A Cut Above (6 page)
“Why?” I drop onto one of the fragile chairs and it squeaks. I can’t believe this. “Why me?”
Max gives me one of his rascally winks. “Because she loves you so much, and wants to do her part.”
I press my palm against my forehead. “What am I going to do? I can’t live with this . . . this stuff.” I scan the room. “And there’s so much of it too. But I can’t hurt her feelings. Why couldn’t she just have had a garage sale, like everyone else?”
“Miss Mona and a garage sale!” Josh wipes more tears after a new explosion of laughs. “Oh . . . I gotta go. I’ve laughed so much my stomach hurts. You’ll figure it out, Andie. You always do.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m so glad you have such confidence in me. I tell you, I don’t.”
He gives another chuckle, then opens the front door. “Don’t bother, Max. I’ll walk home. It’s only a few blocks away. The walk’ll help me work out the cramp in my gut from all this laughing.”
After Josh leaves, the house goes right to too silent. I steal a look at Max, and find him studying me. A blush starts at the base of my neck and slowly spreads up my face.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s not you.” He waves. “This stuff of Miss Mona’s doesn’t work for you. And I’m glad. You’re more . . . more fun, and what you need is furniture that’s more laid back, more fun, more you.”
“Thanks. That’s a really nice thing to say.”
“I do have my moments.”
I flash him a nervous smile. “I know. You’re not all bad.” “Wow! What a rousing endorsement.”
I shrug one shoulder. “It’s the best I can do on a day like today.”
A puzzled look lines his forehead. “A bunch of old-fashioned furniture can bring you down like this? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s really wrong,” I say, standing. “I just have a lot to do to get ready for the trip. The last thing I need is a houseful of Miss Mona’s castoffs I don’t want.”
His eyes narrow. “The trip? What trip would that be?”
“Miss Mona didn’t tell you?”
“Not a word.”
I close my eyes. “Great.” When I look at him again, I see he’s not happy. Fine. There’s not much I can do about it. “She’s sending me to negotiate the price on an emerald lot. In Colombia.”
“No.”
I snort—lovely, huh? “That’s what I said. But you know Miss Mona. It got me nowhere. She’s going to sell emeralds, and I’m going to buy them for her.”
Silence drops between us like a pot’s worth of overcooked linguine. I twitch.
Max shuffles.
Where did the guy who kissed me that one night go?
“Fine,” Max finally says. “When do we leave for Colombia?”
“What do you mean ‘we’? There’s no ‘we’ in the Colombia trip. I’m just going to meet with Mr. Cruz, the vendor who brought some samples to Miss Mona’s office today. I’ll pick out the stones we’ll show, pay the man for them, and head back home. Piece of cake.”
He crosses his arms. “I have just two words for you: Burma and Kashmir.”
A shudder rips through me. I have more bad memories than good from those two trips. “That’s not fair, Max. This time is different. I’ve already met Mr. Cruz. Miss Mona knows him too. I’m not heading out to meet crazed miners I don’t know. I’m going to Mr. Cruz’s office to do business, no different than if his office were in . . . oh, I don’t know, Poughkeepsie, New York.”
Max takes a step toward me, and if I were a betting woman—which I’m not—I’d wager those were angry flames in his eyes. “Might I mention that, unlike Poughkeepsie, New York, Colombia has hordes of gun-toting guerillas and a slight problem with the illegal drug trade?”
Why, Lord? Why are you letting him use my own thoughts
against me?
“Believe me, Max. I want nothing to do with anything or anyone other than Mr. Cruz and his emeralds. He just didn’t bring any stones worthy of the price he set on them.” I start to pace. “Oh, they were good ones, all right. But not for $11,000 a carat. He told us he has better ones in Colombia, and Miss Mona insisted I go negotiate there.”
“She insisted.”
“Yes. She did. And you can ask her about it.”
“Well, then, she’ll just have to send me too. I won’t let you risk your life like that.”
Oooooh!
“Excuse me?” I say in a voice dripping ice. “You won’t . . . what?”
“I won’t let you flirt with danger again.”
That’s what I thought he’d said. Not good. “You, Mr. Matthews, don’t have the power or authority to say any such thing. It’s not up to you to ‘let’ me do or not do anything at all. I would appreciate you taking your high-handed ways out of my living room before you say any more offensive things.” Or I go back to my old defensive tactics.
