Bear The Heat (Mating Call Dating Agency Book 3) (9 page)

Rory shot him a crossways look. “You mean like
Terminator
?

That’s pretty good.”

He nodded. “Among other things. Listen, do you think maybe...” he trailed off for a moment. “I’m terrible at this. You want to come watch some with me? I mean, I know you
do
, but it’s just a question of when.”

“I thought you said you weren’t any good at the whole smooth-talking thing?” Rory asked, trying her best not to throw him back on the ground and hop right on top. “I’ve got to finish a few things, and I have to figure out how the hell this fire started or I’m going to go crazy. But after that?”

“I have no idea why I’m saying yes to this,” Rory said, “but...

actually yeah, I do have an idea. It might have something to do with the way you keep looking at me, and how you haven’t stopped touching my shoulder since the first time you did it. If you think you’re terrible at this—whatever
this
is—then you need to guess again.”

“Maybe I’m only good at it because it’s you, and I really feel it,” he said. The easy way he smiled made the center of Rory’s normally rather cold core melt just a little. She smiled back at
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him and tilted her head toward the hand that was still on her shoulder.

“I’m not entirely sure why I’m agreeing to go watch a bunch of steroid-laden testosterone movies, but... yeah it might be because it’s you, and because
I
really feel it. Eve really knows what she’s doing, huh?”

He gave her one last smile, one last gentle kiss on the cheek that lingered for just a moment longer than he had to linger, warming her skin and prickling a trail down her neck. “She does,”

he said as he turned around. His hand slipped down her arm, they grasped hands for just a moment and then they let go.

“Well, and also I need someone to get rid of this tick.”

“Oh shut up!” Rory almost howled with laughter, and Breaker’s huge shoulders shook. “Text me your address. I won’t be long,” she said.

He nodded as he plodded off, and then when he was just out of earshot, she continued her thought, speaking it out loud to the empty lot and the carcass of a house. “It won’t be long, because I’m not entirely sure how long I can keep myself from letting my heart actually pound its way out of my chest.”

She let out a long, patient exhale that seemed to drip from her lips. “Yeah,” she said, as he climbed up into the cab of his truck – a mid-90s Ram she thought – and looked back in her direction as he turned the key.

He nodded, and smiled, never letting his eyes leave hers, not even at this considerable distance. “See you soon,” he mouthed.

Rory just smiled.

As soon as the truck rumbled to life and went on its way, she let out another long-held breath and sat down heavily on the stoop leading into the burned house. “Holy
shit
,” she announced.

“Did I really just make out with a guy I met for a half hour in the lobby of a dating agency?”

Before she could really process what was going on, her phone—the one she used for making calls—buzzed in her back
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pocket. “
Need you to look at something
,” the text read. It was from Monte, and whenever he actually asked for help openly, it was really something. “
I can’t tell what I’m doing, and I think it might
be a pretty terrible mistake, so I need your help
.”

“
Be right there—office?
” she texted back, knowing the answer before it came. Of course it was the office. What the hell else would Monte be doing that he needed such urgent help with?

And anyway it’s not like he really did anything
except
working.

“
Home
,” came the reply.

She didn’t even bother to follow up. If he wanted her at his house, something was
definitely
wrong. A laundry list of possible problems ran through her mind, but the one that worried her the most was that he was having some kind of health problem – Monte never did have the best heart, she thought, and his blood pressure was pretty high.

Rory ran to her car, not even thinking about the fact that in the space of a half hour, two things that she never expected had happened – she had apparently wandered into a guy who at least on the surface appeared to like her, and second, Monte asked for help at his house.

There wasn’t time to think, not really, but when she pulled into the curbside parking space in front of her boss’s red brick craftsman house, she got a shock of energy that almost took her breath away.

“What if this is it?” she asked her empty car. “What if
he
is it?

Oh my God, I’m going insane. I’m talking to my air freshener and I’m thinking about living out some
Leave it to Beaver
fantasy with a bear I just met. I should probably get my shit together, and take things one step at a time. If I don’t, I’m going to end up taking forty steps at once, getting myself all screwed up over this guy, and then having my heart broken.

“And yeah, I really need to stop talking to my goddamn car.”

“Rory?” a voice from the open front door came, loud and clear. “I need your help!”

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Instinctually, she kicked open her Acura’s door, which had been kicked open so many times that a spider’s web of cracks and splits were all over the driver’s side door. As soon as she hopped out of the car and balanced on the curb on just her big toes— there are other benefits to mink-hood aside from the sense of smell—her boss tottered out of the house, shirtless.

“Oh my God, Monte!” she shouted, running to his side.

“What happened? Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?”

That’s when she noticed the truly horrific, eye-abusing, monstrosity around his neck. “Wait, why the hell are you wearing a tie covered in naked hula dancers?” She paused for a second, then grabbed the fat end of the tie and held it up in her hand, as though inspecting it more carefully in the sunlight would reveal she’d somehow mistaken what was printed on it.

No such luck.

“I need an explanation, and I need it now, otherwise I’m not calling the ambulance, I’m calling the guys in the white suits with the long-handled butterfly nets. You
can’t
be serious about wearing this out of the house, especially not if you’re going on a...”

“Date?” they both said at the same time.

Rory blinked her eyes hard and then pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, no, no,” she said. “No, this can’t be happening. I am
not
seeing this right now.”

The end of the tie lay lazily on top of Monte’s slight potbelly.

“What? What’s so wrong with me having a date? Dora’s a nice girl and she makes me laugh and—”

“No, that part makes me happy,” Rory said. “Really happy.

