Unscrewed Read online

“Is that toilet paper?” he asked.

  My mind slammed to a halt. I stumbled backward, slapped my hand to my left ear, and felt the filmy tissue on my fingertips. It did indeed seem to be toilet paper. I just managed to refrain from sliding under my linoleum.

  “I cut myself shaving,” I said, backing away. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “In the vestibule?” he asked, but I had already retreated to the sanctity of my bathroom.

  My face was as red as Mexican hot sauce when I looked in the mirror, but at least there was no more toilet paper adhered to my ear. I patted my cheeks with a little cold water, calmed my breathing, and took a look at my hair. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared. I plied it with a pick just to give myself some time to think. Maybe it wasn’t too late to change back into pants…and a parka. Something to assure Rivera I had no intention of sleeping with him, that I hadn’t even noticed that he smelled like something you’d spread on pancakes. Or…I could barricade myself in the bathroom and slide a note under the door.

  Go away. I’m working toward the celibacy world record.

  I closed my eyes and paced. Water, or something similar, splashed against my shoe.

  Shit!

  Probably.

  Luckily, or possibly because my toilet rebels with the regularity of Old Faithful, I keep a bucket and rags under my sink. Squatting was not a simple task in the Post-it-Note skirt, but I managed.

  I could hear Rivera mumbling something to Harlequin, who seemed to be concurring in a series of hums and whines.

  Two seconds later I was running water into the plastic pail. Cramped from squatting, I put the bucket near the toilet, spread my legs, and bent from the waist to clean up the floor.

  “McMullen—”

  I squawked and spun around.

  Rivera was standing in the doorway, brows raised, gaze pinned to where my ass had been, half exposed in my cleaning lady imitation. He skimmed his eyes down the length of my legs. It took about half an hour.

  “What?” I rasped.

  A smile twitched his lips. Then he stepped inside and closed the door firmly behind him.

  2

  If they really wanted us to resist temptation, they shouldn’t a made it so damned tempting.

  —James McMullen, Chrissy’s most astute and philosophical brother

  I FELT AS if the oxygen had been sucked out of my lungs by a Power Vac. The world seemed to waver a little around the edges as Rivera stepped close.

  My bathroom wasn’t big enough for a pair of pimentos. He was bigger than a pimento. I hoped.

  Harlequin whined from the far side of the door. I may have done the same.

  “What are you doing?” Rivera’s voice was deep and smoky.

  “I just…” I nodded toward the bucket. “I had a little…trouble…” Breathing. What the hell? I was a trained professional. A licensed psychologist. And he looked as tasty as a raspberry truffle.

  “You trying to seduce me, McMullen?” he asked.

  “Whaa—” My huff sounded like I was clearing a blow horn, but he was still gazing at me, chocolate eyes bedroom-soft and felonious grin off-kilter. “No. I…No. My toilet—”

  It occurred to me through a foggy sort of unreality that no sentence should begin with the words “my toilet” when a man was looking at me like this man was looking at me, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself, to catch my breath, to function with a modicum of normality. I love normality.

  I cleared my throat and reached for my professional voice. “My toilet overflowed.”

  “I missed you,” he said, and shifted closer. Our thighs brushed. His were hard.

  “I was just…” My hormones were jumping like Mexican beans and had begun shouting obscene suggestions. But the last time I listened to my hormones I’d been accused of petty theft and threatened with a restraining order. Long story. “…cleaning up,” I said.

  “Looked like you were practicing for a pose-off.”

  “My septic system is…” I felt light-headed and overheated. Maybe I was wearing too much clothing. He sure as hell was. “Ummm…somewhat out-of-date.”

  He shifted a half inch closer. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. “Legs look good, though.”

  Maybe I would have commented, but I was concentrating on breathing. And there was a commandment I was trying rather desperately to recall. It went something like…thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ass. “I didn’t want to get it on my shoes.”

  “Shoes look good, too. I like the bows.” He propped a hand against the wall behind me. He was so close I could taste him. My insides twisted up like silk undies.

  “Hope I didn’t…” Drooling would be bad. I shouldn’t drool. “…get them dirty.”

