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“We met two months ago.” Snagging my phone when it rings again, I roll my eyes and hold my hand to the receiver. “You can plan your own white-dress wedding, Aubree. But leave me and my shit-show alone.” Then I smile. “And I mean that with love.”
Bringing the phone to my ear, I remove my hand from the bottom. “Doctor Mayet speaking.”
“Mayet,” Seraphina grumbles. “Mayor Lawrence is on line three.”
“Ugh.” I drop my face into my hand and sigh. “Fine.”
Reaching out, I kill our call, then I press the button for line three and bring the phone back to my ear. “Doctor Mayet speaking.”
“You’re a difficult woman to get in contact with, Doctor. Is your workload that crazy, or are you simply avoiding me?”
“You ambushed me.” I poke Aubree’s rump to nudge her away from my desk. “You said I didn’t have to go to your stupid charity thing, so I chose not to. Then you had me attacked in my own building, squeezed into a gown, shoved into a car, and then tossed onto a stage to accept a medal I can neither appreciate, nor find. What kinda bullshit is that?”
Across from me, Aubree’s cheeks flame.
“I didn’t want to go, Lawrence!”
“You found yourself involved in a high-profile case, Doctor Mayet.” Justin Lawrence, former shark lawyer and district attorney for the state, speaks calmly. Smugly. “You might have acted in self-defense that day back in December, but the fact is, you killed a man. You killed amayor. What do you expect me to do but spin it so you’re a hero?”
“It was fine as it was!” I growl. “The papers reported on it. It was publicly noted I acted in self-defense. No one was even talking about it anymore.”
“Everyonewas talking about it.” He chuckles. “Just not to your face. I was the incoming mayor, I was the fresh face to Copeland City’s administration, and at least a dozen times a day, I was answering questions about how you and I would work together. It was a brewing storm that could have become catastrophic, so I got ahead of it and put an end to it. You got a shiny medallion and a free meal for your time, and I got to put to bed any rumors that our city officials can’t work together.”
“You lied to me.”
“Would you have come if I told you the entire truth?”
“Absolutely not!”
Silence hangs for a beat as Justin’s breath comes out on a soft laugh. “I rest my case. It’s all done now, Mayet. The worst has passed, and everyone has moved on. Now talk to me about the George Stanley.”
“Talk to you about the George Stanley?” I parrot. “Sure. We need five hundred thousand dollars added to the budget so we can buy a new CT machine in the next thirty days, and we also need more staff in the tox lab. They’re overworked and understaffed, and because of it, I’m not getting my reports as quickly as I could.”
“Oh, well…”Money, money, money.“That’s a significant expense, Doctor Mayet.”
“Uh-huh. Probably shouldn’t have called me, then.”
Hanging up the phone, I look to Aubree and stop when she watches me with an expression like she’s sucking on a lemon. Her lips are pinched and her cheeks are red. “What?”
“You just verbally destroyed the freakin’ mayor!”
“Eh.” Pushing up from my chair, I snag the file Aubree brought in and tuck it under my arm. “He’s fine. He considers me his daughter, and everyone knows daughters step up to their dads. It’s an unwritten rule.” I cross to my office door and open it. “Let’s go figure out what Mel has in common with the roadrunner dude. See if we can give the detectives a cause of death.”
“And by detectives,” Aubree dashes across the office to slip through the door, “you mean the one who asked you to marry him?”
I release the door with a huff and continue walking. “Lord help us both, it’s gonna be rocky.”
“Let’s get dinner at the bar tonight.” She bounces as she keeps up, smacking the elevator call button the second we’re close enough. “I’m ready to be a grownup and not freak out about Tim. Besides, no one cooks a burger the way he does. So at some point, I have to get over it, right? I have to adapt to watching him kiss some other bitch.”
“Uh-huh. And I’mcertainyou’re capable of such maturity.” Stepping into the elevator, I wait as she taps the button for the freezers on level two. “This is going to escalate before it gets better,” I mutter. “I know it.”
“It’s gonna be fine.” She crosses her arms and looks up at the ceiling of the elevator. “In fact, since we’re inside the Neutral Cube of Truth-Telling and Fantasy-Living, I should confide in you the fact that Tim carried me home last night.”
I look across at her and stare at the side of her face. “Yeah?”
“Mmhmm.” Her lips curl into a devious grin. “He carried me all the way. Then he put me in bed and said some stuff under his breath about how I’m a pain in his ass.”
I choke out a snigger and step off the Neutral Cube of Truth-Telling and Fantasy-Living when the doors open. “I think we already knew he felt that way.”
