The Brush Off

Jackson Scythe splayed his big—tan, long-fingered, ultra-masculine—hand on the door, opening it wider to allow my entry. As I took a tentative step forward, letting my imagination wander to ways he might use those hands, he passed me a brown paper bag he’d had tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

“What’s this?”

“Barf bag.”

I tried to hand it back to him. “No, really, you’re not all that bad.”

That earned a double quirk of the eyebrows and I could’ve sworn a twitch in a smile muscle or two. But he wouldn’t let me score the last point. “You ever seen a dead body?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then you better keep it.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

An
Original
Publication of POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2004 by Linda Zimmerhanzel

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0045-2
ISBN-10: 1-4165-0045-6

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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http://www.SimonSays.com

This is for my
wild angels,
both in Heaven
(okay, you guys with wings, I’m finally listening!)
and on Earth…

Donna Drayton,
the friend who can read my mind.
Pam Morsi,
the colleague who won’t hear of me giving up.
Paige Wheeler,
the agent who cattle-prods me.
Christina Boys,
the editor who gives me smiley faces in the margins.

And, of course, I couldn’t forget my hairdresser,
Jay Askin, who patiently withstands three
hours of questions every six weeks.
(Oops, guess it’s not a secret anymore
that I’m not a natural blonde!)

I couldn’t have done this without y’all!

I hope we make somebody laugh….

Keep up appearances; there lies the test;

The world will give thee credit for the rest.

Outward be fair, however foul within.

Sin if thou wilt, but then in secret sin.

—Charles Churchill

“I
T’S STUCK!” HE WAILED.

Eardrums cringing, I pulled and pushed and squirmed harder just to avoid hearing any more of his contralto whine. Finally, red-faced and panting, I looked at the reflection of our contorted shapes in the mirrors surrounding us and had to agree. It was stuck. Which meant
we
were stuck. Together.

“Damn it,” I mumbled, more to myself than to him. It was my fault I took the job. He’d told me exactly what he’d wanted, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I told him I couldn’t do it. But when he begged and whined, I’d agreed just to shut him up. Later, I’d tried to call and cancel, but he’d started in on how I was “The Best” (yes, including the capitals) and he didn’t want anyone but me touching him…well, flattery works even when we know we’re being buttered up. I was no exception, though I was still wavering between refusal and acceptance when he dealt the fatal blow. He had to remind me his wife was my best friend. Now, how could I say no?

This was why, I answered myself, with another stomach-clutching look in the mirror. I took a deep breath and got realistic. “I’m going to have to cut it.”

“No! Reyn, no!” His bawl dissolved into a sob. Tears quivered on his fleshy cheeks. “You can’t cut my hair! Not my precious…
mi pelo muy bonito—”

“Mario, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we have any choice.”

I tried to pry my cramped hand from the sticky handle of the brush, but it was no use. I’d thrown out my back with my last attempt at getting the round boar’s hairbrush loose from his long, baby-fine strands when I put my foot up on the back of the chair to try to yank it free. So here I was, my denim broomstick skirt hiked practically up to my hips, one foot stuck between his back and the chair, the other dangling toward the ground, my chest draped—a generous verb, admittedly, considering my barely-B-cups—across the top of Mario’s head, and my right hand attached by mousse, hairspray, and volumizer to the brush. My other hand was no help, being inextricably tangled in hair that had turned the consistency of half-dry molasses. Needless to say, I couldn’t pull with all my strength. Still, never one to give up easily, I gave it one more weak yank; he squalled. With a frustrated sigh that was an ounce of self-control away from turning into a whimper, I relaxed my arms, making the muscles along the right side of my spine tighten frighteningly. I knew from experience those muscles would freeze in place, and I’d end up looking like the Hunchback of Notre Dame for the rest of the week. The handicap was good for better tips but frankly not worth the extra money.

“Why is this happening to me?” Mario sniffed. A tear dripped from the end of his nose onto the front of his mauve smock.

I thought of telling him the truth—that he was a vain idiot. But I held my tongue, mainly because I could qualify for that moniker myself, at least the
idiot
part. “Well, Mario, I
did
tell you I’d never used these products together before, let alone so much at one time…”

“But—but it’s the only way I can get the volume I need.” His liquid brown eyes met mine in the mirror with an anguished look that reminded me of my dogs when I don’t let them in out of the rain.

