Finders Keepers Losers Die (15 page)

Huh? Was that the brush off? It definitely
sounded like it. Not even Will could be totally clueless about how
to treat a woman the morning after. He must know the host is
supposed to at least stick around for coffee.

"Sure thing," I said casually. "See you
tomorrow."

He was about to pull his T-shirt over his
head but stopped. "Yeah. Right. Tomorrow. At the office. Not
tonight." He blinked a couple times then continued dressing.

"You weren't expecting me to stay here again
were you? I'm sure I mentioned this was a temporary
arrangement."

"No. I mean, yes." He shook his head. "Yeah,
you said it was just for the night, but," he shrugged one shoulder.
"That's fine. Whatever. So where will you stay?"

"Gina's. It should be safer than Mom's."

"Safer. Huh." He stared blankly which
unnerved me more than his yelling ever could. "Christ, why would
someone try to burn your place down?"

I didn't tell him my theory about someone
wanting Roberta's jewels. Actually, I didn't tell him about
Roberta. It was best he didn't know. Best for me, that is, and my
future employment prospects.

"Who knows? Anyway, I've gotta go too."

"But, Cat—"

"Not now."

He sighed and didn't ask again.

We left the house at the same time and
headed in opposite directions. My first stop was Gina's. I probably
should have visited Mom but I didn't feel like facing her and
telling her I nearly burned to death in a fire started by someone
who probably wanted to kill me. Mothers can be kind of sensitive
about these things, even New Age ones.

Besides, I needed clothes and who better to
go shopping with than your best friend?

Gina let me into her apartment with one
raised eyebrow. Then the other one joined it.

"You got laid!" we said together. "How do
you know?" we both replied.

Gina recovered from her giggling fit first.
"Is that why you're dressed like a gender-confused homeboy?"

I explained about the fire, leaving out the
nasty details about how it started. Best friends, like mothers,
tend to over-react. "I needed somewhere to stay so I went to the
office."

"But you could have stayed here."

"Yes, we could have had a threesome."

"Oh, you saw?"

"Not much."

The scent of her latest floral arrangement,
a blue and white bouquet, perfumed the apartment. I always liked
going to Gina's. The smells and colors from the flowers she brought
home from the shop made it fresh and inviting. She had good taste
in decorating. Nothing modern or bleak, just comfortable armchairs
covered with big cushions and family photos hanging on the walls.
It was like walking into a
House and Garden
photo shoot.

She headed into the kitchen and I followed.
"I drove by last night, intending to stay," I said, "and saw him
through the window. Who is he?"

"No, you first." She placed a pot of coffee
on the stove. "So what happened at the office? Who—?" She spun
round, her mouth wide open and her eyes bugging out. "Will?"

I nodded.

"Finally!" She clapped her hands like a
performing seal. "It's about time you two got together."

I eyed her with caution, half expecting her
to morph into someone else. Someone who actually
liked
Will.
"You're not mad? Don't you think he's a bastard?"

"No, you do. Which is why he's perfect for
you."

I shook my head. "I don't get it."

"You need someone who gets your juices
flowing."

"Interesting choice of words."

She looked at me sideways. "Anyone with eyes
can see the sparks flying between you."

"Sparks are caused by two hard objects
clashing, Gina. Nothing romantic in that."

Gina's frown looked more like a pout. It was
kind of cute and hard to take her seriously when she did it. "But
you just slept with him. Surely you're past all that now?"

"I don't know." I sighed. "I like him, I
really do—when he's not being the workaholic asshole. It's just
that…I don't know. I can't put my finger on what it is about him
that bothers me. We'll see what happens tomorrow at work. He gave
me my job back." I tried to sound brighter than I felt. In truth,
the next day loomed like King Kong over the Empire State Building.
All I wanted to do was scream.

"That's great!"

"Maybe."

She poured coffee into mugs and handed one
to me. We sat opposite each other at the little kitchen table. Gina
blew into her mug, watching me over the rim as I sipped. "You
know," she said, "for someone who had wild sex with a drop-dead
gorgeous man, you don't seem very happy."

