored in the time to wash and dry her hair when she calculated the time to get up, she was now officially behind schedule. She groaned and leaned against the wall. “I can’t do this.”
A minute later, she talked herself into trying. She rapidly shampooed and loofahed herself, and three minutes later jumped out of the shower. With another cup of coffee steaming close to hand, she blow-dried her hair, then used a dab of hair gloss to smooth down the flyaway tendrils. When one got up so early, makeup was necessary to cover the automatic look of horror and sheer disbelief; she applied it with a fast but lavish hand, going for the glamorous, just-left-a-party look. What she got was closer to a hangover look, but she wasn’t wasting any more time on a hopeless cause.
Don’t wear white or black, the television lady had said. Jaine put on a long, narrow black skirt, figuring the lady had meant to avoid black on her top half, which was what would be seen. She paired a scoop-neck, three-quarter-length-sleeved red sweater with the black skirt, cinched a black belt around her waist, and slipped her feet into black pumps at the same time as she was fastening classic gold hoops in her ears.
She glanced at the clock. Three A.M. Damn, she was good at this!
She would bite her tongue off before she ever admitted it.
Okay, what else? Food and water for BooBoo, who was staying out of sight. Smart kitty, she thought.
That little chore taken care of, she let herself out at five after three. The driveway next door was still empty. No brown Pontiac sat there, nor had she heard any other vehicle enter the drive-way during the night. Sam hadn’t come home.
He probably had a girlfriend, she thought, gritting her teeth. Duh! She felt like an idiot. Of course he had a girlfriend. Men like Sam always had a woman or two, or three, on their strings. He hadn’t been able to get anywhere with her, thanks to her lack of birth control, so he had simply buzzed on over to the next flower in line.
“Jerk,” she growled as she got into the Viper. She should have remembered her past experiences in the relationship wars and not let herself get so excited. Evidently her hormones had overruled her common sense and she had become drunk on ovarian wine, the most potent, sanity-destroying substance in the universe. In short, she had taken one look at his naked body and gone into heat.
“Forget about that,” she muttered to herself as she drove the dark, quiet residential streets. “Don’t think about it.” Sure. Like she was going to forget the sight of that joystick of his waving proud and free.
She felt like crying at the thought of having to give up that awe-inspiring, mouthwatering erection when she hadn’t even had a crack at it yet, but pride demanded. She refused to be one of a crowd in a man’s head, much less his bed.
His only excuse, she thought, was if he was lying in a hospital somewhere, too badly injured to dial a telephone. She knew he hadn’t been shot or anything; that would have been in the news, if a cop had been wounded. Mrs. Kulavich would have told her if he’d been in a traffic accident. No, he was alive and well, somewhere. It was the where that was the problem.
Just to cover all bases, she tried to work up a teeny bit of worry over him, but all she could manage was a heartfelt desire to maim him.
She knew better than to lose her head over a man. That was what was so humiliating: she knew better. Three broken engagements had taught her that a woman needed to keep her wits about her when dealing with the male species, or she could get seriously hurt. Sam hadn’t hurt her—not much, anyway—but she had been on the verge of making a really stupid mistake and she hated to think she was so gullible.
Damn him, why couldn’t he at least have called?
If she had a lock of his hair, she thought, she could put a curse on him, but she was willing to bet he wouldn’t let her anywhere near him with a pair of scissors.
She entertained herself with thinking up imaginative curses just in case she did manage to get some of his hair. She particularly liked the one that gave him a bad case of wilt. Hah! Let him see how many women were impressed when his joystick became a joyless noodle.