  “Damn things should be registered as lethal weapons.”

  I was beginning to pant. “The shoes?”

  “The legs.” He was so close I could feel his breath on my face. Jesus God, he was going to kiss me. The last time I’d kissed a guy…Ahh, hell, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d kissed a guy.

  “Rivera!” I gasped.

  “McMullen…” he murmured.

  I tried to be strong, or conscious. “I don’t think we should—”

  He kissed the corner of my lips. Something below my waist whimpered. Might have been the dog. Kinda doubt it.

  “Let’s skip dinner,” he said.

  I opened my mouth, but even my stomach failed to object. Maybe I was temporarily dead. This was heaven. The celestial toilet rested against my left knee.

  He slipped his hand behind my neck. My brain went limp.

  “Damn,” he said, “you’ve been driving me crazy ever since you killed Bomstad.”

  A few cerebral cells bumped around, trying to work out the meaning of life, or how to remain vertical. “I didn’t kill Bomstad.” My voice sounded kind of breathy.

  “Used to believe that,” he murmured, eyes half-closed, head tilted the slightest degree. “But one look at you in this alleged skirt probably stopped his heart.” He shimmied his hand down my back to the skirt in question. I shivered to my toenails and let my head rest against the wall behind me.

  “How’s your heart?” I asked. I sounded funny, like someone had taken sandpaper to my larynx.

  “Last physical said my heart was pretty good.”

  I swallowed. “What’d they say about your other stuff?”

  The left corner of his mouth hitched up a tad. “Other stuff’s feeling pretty good, too.”

  I couldn’t argue. It was pressed up against my thigh.

  “Kinda out of practice, though,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Use it or lose it.”

  I was so damned weak. Even the memory of my past seventy-six beaus couldn’t convince me to kick and run. “Wouldn’t want that.”

  “I could make dinner…afterward.” One of his thighs was between mine, kind of cradling me. “If I live that long,” he added, and kissed me.

  I kissed him back. He had one arm on each side of my head, holding me up, locking me in. If this was torture…

  His hand moved to my breast. I locked my knees to keep from falling into the toilet, or climbing him like a spider monkey. He kissed my neck. His lips were firm and warm. I was vibrating with need just like the heaving-breasted women in the romance novels I’d been reading since I was old enough to hide under a blanket with a flashlight. His chest felt like sun-warmed marble against my palm—just like a romantic hero, all brawny and sexy and…

  The vibrating near my crotch was joined by a tinny, almost recognizable melody.

  Now, that was something different. Even Danielle Steel hadn’t thought of that. I pushed him away, glanced down. “Is your…” I began. I was hardly panting at all. Excellent. “Are your pants singing?”

  He chuckled. “Cell phone,” he said, and slipped his hand around my waist.

  “And here I thought you were just happy to see me.”

  “Believe it,” he said, and shifted so I could feel the f
ull length of him against my hip.

  “Shouldn’t you…” I might have gasped a little. “…answer it?”

  “No.” His hand was under my shirt. His phone was still ringing. Either that or my thighs had started to harmonize.

  “Catchy tune.” I couldn’t quite identify it, but it seemed wise to fixate on it lest I take him down like a grizzly on a salmon and swallow him whole. “Carly Simon?” I guessed.

  He drew back with a scowl, paused as if dragging his mind past the stark banks of lust and back into sanity. Then he dipped his hand into his pocket. Flipping open his phone, he pressed it to his ear, eyes searing mine. “Yeah.”

  I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line, but his expression darkened toward dangerous. I was still leaning back against the wall.

  “All right,” he said, and snapped the phone shut. The bathroom was as silent as my bedroom had ever been. A tic bounced in his jaw. His eyes were blacker than hell. “I’ve got to go.”

  My ovaries growled. I may have done the same. “Now?”

  “Yeah.” He shoved the phone into his pocket. It was matched by a bulge on the other side. Maybe he kept his nightstick there. “Sorry.”

  I straightened, but I didn’t grab him by the shirtfront and demand favors of any sort. Instead, I smoothed out my skirt. “Everything all right?”

