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He got off the stool and stood in front of her, making her tip her head back to look him in the face. She didn’t back up and they both knew he could use his size to intimidate her. The best thing he could do at this point was shut the hell up, but Flick’s eyes double-dared him.
“I think you’re part fun fair, part wrecking ball. I think you have an on switch but no off. I think you’re good at your job. Ambitious. Pushy. You’ll play rough if it gets you what you want, but you’re a politician too, so you’re not above manipulation, razzle-dazzle ’em, move fast so they can’t see you coming and don’t see the trail of destruction you leave behind till it’s too late. I think you’ll burn out hard because you can’t pace yourself. Why don’t you have a significant other? What’s with the sexual desert?”
Her chin bounced higher. “Why don’t you?”
“I’m asking the questions.”
She ripped off a sloppy salute that was sheer smart-ass. “Maybe because I run on rails too.”
Which wasn’t the answer he expected. “Roller-coaster rails.”
“That’s right, and most men can’t stand the pace, don’t like the sharp turns and jolts. They want me to be predictable, safe. And I’m not. I’m the first person in my family to finish school. To go to college. That took hard work and I couldn’t always be sweet. Nice finishes last and that’s not going to be me, and what I want most in my life is to help other people to have the chances I got.”
He took a step back and sat. This got hot quickly. He’d pushed it, and she was stirred up, steaming. He needed to de-escalate things before one of them said something they really regretted and couldn’t take back. “Would you like more wine? I can open another bottle.”
“I would like pie.”
“I don’t have pie.”
“But you can cook pie, right? You have pastry in the freezer and canned peaches in the pantry.”
She had snooped and admitted it. “Yes, I can bake pie.” His entire cooking regime was comfort food he could make half asleep, and pie fitted right in. If he felt like eating clever ingredients, fine food, he ate out.
“You’re being a shit. If you think I’m so awful, why did you let me move in? I can’t be a nun, though the celibacy part is a lock, and I can’t promise not to disturb you, but I’ll do my best to play by your rules. I’ve had a tough week, disappointed a lot of people, and I would like pie.”
He should’ve told her where the market was so she could go buy Sara Lee, but she stood there with her hands on her hips, with hair escaping her clip and curling around her face, with red cheeks and over-bright eyes, and he was being a shit, because Flick Dalgetty made him twitch with irritation.
Which was how he came to be making Grandma Bel’s peach pie on a Friday night, to Talking Heads’s “Psycho Killer,” for the roommate who wasn’t a ghost and wasn’t a nun, who he was unaccountably bothered by.
Chapter Four
Who knew it took an hour to bake a peach pie from scratch? No one in Flick’s life had ever cooked any kind of pie. They bought them at Walmart, and they came in a box, and they took twenty minutes to reheat if you bothered with the oven and about five if you were impatient and used the microwave.
Everyone in her family had been impatient. Mostly they ate pie cold and the dessert default was ice cream.
She wouldn’t have asked Tom to make pie if she’d known how long it took. Now she had to eat the pie, which wasn’t the hardship; she wanted the pie, it was the hanging around while he made the pie that was the issue.
Tom clearly didn’t like her, or want her living here, and that was a problem. And hell, she’d known that and yet once she’d learned his address and asking price, she’d jumped in feet first, like always, because the solution in front of you was always a better option than the one that might never materialize.
What an end to a disagreeable week. Resigning had not gone well. Turning down the counteroffer even less well. Her timing was bad. The firm was busy, and clients relied on her. She’d been made to feel she was letting the whole place down by quitting now, and instead of excusing herself and going to her room when she’d encountered Tom and his fried chicken, she’d gone and reignited the cold war between them, right when he’d started to sound more interesting than a ruggedly handsome boulder.
And she hadn’t mentioned the job or the move to her family yet.
Roller coaster was right. Sometimes she made herself feel sick with the twisty machinations of her life.
At least pie-cooking time allowed her to escape the living room and change out of her work clothes. She took her cue from Tom and pulled on yoga pants and a sloppy top that hung to mid-thigh. He was barefoot, so she didn’t worry about shoes. He’d see her chipped toenail polish, but that detail hardly mattered. He’d seen her temper and her childishness.
“He really brings out the best in you, Felicity.” She washed her face, removing what traces of makeup, untouched through the day, had remained. Her hair was a mess, but this wasn’t a date. She didn’t need to look like anything except comfortable, so she pulled it out of its band and left it loose, shoved back behind her shoulders.
She looked pale and tired.
Annoying that Tom looked as good out of his corporate wardrobe as in. He had the chest and shoulders to make a T-shirt look sexy and the square jaw of a cartoon hero. No denying it, her housemate was a looker for a boulder.
Annoying that the man cooked so well. Though anything that wasn’t reheated leftovers was good as far as Flick was concerned. Still, annoying. Bet he took back that invitation to eat together again. For about five minutes, it had sounded damn near neighborly, before he said she’d burn out and implied she was a lousy lay.
She stopped with her hand on the fashionably chromed door handle of her room. “I made a man who doesn’t like me talk about his dead mom and cook pie. Go me.”
She’d be lucky to taste the pie through the guilt of that. She’d eat, make the appropriate nom-nom noises, offer to clean up and quit the scene before she could do any further damage to her tenuous living arrangement in the nicest apartment she’d ever been in.