He was never going to achieve the volume he wanted, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Not while I was within earshot of that ear-splitting, whiny wail. I wiggled the fingers of my captured left hand and began to feel them earn a measure of freedom. The throbbing pain in my back grew more insistent.

“I think,” I began cautiously through clenched teeth, “I can get this hand free.” I eyed a pair of scissors within reach.

“Oh, yes,” he enthused, tears forgotten. “Then we can get some water. Maybe that will loosen it up.”

“I can’t reach the water, but I can reach the scissors.” I tried to tone down the hopeful lilt in my voice.

“Aye-yi-yi-yi! Don’t do it, Reyn. I’ll tell Trudy, I swear I will.”

I sucked in a breath and got ready to let loose on him. Someone beat me to it.

“Mario? You’ll tell me what? What are you two
doing
down there?” a tentative soprano called from down the hall as we heard my front door, heavy with its beveled glass, clank shut.

Our eyes met in the mirror. His registered relief. Mine, abject embarrassment.

“Trudy?” Mario quavered. He turned his head toward the door. Or tried to. Our precarious positions wouldn’t quite allow it without him taking half of my body with him, which he tried to do but only made it about a quarter of the way.

I should’ve been grateful to be rescued, but the fact that it was Mario’s wife doing the rescuing completely squelched my relief. Why me? No one else on earth would go through the rest of her life making sure neither one of us forgot this horrible moment in time.

I had visions of being hounded every day by this embarrassment. I could be a poster girl for
Just Say No…to Overstyling.
Didn’t they teach us to know our own limitations (and those of our customers) in cosmetology school?

“Where are you?” Her voice was getting louder—a dreaded clue that she was obviously headed in the right direction.
Damn.

“Down here, Trude, in Reyn’s chair.” Mario was crying again, this time for joy. And I always thought the phrase “drowning in emotion” was an exaggeration.

Trudy appeared in the doorway, and I craned my neck just in time to see her mouth fall open and her hands bury themselves in her shimmering copper tresses. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, save me…and spank my heinie,” she breathed while tracing the sign of the cross—forehead, chest, right breast, left breast.

Trudy was a Catholic with style. I admired that, although not as much as usual right at that moment.

“What’s happened to you two?” she demanded after intoning a modified prayer for religious absolution.

“What does it look like?” I muttered with a surly glare at her via the mirror.

Trudy closed her mouth and opened it again. She shook her head and licked her raspberry lips. She rubbed her fingers with their raspberry-tinted nails over her eyelids. She smoothed down cotton-candy-pink silk over her buxom bustline. I wasn’t quite sure cotton candy went with raspberry or that raspberry didn’t clash with the highlights in her hair, but I wasn’t opening up those color debates now. Finally, she said, “I wouldn’t venture a guess.”

“Very funny,” I retorted, seriously eyeing the scissors as a weapon now instead of as an escape route. Trudy had recovered from her shock, and the twinkle in her contact-created aquamarine eyes hinted at the infectious giggle-snort I loved so much when we were laughing. At something or someone else, that is.

Mario, weakling that he was, had held his tongue, no doubt in the hopes that I would talk us out of the sticky situation. Seeing I wasn’t going to try, he gave up his silence. “Trudy,
mi corazón,
Reyn threw out her back.”

“While doing what, pray tell?”

“Trude, I wanted that look that I was talking to you about, you know, that early-nineties Michael Bolton/Julio Iglesias combination. It’s just so romantic.” He tried to crane his neck to look at me. “Trudy calls it a variation on a faux hawk. Get it? Not a mohawk because of the long hair.” He looked back to Trudy. “But the lift and height on the crown, the curls…I wanted to surprise you for your birthday.” Mario’s eyes brimmed with so much earnestness I almost regained my sense of humor. Almost.

“Julio and Michael, huh? How come it looks more like Lyle Lovett, then?” she quipped with a straight face that broke into a grin the moment she finished the sentence.

Here came the giggle-snort.

Actually, it took longer than I expected, a testament to the fact that Trudy was really trying for restraint, although not hard enough. I knew I should be damned grateful she wasn’t jealous, that she wasn’t thinking the worst—that I might have been in a clinch with her honey. But frankly, if she’d even entertained that idea for an instant, she wouldn’t have been my friend for long, because Mario was so far from someone or something I’d want to be swapping spit with that I’d be seriously insulted if she even imagined it. Besides the fact, of course, that I would never do that to a friend. Except maybe a friend married to Harrison Ford…

Mario bowed his head, taking me with him and stretching my back. “Argh,” I moaned.

