Polished Slick (Natural Beauty) (15 page)

“Since the day I beat him at golf at fourteen. I quit right after that and he never asked me to play again. I took up surfing instead.”

They paused their conversation long enough to put in their food orders. Trinity sipped some more wine. “So, what happened with the house?”

“Oh, well, that’s why we’re here. Won the auction, but I can’t say I won much of a
house
. We’re going to have to raze it. It’s a complete mess. Structurally unsound and a veritable cesspool. I think someone must have been squatting in there for quite a while. Saw a lot of fast food trash on the first floor.”

She cringed. Such a damned waste. “So, what are you going to do?”

“I’ve got some money saved up from my…heh…frugal living for the past few years and I guess I’ll finance the rest, but…” He tapped the plans unfurled on top of the white tablecloth. “I want to build this house, but I’m worried there’s so much me in it that…well, that other people won’t be comfortable.”

Trinity stood and walked to the side of the table to lean over the plans. It was a single-story U-shaped house. The top of the U pointed toward the back of the property and opened into a courtyard used for outdoor dining. One leg of the U housed three bedrooms and a bath. The other had a master suite and office. The front of the U was communal space, the kitchen, living area, and a guest bath. There were also plans for a two-story garage with a guest apartment.

She shrugged. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Do you think it’s too open?”

“Aunt Ginger’s house has Georgian architecture, so I’m used to a lot of walls. Growing up, though, sometimes I wished I could see what she was doing in the kitchen when I was in the den. I think if you like the people you live with you kind of want to be in the same room.”

“But you can’t predict whether or not your kids will like you.” There was a bit of edge in his voice she almost didn’t catch. She wondered what the basis of it was.

She shrugged and returned to her seat. “No, you can’t. But…kids have bedrooms they can lock themselves up in.”

“Okay, hypothetically speaking. If we were married, would you want personal space
aside
from the bedroom? Say, if you wanted to read a book alone or make a phone call.”

Married? To Jerry? Her face burned at the thought of him sharing her bed night after night, and she quickly turned toward the window.

“I…well, if I were making a phone call I’d probably use the office, assuming no one was in it. Reading a book?”
You’d sit next to me on the sofa and I’d put my feet on your lap
. “Well, I guess that could be trickier if there was a lot of ambient noise.” She tapped her fingers atop the drawing for a few beats then shrugged. “I don’t think it’d bother me. People adapt. Plus, there’s an entire basement. What do you have planned for that?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. I thought maybe it’d be the haven for all my computer equipment or some sort of game room. Keep that junk out of the line of sight, you know?”

“Or…maybe a playroom for kids?” She was fishing and she didn’t care if it was obvious.

She didn’t consider herself to be a particularly maternal sort, but Nikki had said she hadn’t thought she was either, until she got with Charlie. Her bond with Gabby made her want kids of her own. Trinity thought Nikki would make a
fabulous
mother. She had the smarts, the flexibility, and the support system.

Trinity let out a little giggle at the thought of Great Aunt Ginger as a great-
great
Aunt, loving up a little Jerry clone. It would
have
to be a boy, of course. All boys. Trinity wouldn’t know what to do with a little girl. Paint her nails? Fluff her hair? At that thought, her fingers moved idly to her own cropped locks. She’d started cutting her hair short in high school. It had been for utility, not fashion. She was hard-pressed to remember what she even looked like with hair.

A small part of her was a little tired of looking like a boy…probably in the same way Jerry hated being compared to a woman.

“You look like you’re thinking too hard, pixie,” he said, rolling up the plans as the server returned with a tray bearing their meals.

She gave the server a smile of thanks and picked up her fork. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.”

“Playroom’s a good idea, I think,” he said with a little smirk. “Probably stash the washer and dryer and such down there, too, so someone can keep up with the unyielding mounds of laundry and keep an eye on the little playing twerps simultaneously.”

“Yeah.” She flaked her tender salmon with her fork. “Go with your gut, Jerry. You’re the one who has to live there.”

“But
you
think it’s okay? A woman would be okay with it?”

