Crazy for You (33 page)

Not that I’d been much better myself. Allowing Kennison to make me feel inferior because I had a small patch of puckered skin—how pathetic. Labeck was right. My scar
was
a badge of courage. I wasn’t going to try hiding it with my hair anymore. My attitude toward anyone who stared at it would be: deal with it.

Josie and I resumed gazing at the infants and I wondered whether I looked as gooey-eyed as Josie did, staring longingly at those little dumplings of bliss. Would I ever have one of those tiny, squirming bundles to hold in my own arms?

Tiny squirming bundles with heads the size of grapefruit, I noticed. Grapefruit that had to come out of an opening no wider than a grape. Yeesh. Getting burned by thugs, getting shot at—that was a piece of cake. Shoving an eight-pound baby down your birth canal—well, they ought to give out medals for that.

Maybe I should just ignore my biological clock for now, I decided. Not forget it, just reset it to the ovarian equivalent of Daylight Savings Time. And in the meantime, I’d make darn sure to take my birth-control pills. Because I was pretty sure that Bonaparte Labeck and I would be sharing a bed again in the very near future

Chapter Thirty-nine

Be ladylike in victory. Resist the urge to blow raspberries at your boyfriend’s old flame.

—Maguire’s Maxims

“I am not sitting in that thing.” Labeck folded his arms across his chest and set his jaw in the way that always gives me an uncontrollable urge to whack the back of his head.

“Sir, it’s regulations. All patients must leave the hospital in a wheelchair,” squeaked the hospital volunteer, a candy striper of about sixteen, who looked about to cry.

Labeck was looking particularly fearsome this morning, his unshaven face resembling a saguaro cactus, his hair looking as though it had been styled with a Cuisinart, his right cheekbone bearing a thorn slash like the Frankenstein monster’s stitches.

“I don’t need a wheelchair. I’m fine. Yesterday I walked fifty miles through the snow on one foot and punched out a dozen—”

“Just sit in the damn chair,” I said.

He sat, as cheerful as a cloud of soot.

“Sorry for the language,” I apologized to the girl, which only made her look more scared.

The three of us descended in the elevator and the volunteer wheeled Labeck out of the hospital to the pickup entrance, where our transportation awaited. Since Labeck was not supposed to drive and Pig was in car heaven, Eddie Arguello had agreed to pick us up. The Cadillac Cimarron idled curbside, its tailpipe exhaling such vast clouds of carbon into the atmosphere you could almost see the hole in the ozone layer opening overhead.

Eddie was holding up a sign like a limousine driver at the airport: Maguire-Labeck.

I thought that had a nice ring to it. He held up the morning newspaper in his other
hand. Large black letters above the fold proclaimed
Local Surgeon Charged With Murder
.

Eddie flipped the paper so that we could read the smaller headline below the fold.
Charges Dropped Against Channel 13 Cameraman
. Labeck broke into a smile.

“Can I get out now?” he asked the volunteer.

She nodded vigorously, clearly implying that if he fell on his stupid head it was not the hospital’s responsibility, and quickly made a getaway.

Labeck hobbled the few feet to the car. “Remind me to never get shot again,” he said. “Because I don’t intend to spend another day in the hospital for the rest of my life.”

A spiffy white Mazda pulled up and double-parked next to Eddie’s junkmobile. Aspen Lindgren got out, clip-clopped over on high-heeled boots, and hurried up to Labeck. “I phoned the hospital and they said you were being released this morning, Benny,” she said breathlessly. “I’m sorry I got here so late.”

Aspen was flushed, which only made her look prettier. She wore a lilac-colored coat with a purple scarf wound fetchingly around her neck, and a silver Christmas tree pin. Her honey-colored hair frothed in the cold, crisp air like milkweed down. She carried an enormous bouquet of flowers.

“I was so terrified when I heard you’d been shot,” she said to Labeck. “I would have come last night but I was in Chicago and didn’t hear about it until I got back. Then this morning I had to be up at the crack of dawn to cover Black Friday—you know, busiest shopping day of the year and all that. I swear the media actually
hope
someone will be trampled to boost their ratings.”

Black Friday! I groaned inwardly. I was scheduled to work this afternoon. In the turmoil of the last two days, I’d forgotten the fact that my job existed.

