How to Score (13 page)

And then there had been Lance. Just the thought of him made her feel small and somehow defective.

“Lance seemed normal,” Sammi ventured.

“Yeah. Until you discovered he was a cheating dirt-bag.”

Which had hurt—really hurt. Truth be told, it had destroyed her self-confidence.

Chloe opened Chase’s refrigerator and stared inside. “I don’t think you should write this guy off just because he’s in law enforcement.”

“Yeah, well, there’s more baggage that comes with the job than just the enforcer mentality.” Sammi pulled a carton of ricotta cheese from the grocery sack. “Remember how Mom used to listen to the police scanner every time Dad was at work? She spent her life worrying that something would happen to him.” It was not a lifestyle Sammi wanted for herself.

“Yeah. But then, Mom was always a nervous Nellie.”

“As it turned out, with good cause.”

The memory of the awful day their father had been shot hung in the air between them. She and Chloe had been at high school when their ashen-faced grandmother had arrived with the news and taken them to the hospital. In her mind’s eye, Sammi could still see her mother’s tear-streaked face in the fluorescent lights of the ICU waiting room, hear the beeps and swooshes of the medical equipment keeping him alive, picture her father’s tube-riddled body, lying helpless and unmoving on a hospital bed.

Chloe closed the refrigerator door. “That was a freak accident.”

“It’s an occupational hazard, and you know it.” Sammi folded the paper bag. “But I don’t know why we’re even talking about it, because it’s a nonissue. Chase thinks I’m a bigger health hazard than Typhoid Mary.”

Chloe’s mouth curved in a knowing grin. “From the way he looked at you at the swap meet, I think he’d love to catch what you’re carrying.”

The thought made her heartrate kick up a notch. “You think?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Sammi knew it was illogical, but as she bent to stash the sack under the sink, she couldn’t help smiling.

“This is really good.” Chase looked up from the plate of lasagna, sautéed green beans, and Caesar salad he was balancing on a lap tray. “Delicious, in fact.”

Sammi smiled at him from her perch on the edge of the bed. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m not.” Okay, well, he was. The scents wafting from the kitchen for the last hour had made his mouth water, but he hadn’t really expected this. “Where’d you learn to cook like this?”

“From my grandmother.”

“The one who lived in Tulsa?”

Sammi nodded. “Chloe and I stayed with her and Granddad every summer. They had the coolest little art deco home.”

“So that’s where you got your interest in all things art deco.”

Sammi nodded. “My grandfather’s dad was a stonemason, and he helped build some of Tulsa’s landmark art deco buildings. He may have actually worked on my house, because he did some projects with the architect who designed it.”

“Wow. That’s cool.” No wonder she was so attached to the place.

“Yeah. Anyway, after my grandparents died, their house was sold. Within a year, the whole neighborhood was torn down for a strip mall. And that’s when I got interested in recent history, and the importance of preserving it.” She took a sip of iced tea, then set down the glass. “What about you? Were you close to your grandparents?”

He shook his head, then winced as his wound throbbed. “I never knew either set of them.” His father had been disowned by his parents before Chase was born, and his mother’s parents had died when he was an infant.

“So what did you do in the summers?”

A picture of his family’s rusted mobile home formed in his mind—the hole in the front screen door, the rancid smell of his father’s cigarettes and spilled beer, the windows lined with aluminum foil so his dad could sleep off hangovers in the dark. He and his brother had spent as little time there as possible. They’d played broomball on the pot-holed asphalt road, tossed a football back and forth in the pasture behind the trailer park, and built a fort in an old oak tree near the dump. “I mainly watched my little brother while my mom worked.”

“What did she do?”

“She was a waitress.” The next question was going to be about his dad, and he didn’t want to go there. He was about to steer the conversation back to her cooking when Luke’s cell phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” Sammi said, reaching forward.

