Mr. Fix-It (9 page)

“You should have made a cake out of
cake
,” Daphne admonished. “Three thousand!” she called just before Llewellyn would have banged the gavel on Carter’s twenty-five hundred.

Llewellyn playfully growled. “The beauty in green is engaged in a spirited duel with the persistent gentlemen cowboy. I like a lady with spunk. Do I hear thirty-one hundred, anyone?”

“Thirty-five,” Carter exhaled loudly, as though bored with the game.

“He can’t afford that!” Khela whimpered. “That’s probably a month’s salary for him. We can’t let him spend it on that cake!”

“Four thousand!” Daphne said with a saucy toss of her mane for Llewellyn’s benefit.

Khela blanched at the way Llewellyn’s gaze zeroed in on Daphne with laser precision. He smiled at her, flashing deep dimples.

“Four thousand five,” Carter returned.

“Do I hear forty-six hundred?” Llewellyn seemed to ask Daphne alone. “Or shall I sell at forty-five hundred and get on with the business of having a drink with the lovely lady in green?”

“Five thousand!” Carter hollered.

“Sold!” Daphne called.

“Daphne!” Khela’s cry was drowned by the sharp crack of a gavel finalizing the sale and the ensuing laughter of the crowd. She looked on in horror as Llewellyn leaned forward and shook Carter’s hand, and Daphne fairly skipped to the podium.

“Traitor,” Khela called after her.

Carter, on tiptoe, turned to scan the audience, which began to disperse with Llewellyn and Daphne drifting side by side toward the bar. Carter’s narrowed eyes fell on Khela, and she ducked. With the grace of a bow-legged goose, she scrambled to the nearest hiding place, a work five feet long, six feet high, one foot thick and suspended from the ceiling with thin cables. The side facing Khela appeared to be painted gold, with a fuzzy texture.

A waiter garbed entirely in black glided by with sparkling flutes of blush champagne balanced on a black tray. Khela grabbed a glass, and was bringing it to her lips when Carter rounded the hanging art piece.

“I hope it’s chocolate,” he said with an unreadable smile, his voice startling her.

Khela whirled on him. “You shouldn’t have bought my cake!”

“I didn’t.”

The grin that accompanied his response should have started Khela’s alarm bells ringing.

“I bought what comes with the cake,” he said.

“I don’t follow.” She licked the rim of her glass before she sipped from it, a trick Daphne had taught her to keep from stamping the glass with her lipstick.

Carter watched the unintentionally provocative gesture with interest.

“What comes with it?” Khela asked dryly. “Ice cream?” She snickered as she sipped her champagne.

“You.”

The perfectly chilled Bollinger Grand Année Rosé left Khela in a spray of surprised indignation that dampened Carter’s shirt front and dripped onto her bodice.

“For five thousand dollars, I bought that cake along with the pleasure of having the cook serve me the first slice.” Carter pulled a program from his pocket and unfolded it to show her the detail she’d clearly overlooked.

Khela snatched the program and brought it to her face to peruse the lines she had failed to notice. She slowly raised her face to find him offering a smile and a neatly folded handkerchief. “You bought me,” she gasped.

“For cheap,” he murmured devilishly.

Chapter 6

“Yours was the kiss by which I’ve measured all others!”

—from
Tender Memories
by Khela Halliday

“That was a good one.” Carter began mopping up Khela’s bosom.

“I can do that.” She reached for the square of white cotton. Her fingertips brushed his, and in that instant, a discordant chime from the artwork beside them stole their attention.

“What the hell is this?” Carter muttered, squinting at it.

Inspecting the work more carefully, Khela saw that it wasn’t merely a large, blank canvas with a metallic sheen mounted in a black case. Thousands of tiny bells produced the hairy gold texture, and it was the bells that had responded when Khela touched Carter.

“Seems like you can call any ol’ thing art these days.” Carter moved closer to Khela. He dabbed at her collarbone, lifting the glistening beads of champagne. “Good thing you had your dress Scotchguarded.”