He blows out what sounds like a gust of frustration. “Okay. So I didn’t put it in a particularly diplomatic way. But I . . . I care about you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
“Are you questioning my ability to look out for myself?”
“No. I just read the newspapers, and am aware of too many people taken hostage in Colombia. I don’t want you to be the next one.”
“Gee, thanks, Max. Now you’re scaring the living daylights out of me. I’m going to spend my time in Colombia staring over my shoulder, seeing bogeymen in every shadow.”
“No, you won’t, because you’re not going alone.”
“I’m going. Alone.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.”
“What part of partnership equals more than one do you not get, Andie?”
“Me? What about you? Where’s the part where you trust your partner’s judgment? The part where you don’t undermine your partner? The part where you don’t go putting yourself on a high pedestal and tell your partner what to do?”
His eyes narrow again. “Still as stubborn as ever.”
Am I? Am I being unreasonable, Lord? Or am I setting
reasonable boundaries?
“No, Max. Just an independent career woman who doesn’t like caveman attitudes. I mean, I really thought, after the k—”
I clamp my lips shut as I realize what I’m about to say. I’m still that emotional chicken. I’m not ready to put the memory of that kiss into words. Max still scares me, even if I’m no longer letting myself hold him at arms’ length with the sniping and fighting and sarcastic digs.
“Tell you what,” I say. Reasonably, too. “Let’s let this go for the moment. We can sleep on it, and then, in the morning, we can talk it over rationally.”
He runs a hand through his blond hair. “I don’t think there’s much to talk about, Andie. It doesn’t look like you want what I do.”
Is that a hint of pain I see flash over his face? Could I have hurt his feelings? That’s not what I intended.
Even though he scares me.
But no matter how bad I feel, I can’t make myself say another word. After a few minutes, Max shakes his head.
“Have a good night,” he says as he walks to the door. “I’ll see you at the studio in the morning.”
I follow; watch him climb into the U-Haul then drive away. A sense of failure overtakes me.
“What have I done?”
I collapse into my not-so-comfy window seat in business class and allow myself the luxury of a sigh of relief. The past few days have been a challenge, with all the verbal dueling I’ve had to do. Yeah, it’s all about Max. He’s no pushover, and he pulled out all the stops. Over and over again, he regaled me with gory details of past Colombian guerilla crimes. I knew what he was trying to do. He wanted to scare me.
Okay. So he succeeded. But I’m still going. Alone. See?
And he didn’t scare just me. You got it. He filled Miss Mona’s and Aunt Weeby’s ears with the same sabotaging mumbo-jumbo.
Max has a way with women, and Miss Mona is a quintessential female, a true southern belle, no less. Have I mentioned how much Miss Mona and Aunt Weeby love Max?
Uh-huh. I had to take all three of them on.
Especially when they kept reminding me of his knight-in-shining-armor moments. And there were Aunt Weeby’s and Miss Mona’s matchmaking tendencies to battle too. I mean, in their romance-addled brains, nothing is better than to have Max and his overprotective, hunky self at my side while I traverse the wilds of a romantic but dangerous land. Think Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, folks. Or maybe Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
In their eyes, Max the Magnificent ranks right up there with the best of movie heroes, romantic and . . . well, studly heroic, sweeping in to save me just at the right moment.
Fine. So he did save my sorry hide a time or two. But he didn’t
have
to do it. I’m sure I could’ve got myself out of those binds all on my own. Pretty sure. Besides, he has studying to do. That GIA Graduate Gemologist certificate isn’t a piece of cake to get. I should know.
When faced by that reality, he concocted some lame line about needing to come with me because he needs my help studying. What’s up with that? Mr. College Scholarship needs
my
help with schoolwork?
Humph!
In spite of all the pheromonal appeal Max put out, and all the grandmotherly oohing, aahing, and invoking of scary scenarios (which, of course, require Max’s heroic intervention) the Daunting Duo deluged on me, I stand firm—I am woman, hear me bleat. In the end, I make it clear I’ll only be gone for a measly three days, will meet Mr. Cruz, pick up faboo emeralds for our fans, and return refreshed and revived by virtue of time spent in proximity to the spectacular grass-green gems. What girl wouldn’t perk up after handling bling-bling like that?
