Outside The Lines:: Third Person Narration (4 page)

Chapter Three

MAYBE SHE should have tried stamp collecting or scrapbooking.
 
Skiing now seemed ambitious. Stupid. Suicidal.
 

On the other hand, Juliette was proud just to be up here, standing at the top of the bunny slope.
 
And they’d only had to stop the lift twice, once at the bottom and once at the top, to drag her out of the snow.
 

The air was glittering bright and blue and smelled of pine trees and snow, so cold and fresh it burned her nostrils every time she inhaled.
 
The burn distracted her from the sight of the sheer mountainside dropping away below her.
 

Her belly rolled.

Excitement. This was
excitement
. Right?

The sun burned hot in the mountain air, and most people had disrobed down to shirts and pants. A few reckless snowboarders even wore baggy shorts with long johns.

She followed suit, undressing down to a thermal top and slick ski pants, her puffy, new, and extremely expensive jacket stored uselessly in a rented locker below.
 
Her gloves were on, goggles on the top of her head, ready to be snapped down at a moment’s notice.
 
She was ready to rumble.

She stared down the snow-covered hill.
 
People shot past her, laughing and having fun.
 
She eyed them warily, then wiggled her fingers and bent forward at the hips, the way everyone else seemed to be doing it.
 
Then she straightened again.
 
The mountain was big. Really big.
 

She bent forward. Then straightened.
 

As she stood there, debating whether to try the bending-over step again, someone skied up beside her with a competent-sounding sluice of snow. It stopped. And stayed. A large, unmoving shadow.

She turned and peered up into the handsome, five-o’clock-shadowed face of Johnny Danger.
 

“What the fuck are you doing, Jauntie?”
 

“Holy Mother of God!” she gasped the Catholic cry of alarm from her youth reflexively—guilt was a powerful mnemonic—and leapt backward.
 
Unfortunately, she was trapped by the skis and couldn’t actually leap anywhere, so instead she tipped over backward and sat down hard, knees bent.
 

She glared up at the large dark shape of him. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
 

“I asked first,” he said.

She scowled. “I’m at the top of a mountain wearing skis, Johnny.
 
What do you think I’m doing?”

He looked at her doubtfully.
 
“I have no idea.”

“What are
you
doing here?” she said again, trying not to look like an idiot sitting in the snow. “How’d you find me?”

“You told people you were skiing.”

“There are a lot of mountains.”
 

“You told Roxy you were going to Destiny Falls. This hill’s best for people who don’t know how to ski.”

“What makes you think I don’t know how to ski?” she demanded indignantly.

“I’m psychic.” He reached down and hauled her up out of the snow.

“But why use your psychic powers on me?” she complained, struggling to her feet. “Why are you here?”
 

“Because you weren’t at the meeting this morning.”

“But…why would I have been at the meeting?”

“Because I left you thirty-five messages about it last night. And again this morning.”

“Oh.”

“Because my client is pissed.
 
Because they want this divorce finalized by year’s end, and you’re not answering your phone. Or texts.
 
Your receptionist isn’t in, your door is locked, and you have a Gone Fishing sign hanging on it.” His gaze was glacial, his voice just shy of a growl.

“I don’t have a receptionist,” she muttered as she scrambled for her phone. Was she not getting reception?
 

“Because reading your valuation is like reading science fiction.”

She slid her gaze up slowly from the phone screen. “Science
fiction
?”
 

“Science
fucking
fiction,” he clarified, his eyes hard.
 

Juliette felt the stirrings of anger.
 
Uh-oh.
 
Stirrings were a bad thing.
 
She kept herself purposefully unstirred.
 
And unshaken, for that matter.
 
She was practically inert.
 

Except right now, she was starting to feel angry.
   

“Well, Mr. Danger, I’m very sorry to piss off your client, but perhaps if the information I needed had been provided in the first place, maybe if I hadn’t had such a hard time accounting for all their money—”

“All her money.”

“And they’ve got two rental properties—”

“
She
has two rental properties.”

“And an LLC—”

“
Her
LLC.”

Juliette met his eye. “Which she says he opened. In her name.”

“Exactly,” he said slowly.  “
Her
name. Her properties. Her LLC. Not his. And so they appear in her valuation.
 
Not his.”

She hesitated. “If Judge Billings did that to avoid some kind of liability himself, well…that might not be legal.”

“That’s not your job.”

She leaned closer and said real quietly, “I have some bad news for you, Danger: I’m not too good at following rules.”

He leaned nearer too, so their mouths were extremely close.  Incendiarily close.  “I have some bad news for you, Jauntie: neither am I.
 
And you’re fucked.
 
Get ready to explain your valuation in court.”
 

They both straightened again, fast.

“We could argue about this all day,” she said irritably.

He said nothing. She felt her heart drop a little. Because none of that mattered. If she was wrong…. Her business was small and struggling. Mrs. Billings was her doorway, her portal, her starting gate. If she screwed this up....

“Face it, Jauntie, your valuation was off.
 
By over a hundred thousand.”
 

“That’s a lot to be off,” she retorted.

“That’s my point.”

“I wasn’t off.”

