Asking for Trouble (8 page)

“I’ve got a new car,” Alyssa said, standing next to the
dark-blue compact, reaching a hand out to stroke the hood as if she couldn’t
help herself. She laughed, and the happiness in it rang out loud and clear. “I
honestly wasn’t sure it was going to happen. You had
me
convinced we were walking out without it.”

“It was always going to happen.” He had to smile back, she
was so excited over this boring little sedan. Well, it was a major improvement,
although if he’d had his way, he’d have put her into something a whole lot better.
Well, if he’d had his way, he’d have put her into his own car, and he’d have
kept her there.

He’d showed up as agreed at ten that morning to take her car
shopping, had rung the bell down at the street, waited a while, then rung it
again. At last, he heard her voice on the intercom. “Joe?”

He spoke into the brass-plated grille. “Yeah.”

“Shoot,” he heard. “Come up. Sorry.” The door buzzed, and he
shoved it open, climbed the three flights to her place, already resigned to a
wait.

It wasn’t Alyssa who opened the apartment door. It was a
guy. A barefoot guy, tall and thin and with serious bedhead, wearing skinny
hipster jeans and a slim-cut black button-down shirt. A guy who’d got out of
bed not very long ago, wearing the clothes from the night before.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on in.”

Alyssa came out of her bedroom looking flustered and . . .
strange. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got in the bathroom yet. I need a
minute.”

Joe looked between her and the guy. He had no right to be
jealous, and he knew it. He
knew
it.
Her sex life was no business of his. But he wanted to shove the guy right out
the door and keep on shoving. At a minimum. He pushed his hands into his jacket
pockets and reminded himself to breathe.

The bathroom door opened on a cloud of steam and Sherry came
out, tightening the sash on a very thin blue bathrobe.

“Oh. Joe,” she said, faltering to a stop. “I didn’t know
you’d be here today.”

“Hi,” he said, carefully not checking out the bathrobe.

Sherry recovered her balance pretty fast. “Bathroom’s all yours,”
she told Alyssa, then looked at her more closely and laughed. “Great hat.”

Alyssa stared at her blankly for a moment, then put her hand
to her head. Her mouth opened and shut again, and she snatched the thing off
her head, went to her bedroom door and chucked the hat inside.

“Five minutes,” she told Joe, ducking into the bathroom and
shutting the door behind her.

“Oh, did you meet Jonathan?” Sherry asked Joe. “Joe,
Jonathan. Jonathan, Joe. Want some coffee?” she asked the guy—Jonathan.

“Yeah,” he said. “Or we could go out to breakfast, if you
want.”

She perked up. “Breakfast would be good. I’ll get changed.”

Ah. Sherry’s . . . guest. Joe felt the tension leaving his
body like air from a balloon.

Jonathan flopped onto the couch and picked up a magazine
from the coffee table. “Could be a while,” he told Joe. “In my experience.”

Joe was pretty sure he was right, so he took a seat in an
armchair. It wasn’t too long, though, before Alyssa was back out of the
bathroom door again, and he rose to his feet.

“Ready,” she said. “I just have to get my boots.”

“And a coat,” Joe said. “It’s cold out there.”

She came out of her room a minute later carrying a pair of low
red boots with pointed toes and Western tooling, perched on the arm of the chair
Joe had just vacated to pull them on and zip them up. She was wearing a dusty
red quilted coat that hung open over a ribbed dark-blue sweater that matched
her eyes and clung to her figure fairly convincingly. And a skirt, a flimsy
little gray thing that didn’t come close to reaching her knees, and swooped up at
the sides quite a few inches too, which hiked up a whole lot more during the boot-fastening
exercise.

“Ah . . .” Joe said, “do you think a skirt is right? I mean,
you might want to look more serious.”

She looked at him in surprise. “I’m wearing tights,” she
pointed out. “Almost like pants.”

No. A short skirt and sexy little boots weren’t like pants.
He didn’t know what tights had to do with it.

“Besides,” she said, “aren’t most car salesmen guys?”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said. He’d looked up from his magazine to
check her out, Joe saw, some of his tension returning despite his best efforts.
“They’re guys.”

