C's Comeuppance: A Bone Cold--Alive novel (5 page)

“Yeah. Mother’s a far bigger problem. Hovers like a hummingbird.” Jemma let out her breath. “But that’s neither here nor there. What can I do you for?”

Lyla laughed at the turn of words. “I’d like to say it’s what I can do for you…”

“I’m all ears.”

“C came back last night after he’d visited DamSite.” She paused and Jemma didn’t help the conversation with any ahs and ums. “Did you really send him over there?”

“Lock, stock, and ponytail.”

There was silence between them. “You’re not going to help me here, are you?”

“Nah, Lyla, listening to you try to ask me something you don’t want to is more fun than I’ve had in weeks.” She paused. “But I’ll give you a little help. Just blurt out what you want.”

“Hmm.” Jemma could envision Lyla sitting at her kitchen table, drumming her fingers on the placemat or slowly stirring her breakfast tea. Was T there, too, being the helpful devoted husband he seemed to be? That she’d ever know that kind of love—what a fairy tale! “He, ah, well, the Jemma he described just didn’t sound like you.”

Jemma wrinkled her brow. “He’s not exactly the normal client, you know. Barging in here, demanding a house as big or better than the one y’all are building.” She wasn’t making excuses, just giving an explanation.

“Jemma.” Lyla paused, took a deep breath. “Honey, he used the term frigid bitch.”

“Oh.” She closed her eyes, set her jaw, let her resolve strengthen just like she’d done so many times before. “I haven’t been called that in years. Good to know I haven’t lost my touch.” Her sarcasm rankled even herself. Her concentration was broken as the front door opened and footsteps tracked across the outer office. She looked up to see who entered. “Tell me, Lyla, since when do you defend your brother-in-law?”

“Since he’ll tell anyone and everyone he meets about you and it won’t be complimentary. I don’t want to see you lose any business.” She paused. “I don’t want to see you hurt.”

Jemma’s eyes settled on the newcomer as he stood in the doorway into her office. “You think I might lose his business?”

“Seems like you don’t want it.” Lyla’s voice was quiet.

“Some clients you just can’t discourage enough.” She covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and mouthed ‘Good morning, Mr. Samuels.’ In response he raised the piccolo to his lips and started a haunting melody.

“Jemma, tell me I’m not hearing what I’m hearing.”

“In the flesh, Lyla.”

“Do you want Sam to come fetch him, drag him away?”

“That’s up to you. You don’t want me to send him home?”

“I’ve been trying to do that for six days. See if you can have any better luck.” Her tone was somewhere between worried and resigned. The phone clicked.

Jemma stared at the receiver and carefully put it in its cradle. “DamSite not have anything either?”

C lowered the piccolo, its plaintive tones hanging in the still air. “Your competition was most helpful.” He dropped the piccolo on the chair in front of her desk, choosing instead to sit on the mahogany edge. Leaning over, his hair swept the desktop. “I know there’s stuff in the area, but I don’t want them to show me.” He still wore the clothes from the day before.

“They’ve already mentioned it to you, Mr. Samuels. It would be unethical for me…”

“Yeah, right. Ethics. That’s what I believe in.” He straightened, folded his arms across his chest.

“Why me?”

Now she got the grin that had laid low many a groupie over the past decade. “You waved a red flag in front of a charging bull, Ms. Jemma Lovelace. And I do love a challenge.”

She licked her lips and pushed away from the desk with both hands firmly gripping the edge. “Mr. Samuels, I—”

He leaned over again, caught her wrists. “Call me Charles.”

***

“Mr. Samu—Charles.” C smiled as she changed his name. Still, even as Jemma pulled on her hands, his long slender fingers were advancing up her forearms. “Please let go of me.”

He would have resisted the words, would have continued his frontal assault on her perceived frigidity if she hadn’t raised those golden-flecked hazel eyes to his. He might have imagined the tears there, but the tremor of her upper lip was real and Eddie C knew when to back off.

“Your loss.” He tossed his mane of hair over his shoulders and tried to toss off the rebuff as well, but had little experience doing so. “You a dike?”

