High Heels and Homicide (2 page)

M
aggie Kelly sat at the desk in the corner of the large living room of her Manhattan condo. Sort of sat. She actually was rather
supported
by her desk, her headset phone jammed down over her uncombed hair, her forehead pressed to the desktop, her arms hanging on either side of the chair. She looked rather like one of those collapsible dolls, one whose button had been pushed.

She spoke into the headset. “Okay, okay. Once more, with feeling.
M
, as in
moronic
.
A
, as in
asinine
.
R
, as in…as in—
ridiculous
! Margaret. It's
Margaret
. My name is Margaret Kelly, not Missy. How difficult can this be? You'd think my name was Schwarzenegger. What? No!
Not
Missy Schwarzenegger! Margaret Kelly! Oh, God—what?
No!
Don't put me on hold. I've already been on hold three times, and I already know all the words to “It's a Small World.” Don't put me on—oh, hell…”

“Talking to your knees, my dear? There are some, myself not included, of course, who might consider that a tad eccentric. But, then, I know you.”

Maggie pushed herself upright to glare at Alexandre Blake, the Viscount Saint Just of her bestselling historical mystery series and currently known as Alex Blakely, her supposed distant relative and model for her fictional creation. He lived across the hall now, but had never seemed to be able to understand the concept of knocking first before barging in on her.

She liked having him around, now that she'd gotten her mind around the fact that, heck, he
was
here. But there were times when she wished he was more of an in and out—no, that might sound a little too sexual—a less-
constant
presence in her life. Okay, that was better. Not great, but better.

“Why are you always barging in here when I'm at my worst?” she asked him, looking down, to see that she'd buttoned her pajama top incorrectly. Nothing new there…including the faded pajama top that had been her favorite since college, or maybe high school. Junior year. She wore it now over ancient sweatpants, the knees and seat of the pajama bottoms having worn through a few years ago.

“Feeling snarly this morning, my dear?” Alex asked, one well-sculpted eyebrow raised Clint Eastwood style. (She'd thought she'd re-created Jim Carrey's expressive eyebrows, but in the flesh, they were definitely Clint's.) The young Clint of the spaghetti westerns. Young and yummy Clint. And she ought to know, because hidden deep in one of the desk drawers was her physical description of the Viscount Saint Just.

There was a lot of the young Clint Eastwood in the Viscount Saint Just—the lean face, the slashes in the cheeks, the long, sleekly muscular frame—along with snippets of younger versions of Sean Connery (voice in those Bond films), Paul Newman (bluer-than-blue eyes), Peter O'Toole (nose), and Val Kilmer (mouth—oh, dear God, yes—Kilmer's mouth in
Tombstone
: “I'm your huckleberry.”).

Maggie had set out to create the Perfect Regency Era Hero, and she really did do good work, if she did say so herself.

Except for the arrogant part. The self-assured part, and maybe the brilliant-cutting-wit part. She might have gone a little heavy on those, at least she thought so once her fictional Perfect Hero had morphed into a living twenty-first-century man with all his early-nineteenth-century superior male sensibilities intact.

There were moments lately when she wondered if she could mentally incorporate a few more bits of Hugh Grant into the character of Saint Just, who already had a sexy shock of black hair, and then sit back and watch Alex to see if he'd change. Maybe a little something around the eyes—a small air of vulnerability, maybe?

It was a provocative thought, especially as she'd watched Grant in
Love Actually
late one Saturday night. Just she and her two cats and her burnt microwave popcorn with extra butter. She led such an exciting social life.

But that was beside the point, as was her on-again, off-again romantic interest in the gorgeous, perfect hero standing in front of her, which was currently very, very
off
.

“I have a good reason to be snarly,” Maggie said, adjusting the headset, the better to muffle the sound of some twit telling her that she could save time by contacting the company on the Internet. “Tried that,” she mumbled.

Alex made a small, circling motion with his right index finger. “Forgive the question, but is there someone on the other end of that?”

“There have been a
lot
of someones on the other end of the phone in the past…” she began, glancing down at her watch, to see that it was noon, “…the past forty-five minutes. And if I could talk to someone who has English as their first language, I would probably spend the first five minutes just sobbing my thanks into the phone. They call this a
help
line?” She turned in her chair, began shuffling through the mess on her desk. “Where's my
I Love Lou Dobbs
button?”

She felt Alex's hands on her shoulders as he slowly spun her around to face him. “Maggie. Concentrate. Tell me what you're doing…attempting to do.”

She swallowed. Nodded. Swallowed again. Pretended not to notice that someone inside the earpiece was now asking her, musically, if she knew the way to San Jose. “Okay. I'm on the phone with the airline. I get flyer miles every time I charge something with my credit card, and I want to cash them in for our flight. It might have been easier if I'd asked one of the agents for a kidney.”

“You didn't do that, did you, Maggie? That's crass.”

She rolled her eyes. “No, I didn't do that, and I know it's crass, as well as a cheap joke. But I'm going nuts here, Alex. I don't understand what they're saying, they don't understand what I'm saying—and I swear to God,
nobody
understands all the rules. Look,” she said, grabbing a card from her desk. “See this? This is a coupon for a free companion ticket. I buy one, you fly free. I buy two, two fly free. I understand this. This is fairly basic, right?”