“And guys like skirts better, right?”

Joe didn’t know about other guys, but he knew he did. And
Jonathan apparently did too, because he was nodding agreement.

“Then,” she said. “I’ll distract them, get them off-balance,
and you can look all serious and scary, Joe, and intimidate them. Don’t you
think?”

“Could work,” he said. “Though if you really want to
distract them, you should put the bear hat back on.”

She burst out laughing, and Jonathan joined in. “Yeah, that
was a surprise,” he agreed.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” Alyssa complained. “It’s
cold in my room. There’s no heat in there. I was waiting for the bathroom, to
do my hair and makeup, but Sherry was in there, so I was keeping warm, and I .
. . I forgot.”

“Never mind,” Joe said. “I might need to see it again,
though. The ears were pretty special. Where’d you get that?”

“Gabe. He gave it to me for my birthday. He thought it was
funny. I found it when I unpacked, and like I said,” she shrugged, smiling
again, “it’s cold in my room. Anyway, you ready to go?”

“Yeah. Good to meet you,” Joe told Jonathan. He got a raised
hand in return and was thankfully able to leave the guy behind.

“Sounds like the first thing is breakfast,” he said when
they were descending the flights of dingy stairs. “Because I have a feeling you
didn’t manage that this morning either.”

“I overslept,” she admitted. “Well, sort of. I haven’t had a
roommate for a while, and I forgot how . . . awkward it could get at times. They
didn’t have the door shut, so it seemed like a good idea to wait, but it was
kind of a long wait, and then I fell asleep.”

“Sherry’s got a boyfriend, huh? I wouldn’t have guessed
that.”

She shot him a quick look as he held the front door for her.
“Ha. I bet you wouldn’t have. And I didn’t even tell her how rich you are. She
figured that one out later, all by herself, with a little online research. If
she’d known you were coming over today, believe me, she would have made sure
she didn’t have company.”

Was she jealous, or was that just wishful thinking on his
part? “You’re saying I’ve got a shot there?” he asked, following her to the
little yellow compact and holding the door for her once she’d unlocked it.

“You know you do.” She scowled at him, then tossed her head
so her shiny dark hair bounced before climbing in, and if a person could be
said to flounce getting into a car, she flounced. “But she’s not your type.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he mused before he slammed her door
shut. He walked around the car and squeezed himself in on his side feeling a
whole lot better than he had been a few minutes earlier. “I have a weakness for
sassy girls with smart mouths.”

“Only because you probably think they need a big strong man
to straighten them out,” she muttered.

“Mmm,” he agreed. “That’s about it.”

No, that was exactly it. Because he wanted to do everything
wonderful there was to do with Alec’s little sister, and everything nasty there
was to do, too. Absolutely everything. There was nothing he hadn’t thought of,
nothing so dirty that he hadn’t done it to her, again and again, in his wild,
undisciplined, out-of-control mind. He just hoped she didn’t know. Sometimes,
when she looked at him, he thought she did. And that thought made him sweat at
night as much as the rest of his thoughts did. Well, almost as much.

But he hadn’t done any of it. Of course he hadn’t done any
of it. He’d taken her car shopping. And afterwards, out for a hamburger,
because that was what she’d wanted.

“You sure?” he’d asked when they were making plans over the
hood of her new car in the dealership’s lot. “I know I don’t seem like a very
classy guy.” He ran a hand over his stubbled cheek, cast a glance down at his
leather jacket and jeans. “But I could go home and change. And I do
occasionally eat piled-up food.”

“Piled-up food?”

“You know.” He measured serving portions with his hands. “Three
sprigs of asparagus on a big white plate, covered up with a tiny piece of meat,
a leaf of some bitter thing you wouldn’t even eat in a salad on top of that. And
then. . . figs, or organ meat, some lumpy thing, and a sauce with a French name,
poured around into patterns that some guy thought looked interesting. Piled-up
food. Date food.”

She laughed. “I know exactly what you mean. You know what my
best date is?”

“No, what?” He smiled down at her. He knew what
his
best date with her would be.

“A sports bar, a beer, and a hamburger,” she admitted. “So
if it turns out you don’t like the guy, at least you get to watch the game.”

