Shameless (3 page)

“Um, I think you made a mistake,” Jeremiah Johnson said, staring at the display.

Nina moved out of view and Kevin ran the back of his hand across his forehead. “Pardon me?”

“You added a zero to the amount, I think.” Johnson waved a book. “This should be $23.95, not $239.50. Unless the price on hardcovers went up again.”

Kevin grimaced and mumbled an apology to the economics professor, canceling the transaction and starting again from scratch.

He didn’t know how long he could take Nina’s shameless flirting. While she’d always been friendly, often times bawdily so, she’d never downright tempted him the way she was doing now.

And his job performance was suffering for it. Over the past two days he’d gotten more orders wrong than right. Considering that he prided himself on customer service, his aberrant behavior only amplified his stress level.

He handed Johnson his purchase and apologized again even as Gauge walked behind the paneled counter and grabbed a few bags. “You know, one conversation will eliminate your sorry state.”

“Shut the hell up, Gauge,” he said under his breath.

But apparently not quietly enough because old Mrs. Christenberry stared at him in open-mouthed shock.

That was it. He and his friends were going to put this ridiculous topic to rest. Right now.

“Julie, man the register, please,” he said to a part-time sales associate who was stocking books nearby.

He grabbed Gauge by the arm and led him in the direction of the stockroom. “You and I need to talk.”

“It’s about damn time.”

He could say that again.

He opened the door, ushered his friend through it, and then stared at another associate who was stripping the covers off paperbacks to send back to distributors for credit.

“John, go see if the music center needs any attention for a few minutes, will you?”

The teen eyed him and a grinning Gauge and hastily left the room.

“Christ, Kevin, you’re worse off than I thought.”

Kevin stared at his friend. Gauge looked unaffected as he leaned against a table and crossed his feet at his booted ankles and then his arms over his chest. His T-shirt today was black and sported the logo from a Memphis House of Blues.

“This has got to stop. Right now,” he said, pacing one way and then back again. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I can’t ban these…images from my mind.”

“What images? Of Nina naked and moaning?” Gauge nodded. “Yeah, I’m going through pretty much the same thing.”

Kevin stopped and fisted his hands at his sides. The idea that his friend felt the same way about Nina bothered him even more than the thought of his own agitated state.

“What? You believed you’re the only one who’s been suffering since our little conversation the other night?”

“But you’ve slept with two women since then.”

Gauge grinned. “And your point is?”

“My point is that you’re an asshole.”

Gauge chuckled at that, nudging up Kevin’s already soaring stress level.

Kevin grasped Gauge by the front of his T-shirt, forcing him to uncross both his ankles and his arms.

“Whoa, watch it now.” Gauge’s smile disappeared briefly, the moment suddenly tense.

Kevin released him and took a long breath. “Sorry.”

Gauge smoothed down his wrinkled T-shirt. “No need getting violent on me. I can set you up with someone if you’re feeling that pent-up.”

“No, thank you.”

“You sure? Because I can guarantee you’ll feel one thousand percent better tomorrow morning.”

“No,
you
would feel better. I’d probably feel worse.”

“But what if that person was Nina…?”

Liar.

Everything had changed. Not physically. But emotionally, Nina felt as if a door had opened, offering views out onto a lush vista she hadn’t known existed.

All she had to do was step through that doorway and welcome the change.

And those emotional changes would then also become physical.

Through the round window in the kitchen door, she watched as Kevin chatted with Heidi Joblowski, her assistant. She gave an involuntary shiver.

“Ten years younger,” Gladys said, her gaze following Nina’s. “That’s all I’d need and that man would have been in my bed aeons ago.”

Nina nearly choked. “Ten years would make you sixty.”

Her grandmother grinned. “Your point being?”

Her point being that there still would have been more than twenty-five years between her and Kevin.

Then again, her grandmother was probably right. She would have found a way, by hook or crook, to back Kevin—or any man she wanted—into her bed.

She shook her head.

Thankfully Gladys wasn’t sixty anymore. She was seventy. And finally beginning to show it.

Nina hid a small smile as she took off her apron and then picked up the two plates she’d prepared. “Grab those soft drinks, will you? Our table’s just been vacated.”

Their table was the one for two in the far corner of the café Gladys swore was the only place to sit. “All the better to see the hot young men you work with,” she’d told her granddaughter.

Nina positioned the plates on the table and moved her chair so that she sat more next to her grandmother than across from her. She’d learned long ago not to block her view. Besides, there was always the risk of getting whiplash from Gladys asking her to quickly lean this way or that so she could get a better look at something, or rather, someone.

Of course, her grandmother had no way of knowing that she now shared her interest in her coworkers. Rather than cluck her tongue or put up her hand to ward off any unwanted comments on either Kevin or Gauge’s posteriors, she intended to appreciate the view with her.

“So, are you done with your redecorating yet?” Nina asked, waiting until Gladys was seated and had placed her paper napkin in her lap, despite her casual surroundings.

She was long accustomed to her grandmother’s oddball behavior. She might sit with perfect posture, but her sometimes purple hair, her hot-pink lipstick and her gold lamé jackets gave her an air of regal yet trashy pride.

Gladys waved her hand as she took a bite of her tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat. “That’s been done for weeks. Where have you been?”

Right here. And she’d enjoyed three lunches with her since then. But Nina figured it was as good a place to start conversation as any. Urging her grandmother into a monologue about the fit nature of the handyman the decorator had sent to do the more difficult work—or the good-looking decorator himself, even if he did prefer men to women—would have gotten the ball rolling.