  He glared at me from beneath heavy brows, but I’m not sure he really knew I was still there. “Trouble with the senator.”

  “The…” I shifted my weight more securely over my three-inch heels. “Senator?”

  He opened the door. Harlequin sprang inside, but Rivera didn’t seem to notice him, either. You’ve got to be pretty far gone to ignore a dog the size of a refrigerator.

  “Dear old Dad,” he said, but even in my current state it would have been difficult to misread the sarcasm.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. My brain was tumbling around in my skull like a sun-dried raisin. Seems like all my body fluids had been called to the front lines.

  “Listen.” His voice was rough and deep, his dusky gaze fire-quick as it shot toward the front door and back, impatience stamped like a tattoo on his brow. “I’ll have to take a rain check.”

  “No problem,” I said, drowning out the strident protests from belowdecks.

  “You sure?”

  “Of course.” I managed a nod. “Familial matters come first. You must attend.”

  He stared at me for an instant, then kissed me once, quick and hard. After that he was gone, striding across the floor like RoboCop on steroids.

  It took me a full minute to marshal my senses. But finally I teetered atop my heels, wobbled out of the bathroom, and traipsed into the kitchen. The freezer handle felt nice and solid beneath my hand. I refrained from ripping it off and pulled out a carton of Freaky Deaky Fudge ice cream. Frozen moral support.

  I shoveled a spoonful into my mouth. It hit my overheated system like a garden hose on a forest fire…optimistic but ineffective. It didn’t matter, though. I wasn’t some teenybopper bent on steaming up the windows on my boyfriend’s T-Bird. I am woman. Hear me roar. Or moan.

  Harlequin whimpered, possibly in sympathy. Possibly because I was eating and he wasn’t. I flicked him a chunk of Freaky. He caught it, swallowed, made a face.

  I grinned at his expression. Everything was fine. So Rivera had left prematurely. It was no big deal. If I was ever going to have a grown-up relationship, I would have to learn to rise above minor frustrations and petty inconveniences.

  I ate some more ice cream.

  Rivera had issues to work out with his father. I knew that much from past conversations. Thus, it was really quite commendable that he was attempting to do so now…at 8:20…on a Saturday night…during the first viable date I’d had since the Clinton administration.

  Another bite of Freaky Deaky made me feel a bit calmer. I didn’t want to rush this relationship anyway. We were adults. We both had obligations, careers, pasts. And I’d made the mistake of moving too fast before. A tsunami was mild compared to the catastrophic results of those disasters.

  And it wasn’t as if Rivera wasn’t attracted to me. I had hard evidence to the contrary. I gave myself a Freaky Deaky salute for my cleverness and reminded myself there was no hurry. He’d be back. We’d talk things through like intelligent adults. Maybe I could help him unravel his tangled emotions regarding his father. Men often have mixed feelings concerning the patriarchic head of their adolescent years, especially….

  “‘Like a Virgin’?” The song title sailed from my lips on a glycogen wave. Rivera’s phone had been playing one of Madonna’s megahits.

  I stood, spoon still loaded, glaring numbly at nothing.

  Oh, yeah, I was all for talking things through, self-actualization, getting in touch with one’s inner child, and all that crap.

  But what the hell did a virgin of any sort have to do with Lieutenant Jack Rivera? Wasn’t that particular song far more likely to herald a call from an old flame out of his sordid past than from the illustrious senator he hated like a father?

  But maybe I was being overly suspicious. Maybe all the grim lieutenant’s calls were preceded by sexually suggestive songs that whispered breathily of being touched for the very first time.

  Yeah. Sure. Made sense.

  And maybe if Colin Farrell propositioned me with his crooning Irish accent and his soulful fuck-me eyes I’d tell him to take a hike. ’Cuz that’s just the way the world works.

  3

  It’s not as if I don’t like men, I just have more respect for my washing machine.

  —Hannah Greene, Peter John McMullen’s first disenchanted wife

  SOLBERG,” I SAID by way of greeting. I was gripping the phone in both hands, holding on like a sun-welted businessman reeling in a tiger shark.

  “Babekins.”