That made her giggle. “I can’t speak for all of womankind, especially since I don’t cook. Notice I didn’t say anything about the kitchen?”

One of Jerry’s eyebrows twitched. “Anything else you don’t do?”

“I don’t garden or iron, either.”

“Hmm,” was all he said before digging into his steak.

His “hmm” made her stomach drop.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A few days passed before the electric company restored power to the farm, so the staff of N-by-N worked essentially in gray mode. Aside from Juan stopping in to check on delivery information, the folks who could work from home
did,
and the rest had a bit of a mini vacation. Even Trinity had reluctantly spent a couple of workdays at the beach. So on Friday, with all the staff back in the barn—including Jerry who normally worked from home on Fridays—it felt almost like a reunion.

Juan hovered near Jerry’s workstation waiting for him to load the company’s new webpage. “So, where you living at, man?”

Jerry scoffed. “Well, temporarily, I’m at my parents’ house. Kate went on a Caribbean cruise with her garden club, and my father insisted I stay for the time being. It’s a helluva awkward situation. I don’t know how long that’s going to work.”

He squinted at the ftp program’s error message and pounded his fist on the desktop. “Goddamned spotty internet. Have to start the upload again.” He turned his desk chair around to look at Juan, who by then was leaning against the cubicle wall with his arms crossed. “Anyway, I was hanging out on the back patio doing some coding for the new nail polish stuff, and he just walked right outside with his coffee and newspaper. For a while he didn’t say anything. He just sipped and read his paper. Weird for him because he generally has breakfast standing at the counter. He’s not one for unnecessary leisure. Every now and then I’d look up and catch him staring at me. So, I closed my laptop and asked him what was up. He gave me that ‘oh nothing’ bullshit and I called him on it.”

“Well, what happened?”

“It was really odd, Juan. He said something about me looking like my mother when I scrunched up my brow a certain way.”

Juan scrunched up his
own
brow. “That’s odd. Your mother or your
mother
?”

“That’s the thing—I was going to ask but then Kate called from wherever the fuck she was to ask him what kind of rum cake he wanted, and I used that distraction to sneak away.”

“He said he’d only met her the one time, right? The woman in Belgium?”

“Twice. Once when committing the deed, and the second time was picking up the product of the deed. Me.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Neither do I. That’s probably why we’re friends. We’ve got similarly calibrated bullshit detectors. Anyway, I think I’ve got a handle on who she might be. I did some snooping around in Dad’s old travel records and figured out where he stayed when he was in Belgium. He always used the same hotel when he was there, so I figured the woman must live in the area.”

“And you were able to find her based on that
how
?”

Jerry shrugged. “Dad’s had the same secretary for more than thirty years. I asked her sort of nonchalantly how he spent his downtime when he was working over there. She honed in on exactly what I was asking. I guess Dad wasn’t as discreet as he thought. There was apparently a woman who worked at the front desk at the hotel whom he was seen chatting up a lot.”

“Ah. And you found out her name?

“It wasn’t that hard. There was a little line on the receipts that listed who handled the transactions. Same woman every single time.”

“That’s a long time to keep travel receipts.”

“Right? I figured I’d screw up the courage, look her up, and…just ask.”

“Hey, do the damn thing. You deserve it. Oh, you gonna finally teach me to surf this weekend?”

“Are you serious?” Jerry laughed, spun back around to his computer and opened a browser window. He said a short prayer to the Internet god that uploading those image files without actually looking at them wouldn’t screw up the website rendering. He wasn’t in the mood to twiddle with the script, and Ron had supposedly sent files that were the right dimensions, so Jerry decided to just cheat for once.

“Yeah, man. How hard can it be?”

“Ha! We’ll have to find you some nice shallow waves, my—
whoa
.”

Nikki ran out of her office squealing. “Aren’t they great! I saw the page coming up through the inner office window. I had a sneak peak of them, but that was only on my phone.”

