Windfall (27 page)

“I don't think it's any of your business.” Well, well. Lewis had developed a prim streak. For a guy who hadn't hesitated to get wild with me on the floor of a college lab, that was a bit hilarious.

“I'm just pointing out that there may be a pot/kettle issue on the table here regarding sleeping with the Djinn.”

“Funny, I didn't invite you into my private life.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Pot.”

“Kettle.”

“Bite me, Lewis.”

“Very mature.”

“Bite me
hard
!”

“Grow up.”

“You first!”

We stopped, staring at each other, and for no apparent reason, burst into laughter. Flagrant, stupid giggles. Stress and near-death will do that to you. I had to set my coffee down for fear of acquiring more burns he'd have to heal.

When we settled down again—which took a while—I said, “Okay, I've thought about it. I'm not going to work today.”

I picked up the phone. Lewis reached over and took it away from me. Our fingers brushed, and he was very close to me.

“You are,” he said. “I don't think you should stay here.”

“But—”

His fingers twined with mine. “I'm not blind and deaf, Jo. You think I don't know? You think I can't feel it?”

I felt horribly off balance. Were we flirting? Had we been flirting? Was he coming on to me? I'd thought he understood . . .

Lewis said, “No buzz.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

He raised our clasped hands. “No buzz. No resonance. No feedback. Jo, you can't hide it from me. Your power is gone.”

He wasn't talking about flirting. He was talking about my Warden abilities . . . and he was almost right. My power wasn't
completely
gone, but it was definitely operating at such a low voltage that he wasn't drawing a spark from it anymore. Lewis, who'd always drawn fire and power out of me, couldn't even feel a tingle anymore.

That wasn't seduction in his eyes. It was pity.

“Jo—” He let go of my hand and moved damp hair back from my face. “Go to work. I don't want you here in case things get ugly. You'd get hurt.”

“Sarah—Eamon—”

“I can keep them safe; nobody's gunning for them.
You,
however, don't have enough sense to stay out of the line of fire, and you'll be a target. Go. Do whatever it is you do.” He winked at me.
Winked.
“And besides, I love watching you on TV.”

 

Mona was running a little rough. In-town driving really didn't agree with her, of course; she needed open road and high RPMs and curves to conquer. Her heart just wasn't in the few miles to the studio. I patted her console and promised her a weekend in the country soon, not to mention a nice detailing.

Cherise's convertible was parked in its accustomed space when I arrived. Top up. I scanned the horizon. Yep, the clouds were crawling closer. Rain later today, for certain.

I checked in with Genevieve, who laconically pointed out my costume hanging on the rack. I did a double take.

“What . . . ?”

Genevieve, who had for some reason added some white streaks to her hair during the night, as well as a raspberry stripe from front to back, sucked on her cigarette and shrugged. She had a new tattoo as well. I'd never actually seen a woman with a naked woman tattoo before. It seemed recursive.

“You've got a new gig, sweetheart,” she said in that tobacco-stained voice. “Want my advice? Avoid the Fruit.” She meant Cherise, whom Genevieve had nicknamed Cherry back in the early days. Hence, the Fruit.

The costume hanging on the rack was an aqua-blue bikini.

I gulped and held it up. Not enough fabric to it to make a blindfold. It would be different if I was strutting it on the beach, or—better yet—wearing it for David, but for an audience in the hundreds of thousands . . . I felt faintly violated.

“Um, do I have a—”

“Choice?” Genevieve's laugh sawed the air. “You're funny, kiddo.”

I tried a smile, went behind the screen, and changed.

It was worse than I'd thought. I'd had the perfect bikini—in fact, I still had it in a drawer at home—and this wasn't it. It was way too
Penthouse
for public view, and it was designed for someone of Cherise's build, not mine. I felt like I was modeling fabric swatches. The thick bathrobe was a relief. I came out to give Genevieve a miserable look, and she raised one overplucked eyebrow in commiseration.

And then proceeded to torture my hair with hot irons until she was satisfied.