  The Geekster’s voice was as nasal as ever. I remembered to be strong, because even though he was a stunted little techno nerd with a retarded sense of humor and a laugh like a wild ass, he had a world of knowledge at his geeky fingertips.

  “You busy?” I was trying to sound casual, but my mind was bouncing.

  “I was just about to make Angel here some popcorn.”

  “Elaine’s there?” Elaine, aka Angel, was my best friend. And it was my fault she’d hooked up with an electrodweeb. That knowledge can still bring tears to my eyes.

  “Yeah. She’s a hell of a—Sorry, sweetums,” he told her, ineffectively covering the mouthpiece. “A heck of a Scrabble player. You wanna talk to her?”

  “No.” Ignoring Laney’s presence gave me a chance to pretend she was touring the Louvre with Johnny Depp instead of being holed up with a vertically inadequate myope. “Listen, Solberg, I need a favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  It was just a turn of phrase. I reminded myself not to get excited. Taking a deep breath, I jumped in. “I need Rivera’s home address,” I said.

  There was a pause, maybe the sound of some eye-popping. “Jesus! I mean, geez, Chrissy.” I could hear him shuffling his feet. They were size 12, huge for his five-foot-seven frame. I refused to contemplate what that meant in the dimensional scheme of things. “The grim lieutenant don’t exactly have me on his short list of friends now. If I—”

  “Not the lieutenant,” I said. “The senator.”

  There was silence for seven heartbeats. I counted them in my head, but they were almost drowned out by Madonna’s crooning lyrics. “Like a Virgin,” my ass!

  “Senator Rivera?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The grim lieutenant’s prestigious sire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sounded ultra-controlled, as if he were on the edge of a precipice and didn’t want to make any false moves, lest he teeter into the yawning abyss. But I was already in the damned abyss, wasn’t I? And Madonna was down there with me, singing up a storm. “What’s going on, babekins?”

  “A lot of unnatural shit, that’s what!” I s
napped. There may have been a bit more vitriol in the statement than I had intended. But Solberg was as charming as a bald lab rat and he was dating Brainy Laney Butterfield, possibly the most beautiful woman in our stratosphere. What did that mean for the rest of the female population?

  Growing up together, I had always fantasized that she and I would marry matching brain surgeons and take high tea with the queen at Buckingham Palace. But if the royal guard heard Solberg’s hee-hawing guffaw, they’d shoot him from the parapets and feed him to the Celts.

  “Unnatural?” he repeated, but I wasn’t quite cruel enough to tell him there was nothing so aberrant as he and Laney existing in the same solar system.

  “Get me the address,” I said instead, “and I won’t tell Laney what you did when I drove you home in your Porsche.”

  I could feel his mind whirring on the other end of the phone line. He’d been as drunk as a frat boy when I’d dropped him off in his neo-riche neighborhood one hot summer night. If I said he’d danced the mambo with Shamu while wearing his boxers on his head, he’d believe me. And he doesn’t even wear boxers.

  I can’t begin to tell you how sad it makes me to know that.

  Still, for one elongated moment of silence I thought he might argue.

  “Gonna take me a couple minutes,” he said instead, and excused himself.

  I hadn’t even finished off my carton of Freaky Deaky when he called me back, rattled off an address, a warning about messing with powerful politicians, and a plea not to tell Laney anything that might alter her high opinion of him. But he didn’t have to worry. She’d seen his scrawny frame decked out in swim trunks and still hadn’t called the pound. Knowing that, there seemed little I could do to change the unpredictable tides of fate. “I’m a changed man, babe,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t do nothin’ to—”

  I hung up on him and crumpled the scrap of address in my palm—3430 Tramonto Drive, Pacific Palisades. A ritzy part of town. Real estate there runs into the bazillions, and houses hang suspended over the bay like crystal chandeliers. It would take me nearly an hour to get there. Not that I was planning to spy on Rivera. That would be beneath me. Sophomoric and suspicious. If the lieutenant and I were ever hoping to get past the heavy breathing stage, I was going to have to learn to trust him. Trust, after all, is the cornerstone upon which all secure relationships must be constructed. The very bastion…