He watched her expression change from protest to disbelief to anger. “
Mister
Samuels—” no friendly Charles salutation here “—I find you most offensive.” Now she used those same strong hands to push herself up from the chair and away from the desk. Away from him. C caught himself in a quick daydream about those hands and his anatomy before drawing his attention back to her face. “One.” She raised a finger. “Get off my desk. Two.” Another finger joined it, the ‘v’ for victory symbol a bit misplaced. “Has no woman ever turned you down for anything?”

C scooted off her desk and stood on the other side. He studied the top of the piece of furniture, finally holding up one finger. “One woman and she didn’t get a chance to turn me down because she hated me the instant she saw me.”

“Lyla.”

“My beloved sister-in-law. The one and same.” He set his mouth, found himself considering decisions he never had before. He stole a look at this fascinating woman and at the same time had to ask himself why he found her so. She now had her hands on her waist, her lips set in a derisive curl. Was it merely the challenge of the situation for him? “Is it me you hate?” He paused. “Or my persona?”

That brought her head up. A woman of ethics. Someone who could separate Edward Charles from Eddie C even if she didn’t know she could. “I don’t hate you. I just find you offensive. Like I said.”

“Edward Charles or Eddie C?”

“I didn’t know there was a difference.”

“It’s been a long time since there was.” Like maybe when he was twelve. He pulled at his cut-offs, tucked in the back of his T-shirt. “Miss Lovelace, I like this part of the country. It reminds me of home without all the stigmas associated with growing up poor white trash.” He saw her eyes soften.
God, this would be easy.
“Lyla’s probably lifted her motel ban on me by now, so I tell you what.” He picked up the piccolo. “I’m going to shower and change clothes and come back looking like a real client.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Say by eleven? That give you enough time to see if you can really find me something to look at?”

Jemma nodded.

He would like to know what she was thinking. But there was time enough for that.

***

What were you thinking, Jemma? What were you thinking?

Jemma stood behind her desk as the front door closed softly behind C. Even the bell hadn’t tinkled.

Slowly she pulled the desk chair under herself and opened the computer’s property list, but it blurred in her vision. Her eyes fixed on a point on the far wall and she stared ahead blindly.

What exactly had happened in the last few minutes? She tried to run through the event and make some sense of it, see where she’d lost the upper hand—if she’d ever had it. She’d called Lyla. C had come in in the middle of that conversation. She’d hung up with her friend and now, regrettably, there were fences to mend there. But why? She forced her mind back to C. He was coming in at eleven. How exactly had that appointment happened?

Okay, okay, Jemma, calm down,
she told herself.
He tells you to call him Charles, then he won’t let go, then he does, looking like rejection is a new experience,
which he then told you it was. Why you, Jemma? Why is he so doggedly determined to disrupt your life?

Focus! He accuses you of being gay, you order him off the desk, and he stands there and, well, he looks like he’s taking stock of the situation. Weighing the pros and cons, trying to decide which goal to pursue, trying to decide whether to go or stay, trying to decide whether to pick up the gauntlet or let it lie.

Did you challenge him? You didn’t mean to. Truly. You just wanted him out. But why? Really, really why?

Not going to be another notch on someone’s bedpost. Not going to give in like a starry-eyed groupie. Not going to give him the satisfaction—

Jemma blinked. Not going to give any man the satisfaction. That was it, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter that he was Eddie C. He was a man, a man who seemed hell-bent on a course to have her or embarrass her. In any case, she’d still be alone.

Her thoughts trailed off as the front door slammed open, bell clanging wildly. “Good morning!” Carolyn cheerfully called as she waved in Jemma’s general direction and headed for the coffeepot. “Got anything going this morning yet?”

Jemma turned her attention to the computer. “Appointment at eleven. Looks like I’ll be out of the office the rest of the day.”

Chapter Five

I
t must be his day for challenges. While Eddie C couldn’t say the Blue Dream Inn had welcomed him with open arms, the old man at the desk had been more tolerant without an early morning warning call from Lyla. He insisted C take the last room in the back and preferred that the red car be parked around the side of the building and out of sight of the main street.