I’m glad I’m going alone. Max is way distracting.
So here I am on Avianca’s flight 605 for the last leg of my multi-stop trip to Bogotá, buckled in and ready to indulge in some heavy-duty nail biting. Although I’d never confess it to another living, breathing being, takeoffs and landings tend to make me just a teensy-weensy bit anxious. All right, all right. So I’m petrified. Goes with the chicken part.
When the roar of the airliner’s engines erupts, I clutch the armrests, close my eyes, and start to pray. By the time we reach cruising altitude, though, I’m calmer and manage to relax enough to drift off to sleep. After a while, the clatter of the service cart jars me awake.
A cranberry juice cocktail and a chicken-flavored sawdust something-or-other later, I draw out my laptop and figure it’s as good a time as any to catch up on research I’ve downloaded over the last few super-busy months. An article on the ongoing controversy over finds of yellow labradorite— or is it simply bytownite?—and its kissing cousin andesine/ labradorite—had caught my attention, but I hadn’t had a chance to read it yet. Now that material’s singing my song. Once I start reading, the article holds my attention as it goes into great detail about the recent discovery of a previously unknown treatment that seems to have turned lesser quality yellow stones into magnificent fiery scarlet or bluish green ones with intriguing color-shift tendencies in different light. The most interesting part of the article is the implication of a very large retail organization that invested heavily into the red and green material and sold it as untreated, natural-colored pieces . . .
Uh-oh.
You got it. This is a legal no-no.
I dive back in to read more. The FTC and the FCC have gotten into the mix now, and the dollars invested and then lost on the scam perpetrated by unscrupulous gemstone vendors have reached astronomical heights.
I drop the magazine onto my lap and sigh. Dishonesty runs rampant in my business.
But all that doesn’t take anything away from the original stones. I still love the gorgeous yellow feldspar stones found in Mexico when mining for Mexican fire opal. I’d offered some for sale on a show a few weeks ago.
“I bought one of those yellow labradorites from you, and I love it,” my elderly seatmate murmurs when I look away from the screen to glance out the window. She adds, “To be honest, I love everything I’ve bought from the S.T.U.D.”
I’m still not ready for how chummy my viewers feel through just watching my shows. It catches me unaware at the most unexpected moments. Like now.
“Have you been a member of the S.T.U.D. family for a long time?” I ask.
“Oh, I’d bought a set of pans and an outfit here and there since the channel launched, but it wasn’t until you and your boyfriend came on that I . . .”
Your boyfriend . . . your boyfriend . . . your boyfriend . . .
And here I’d hoped to gain some distance from Max during this trip. I need to put it all in perspective, something I’m not good at doing on a regular basis. Constant reminders of the man aren’t going to give me the space I need to get myself off the emotional teeter-totter. And you know I can’t go back and handle my feelings for him without dredging up some balance.
Especially after his possessive Neanderthal approach to my trip.
“Andie?” the woman at my side asks, concern in her voice.
“Are you okay?”
“Oh! I’m so sorry. Your comment made me think of something, and then my thoughts just stole away with me.”
She chuckles. “My darling Howard is a lot like your Max, if I do say. I used to have trouble keeping track of my thoughts, once upon a time too. I don’t mind changing seats with him so you two can sit together for the rest of the flight.”
I fight the wince with everything I’ve got. “Max isn’t mine. He’s not my boyfriend.” And how
do
I feel about that? Hmm . . . “He didn’t come on this trip. You don’t have to change seats.”
“I’m surprised. Don’t you two work together?”
Do we? Together? Really? Or do we just butt heads? “We do cohost the shows, but we’re not joined at the hip.”
“He has gone with you to Burma and . . . was that Tibet?” “Close. Kashmir.”
“That’s right! The old sapphire mines.” She holds out her right hand to admire a stunning and substantial ruby ring. “I wouldn’t have minded a Kashmir sapphire, but I do love this ruby I bought after your trip to the Mogok Valley.”
I check out the piece. She’s not hurting for funds; the stone’s one of the finest ones we brought back from that ill-fated trip. I remember its price tag for its slew of zeros. “Congratulations. That was one of my favorite pieces.”
“You know the individual stones?”
“I picked out the rubies myself at the vendor’s office.”
“And you remember each stone? I’m impressed.”