He laughed. “You just put yourself on every guy’s wish
list.” Like she wasn’t there already.

“But I’m freezing,” she pointed out. “And I’m starving, and
I want a hamburger. You going to take me to get it, or what?”

“I’m going to take you to get it. We’ll drop your car off at
your place, how’s that, and I’ll take you in mine. That way you can have as
much beer as you want with your hamburger. Unless you want to drive your new car
some more,” he realized he should add.

“No,” she said. “I want you to drive. I want my beer. I
think I deserve
two
beers, after all
that car shopping.”

“I have to say thank you,” she said when they were sitting
in Chez Maman—hamburgers, but bistro hamburgers, because he did have
some
standards. And she looked so
pretty, he hadn’t wanted to take her to some dive. “Moving me was bad enough,
but taking me used-car shopping on your Sunday? You’d probably have paid money
not
to spend your weekend like that. And
I’m not even your sister.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not my sister.”

 
“And another
thing,” she went on. “This is what I really want to say thanks for.” She picked
up a french fry, dipped it in mustard, then held it in midair and wrinkled her
brow a little. Alyssa could get more expressions out of one face than anyone he
knew. “That you didn’t do it
for
me,”
she finally said. “Thank you for that. I assumed that I’d be trailing along
while you chose my car for me and told me to like it. That’s what I’d have done
if Alec had gone with me. Rae would have been more tactful, but same
difference.”

“It was your car, not mine,” he said, gratified that he’d
got it right. She’d clearly been surprised when he’d suggested that she search
ads for cars she might be interested in, contact the lots and let them know
she’d be coming by, and he’d worried that she’d thought it was because he
didn’t care enough to do it for her. “You know what you like, and I don’t. And
anyway, things you get for yourself are better. Besides,” he said, and he had
to smile at her now, “the look on their faces when I got out of the car, after they’d
heard your sweet voice on the phone, when they’d been in there rubbing their
hands thinking how easy it was going to be . . . that was worth the price of
admission.”

“You think I have a sweet voice?”

He was lousy at compliments, he knew it, but he had to get
better, because look at what had just happened. He’d said all that, and her
takeaway had been that she had a sweet voice. He had to get better.

“You know you do,” he said. “You have a great voice. All
lively and . . .” He shrugged. “Female,” he finished lamely, which wasn’t any
progress at all.

“As opposed to a male voice,” she teased.

“Mmm.” He took a bite of burger.

“This was the first time I’ve ever ridden in your car, do
you realize that?” she asked after taking her own bite. “You have a different
car than I was thinking.”

“What did you think it would be?”

“Hmm.” She put her head on one side and considered. “A
pickup truck,” she admitted, and laughed. “An old, battered one. Not one of
those shiny new ones with the crew cab. Which is making me rethink your
one-bedroom apartment with the white walls and the board-and-brick bookcases,
too. I realize I have no idea at all where you live. Do you have hidden depths,
Joe?”

“Maybe.” She was making him nervous now, so he shifted back
to her. “How about you? What’s your dream car?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Really?”

“I don’t think women necessarily spend a lot of time
dreaming about cars,” she explained. “At least I don’t. I might think about the
house I want someday . . . All right, scratch that, I
definitely
think about the house I want someday, but cars? No.”

“Really. I always had a dream car, though it changed a lot
over the years. And I can imagine yours pretty easily.”

“So what’s my dream car?” she asked, holding her messy
burger in both hands, her head on one side again like a perky little robin, smiling
happily at him.

He worked on his fries for a minute while he thought. “Porsche
Boxster,” he decided at last. “Absolutely. That’s your car.”

“Is that a convertible?”

“Yeah. Red. A red Boxster.” He got an image of her coming
downstairs with him today, out the door of that scruffy apartment building, expecting
to get into that piece of junk with the shot transmission. Seeing a red Boxster
with a big red bow around it waiting for her instead, just like in the TV
commercials. A car to match her, just as hot, just as sleek, just as sexy, the
curving lines of it asking you to run a hand over them, the dangerous promise
of being able to go just as fast as you wanted, of taking every corner too
sharply, of taking it all the way to the limit.