Thirty minutes later, I was walking onto the set, feeling like I was on my way to the electric chair. Clutching my bathrobe in a death grip. Cherise was sitting in a chair over to the side, looking like a thundercloud. I don't mean frowning, although she was doing that, of course. No, she looked like a
thundercloud
. As in, blue foam cloud suit, with little drops of silvery rain glittering all over it and hanging by wires. Her legs were covered in thick black tights.

I clapped my hands over my mouth in outright horror. She frowned harder.

“I did
not
ask for this,” I blurted. “God, Cher—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “It's not your fault.”

“This is
awful
.”

“Are you wearing my bikini under there?”

“We can quit.”

Cherise managed to look mutinous and defeated at the same time. “And do what? Flip burgers? Internet modeling? I've got my pride, you know. I'm a
professional
.”

Her little, silver suspended raindrops were shivering with indignation.

I swallowed a bubble of laughter and nodded. “Let's just get through this, okay?”

“I will if you will,” she said, and looked around at the stagehands, who were all staring at us. Probably waiting for me to drop the bathrobe. “You! Assholes!
Nobody
drops water on me today unless you want to cash in on that pension, you got me?”

For a little thing, she was ferocious. Nobody answered.

Marvelous Marvin strolled onto the set, toothy as a land shark, and patted his stiff hair. “How do I look, girls?”

“Clark Gable and Valentino all rolled into one,” Cherise said. He beamed at her and moved into his camera position. She glared after him. “They're dead, asshole.”

“Let me guess. Marvin's behind this?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Marvin wants to ogle your ass for a while. And besides, he's pissed at me because I wouldn't put out.”

Usually, that would have been a joke, but the way she said it . . . “Seriously?”

She just looked at me.

“You're going to report him, right?”

“Oh, yeah, right. Like Bikini Girl is going to get any traction on a sexual-harassment issue. Plus, there's the whole issue of me having tormented the hell out of every HR person to the point where they run when they see me coming.” She eyed me speculatively. “But you, on the other hand . . .”

“Me?”

“If he snaps your bikini, you'd report him, right?”

“No,” I said flatly. “I'd kill him.” Especially today.
So
not in the mood for this. I wanted to do this, grab my paycheck—which would be the last one, as I planned to be fleeing soon—and get the hell out.

Whatever Cherise was about to say was cut off by the command for silence on the set, and we stood in silence, waiting for our cues.

Hers came first. I watched her lumber out into public view in her thick, lumpy cloud costume. Watched Marvin deliver his lame-ass jokes at her expense. I'd never really looked at it from this side of the camera before. Damn, I had a really pathetic job.

Marvin had set up a water-drop joke. The stagehand didn't pull the bucket. Cherise was just that scary, and besides, the stagehands were union. They didn't give a shit. When Marvin gave the signal, the stagehand up there just grinned, shrugged, and chomped gum.

Cherise gave him a behind-the-back thumbs-up.

Commercial break. The anchors sniped at each other over who had stepped on whose leads. One of them was rewriting an intro for the next piece. Badly.

Marvin speared me with a look and gave me the toothy grin of death.

“Joanne,” he said. “Let's flash some skin. You're up.”

I took a deep breath and slid the bathrobe off of my shoulders, then folded it neatly on a chair. The air felt ice-cold on my all-too-exposed skin. I walked over onto the tiny ocean set, which had glittering white sand, a blue-sky backdrop, and an oversized beach ball. Marvin came over to join me. Close up, his tan looked a shade of orange that earthly sun didn't produce, and the professionally even smile didn't really disguise the ruthlessness in his eyes.

“Okay, this is the standard beach setup, right? So look pretty and nod.” He gave me an analytical once-over. “Turn around.”

“What?”

“Turn around.”

I didn't want to, but I did it, a fast circle. When I was halfway around, he reached out and stopped me.

“Your tag's showing,” he said, and slipped his fingers into the back of my bikini bottom.

And snapped it.

And burst out laughing.