I avoided her gaze. Talking about sex with
Will felt awkward, even with Gina. Usually I could tell her
everything, providing as much lurid detail as she could stomach,
but not that morning. Maybe it was because she knew Will. Or maybe
because I didn't know what the sex meant to me yet.

"You know how it is," I said. "You get
carried away with the moment then in the cold light of day, you
wonder what the hell you were thinking. The problem is, Will and I
just don't get along." I shrugged. "I'm not sure he knows how to be
anything other than a dictatorial egomaniac." I sipped my coffee.
Maybe I wasn't being fair. I really only knew Will The Boss, not
Will The Guy. And someone who made love like that couldn't be all
bad. I smiled into my mug. "He was fantastic though."

Gina gave me an all-knowing smile. Only
someone who'd recently experienced great sex could smile like that.
"Look, Cat, the agency's his business, his baby. He's protective of
it. I understand that. And maybe if you didn't, um, deliberately
try to annoy him, he wouldn't be so…"

"Mean." I bristled. Gina was my friend. She
was supposed to be on my side whether I was right or wrong. "I
don't annoy him. Not deliberately anyway." I shook my head and
ended the conversation with a wave of my hand. I didn't want to
hear Gina defending him again. After the intimacy of the previous
night and the abruptness of our departure that morning, I felt a
little raw when it came to Will. The last thing I needed was a
lecture. "Enough about Will. I want to know about the new man in
your life. Why didn't you tell me about him earlier? Who is
he?"

"Well," she leaned forward and grinned
stupidly, "he came into my shop yesterday to buy his mother some
flowers for her birthday."

"He's nice to his mother. That's always a
good sign. Although he might be a mommy's boy." I screwed up my
nose. "That could be bad."

"Cat, pay attention. He came back later and
I thought, oh no, he's going to complain about the flowers. But he
bought a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses and gave them to me." She
indicated the door to the living room. "They're the ones on the
coffee table."

I hadn't noticed. Gina always had flowers on
her coffee table. "But why? Not only are you already surrounded by
flowers and take home the left overs, you get them wholesale so he
just wasted his money."

"No, he didn't. And I thought it was
lovely." She had a dreamy, faraway look on her face. Yep, she was
gone. Gina had only ever looked dreamy once before—when she'd
fallen head over heels for a football player. She'd dated him for
six months then it had ended in tears and a broken heart. Guess
whose.

"So what's his name?"

"Walter."

Walter? Who was named Walter these days?
"He's not sixty is he?"

"No. Late thirties."

Gina was my age, twenty-eight. I said
nothing but I thought ten years a little excessive. Anything more
and I'd say it was father-figure syndrome.

"He's a computer programmer," she went
on.

"Since when do you date geeks? What happened
to the jocks?" Don't get me wrong—I was glad to see her moving up
the evolutionary ladder to choose her dates, but I wasn't sure if a
computer nerd was the way to go for a party girl like Gina.

She sniffed. "I'm ready for someone a little
more sophisticated. Besides." She grinned. "He's amazing in
bed."

We giggled like schoolgirls.

"He must have left early this morning," I
said when I recovered.

"He had to be up early today so he went home
last night."

Call me over-protective, but who the hell
gets up early on a Sunday?

The guy who didn't want to face his lover in
the morning because a relationship is out of the question, that's
who. For Gina's sake, I was willing to give him the benefit of the
doubt. He could be a workaholic like Will.

"So what's he like?" she asked
conspiratorially.

"Who? Will? In bed?"

She nodded eagerly.

I couldn't stop my smile or the blush
burning my cheeks. "Let's just say he knows what he's doing and the
equipment is top of the range."

She laughed. "Then it doesn't matter if you
don't get along outside the bedroom."

She had a point but it was time to move the
conversation away from my sex life. "When I finish calling the
insurance company, let's go shopping."

"You bet. You can't wear that all day."

After getting lost in automated
tele-prompting hell, I finally got to speak to a real person at the
insurance company. At least I thought he was real. It was hard to
tell from the bored monotone and one-word answers. Guess I'd sound
like that too if I had to work on a Sunday in a job that beat mine
for crappiness.