“Oh,
Dios mío,
Reyn. I’m sorry,” he sputtered, throwing his head back up, sending me off-balance, teetering off the edge of my stool, taking my hands and his hair with them. Mario screeched in pain. Trudy dove to grab me, or so I thought. She grabbed my arms instead, trying to save her husband’s hair as my body continued its date with the floor. My body stopped in midair, and the excruciating tightening of my back prevented me from feeling anything in my shoulder when the telltale
pop
announced the sickening moment it dislocated.

Frantically, muttering a combination of curses and prayers, Trudy freed my hands as I collapsed onto the floor in a heap of misery.

Mario was crying. I felt a wave of comfort at his sympathy until I saw him patting the tangle of his silky jet-black hair and realized he was crying over the mess his coif was in, not the mess my body was in. Trudy jumped into his lap. They snuggled and nuzzled, and she sprinkled his face with kisses as I battled against the wave of nausea that threatened to dirty my just-polished oak floor.

“What do we have here?” asked a familiar voice with a smooth Mexican-American accent flavored with just a hint of affected aristocratic nasal. “If I’d known you were into this kind of thing, I could have sent you some more business, Reyn.”

Head on the floor, I looked upside-down at the underside of the chin of the king of the beauty salons in San Antonio.

“You missed a spot shaving this morning,” I croaked.

Ricardo threw his head back and laughed deep, low and toe-curling. It was his sensual signature and, I was convinced, the main reason he’d parlayed a mini beauty empire in our burgeoning South Texas city. It sure as hell wasn’t because he could do hair. I’d always thought all his clients resembled teased Pekinese when they emerged from his enclave.

Not that I’d ever tell him that. His business acumen was unsurpassed, as was his power in certain circles, the styling salon circle being one of them. We’d once had a comfortable boss-and-employee relationship, one in which we argued but retained a mutual respect and a certain chemistry. After I went out on my own, the relationship evolved into a friendship that was contentious but close. Still, I knew he could and would blackball me in an instant if he wanted to. I valued honesty more than was probably good for me, and I wasn’t always tactful, but occasionally I recognized when diplomatic skills were required. Now was one of those times, I told myself.

“She’s not so bad off if she can use that rapier tongue of hers,” Ricardo said in an aside to Trudy and Mario.

“My tongue’s not what’s hurt,” I muttered, still surly.

“And what is,
pobrecita?
” Ricardo paused for dramatic effect. “Besides Mario’s hair.”

I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth and was briefly grateful that I was disabled. It kept me from unwisely wiping that smug grin off Ricardo’s unnaturally beautiful face.

“She hurt her arm,” Trudy put in generously. She said it without looking at me, as she was still in Mario’s lap, fussing over his hair.

“My shoulder, actually,” I corrected, feeling my blood begin to boil at the injustice of it all. I was doing my dumb friend’s dorky husband a favor, which only got me into excruciating pain and was still the butt of every joke. Where was the justice in life? “I think it’s dislocated.”

Ricardo’s brilliant grin—upside-down—made me dizzy. Why was he happy about my painful predicament?

“You’re in luck, my dear Reyn. I can fix that for you.”

Before I could get the “Sure you can” out, he’d reached down, scooped me up with deceptively slender arms, and done something indescribably painful in a bear hug that left me suddenly relocated. My ligaments protested mightily, but I was able to move my right arm. I wouldn’t have to cancel tomorrow’s appointments after all. Then the muscles in my back barked, and I was in pain again. A different pain, admittedly, but pain all the same. When you start cataloging the differences between throbbing aches and stabbing aches, you’re in trouble, period.

Mario and Trudy looked at Ricardo in amazed and undisguised admiration. “Where’d you learn how to do that?” Trudy asked.

“Ah.” Ricardo waved one manicured hand at the pair. “I used to be a paramedic. In another life.”

“Dios mío.”
Mario’s eyes widened. “You’re reincarnated?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I’d let this doofus talk me into anything, his wife being my best friend notwithstanding. Trudy flushed to match her lips and nails—raspberry red with embarrassment; it felt nice to pass some of
that
around. It was also nice to know that while love had made Trudy blind, it hadn’t deafened her as well. Ricardo was regarding Mario with an air of condescending patience. “No, Big M, I was a paramedic before I found myself, before I realized my mission was to create beauty, instead of to heal.”

Leave it to Ricardo to glorify doing hair above saving lives. He almost had me believing the swill. I was tasting bile again. I cleared my throat.