I spun, with perfect timing, and yanked his toupee off his head just as the camera operator finished his silent three-two-one countdown. The thing felt damp and dead-animal in my hand. I tossed it offstage, to where Cherise was standing. She fielded it neatly, waved it like a battle flag, and grinned at me.

Marvin was
not
amused. The red light went on, and he was still glaring at me for a full two seconds before he pulled himself together enough to bare his teeth at the audience and start the shtick. His hair plugs looked naked and sickeningly experimental under the harsh lights, and some of them were standing up stiff as cornstalks from where I'd pulled the toupee off. We were talking about the possibilities for fun and sun in the next three days, I gathered. Marvin talked in totally unscientific generalities about updrafts and warm fronts, and gave us the assurance that we were over the worst so far as hurricane season went. “And I can personally guarantee that the next weekend is going to be spectacular!”

I stood hipshot in my best cover-model pose, waving and smiling. Presenting myself mostly in profile, because it seemed slightly less revealing than standing full-on or (God forbid) facing away.

Marvin turned to me and gave me the most furiously charming smile I'd ever seen. I smiled back. Give us pistols at ten paces, and we'd be the picture of friendship.

“Why don't you read the forecast for the next week, Joanne?” he asked. Which gave me a pleasant little shock of surprise.

“Sure,” I said warmly, and caught, too late, Cherise frantically making a no-go gesture with both hands. Damn. Whatever was coming, I'd just walked right into it.

“It's on the beach ball,” he said.

The beach ball was behind me.

I froze, stared at him for a second, and then recovered my smile. “Would you get it for me, Marvin?”

He kept smiling. “Sorry. I'm busy.”

The whole point was, of course, to get me to turn my nearly naked ass to the camera. I bit the inside of my cheek and decided to just go for it. “Actually, Marvin, I'd like to give it a shot without the notes.”

Which wasn't what he expected or wanted to hear. He shot a look at the director, who made a bored keep-moving motion. “Sure.” He rolled his eyes for the benefit of the viewers.

“Well, Marvin, from the radar imaging you showed us earlier, it's pretty obvious that we have a warming trend moving in from the southwest, moving northeast. I'd say from the satellite time-lapse that we can expect to see some clouds later today with a strong possibility of afternoon showers, and by tomorrow, lows in the mid-eighties and highs topping out around ninety-two degrees. The dew point will be around seventy-four, with humidity of about eighty-four percent, rising through the weekend. We can expect to see some thunderstorms by tomorrow evening, about a seventy-three percent chance. So let's be careful out there. There should be some major electrical activity associated with these storms, as well as the possibility of rising winds.”

I finished it with a wide smile.

There was a stunned silence. The two anchors and the sports guy looked at each other in open-mouthed amazement; I guess they didn't think a girl in a bikini could so much as string together a sentence, much less deliver a coherent, scientific analysis.

I hadn't used even a little bit of Oversight to do it, either. I didn't think I was capable of that, at the moment. I'd done it all from my own observations last night, and the maps, and the same data Marvin had available at his disposal.

And I knew I was right. One hundred percent right.

Marvin looked like a gaffed fish. He must have realized it, because he flushed under the pancake makeup and forced a labored smile in return. “Ha! That's very funny, Joanne. You've been watching a little too much Weather Channel.” He broadly mugged for the camera. “Sorry, folks, but Joanne's forecast is completely wrong. There's not going to be any rain. I've already guaranteed it.”

“Want to bet?” I asked.

“Oh, we don't encourage gambling on our show,” Marvin shot back, with a quick, frantic glance at the director. Who was looking enraptured with the sudden tension on the set, and gave him a go-ahead nod. “But I suppose a friendly wager, in the interest of science . . .”

“If it rains, Marvin, I think you should have to wear the Sunny Suit,” I said sweetly.

The anchors laughed, off camera. Cherise had her fist stuffed in her mouth. All her silver, suspended raindrops were glittering as she shook.

Marvin sputtered and twisted, but after all, he'd given his personal guarantee. “Well,” he finally said, “I'll take that bet. Because Marvelous Marvin stands by his predictions!”