No, what I’m talking about is this thing on your neck. Honey, if you came to a date with me wearing that thing, I’d start looking for the
Candid Camera
crew.”

“Really?” he asked, innocently. “I thought it was kinda funny.”

“Yeah,” she answered sharply. “I think I finally realized why it took this long for you to get a date. Come on in here. I might not
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be able to make sure you two hit it off, but I can damn sure prevent her spitting a drink all over you as she laughs, and then running away.”

“That was sorta harsh,” Monte said, but as Rory entered his house ahead of him, he smiled. “But thanks, I couldn’t do it without you.”

“This is really, really cute,” Rory said.

“The tie? I thought—”

“Oh yeah no. God no,” she said after a brief pause. “That tie...

I hope you got that in a raffle at a tiki bar. I’m not even sure how that thing got made without someone throwing up on it.”

She started laughing, and then got the idea that maybe her friend was somehow actually attached to that horror show of an accoutrement.
On the one hand, I’m doing him a favor
, she thought.
But on the other... I mean I’m attached to my Welcome
Back, Kotter lunchbox, so it’s not like everyone makes the most
rational choices all the time
.

“I bought it when I was on vacation in Key West,” he said. “I went into something called a pie shop, and was a little surprised to find that they weren’t selling dessert.” He paused for a moment, considering his thoughts. “Or rather they
were
, just not the kind you eat. Wait, no, I suppose you could eat it, but,” he blustered to a halt. When Rory looked at him next, after emerging from his closet with four different ties, he was bright red.

“So you found a hooker hangout? Red light district?” she asked, loving the shade he was turning. “I gotta admit, calling it a pie store is fairly ingenious. So, how’d you like it?”

“The pie? I, uh... I mean, I had good pie, but not... there,” he started sputtering. “Look! I didn’t make whoopie with any hookers, okay! I just bought the tie because I needed to use their
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restroom and didn’t want to be one of those people who just go into a place to use the john.”

“That’s my Monte,” Rory said with a smile. “Never wanting to offend a hooker.”

Sailing right past the fact that poor Monte had managed to turn almost purple, Rory buttoned the cuffs of his shirt wrists, and wrapped one of her ties around his neck. “This one’s pretty good. The blue matches the shirt, but,” she scrunched up her lips and frowned. “Nope, won’t work.”

“Why not?” he asked. “You said it’s nice and I need to get going. I’m meeting Dora at Chez Justine in a half hour.”

“Doesn’t match your face,” she said, trying to hold back the laughter as she turned him to the mirror. “Those two shades of purple don’t really work together. I think we better go with a red.”

“Oh, damn it!” Monte threw up his hands in an incredibly overdramatic gesture. “I’ll never understand how you can keep yourself from laughing like that. It’s like you’re Bob Newhart except actually funny.”

A shadow fell over Rory’s face as she sat down and saw the picture of Monte, and his wife and kids on the dresser top. “How do you do it?” she asked.

“Well first you take down your pants, and then you ask the other person if it’s okay. Then you’ll take down their drawers.”

Rory smiled, but her eyes were distant. “You just said ‘drawers’,” she said flatly, and laughed softly. “No, I mean... when your wife died, you didn’t really miss a beat.”

Monte shrugged. “I missed a lot of them. I screwed up so many cases that I can’t really keep count. And past that, I was a goddamn train wreck for years. But now, having the twins helps a lot. They remind me of her, you know?”

Nodding slowly, Rory had a thought, but hardly wanted to share it, because it was more than a little morbid, and definitely not fitting for the light mood of jocular sexual humor they’d
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fallen into, like they always did. But then, Monte sat down next to her and put an arm around Rory’s shoulder. “You mean how do I date Dora?”

“Er, well yeah. I mean, I’ve heard you talk about Ella and sometimes it’s like she’s still alive.”

Monte ran his hand through his smoothed down hair. “It is,”

he said. “But other times it’s very lonely. When the twins started high school, they started badgering me to see someone. That’s not a pun,” he said with a grin. “Those two girls are more perceptive than I give them credit for. Always have been, I guess.

It was hard on them, you know, coming up and losing their mom. I think in the back of my mind I always denied myself that sort of comfort because I knew... or I thought, anyway, that it would upset them.”

“It doesn’t?” she asked. “I mean they
are
smarter than you, so that makes sense.”

The two of them smiled for a moment. “They are that,”

Monte finally said. “But look, there comes a time when you either have to just give up on yourself and get buried in whatever—school, work, your quest to single handedly eat an entire gallon of moose tracks ice cream in one sitting—and really those are your only choices.”

“I almost made it,” she said. “Got close anyway.”

“And then you threw up. But listen to me. I don’t know where this is going with Dora. She’s wonderful, she makes me laugh, and for some reason she seems to like me. But I can’t worry about the future anymore. At some point, it just makes no damn sense to keep worrying about things you don’t know are going to happen.”

They sat silently for a moment, Monte examining his tie in the mirror, and Rory processing what he’d just said. “I think I know what you mean,” she said. “I really, really do.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Over the six years of their working relationship, Monte had proven to have a preternatural ability to
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tell when something was bothering Rory. To be fair, she didn’t do much to hide it, but still. “You got that look on your face.”

Rory stretched her fingers out, then clenched them into fists so that they popped. “Nothing, really,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Do you think you’re going to actually get that one over on me? Do you actually think I’m that dumb?” He reached over and tousled her hair. Monte was the only person on the planet who was allowed to get away with that and keep the tousling hand. “Come on, spill it. Is it about that firebear?”