“Whoa,” Jerry repeated, staring at the screen and watching the animated banner’s slideshow shuffle through images. Most were of the individual nail polishes, and then there were a few of Dom and Cole. There was one of Trinity with a flask, and some of other staff members in candid shots taken in the barn when they were doing color testing. And then there was one of Jerry out of his tuxedo jacket holding up a computer keyboard. That wasn’t what had shocked him. The picture of him appearing to look longingly into Trinity’s eyes during their quiet conversation was the shocker. Jerry’s phone rang as Trinity padded over and stood beside Juan.

“Natural by Nicolette, this is Jerry.”

“You asshole!”

“I’m sorry, who’s this?”

“It’s Roberta, you jackass.”

“Umm…hi, Bobby.” How the hell did his old agent catch wind of his activities that quickly? He’d just loaded the site. “What’s shakin’?” He turned his head around to find Trinity staring at the screen slack-jawed.

“I should be shaking
you
, you idiot. Guess what I saw.”

“Um…the new Matthew McConaughey movie?”

“You always were a joker. I missed that about you. No. One day I was minding my business, running my errands, you know? And I went to see my old friend Ron because I have a couple of new clients out that way. I was in Wilmington for a weekend conference. I wanted to see about him doing some head shots.”

“And?”

“And? I walked in on him editing a shit-ton of photos from this cosmetics company, which obviously doesn’t have products on the West Coast yet, because I’d never heard of it until that day. Guess whose goddamned face was his screen?”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “Whose?”

“Yours, you jackass.”

Jerry held the phone back from his ear, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. He looked at Nikki and mouthed, “My former agent.”

She shrugged and said, “Sorry.”

He put the phone back to his ear. “It’s not like I’m getting paid, Bobby. I work here. Everyone in the campaign posed for free.”

“You better have. I saw the shots Ron was compiling for some sort of magazine layout. You got the two most famous female impersonators in the country posing beside you? Are you trying to kill me? Do you know what the
value
of that shot is?”

“Uh
no
. Dom and Cole are our friends, so the cost and value are probably pretty disparate.”

“I am going to fly out there, wrap my bony fingers around that gorgeous neck of yours, and squeeze it until you develop good common sense. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Jerry! Goddamn you. People are still calling me after all these years to ask if you’re available, and you’re in some fucking Podunk town modeling for free. I oughta…”

“Bobby I gotta go. I’ll call you. Maybe.” He hung up.

Well, it was the truth. Alonzo had entered the barn, and stood near the reception area looking around for assistance.

Nikki waddled over with Juan at her heels. He couldn’t resist being privy to first-hand information. That gave Trinity room to squeeze in closer to Jerry. She perched on his armrest, still staring at the screen.

“Wow, that doesn’t even look like me,” she said softly.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked, wrapping one arm around her waist to keep her from falling off the arm as he rolled closer to the desk.

She jumped a bit as if startled. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I…thought you were…” She sighed. Anyway, I don’t know. That person is, well,
badass
. She looks like she’s supposed to be with that guy. She looks like she has it all together.”

Huh?
“I have no idea what you’re getting at. I’ll agree she’s pretty hot, though. Trust me, no one’s looking at
me
in that picture. Except my agent,” he added in a mumble.

Trinity scoffed and edged off the chair arm. “I can’t go around wearing that much make-up every day. It’s not me.”

“It’s not the make-up, Trinity.”

“Then what is it?” She fiddled with the ties of her sweatshirt, refusing to meet his eye contact.

“Are you
serious
?” He hoped his incredulity was clear on his face. Where the
hell
was this self-confidence issue springing from? She hadn’t seemed to have been aware of her appearance before that damned photo shoot, and now she was intermittently displaying an excess of confidence—as evidenced by the footsie they’d played all throughout dinner—or a complete lack of it.

She didn’t have a chance to answer, because Nikki yelled from up front, “Did you catch that, Jerry?”

“Catch what?”

“They found some prints on the bootleg bomb shards. They got a hit in the national fingerprint database.

He stood, carefully, and hurried up the aisle. “You coming, pixie?” he asked, looking back at Trinity, who was still standing in his cubicle looking lost. She finally responded by shaking her head and moving toward her workbench.