Finally I got my life sorted. They promised
to reimburse me for any expenses I incurred on essential items.
Designer outfits are, of course, essential. And if the insurance
company asked, I owned six pairs of Manolo Blahniks and four Gucci
handbags. Such a pity all my original receipts burned in the fire.
(
Mental note: take receipts out of kitchen drawer and put a
match to them
).

Gina was too embarrassed to go shopping with
me wearing Will's clothes so I borrowed a short, floaty skirt and
the tightest T-shirt she owned. It was still too big across the
bust but it would do.

Before we left I made a quick call to my
mother.

"I'm at Gina's," I said. "We're going
shopping."

"That's nice. Have fun. When
will
you
be home? I thought I'd come over later—"

"No! Mom, don't go to my place."

"Why not?" She sounded suspicious.

"Because I…won't be there."

"When will you be there?"

"I won't be. Not tonight."

She gasped. "Cat! You've found a man! How
long have you been going out?"

Uh-oh. If my answer was anything longer than
two months, she'd be emailing me links to wedding sites. Why is it
mothers always want to marry off their daughters? Does their social
status rise? Is there automatic admission into the Mother-In-Law
From Hell club?

Gina's mother was even worse. Her
twenty-eight year-old daughter was unmarried and it killed her. She
told Gina so every time she saw her. Gina replied that she hadn't
found Mr. Right but she was having a lot of fun looking.

My mom tried her hardest to get me to the
altar a few years earlier when I dated an actor for a while. Thank
God I was living in L.A. and could pretend there was an earthquake
and hang up. If I'd been living in Renford, I could have been
married to Simon by now.
Shudder
. Nice guy, but his head was
as wooden as his acting.

"Mom, I haven't found a man." It wasn't a
lie. I hadn't
found
Will. He'd been there all the time.
"Gina and I are having a girl's night at her place. Oh, and if
someone calls for me, tell them I'll call back later. Thanks, bye."
I hung up before she could start with the twenty questions.

Thank God for Sunday shopping. Gina and I
hit The Strip late morning. The Strip was a stretch of shops along
Chapel Road in inner Renford. It was classier than the mall. The
stores along The Strip priced their wares so high that people like
me couldn't afford to shop there.

Except when using someone else's money,
which is what the insurance felt like. I knew there had to be an
upside to having my apartment burn down. Sure, I was too scared to
go back there, my neighbors probably hated me, and someone wanted
me dead, but at least I'd have a killer wardrobe.

We shopped until we couldn't carry any more
bags and then we stopped for a late lunch at Café Mama Lina's. We
both ordered salads for starters. I was hungry after the
shopping-induced high so I ordered coffee and a slice of chocolate
mud cake for dessert. Gina ate a corner of the cake and declared it
was too rich for her. She spent the next ten minutes watching me
with barely disguised envy. That's the downside of having curves to
die for—they become bulges that succumb to gravity if you don't
abstain from chocolate cake.

We paid and gathered our purchases and
headed outside. After the rain of the previous day, the weather had
cooled to a less sweaty temperature and the sun peeped cheekily
through the clouds. I felt cheery considering everything that had
happened in the last couple of days. Amazing what retail therapy
can do.

We walked back to my car. I carried bags in
each hand and some looped over my arms. I was perfectly balanced.
If someone bumped into me, I'd topple over. Sure enough, someone
bumped me and I stumbled to the pavement. Luckily, the box
containing my new knee-length Prada boots cushioned the fall.

I looked up, ready to berate the moron when
I recognized her. "Tanya!"

"Cat?" She looked around quickly, probably
to make sure no one had seen her involvement in the embarrassing
collision. Then she scowled at me like I'd inconvenienced her by
stepping in her way. No apology, no "How are you?" Not even "Are
you fucking my ex?"

But even worse than her attitude, she looked
good. Fantastic in all white. Damn. How could I compete with that
hair, those eyes, those breasts?

The temptation to rub her nose in my liaison
with Will gnawed at me but I felt magnanimous after shopping for
free and refrained.