The zipper of his microfleece pullover winked at her as he leaned forward again, blinding her for a second. “Your valuation for the judge came in almost two K higher than the previous one.”

She tipped a little closer too, hoping something of hers winked at him. “Then maybe whoever did the previous one doesn’t know how to do valuations.”
 

“That would be Dan.”

She froze. “Dan Masters?”
 

“Yep.”

“I thought it was you,” she said, still whispering.

He shook his head slowly.
 
“He’s an expert,” he said softly.
 

Their eyes were inches apart.  Small puffs of steam came out of their angry mouths. Johnny was emitting a lot of heat.
 
Time to back off.
 

She tipped closer and said, real soft, “Apparently not.”
 

Johnny’s eyes hardened.
 
It was like a steel cage clicked shut over them. “See you in court, Jauntie,” he whispered like a lover.

A fissure of heat exploded inside her belly and a cold shot of fear trickled down her chest.  She was a veritable weather front.
 

She was also screwed.

Dan Masters was more than an expert, he was one of the most well-respected accountants in Mergers & Acquisitions.
 
He’d done buyouts for Fortune 100 companies. He probably did valuations in his sleep.
 

She hadn’t known she was going up against him. Not that she would have declined, but she might have…she didn’t know.
 
Done something different.

No.
 
There was nothing she’d have done different.
 

But if this went to court, if her perhaps
enthusiastic
valuation went up against Dan Masters’, she was going down in flames.
 

She straightened slowly.  

“I get it,” she puffed at him softly.  “You don’t like to be wrong.”

“I don’t like to have my clients fucked with.”

Piercing green and filled with anger, his gaze held hers in silence.
 
They glared at each other for a few beats.
 
Then, because staring Johnny Danger in the eye was not always a wise thing to do, she snapped the goggles down onto her face.

“You say fuck too much.”
 
She turned to face the mountain.
 
“You probably
do
fuck too much. You should go to confession.”
 

He laughed. “And you should take a ski lesson.”

She glared down the hill in silence, across the snowy tundra awaiting her, then took a puffy death grip on the poles and started to push off.
 

“Jesus, not like that.”
 
He reached out and grabbed her elbow. “Are you always this reckless?”

“Never,” she assured him vehemently, sliding sideways as her feet started going down the hill, while his hand held her back.
 
“Never,
ever
, am I reckless. First time ever.”

Which wasn’t true at all.
 

It was the second time.
 

Her skis continued their downhill slide at an oblique angle away from them.
 
Johnny didn’t release her arm, so she ended up gradually lowering herself to the ground on her bottom, which was, all things considered, the safest place for her bottom to be, rather than pitched up the side of an evergreen tree.
 
They were all over, looming ominously just beside the dangerously narrow ski run.
 
Shouldn’t the runs be wider?
 
And have bumpers?
 
Like a bowling alley?

Johnny looked down at her partially reclined body, his grip the only thing keeping her from plunging to almost certain death. He shifted sideways, as if he knew how to shift sideways in skis.
 
How nice for him.
 

Then, in some gymnastic-like move, he crouched down beside her, so their bodies were beside each other. His hand was still holding her up.
 

 
“Never, huh?” he said softly.

“Well, once,” she admitted. “When I was fifteen.”
 

“What happened when you were fifteen?” His voice was quiet, not like they were telling secrets or anything, but then again, they were. Only he didn’t know it.

She looked into his eyes. “I went skiing.”

He stared for a second, then burst out laughing.
 
It made his hard green eyes crinkle at the corners, relaxed his grimly handsome, five-o’clock shadowed face into a drop-dead, make-your-heart-stutter smile, all aimed at her.
 

Actually, when she was fifteen and recklessly skiing, she also recklessly slept with Patrick O’Faolain, the blue-eyed hoodlum with a smile like sin and a heart of fool’s gold who’d charmed his way onto their ski bus trip and into her hotel room and she’d sworn off recklessness and blue eyes and skiing ever since.

But now she was at the top of a ski slope, sitting in the snow, looking up at a guy whose last name was Danger, and she admitted it, she was feeling kind of reckless. Kind of breathless. With a hot little shiver cording through her, deep inside, down low. It was hot and thrilling and woke her up in places she didn’t know had been asleep.
 

That was bad.

Because Johnny Danger was the darkest spot set against the brilliantly blue sky.
 
Which described him perfectly: dark danger. And that hot little shiver was just the sort of thing that could get a girl in trouble.
 
Make her think she wanted a taste of his particular brand of danger.
 
But better women than Juliette had been eaten alive by Johnny’s dark, sensual allure.
 

“What am I going to do with you, Jauntie?” he said softly.
 

She looked up into his green eyes and dark allure and frowned. “Go home and tell your client he’s a wanna-be criminal.”

The smile snapped off like a light switch.
 
“How about I tell yours you’ve never done a valuation before in your life?”

She gasped.
 
How did he know that?
 
But it didn’t mean she wasn’t good at it.
 
She had all the right qualifications. And she’d seen something Johnny’s partner hadn’t, which if you slowed down to think about it, was a bit concerning.
 
For him.

Unless it was she who was wrong.