Ready to Roll (2 page)

“I call everyone Toots, Toots.” She did. Had for years. It was a lot easier that way, and Janice worked with a preponderance of Texan men. Unchecked, they’d Hon and Sugar and Sweetie her down into some little gal who could be indulged, or not, when she made requests of them. But when she called them Toots, they took her orders.

“At work you can keep calling me Toots. You can even call me Toots when we’re out at happy hour or burger night. But in my house, Janice,” he emphasized her name, like he had to prove he knew it, which was ridiculous. She knew his name perfectly well. “I want to hear you say Miguel.”

Pollywogs had grown up and gone on a hopping rampage along her spine. Janice couldn’t swallow past the bullfrog lodged in her throat, and feared her mouth was hanging open as she got lost in visions of Miguel looming over her, taunting her with those firm full lips and those broad long fingers, demanding she call him by name. He’d withhold, refusing to serve up the goods, until she did.

Jerk.

If only she didn’t suddenly really want to call him Miguel.

Miguel held back the triumphant smile
he knew would get her fighting again. That was his Janice, always fighting since the day he met her. She never acted like it was a fight, the way she went through life grabbing it by the cojones, but he’d been watching her for enough years now to have figured it out. She attacked first, defeated her enemies—to Janice, just about everyone was an enemy—and strode on like a conquistador.

It had taken him trying a couple of different things, but he’d finally figured it out: he had to make her surrender.

She’d long ago lumped him in with all the rest of her vanquished foes. So long ago she had almost started to look at him as an ally. But becoming Janice’s ally was just about impossible. He’d tried getting her into bed by being friendly about it, and it was no good. Janice grabbed tight hold of her friends, but used part of that hold to keep them in her place. He’d seen it often enough, the way Serena and Liza and them turned to Janice for talks, but she never talked back. Not really. Not in a true letting them in way. And she’d done the same to him.

Miguel was not in the market for being held down by any woman, especially not Janice.

But he had plenty of ideas about turning the tables on her.

So he’d gone insurgent on her. Studied the enemy from within her camp, figured out how she worked, planned his campaign.

And now he was going to beat her at her own game, by attacking before she knew they were at war.

The first shot had been instructing her to show up for dinner. He’d gotten his first taste of victory when he’d heard her SUV pull into his driveway, and the flowers she’d hit him with were almost as good as a white flag.

She was disconcerted, and he’d kept her that way, touching her. Kissing her. Letting her stare at his bed, although that had almost backfired. Wondering what she was thinking, which positions she’d mentally placed the two of them in, and would they match his? Not that it mattered, because he intended to command that particular battle himself.

She’d recovered enough to turn away from the bedroom swinging, posturing as she trashed the tulips and trying to take him down with her damn Toots nonsense.

But it was a weak parry, and Miguel countered it with a thrust of his own. The first of many thrusts he would take that night, he was confident.

He moved closer, blocking her in between him and the sink in his little galley kitchen. She didn’t even try to hide the looks she darted to each side. Once down the hall to his bedroom, then a one-eighty to focus on the front door. But Miguel rotated one broad shoulder to the left, so if Janice wanted to see the front door, she was going to have to look past his deltoid to do so.

And no way was Janice looking past his deltoid.

He leaned a fraction of an inch closer and sniffed the air. Ignoring—as much as he could—her subtle scent of lemons, he said, “The empanadas smell ready. ‘Scuse me.”

And then he palmed her hip to move her a step to his right—closer to his bedroom—so he could grab the bright loomed potholder his littlest niece Anna Lucia had made for him. It was part of an almost-matching set, mostly pink and yellow with some navy strands that Anna Lucia claimed made it macho enough for him. Even if she had been giggling when she’d said it. Miguel had narrowed his eyes at her dad, but Joe had just shrugged. Like Miguel didn’t know what that shrug meant; like Joe hadn’t been shrugging fake-innocently at him for their entire lives. Only Mami believed in Joe’s shrugs.

Mami also believed Miguel was alone tonight, which in Miguel’s mind didn’t in the least forgive her intruding, just then when he was bending over the open oven door but feeling more heat from Janice’s eyes on his ass than from the three hundred and fifty degree heat surrounding his chicken poblano empanadas.