But her grandmother wasn’t biting anything more than her sandwich as she watched Gauge entering the café for a cup of post-lunch coffee.

Her grandmother elbowed Nina so hard she almost fell from her chair.

“There he is.”

Nina relaxed back in her seat, slowly chewing her own bite of tuna sandwich. Ah, yes, there he was, indeed.

A little thrill ran up her back at the memory of their conversation the other night combined with the interesting dreams she’d been having. She told herself she should be appalled, but her own recently awakened decadent side refused the response.

“He’s a lazy lover, you can tell.”

Nina nearly choked on her food. She quickly reached for her drink.

Gladys smiled widely. “Lazy, but his endurance would be out of this world. All day. And all night. That’s my guess.”

Nina watched the lines of Gauge’s bottom in his faded jeans, and then appreciated the muscles of his back and arms in his snug black T-shirt.

She looked over to find her grandmother staring at her.

“If I didn’t know better, girl, I would think you were giving him the lover’s look.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nina said, hoping that her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. “Gauge and Kevin and I have been friends forever.”

“And partners…”

“Business partners,” Nina stressed. She shifted in her chair. “I talked to Mom yesterday.”

Nothing was capable of derailing her grandmother more than mention of her daughter, Nina’s mother.

In all the world, she didn’t think there were two people less alike. Where her grandmother was a free spirit, her mother was as uptight as they came, attending church three times a week, working with Meals on Wheels and playing the role of perfect housewife to her father’s perfect corporate gentleman. While they weren’t wealthy, they were well-off. And her mother had never worked a day of her life.

Her grandmother, on the other hand, refused to let any man take care of her….

Of course, it probably didn’t help that Gladys called Helen her mistake.

Nina’s mother had never liked the attention that Gladys had showered on her granddaughter from a young age. Growing up, Nina’d never understood the feud between the two most important women in her life, but as she got older, she’d come to realize that perhaps Gladys regretted not taking more time out with her own daughter, and was determined to rectify the mistake by playing a significant role in her granddaughter’s life.

Then again, maybe the two women were too different to ever have been close.

If that was the case, what did it say about her and her grandmother? Could it be that Gladys saw herself in Nina? And that’s why she’d formed the bond?

Or could she be trying to counteract Helen’s influence so she wouldn’t turn into a “dried-up old prune,” as Gladys called Nina’s mother?

Another elbow, another scramble to keep herself from falling off her stool.

“There’s the other one.”

Nina didn’t have to ask to whom her grandmother was referring. She’d watched as Kevin joined Gauge at the cashier’s counter in the audio section, apparently having finished his own lunch. Speaking of which, Nina looked down, surprised to find she’d nearly demolished the contents of her plate, as had her grandmother.

“Now him…he’d be a generous lover,” Gladys said. “He’d be eager to please you. Loving.”

Nina watched as Kevin leaned both hands against the countertop, his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing the coiled muscles of his forearms.

“Do you think so?” she was surprised to hear herself ask.

Gladys’s grin made her wish she hadn’t said anything. “I don’t think so, Nin. I know so.”

Her grandmother made a play at wiping her mouth with her napkin, pushed her plate away, and then went about refreshing her lipstick. “So…which one are you looking to bed?”

“Grandmother!” Nina whispered harshly when a couple of women at a neighboring table gave them a hard look.

“Don’t ‘grandmother’ me. I see those looks you’re giving both of them. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.” She put her lipstick and mirror away and closed her purse with a click. “And I know you.”

Nina grimaced. She’d never credited Gladys with knowing her well. Gladys bought her only granddaughter bizarre Christmas and birthday gifts in garish colors that were more her own style than Nina’s. Instead of taking her to Disneyland when she was kid, she’d taken her to the Windsor casinos, convincing the pit bosses that she was eighteen when she was only fourteen and earning her a spot at a blackjack table, which made things easier for Gladys because it meant she wouldn’t have to go up to the room so often to check on her, although Nina hadn’t played.

At least not until she did turn eighteen and could enjoy a hand or two on her own.

“They’re my partners, Grandma, my best friends. I couldn’t possibly get involved with either one of them,” she said, but even she knew that there was no strength behind her words. Only a vague fear.

“You’re also adults, Nina.”

If only her grandmother knew what Gauge had suggested and what Nina was hoping the men would act on. The topic hadn’t been mentioned again since that night. But, oh, how she wished it would be.

“Where are you going?” Nina asked, grasping Gladys’s arm as she started to get up.

She was half afraid that her grandmother would make a stab at a matchmaking effort—if
matchmaking
was the right word for a connection that would only involve sex.

“I have a date for the matinee in twenty minutes.”

Nina instantly relaxed. “It’s not like you to make plans on our lunch day.”

“I didn’t.” She smiled wickedly. “But since it looks like things are well in order here—” she spared the two men another glance “—very well in order, I’m going to give you the space you need to make your decision and go check out the new usher at the cinema. I hear his wife died last year. So that makes him prime mattress-boogie material.”

Nina gave an exaggerated eye roll. “Do you ever think of anything other than sex?”

Her grandmother shrugged into her coat and smoothed down the front, appearing to give the question some consideration. “No, I don’t. And seeing as at my age there aren’t too many opportunities, I have to take full advantage of those that do come my way.” She waggled a finger at her. “And it’s nice to see that you’re finally beginning to follow in your grandmother’s footsteps.”