Chase put out his hand, stopping her. “No!” It had to be Horace. If Sammi answered and Horace asked to speak to Luke, Sammi would put two and two together. The fact that Jones was such a common last name and she didn’t know his brother’s first name were the only things preventing her from figuring out that his brother was her life coach, as it was.

Except he wasn’t. Chase was. But she thought Chase was Luke. Man, what a tangled mess this was!

Releasing her hand, he picked up the phone. “I’m expecting a call from my partner about a case. I’ll need to talk to him privately.” The phone rang again in his hand.

“Oh. Of course.” Sammi picked up his dinner tray as she rose, then placed it on the opposite nightstand.

“Thanks,” Chase said as she headed for the bedroom door.

“No problem.”

Chase waited until she’d closed the door behind her, then swung his feet off the bed and opened the phone.

“Coach?” Horace’s reedy voice sounded through the receiver.

“Hi, Horace. How are you?”

Horace proceeded to tell him. Chase walked to the far side of the room and sank onto the floor beside the bed to ensure that Sammi couldn’t hear him through the wall, then spent twenty minutes listening to Horace go on and on about his mother’s freakishly precise dishwashing ritual, which she insisted he follow.

“So, Horace,” Chase said when he finally managed to get a word in edgewise. “How did your assignment go? Did you look for an apartment?”

“Yes, but that created a whole other problem. Mom found an extra newspaper in my car, and she went ballistic. She ranted and raved about waste and slovenliness and how she’d thought she’d raised me better.”

“What did you do?” Chase asked.

“That thing you told me to do a few months ago.”

Chase thumbed through the thick sheaf of papers in Horace’s file. He no longer saw two of everything—it was more like one and a half—but his eyes still couldn’t focus well enough to read Luke’s hand-scrawled notes. “I’ve, uh, told you lots of things,” he said warily. “Which one do you mean?”

“The thing where I pretend I have safety guards all around me, and Mom’s words just bounce off them, and I mentally tell myself ‘Eye on the goal, eye on the goal’ over and over.”

Man, his brother doled out some lame advice. “That works for you?”

“Well, I like to substitute the words ‘Na na na na boo boo, Na na na na boo boo.’ And yeah, it works for a few minutes, but then it wears off.”

“When it wears off, that’s when you need to walk.”

“Walk? Walk where?”

“Away. To another room. Out of the house. Anywhere she’s not.”

“But-but I can’t do that.” Horace’s voice rose an octave in alarm. “How would I do that?”

“You’d say, ‘I’ve got to go’ or ‘Thanks for sharing’ and then you’d get up and walk away.”

“But—where would I go? I live there. I’d have to come back, and when I did, she’d start in all over again.”

“Well, then, you could leave again.”

“But… ”

Chase squinted down at his brother’s notes, then covered one eye
. Don’t push him,
he managed to read.
Assure him he doesn’t have to do anything he’s not ready to do.
“Just think about it, Horace. Just start considering the possibility.”

With one eye still closed, Chase glanced at his bedside clock. Just five more minutes—thank God. “So did you come up with another rap?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, lay it on me.”

Horace slipped into a Snoop Dogg voice and a cheerleader beat:

I went out looking for a crib of my own,

A place where I could hang and just be alone

I found a place that was really the bomb

But I couldn’t rent it till I dealt with my mom.

Bazoom chock-a-lock-a-lock, bazoom chock-a-lock-a-lock, bazoom, bazoom, bazoom!

Horace paused and shifted back to his normal voice. “That’s as far as I got.”

“It’s a great start, Horace. I can’t wait until you finish it.”

“Yeah, but there’s a problem. I can only rap about things I can imagine, and I can’t really imagine standing up to my mom.”

“You’re getting there,” Chase reassured him. “Rap about what you want your life to be like, and it’ll help you make it happen.” He covered his eye and glanced back at his brother’s notes. “This week, I want you to talk to the property managers at two of the apartments you picked out.”