“Micky Mouse, you there?” Mami called as she walked in like she owned the place.

Miguel had only had the split second between hearing her key in the lock and her storming in to get a hold of himself. And to avoid dumping the pan of savory pastries on the floor. Anna Lucia’s potholders were cute enough, but weren’t as large as his hands. Miguel’s hanging on to the baking sheet while jerking up to stare in disbelief at his mother meant he real quickly had a rising red blister on the pad of his index finger. He said something very ungentlemanly in Spanish, because that was his native cursing tongue, and also because he didn’t want to offend Janice.

Except he forgot Janice had picked up a lot of Spanish working in the warehouse with him and his crew.

And also he forgot that Mami had started wearing her hearing aids all the time.

“Miguel Xavier!
Que dijiste frente a esta chica? ¿Y de cualquier forma, quien es ella? If you told me you had company coming I’d have made you something. You use Sylvie’s recipe for those? She uses too much pepper. Esta chica no se las va a comer, ademas es demasiado flaca.
”

The ‘nice girl,’ meanwhile, had shoved at his biceps until he’d slid the tray of food onto the countertop, flipped the oven door closed with her foot, and moved forward, holding a hand out to Mami.

“Soy Janice Newton.
Mucho gusto.”

And then Janice and Mami were chatting away, a mix of Spanish and English, and walking off to the living room. Janice was telling her about working with him, and excusing her poor Spanish because she’d grown up in a small Texas town with rudimentary high school language classes. Mami was telling Janice she had a charming accent and explaining about her sister Sylvie’s supposed incompetence with empanada fillings, an accusation Miguel had heard often enough. And he’d put just the right amount of pepper in the ones he’d made, so why Mami had to accuse him was a mystery.

Another mystery: why Mami had come in, shouting that excruciating childhood nickname, when she had to have seen Janice’s car in the drive. She was acting like she’d been surprised to find Janice there, but she’d also shown up twelve minutes after Janice. Just exactly the number of minutes it took for Anna Lucia, or her interfering jerk of a father, to notice Janice’s car from their house diagonally across the street, call Mami, and for Mami to drive over to Miguel’s house.

It figured. By rights, Miguel should learn to accept Mami’s inquisitiveness and just tell her when he had guests coming over. It would certainly suit Mami if he did. But he’d learned plenty about strategy from the woman herself—and gotten a refresher course during the months he’d stayed with her after her hip surgery—and he wasn’t going to let her nosiness override his privacy.

Which was easier said than done, with Mami and Janice cozied up on the couch together, laughing about he didn’t want to know what, and Miguel retreating into the bathroom to find aloe to smear on his burned finger.

“Because we couldn’t get him to stop
singing that song, when he was learning to spell his name,” Miguel’s mother explained. “We taught him M - I - G - U - E - L to that tune, just to help him learn, you know?”

“R - O - S - A - S,” Janice sang to the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

“Si, exactamente,” Dr. Rosas said.

Janice laughed. She had an instant mental image of a young Miguel, messy dark hair and earnest eyes, leaning up against his mami and singing his name while she tried to get him to put on his shoes. It was enough to cause one big internal bullfrog to leap into a shallow pond, splashing cool water in a shivery-shock across her chest. What a cutie he would have been.

Dr. Rosas lowered her head and raised her brows, studying Janice’s reaction. She didn’t say anything, though Janice didn’t trust the pursed-lip smile she gave. It seemed entirely too knowing. “My Micky, he’s always been big on learning. He studies all the time.”

“For his B.A., I know,” Janice agreed.

Miguel had been attending night and weekend college classes practically as long as she’d known him. She wasn’t clear on the factors that had led him directly from high school to work, bypassing higher ed—it seemed like his brothers had all gone to university at eighteen, based on what Janice had picked up in passing over the years—but she knew he was determined to finish his degree, and often put classwork ahead of other non-work activities.

“You went to college, I bet. A smart girl like you?”

Janice tried to put on her professional mask. “I did. I got a general business degree, just like Miguel’s working on.” No need to mention everything that process had entailed. Janice didn’t ever talk about that, no matter the charm offensive Dr. Rosas was laying on for her. Her mama had worked every kind of offensive, charm and otherwise, over the college issue, and Janice knew well how to deflect.