“I can take you straight home, Benny, or we can go out to breakfast or—well, just do anything you feel up for.” Aspen jacked up the voltage on her smile and thrust the flowers at Labeck.

He didn’t smile back. “I was going to call you,” he said quietly.

My heart gave a dull thud. “We should go, give them some privacy,” I said to Eddie, moving toward the Cimarron. Except we couldn’t leave until Aspen moved her car.

“No,” Labeck said sharply. “I want you to stay, Mazie.”

Aspen’s eyes slanted to me. I was wearing three-day-old clothes, underpants that could have swum through the snow on their own, and a coat whose moth holes were painfully revealed in the morning light. If I’d set an empty cup at my feet, passersby would have tossed coins into it. I’d been too tired last night to go home to change, and had spent the night in Labeck’s room at the hospital.

Aspen and Labeck had a low-pitched conversation. I tried not to listen.

“He’s dumpin’ her,” said Eddie, Mr. Sensitivity.

Labeck was doing it gently, though, and Aspen took it like a trooper. She sniffled, and my heart broke for her a little. In my magnanimous mood, I could even allow myself to feel a little sorry for Aspen. She really was a nice girl, and now at least she’d be spared finding out for herself what a self-centered, conceited, control-freak ass Ben Labeck could be.

When he wasn’t being a throw-himself-on-the-grenade, brave, daring, fearless hero.

Eddie and I waited a decent minute before approaching Labeck. He wore an expression of mixed regret and relief. He held out the flowers to Eddie. “You want these?”

Eddie’s eyes lit up. “Shit, yeah! I’ll give them to Miss Novitsky, my English teacher. I got a B going in her class and it’s getting too cold to keep stealing flowers out of the cemetery.”

Chapter Forty

Ce n’est pas ce que vous dites; c’est comment vous le dire
. (It’s not what you say, but how you say it.)

—Maguire’s Maxims

Life holds many sensual pleasures. Letting chocolate chips melt on your tongue. Stroking a cat’s fur. Kissing the top of a baby’s head. But few things are more wonderful than standing beneath a blissfully hot shower, letting the spray soak off three days’ worth of grime and grunge.

I made little mews of pleasure as I lathered shampoo into my hair.

“Mazie,” came a deep voice from the other side of the curtain. “If you keep making those noises I am not going to be responsible for my conduct.”

“You’re under doctor’s orders,” I reminded him. “No running, no driving, no strenuous activity.”

I put his chances of following those orders at zero percent. “Aren’t you supposed to be sitting in the living room keeping your leg propped up?”

“I think something else is propped up.”

I smiled.

“When did they fix the shower?” I asked. Labeck had been taking baths for two years because his shower had stopped working.

“A couple weeks ago. A new landlord bought the building. He’s been upgrading. Pretty soon the place will be so upgraded I won’t be able to afford it. How much longer are you going to be?”

Labeck had already shaved and showered, having wound cellophane wrap around his thigh to keep the dressing dry. He’d been in and out in two minutes, leaving me an entire water heater’s worth of lovely volcanic-temperature water. I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair, turned off the shower, and stepped out.

Labeck was waiting there, wearing only a towel and his bandage, holding out a
tent-sized towel for me. “I threw your stuff in the laundry. So now you have nothing to wear,” he said. “What a shame.” His Ghirardelli-colored eyes traveled up and down my body, his gaze hotter than the shower water. He didn’t seem to notice that my body was less than perfect. Or maybe he saw, but it didn’t matter to him.

He took another towel off a shelf and began drying my hair. “You’re planning to stay, aren’t you?” he purred in my ear, using his best aural aphrodisiac tones.

“For a while. Then I have to go to work.”

His face fell. “The coffee shop.”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“I don’t like it.” He took a deep breath. “But I can learn to live with it.”

“It’s not as though I’m going to work in a coffee shop the rest of my life.”

“I know. You can do anything you set your mind to, Mazie.”

He pulled me backward against him, bent and nuzzled the base of my neck. “When do you have to be at work?”

“Two o’clock.”

I watched his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His irises were doing the champagne dance. His hands moved over my body, knowing exactly where to touch, stroke, kiss. “That gives us three hours,” he murmured.

