The smells of too-strong coffee, grease guns, and metal shavings were momentarily replaced by the sweet scent of her perfume—spring rain on a bergamia tree. And his nostrils flared wide as he watched her straight back and heart-shaped ass with the still, silent concentration of a stalking cougar.
He searched his mind for a pithy retort but couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound childish. Left with no recourse, he was forced to let her have the last word.
After she gave the handle a twist, the large door opened with security-tightbeepand ahiss. Then she was gone. A raven-haired siren disappearing into the hot summer night and leaving him feeling cold and desolate by contrast.
When the door swung shut behind her, he glowered at Peanut. “Why do ya always have to rub your kitty privileges in my face?” he asked under his breath.
The mangy feline slow-blinked in answer before flopping onto his side, lifting a leg behind his head, and dutifully going about the business of making sure his testicles were squeaky clean.
It was the kitty equivalent of a giant middle finger.
“Boy howdy, partner.” Having recognized the skirmish had ended, Britt walked over to clap a hand on Fisher’s shoulder. “You and Eliza been oil and water from the start. But now you’re more like fire and kerosene. You can’t seem to be in the same room without one or both of you blowing up.”
It was true. Although…for a while there they’d found some common ground, pulled their punches, and called a truce. It’d been a short-lived thing though. Little more than a handful of days. And then Charles McClean had waltzed into the picture with his Ivy-League education and Gucci loafers, and everything had gone back to the way it’d been before.
No, Fisher silently corrected.It’s worse.
Their previously good-natured ribbing had taken on a decidedlycausticturn. Where once they’d jabbed and jibbed, now they slashed and burned.
“Some folks just weren’t meant to get along, I reckon,” he told Britt, feigning an indifference he didn’t feel.
“Mmph.” The ex-Ranger tossed the shammy over his shoulder so he could cross his arms and regard Fisher with a curious cant of his head. “You think that’s because she’s shinier than a silver dollar and you’re as country as a bowl of grits?”
“Nah. If that were true, she’d giveyouas much grief as she gives me. You’re as country as I am.”
“Not so.” Britt lifted a contradictory finger. “I’m asSouthernas you are. But not nearly as country. Charleston is a teeming metropolis compared to the mud bottom you grew up in.”
Fisher couldn’t argue. His place of birth wasliterallya one stoplight town. Little more than a wide patch in the road where everyone knew everyone, and the only difference from person to person was whether they attended the Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian church on Sunday morning.
“It’s simple,” he explained. “She’s the closest thing we have to American royalty, and I was born so poor I couldn’t even afford to pay attention. We’re like two magnets with negative charges. We repel each other.”
“Well, now.” Britt scratched his chin, his fingernailsscritchingover his beard stubble. “You hear the contradiction in what you’re saying, right?”
“No.” Fisher shook his head at the same time he spied the television hung on the wall between the two large rolling garage doors. It was tuned to the security feed and displayed the scene playing out at the front gate.
He gritted his teeth hard enough to crack the enamel when Eliza slipped through the gap in the wrought-iron gate only to be caught up in Charles McClean’s wide, waiting arms.
The man had parked his shiny gray Mercedes S-Class by the curb. Its chrome bumper and flawless paintjobscreamedmoney. The generational kind. The trust fund and investment portfolio kind.
Fisher couldn’t help thinking there was something profoundly wrong with anyone who would lay down that much cash on a car that could so easily be demolished by the next city bus.
Kinda like the six-figure motorcycle you ride?
The better angels of his nature always reared their ugly heads at the most inopportune times.
No,he silently argued with them. Which, yes, he realized meant he was actually arguing with himself.It’s different. First of all, Mardi Gras is a rolling advertisement for Becky’s business.Rebecca Knight, aka the loveable Becky, was the wunderkind motorcycle designer whose mechanical miracles kept the Black Knights’ covers intact.Second of all, I didn’t pay for Mardi Gras. He’s a benefit of the job. And third of all…
Well, third of all, it was justdifferent.He and Charles McClean were night and day, black and white, so opposite in all the ways that mattered he refused to hear words to the contrary. Even if those words were whispered inside his own head.
“In one breath you’re saying you and Eliza couldn’t be more different.” Britt pulled him from his musings. “You know, her with her champagne taste and you with your beer pocketbook. In the next breath, you’re claiming you’re similarly charged magnets that can’t help pushing each other’s way. So which is it? You’re so different you can’t get along? Or are you so alike you can’t get along? It can’t be both.”
Since Fisher had no way to contradict the logic of Britt’s argument, and since he sure as shit wasn’t going to admit the truth, which was that he found himself picking fights with Eliza to keep from sweeping her up and kissing the daylights out of her, he shrugged. “Don’t know and don’t care. All that matters is I have a night off. And since ya brought up my beer pocketbook, how d’ya feel ’bout joinin’ me for a game of cornhole and a coupla Goose Islands?”
“I feel like you’re putting a period on the conversation because you know I’m right. But I also feel like you’re speaking my language when it comes to brews.” Britt tossed the shammy over his chopper’s handlebars. “And since arguing with you will get me nothing and drinking with you will get me drunk, I choose door number two. Lead the way.”
Britt was hot on Fisher’s heels when he made his way toward the short hall that led to the kitchen. His peripheral vision clocked the image of Charles McClean—heretofore known as Captain Dickless—planting a long, lingering kiss on Eliza’s mouth before she ducked into the Mercedes’s passenger seat. And fantasies of ending the frat boy in bloody and painful ways danced through his head.
Some of what he was thinking must’ve been written across his face because Britt took one look at his profile and whistled. “Damn, man. Evil thoughts are like chickens. They come home to roost.”
