07 Uncorked - Chrissy McMullen Mystery (4 page)

I laughed. It sounded like something between a hyena’s wail and the bray of a wild ass. “What did you expect me to do, Rivera? Shrug? Laugh? Oh, well, yeah, my boyfriend sometimes sleeps with other women. Sometimes sleeps with whores with big boobs and—”

“I was undercover!” he snarled.

“Under the covers, you mean.”

“Holy shit, McMullen, I never slept with her,” he said, and slid both hands into my shorts.

I refrained from devouring him whole.

“How many times do I have to tell you I’m not interested?” I asked, but my fingers seemed to have become twisted in the hair at the back of his head.

“Nameless have you that enamored, does he?” he asked, and sliding his hands lower, he effectively displaced my sloppy shorts.

“He has a name."

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s because you’re a psychotic narcissistic with sadistic tendencies.”

“Quit talking dirty,” he warned.

“You’re sick.”

“You’re horny,” he said, and dropping his head to my left nipple, sucked it through my shirt.

I shrieked. He snarled. Harlequin howled at the door.

Maybe it was the thought of our erstwhile love child finding us fornicating on the kitchen floor that broke me from the spell. Whatever the case, I found my head and scrambled away, bouncing along the wall like a skittering virgin. “Marc!” I yelped. “His name’s Marc.”

Rivera followed me with smoldering eyes. A dozen emotions burned in them. None looked safe. Several looked as naughty as hell. “Marc what?” I eased around the kitchen table. “I’m not going to tell you.” He followed me slowly. One may have been able to call it stalking. “Mark Wahlberg?”

Good God! I wished. “I’m not making him up, Rivera.”

“Mark Harmon?”

Harmon was a hottie, but I kept strictly to reality. “He’s a doctor.” He stopped in his tracks. His expression changed from hot-charged horniness to anger in the drop of a pair of boxers. “Not another nutcase psychiatrist.” I blinked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“If I remember correctly, your last psychiatrist friend tried to kill you with a hunting knife.”

“That’s not true.”

“He was in this house, planning to kill you with a—”

“Fillet knife.” It felt good to correct him.

He raised a brow.

“It was a…" I began, then realized the stupidity of our current argument. “Marcus is a very capable doctor.”

“Capable,” he said, and laughed out loud. “Is that what you’re settling for these days?”

“Screw you!”

“I’m game if you are.” He took another step closer.

I tried to move away, but my legs were stuck on the screwing idea.

It was then that my phone rang from inches away. I jumped, squawked, then grabbed it like a lifeline, knowing it was Elaine even before it reached my ear.

“What’s wrong?” She spoke before I had the chance to say hello.

“Laney!” My tone was desperate. My throat ached with need. “Rivera’s here.” I don’t know what I expected her to do about it. I don’t even know what I wanted her to do about it, but she didn’t hesitate an instant.

“Let me talk to him.”

I removed the phone from my ear and handed it to him, hands shaking like a heroine addict’s.

He deepened his scowl, eyes steady and onyx dark, but he took it. “Yeah?” I could hear Elaine’s voice on the far end but couldn’t make out the words.

Rivera stood in silence for several seconds, listening, brows lowered, then, “I know.” Laney’s voice could be heard again, slow and reasonable.

“I didn’t plan it.”

His body was taut. His lips twitched. He closed his eyes.

“All right,” he said finally and handed me the phone. “Arm your fucking alarm,” he said, and after one last smoldering glance, stalked out of my life.

Chapter 4

A true friend is one who’s happy when you do good and is ready to plan a kick-ass prank when someone else does.

—Chrissy’s brother Pete, while in high school…though the ensuing years haven’t
changed his philanthropic philosophy much

I stared after him for several seconds, then dropped into the nearest chair, exhausted and numb.

“Mac?” I could vaguely hear Laney’s voice through the phone that drooped in my right hand.

I did a little more staring and blinking before I managed the Herculean task of pressing the phone back to my ear. “Yeah?”

“You okay?”