“Talk to them?” His already-high voice went up to a squeak. “You mean, on the phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, gee—I don’t know if I can do that. What will I say?”

“You’ll ask about the apartments. How much do the utilities run a month? Does the apartment complex have a workout room? That kind of stuff.”

“Oh, golly. I don’t want to bother anyone.”

“You wouldn’t be bothering them. They
want
people to call. That’s why they run ads, Horace.”

“But-but… They’ll want me to come look at them, and I don’t think I can.”

“You don’t have to right now. Just make a couple of phone calls.”

“Well… ”

A beep sounded in Chase’s ear, indicating he had another incoming call. Oh, Christ—he hoped like hell it wasn’t Sammi calling from the other room. Surely she’d skip her session since she wasn’t home, wouldn’t she? But in the pit of his stomach, he knew otherwise.

“Our time’s up, Horace. This is my next client. I’ll talk to you next week.”

He drew a deep breath, clicked the receiver, and heard Sammi’s soft voice pour over him.

“Luke? It’s Sammi.”

Damn. He could see her out his sliding glass door, stepping onto the balcony that ran from the living room to his bedroom, her cell phone to her ear. At any moment, she could turn and see him, and it wouldn’t take much in the way of lip-reading skills to figure out he was talking to her.

He scrambled to his feet and strode to the bathroom, closing the door behind him and turning on the shower so she wouldn’t hear him through the wall.

“Hi, Sammi.” He deliberately raised his voice and slowed the cadence of his speech. “How are things going?”

She paused. “You sound like you’re in a rainstorm.”

Hell. She was hearing the shower. And since his area code was Tulsa, a rainstorm didn’t make sense. He paced the small room. “I, uh, have a fountain in my backyard. So how are things going?”

“Not so great.” A forlorn sigh echoed through the phone. “I hurt Chase again.”

“Oh, yeah?” Even as he said it, his conscience prickled. “Tell me about it.”

She filled him in on the events of the day. “And now I’m at his apartment, and I think he has a girlfriend.”

What?
He made a deliberate effort to keep his voice calm. “What gives you that impression?”

“Well, his phone rang while he was eating dinner, and I started to answer it, and he practically knocked it out of my hand to grab it himself. He told me he was expecting a call about a case and he needed to talk in private, but he looked funny when he said it. Now he’s been in there for more than thirty minutes, talking in really low tones.”

Chase sat on the bathroom floor, his back against the tub. “If he has a girlfriend, why isn’t she there with him instead of you?”

“She must live out of town. The FBI’s field office is in Oklahoma City, and Chase goes there all the time, so maybe she lives there.” She sighed. “Now he’s in the bathroom, and I think I hear the shower. He probably needed to cool down after talking to her.”

Oh, jeez—did she think he was in here
wanking?
Chase dropped his forehead to his knees, then jumped as he hit his wound.

“I don’t know why I care,” she continued. “I don’t want to get involved with someone as rigid and stodgy as he is, anyway.”

She thought he was rigid? And
stodgy?
He raised his head. “What makes you think he’s like that?”

“Well, his place is as sterile as the Skylab, I found three to-do lists in his Explorer, and the hubcaps at his swap-meet booth were alphabetized. Plus he folds his dirty clothes.”

What’s wrong with that?
he started to ask, then realized it would sound defensive. He decided to backtrack the conversation. “I thought you told me he didn’t have a girlfriend.”

“He could have lied. That’s what men do.”

“Wow. Not too jaded, are you?”

“I guess I kind of am.”

“Did you even consider the possibility that he was talking about work, like he said?”

“No. Not really.”

“So your knee-jerk reaction is to assume he’s lying?”

She seemed to ponder that. “My knee-jerk reaction is to be cautious and avoid rejection.”

“What makes you think he’d reject you?”

“Because I keep hurting him, for starters. Why would he want to hang around someone abusive?”

She didn’t have the first idea about abusive behavior. “You had some accidents. That’s not the same as abuse.”