“And then you went to Lanigan?”

Janice smiled. Dr. Rosas wasn’t trying at all to hide her curiosity. Well, Janice knew that game as well as she knew hopscotch.

“I worked a few other places first, but ended up there a few years ago, haven’t looked back. Doesn’t Miguel talk about all of us at work? He ought to be sounding you out on all these office politics—well, warehouse politics—get your perspective on some of the cat-herding he has to do. You have to know how to deal with their petty boy squabbles, you raising five sons and all.”

“And each one a bigger gallito than the last.”

Janice snorted then, relaxed now that the conversation wasn’t highlighting her. “Let me guess, Miguel is the baby?”

“And had the biggest strut of them all, si.”

That cute image of little Miguel trying to tie his shoes suddenly reasserted itself, this time with the tyke, shod, dancing around singing his name song while his big brothers growled irritably. Something in Dr. Rosas’s expression told Janice she wasn’t far off the mark, when it came to imagining toddler Miguel.

The tadpoles in her spine wondered why she had any interest in getting the image right.

Mentally banishing them to the swamp, she was smack in the middle of getting Dr. Rosas to tell tales on Miguel when the man himself emerged from the hallway, brushing his hands down his strong thighs. He had a sparkly pink flower bandaid on his index finger, and Janice suppressed her snigger of derision. Almost.

Miguel shot her a look.

Janice stopped suppressing. “Oh, Toots,” she laughed. “I have got to snoop in your medicine cabinet later on.”

“I only keep them around for Anna Lucia.”

“Unless you get an ouchie of your own,” Janice nodded, pretending complete understanding.

“Poor baby,
que pasó
?” Dr. Rosas stood and took Miguel by the hand, pulling him over to the lamplight where they’d been sitting. She shoved her son onto the sofa beside Janice and held his hand under the light twisting it to and fro with no apparent thought to the wrist or arm or shoulder it was connected to.

Miguel pulled back, which only got him a brisk slap to the forearm. “It’s just a little burn, Mami.”

“I’ll decide if it’s little or not. You put aloe on it?”

“Yeah.
No es nada
. I promise.”

They bickered a little more, but Janice wasn’t noting it particularly. The frogs had gone hoppity again with Miguel’s twisting and turning to get away from his mami’s scrutiny. And she had a sneaking suspicion they weren’t bouncing around inside her just cause Miguel’s body, his heat and his scent, were invading her personal space. He was obviously embarrassed by the maternal fussing, but his voice was gentler than she practically ever heard it. It had this little catch in it, kind of a hum that was fond and teasing both, that didn’t exactly show up other times he was talking.

Of course, most of the time they hung out, it was at work, and he was giving orders to the crews. Or shooting the shit with them, which was a whole other layer of macho that had to happen. Janice’d heard Miguel’s voice in all kinds of tones, from polite to pissed off, but she’d never heard this kind of tender tolerance in it before.

Except maybe when he was telling her to show up for a date at his house.

Janice started to stand up, then. No reason she had to be trapped on the sofa just cause Miguel’d gone and gotten his hand extra-crispy. She’d have escaped to the kitchen area or something, except right as she engaged her core to stand, Miguel’s mami yanked his hand closer to the lamp shade, and he flailed out with his other hand to keep his balance. Which meant he’d grabbed her thigh.

And she and the friggin frogs flopped right back down.

He wasn’t even looking at her, or at his non-injured hand, which had taken to downright stroking her. Incremental back and forth caresses along the outside hem of her jeans, but Janice was strong. She spent half her non-work, non-sleeping hours being deliberately active. At the gym, out for a run or a ride, dancing.

So no forefinger sliding centimeter by centimeter along her IT band had the power to make her squirm.

Miguel never figured he’d
be so grateful for Anna Lucia’s stash of bandaids. The kid was seven and colonized her world with aggressive abandon. Her house, Mami’s house, her Uncle Max’s house, Miguel’s house—they all stood ready to welcome their princesa whenever she should deign to descend upon them. Juice boxes, the good kind of goldfish crackers, sparkly art supplies, and Disney board games awaited her at each residence. For all Miguel knew, his two brothers in San Antonio also kept a stash of paper dolls and butterfly barrettes for Anna Lucia.