I shrugged, though I was pretty sure she couldn’t see it from where she was. Which was on location in Matamata, New Zealand. Elaine Butterfield is a kick-ass actress, my best friend since grade school, and something of a weird-ass telepath, but generally she can’t see my body motions unless she’s there in front of me. I wished rather desperately that she was there right then, but she’d gotten married about a year earlier and tended to spend a good deal of time with her husband, a dweeby little nerd named J.D. Solberg.

“Yeah. Sure.” I stared at my back door for a second and whined. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t me that sounded like an abandoned pup. It was Harley. Rising like an automaton, I trailed off to let him in. He slunk inside, swinging his boxy head left and right in search of Rivera. It’s a well-known fact that even the most neglected kids love their deadbeat dads. “I’m fine.”

“Is he gone?”

“Looks like it.” I tried to buck up. “What’d you say to him?”

“I told him the truth.”

“That he’s a jackass?” I said, but I didn’t really think he was a jackass. I thought I should think he was a jackass, but when I considered his ass I rarely had the equus asinus in mind.

“That you deserve more than a panting reunion once every few months,” she said.

“Uh huh.” I nodded dismally. “But did you threaten him with some kind of bodily harm or something, too?”

“I said he was being unfair to you.”

This was kind of a disappointment. I mean, it’s not as if I wanted Rivera hanging around or anything. But I would have preferred to know he wasn’t that easy to dissuade from the whole panting reunion thing. Although, I have to admit, Brainy Laney Butterfield has amazing powers of persuasion. She’s been convincing men to act like idiots ever since the advent of her boobs.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“That he left.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said, and snorted. It was a first-class snort despite my exhaustion. “You did me a huge favor. I didn’t want him hanging around here.” She remained silent. I fidgeted in the quiet. I’m never comfortable lying to Laney.

She could make me fidget from another solar system. Silence is kind of like her own personal truth serum.

“Well…” I paused and sat down. “Most of me didn’t want him here.”

“My apologies to those bits that did.”

“Yeah, well…” I breathed deep and rotated my neck, beginning to relax a little as I fiddled with Harley’s ear. His search for Rivera had been fruitless and he had come to plop his snout on my thigh and give me the droopy eye. “Those bits are fickle.”

“And happy with Marc, right?”

I sat up a little straighter. Harley rolled his eyes up at me but didn‘t move his head.

“Of course they’re happy with Marc. They’re thrilled with Marc. Did I tell you he sold out at the bookstore in Pinsk?”

“Do you mean Minsk?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well…that’s…exciting,” she said, and for a moment I almost wondered if she was being sarcastic. Laney does sarcasm so well it’s sometimes difficult to detect. I’m not always so subtle. “I’m just not sure what that does for your fickle bits.”

“My fickle bits are unimportant, Laney. Because I’ve changed. Grown up. I’m classy now.”

“Instead of Irish?”

I ignored her. “I’ve learned to make chicken marsala.”

“Really.”

“I wash my car on a regular basis,” I said, and didn’t bother to add that my less-than-classy automobile sometimes rebelled by popping a door an orifice open at rather surprising moments…such as when I was driving down the interstate.

“Wow.”

“And I’m reading…” I glanced toward the dog-eared romance novel on my coffee table, then searched for the classic I had begun six months earlier and lost a half an hour after that. “…The Sun Also Rises.”

“Yikes.”

“Because I now realize that cerebral stimulation is so much more important than a couple moments of gasping pleasure.”

“Just a minute,” she said, then spoke to her husband, who was, apparently, in her vicinity. “J.D., honey, send some burly guard to Mac’s house will you? I think there’s someone there impersonating her.”

I tucked my bare feet up under my bottom against the hard wood of the chair.

“You’re hilarious, Laney,” I said.

“Yeah. When I’m finished with this film, I’m thinking of doing a stand-up routine in Vegas.”

“Really?”

“No. Mac, listen, are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right.” I imbued my tone with a marvelous blend of surprise and hauteur. “It’s not as if I’m languishing here alone without Rivera around to harass me.”

“I know.”

“I mean, he was always so high-maintenance anyway.”

“He did bring a certain level of excitement to the picture.”

“And now I have…” I paused. My mind had suddenly gone blank.

“Marc,” she said.

“Yes! Marc. He’s terrific.”

“Isn’t he just?”