“You’re not supposed to engage in strenuous activity.”

He set his big hands on my waist. “No trapezes, I promise.”

“No anything.” I tried to stop my own hands from treacherously pulling him toward me. “You have to follow doctor’s orders.”

“The doctor said you need to keep me happy.” His hands slid up beneath my towel.

“He did not! If you don’t behave yourself, Ben, I swear I am going to reveal to the world that Stayfree maxi pads saved your life.”

He laughed. “Go ahead. If anyone makes fun of me, you can kick their butts. You’re good at that.”

“That’s not what a woman wants to be good at.”

“You know the only thing I regret about this whole thing? Not getting to see you beat that confession out of Kennison.”

“I didn’t lay a finger on him!”

“Right. Glad we got our stories straight on that.”

“You are such a troglodyte.”

“Yeah.” He kissed the hollow between my neck and shoulder.
“Vous êtes beau.”

“No. Not French! Please, not with the French.”

“If I have to play dirty, I will, Mazie.
Vous me conduises fou avec désir
.”

“Stop it!” I put my hands up over my ears.

Which allowed him to unwrap my towel.

“Je veux te faire foutre.”
His eyes were dark with desire, and I didn’t need a translation to understand what he meant, because I had heard that phrase often enough—the naughty words are always the stuff you learn first—during my student days in Montreal to
comprendre
its exact meaning.

And it was exactly what Bonaparte Labeck did to me, or we did to each other, after he led me to his bed. His leg did not slow him down in the least, and we had nearly two months worth of thwarted lust to compensate for.

We both dozed off afterward. I woke up with a start, heart pounding, drenched in sweat. I’d been dreaming that we were running through a dark forest with killers on our tails. It’s over now, I reminded myself, breathing deep until my heart gradually slowed.

We were lying spoon-style, and I was wrapped in the arms of the man I loved. I didn’t know if he loved me back. He’d never responded to that admission of love I’d blurted out back in the woods. Should I regret having said it, regret having laid out my heart like that?

No, I decided, recalling that horrible moment after Pig had crashed, when I’d believed Ben was dead. Life was short and uncertain. Things happened. Accidents happened. Bad guys tried to kill you. Better to speak what was in my heart—whether or not it was reciprocated—than to keep it locked inside. Take the risk. Life was a risk, wasn’t it? If Bonaparte Labeck didn’t love me, he didn’t, and I just had to accept that.

But I was going to operate on the premise that he did love me. He hadn’t said the words, but he’d forgiven me for the paintball tackle, he’d risked his own life a dozen times over to protect me, and he understood the dragon-slaying thing. That was pretty damn close to love, and it was good enough for me. For now, at least.

Ben started to stir, and he was at that tipping point where you wake up or you fall deeper asleep. I wiggled my backside against him to encourage him to tilt over to the waking up side, and he stirred even more. He woke smiling. It was one of the things I most liked about him.

He rolled me over until we were face-to-face. “I dreamed we were eating birthday cake,” he said. “Do you think that has some deep psychological meaning?”

“That depends. What kind of frosting did it have?”

“Dark chocolate. It was
your
birthday.” He looked at me, frowning. “When
is
your birthday?”

“January eighteenth. I don’t know when yours is, either.”

“March seventeenth.”

“So you’ll be thirty-one,” I said.

“Thirty.”

I sat up in bed and stared at him. “That means you’re two months younger than me.”

“So?” He pulled me back down.

“So I’m older than you. I’m a cougar.”

He smiled lazily. “I like cougars. They’re sleek, smart, and good at surviving. Sound like anyone you know?”

I answered by growling and nipping his shoulder. I definitely could get into this cougar thing.

About the Author

J
ULIET
R
OSETTI
grew up on a Wisconsin farm. She has taught school in Milwaukee and in Sydney, Australia, where her duties included coaching cricket and basketball. Her work has appeared in
The Milwaukee Journal
,
Chicago Tribune
, and in many other publications. She is a past winner of
Wisconsin Magazine
’s Wordsmith Award for nonfiction. Currently she lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with her husband and son, teaches in the local public school system, and is writing the next book in the Mazie Maguire series.