Alex took the offered ticket. “Quite a few asterisks leading to several separate bits of barely readable print, aren't there? I do see the small
K
down at the corner. You've circled it.”

“Right. It's a
K
. But guess what? I need a
U
.
An U.
Whatever. You can
have
a
K
, but you can only
use
a
U
.”

Alex deposited the ticket on the coffee table. “I think I'm done understanding, thank you,” he said, wiping his hands together.

“Oh, no. No, no, no, you're just getting
started
. I can use the
K
if I use a
U
with it. The second person I talked to told me that. I'm eligible for a
K
, but not for a
U
, and I can't use a
K
without a
U
—but they sent me a
K
anyway, because I qualified for that one. If I spend another bazillion bucks, I can get a
U
to go with the
K
, but by then the
K
will have expired. Machiavellian in its brilliance, isn't it?”

“American ingenuity at the corporate level. The
K
did get you to pick up the phone, didn't it?”

“Don't interrupt. I don't actually need the
K
, or the
U
. The third gal I talked to told me I have enough flyer miles to go from here to Hawaii and back, and take half a football team with me. Except that there are only about six seats a plane that are available for free miles, so you have to book in advance. We're talking
way
in advance here, maybe a decade. So I've got about a million free miles I can't use, sucker offers with the wrong letter on them, and the ditz who just put me on hold knows how to pronounce Schwarzenegger, but doesn't know how to spell Margaret. That's it, Alex. We're not going.”

“You're only saying that because you're looking for an excuse not to fly at all. Because you're afraid of flight.”

“Damn straight I am. This whole thing is driving me nuts. Do we fly out of Kennedy for one price or go to Newark for a better price? Or, since we can't leave until after Thanksgiving anyway, do we fly out of Philly? But which is the right choice? Do I go for convenience? Or price? And then, just when I think, okay, out of Philly, the idiot on the phone who told me about the flight says, No, that one's booked, so I start thinking, Okay, maybe God wants me to fly out of Kennedy, maybe he
knows something
about the Philly flight. Then again, he could
know something
about the Kennedy flight. But then again, maybe God's just pulling my chain. I could be making a life-or-death decision here, and God's trying to be funny.”

Alex sighed. “Maggie, hang up.”

“Hang up? Are you kidding? I spent twenty minutes online trying to figure out when the hell I'd tried online before and made up a user name and password, because I sure couldn't remember them. Then, once I'd gotten a new password, the damn site wouldn't recognize my credit card number anyway, so I had to call, wait, talk, be put on hold, talk, be put on hold, talk, be put—I am
not
hanging up until and unless this woman figures out how to spell Margaret!”

“Since
you
already know how to spell
stubborn
. Very well,” Alex said, walking over to the credenza and pouring himself a glass of wine, as he had the Regency Era disdain for water. “Then you wouldn't be interested in knowing that thanks to my speaking last week with a representative of the production company, who happened to phone while you were out and I was here, doing nothing in the least nefarious, and after putting forth my personal recommendations on the matter, three airline tickets were delivered just minutes ago to my apartment. I, by the grace or possible cruel joke of God, decided on Philadelphia, by the way, with our return to Kennedy. We depart for Heathrow the Sunday after Thanksgiving, traveling in something called first class. And you Americans vow you aren't class conscious.”

Maggie just sat there, stared at him. “You…it's all…so I'm driving myself nuts for…damn it, Alex, why do you keep doing this to me?”

The man had the nerve to look innocent and the panache to carry it off. “Doing what, my dear?”

“Oh, don't get cute. You know darn well. Stepping in. Taking charge. Never getting ruffled. Always getting what you want. Making me feel like an idiot because I always do things the hard way. And you got
three
free tickets out of them? I mean, okay, me I can understand. I'm the author. They could certainly spring for a ticket for me. But you and Sterling? How did you finagle that one?”

“
Finagle
? I'm not familiar with the term, but I'm confident the Viscount Saint Just does
not
finagle. But, as I am your personal assistant and liaison with the press and Sterling is your spiritual advisor, it was, of course, only logical that we should accompany you.”

“And you're expecting me to swallow this? Oh, wait. The person who called? Female, right?”

“Why, yes. Miss Browning. She had a lovely laugh. Very like the soft tinkling of delicate silver bells tickled by the breeze of a clear spring day.”

“As I'm sure you told her.” Maggie made some sort of low, chuckling sound. “They don't even
see
you, and they go all gooey and do whatever you want them to do, just the way I planned you. Man, I'm good. But that's manipulative, Alex, do you know that? It's not nice.”

He shrugged, put down the empty wineglass. “In point of fact, it's a woman who doubtless spent the remainder of her day spreading her joy to everyone. It is also, my dear girl, three free first-class plane tickets to England. I believe we are all to be considered winners in the exchange.”

“Okay,” she said, giving up. “I'm the last one to be arguing over saving money. Unless you're actually going to start paying your own way around here, Perfume Man.”

Then she gave herself a swift mental kick because that blow had been below the belt. She knew better, she knew his vulnerabilities, because she'd created him. The Viscount Saint Just placed a lot of his pride on being self-sufficient, in
all
ways.

“Oh, God, I'm sorry, Alex,” she said quickly. “You've paid back every cent I advanced you when you first…first showed up. And you're paying off the mortgage on your condo. You're an honorable, upstanding—oh boy, I'll grovel later. She's back on the line.”