“And brilliant.”

“I know.”

“And attractive.”

“He is.”

“And he’s sensitive.”

She sighed. “And there lies the problem.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I tried to sound offended, but mostly I really didn’t want to know what she was talking about.

“I love you, Mac, but you don’t do sensitive.”

“What? Sensitively lies at the very core of what I do. Who I am. I adore sensitive.”

“Mac, honey, think about it. You were raised with a family whose main form of entertainment involved noisy bodily functions.”

“That’s not true.”

“Peter,” she said. “Could he or could he not sing the national anthem with body parts other than his lips?”

I gritted my teeth into a smile. “Well, I like to think Pete is not indicative of my family’s—”

“And didn’t Michael have some special skill he liked to—”

“I don’t see what that has to do with—”

“Belching!” she said. “He could project belch. Make it seem like someone else was doing it. Usually the shy little girl that sat next to him in English, or the teacher who had just finished lunch. But I think James was the real champion in this little contest. What was his talent? I can’t quite seem to—”

“Listen, Laney!” I snapped, then calmed my voice and drew a cleansing breath. “The McMullens may not be Illinois’s founding family, but it’s not as if we’re knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.” I thought about that for a moment, remembered my brothers cackling gleefully as they planned yet another hilarious prank, and moved on. “And even if we are, that by no means precludes me from being able to become close to someone who is articulate yet—”

“Shadow puppets!”

Shit!

“He could make shadows with his hands that looked like copulating—”

“So what!” I may have shouted the words. Fucking barbarian brothers. I hated them all. “Maybe that’s why I appreciate sensitivity so much. Maybe that’s why it touches my soul like nothing else.”

“Touches your soul?” Her tone was Sahara dry.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Did I tell you Marc wrote me a poem?”

“A poem?” She sounded increasingly dubious, bordering on disbelief.

“Yes. It was wonderful. Soulful and eloquent and endlessly…creative.” I could almost hear the wince in her voice. “You didn’t laugh at him, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t laugh at him.”

“Not even a little?”

“No!”

“No snorting or eye rolling?”

“Laney!”

“What? You hate poetry.”

“I do not hate poetry.”

“You told me you hated poetry.”

“I said I didn’t understand poetry.”

“You slept through the entire free verse class in middle school lit.” See, there’s the problem with having lifelong friends. They have memories like pachyderms. “Well, those were boring.”

“And Marc’s wasn’t?”

“Absolutely not.”

“What was it about?”

Oh hell! I had no idea what it had been about. It had been thirty-seven stanzas long.

Thirty-seven! No one should be expected to stay awake that damn—

“Mac?”

“It was about the sea.”

“The sea.”

I waved a wild hand at nothing in particular, then brought it back to rub my eyes. “It doesn’t matter what it was about. Marc’s wonderful.”

“I know.”

“He’s smart and…well read…and neat.”

“And there’s nothing more fun than a man who organizes his socks.” I paused for a moment, realized she was being facetious, and launched into defense mode. “I don’t need fun, Laney.” I jerked to my feet. Harley stood, too, looking offended.

“I need…”

“What?” she asked. “What do you need?”

“Stability and maturity and…” I motioned vaguely toward the world at large.

“Sex?”

“Sensitivity!”

“Screw sensitivity.”

“Laney!” I had rarely heard her use such foul language. Her father the preacher would turn over in his grave. If he had a grave. Which he did not because he was still alive.

“Or have you already?” she asked.

I gasped, eyes wide. “Are you asking if I’ve slept with Marcus?”

“Yes.”

I pursed my lips, scowled at the cupboards. “We haven’t quite gotten around to that yet.”

“Haven’t gotten around to it.”

“I thought it was a good idea to wait.”

There was a long, pensive silence. “Can I ask why?”

“And this from a preacher’s daughter!” I tried to sound disapproving. But it was like scolding a nun. Laney was, and has always been, my moral compass. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Mac,” she said, and sighed, long and slow, “you propositioned our calculus teacher.”

I felt my face flush. “Well…it wasn’t as if I was a student at the time.”

“The last cords of Pomp and Circumstances had barely died away.”

“That’s simply not true.”