C hadn’t been thrilled but had handed over the no-limit gold card and signed the register like a normal citizen.

The motel room was depressing. The tiled bathroom had seen better days and the bed was lumpy. The place would do for a shower, but he’d go into Dallas to spend the night. Like he had thought about doing at two thirty this morning when he’d pulled into the hotel parking lot in a north Dallas suburb. But he hadn’t been inclined to register, so he’d simply settled the Porsche between two family minivans and leaned the seat back. He woke as the sun rose and the van on the right was slammed into gear. The fast-food place next door had done for breakfast and a quick toilette.

Now he combed his hair back and secured it with a silver beaded band. He had no khakis, having consigned them to the realm of casual-Fridays businessmen and golfers, but there was a clean pair of jeans folded at the bottom of the duffel. The knit shirt was black, never worn. He looked good in dark colors, knew they showcased his blondness to the best effect, but they were damn hard to keep from fading. He’d finally just put in a standing order for three new ones every month from some Rodeo Drive boutique. They arrived like clockwork and his credit got to stretch its no-limits.

He secured the leather sandals and then stepped back from the wavy mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Damn! If he didn’t know better, he’d say he looked like fit company for anyone.

Even one Miss Jemma Lovelace, a woman whose time had come to join the Eddie C pantheon. She just didn’t know it yet. Showing her was going to be just the challenge he needed.

***

The short list started with the Brady place and could have ended there if Jemma hadn’t scrolled through another screen and stopped on Norm Hudson’s property. He’d finally decided to sell out the remainder of the family farm. He had shocked the community six months ago by agreeing to sell the back two hundred acres to Lyla and T for their new home. No one had been able to adequately figure out why, except the old man seemed to have a soft, if somewhat gruff and hard-edged, spot for Lyla in his heart.

Perhaps the revenue from that sale had whetted his appetite for more. He had no heirs. He had assured the breakfast bunch at the Quik-Lee that nothing was going to waste and he would die neither pauper nor prince. Jemma had heard he’d stopped in at the travel agency and requested information on around the world tours, but she’d believe that when she got a postcard from the southern hemisphere. In the meantime, the fact that he’d gone to New England with a group he usually ridiculed for such pantywaist endeavors was enough to have a certain element ready to commit him to a mental institution.

Still, Jemma felt a certain connection with the old man. Her mother and Norm’s wife, Bertie’s sister, had been friends when Jemma was a child. She’d spent many afternoons out at the Hudson place. The farmhouse was nondescript and worth more now as architectural curiosity than dwelling. Norm’s neglect of his home began when Edna went into the nursing home after a massive stroke. Just like her father, Jemma mused, except the Lovelaces had the resources and inclination to keep JT at home. But Norm had been a faithful companion to her during the years she lay in an incapacitated state. He simply had not cared about his home. Jemma had been saddened when she’d toured it to put it on the “for sale” list. Now she was hesitant to show it since the first two couples she’d taken there had beaten her back to the car in their haste to leave. But C? Well, he might feel right at home in the rat’s nest.

Jemma heard the front door edge open and Carolyn’s voice go up into its cheery-surprise range. The intercom buzzed. Maybe it wasn’t C.

“Jemma, Eddie—uh, Mr. Samuels—is here to see you.”

Waiting in the anteroom like a normal person? Jemma felt the rules of the game he was attempting to play changing even as she sat there and debated having him come in or not. “Send him in, Carolyn.”

She almost didn’t recognize him. Hair pulled back, shirt hanging casually on him, the jeans crisp, the cologne—oh, she had to stop this line of thought. And she was concerned about
Norm’s
mental health?

She reached around to the printer. He stood by the chair as if waiting to be invited to sit. “Please, have a seat.” She avoided giving him a name.

He sat, crossed his legs ankle to knee, was the model of decorum. “Find anything?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “How long do you plan on keeping up this game?”
“How long can you play?”

There
was C, hiding behind a veneer of politeness. She laid her hands atop the printouts. “We have two properties to look at.” She slid papers around, then over to him. “That one is probably your best bet. The Brady place. You can see from the pictures that it’s unfinished—”