“Yeah, good thing,” Khela sighed.

He was too close, his touch too sure. He’d cut his hair since she’d last seen him; the whiskey blond scruff was much closer to his head. His topaz eyes were just as impish and intense, the fire in them playful and only slightly dangerous. The shape of his mouth still eluded Khela’s powers of description and, looking at it, she enjoyed phantom memories of the delights it had once given her.

She lifted her chin a bit, bringing her mouth that much closer to his as he touched his handkerchief to her left shoulder, near her neck. His nostrils flared slightly as he drew a deep breath, and then said the very thing Khela was thinking about him. “You smell so good.”

The bells aligned with Khela’s upper right arm and shoulder leaped to rigid attention, reacting as though they too felt the power of his compliment. Their microscopic clappers strained toward Khela, producing a high-pitched, tinny buzz.

“What are you wearing?” Carter asked her.

“Old Spice.”

“Me, too,” Carter smiled. “Looks like we’ve got more in common than a fondness for cake.”

“My junior year trigonometry teacher used to bathe in Old Spice,” Khela said. “We could smell him coming three floors away.” Carter’s scent was woodsy and clean, with a hint of citrusy spice. It was masculine without being overpowering. Khela filled her lungs with it. “You’re not wearing Old Spice.”

“Neither are you,” he responded. “So what is it?”

“Khela No. 1.”

He stepped closer to her, his hands still low on his hips. A large patch of bells even with their torsos sprang to tinkling life.

“Is that anything like Chanel No. 5?”

“It’s my scent,” Khela said. “There’s a boutique that’ll custom design a fragrance for you. It’s their Le Parfum Sur Mesure. It took about six months to create my fragrance. They won’t ever sell the recipe to anyone else.”

Khela’s heart rate surged painfully when Carter bowed his head and stuck his nose in the space just behind her earlobe. He took a deep, quiet sniff of her, slightly moaning as he drew back.

The motion and music of the tiny bells followed his movements, reaching a crescendo when he nearly touched Khela.

“Can you detect the rose?” she asked, a shiver in her voice.

He answered in the positive with a deep “Umm” before leaning in once more.

Khela unconsciously held her breath and the bells jingled to life again in a pattern roughly matching their silhouettes.

“There’s vanilla, too,” he said. “And…” His breath caressed her neck as he breathed her in. “Sandalwood?”

“Very good,” she sighed.

The bells nearest Khela’s chest quivered so rapidly, their clappers seemed to ring in one single long note.

“Do they do scents for men?” Carter asked, taking a half step back.

Khela swallowed hard, at first unsure of what he’d said. Too conscious of the pressure suddenly mounting deep within her, she cleared her throat once more and asked him to repeat himself.

“Does this store create scents for men?”

“I imagine so. Yes.” Khela touched the heel of her hand to her forehead, the bells playing a faint accompaniment to the elegant movement of her arm. “It’s getting a little warm in here.”

“Is it in Boston?” He returned his soiled handkerchief to its home.

“No, uh, Paris,” Khela said. “On the Champs-Elysees.”

“You went all the way to Paris just to cook up some perfume? It must have cost a fortune.”

“Some people spend too much money on perfume, others spend too much on
cake
,” she remarked, her voice cooling along with the activity of the bells as she cupped her right elbow in her left hand.

“Hey, my money’s going to a good cause,” Carter said. “The cake is just a bonus. So how often do you zip off to ol’ Paree?”

Khela’s bells lost a bit of life. “I’ve only been once, and I went there for work, to research a book.”

“The guy I brought with me, Detrick Francis, he flies to Europe frequently for business.” Without touching its surface, Carter slowly waved his hand across a section of the artwork. The bells released their notes as their movement followed that of Carter’s hand. It was not unlike that of grass shaped by a gentle breeze. “Custom cologne is right up his alley.”

“What does he do?” Khela asked.

“He’s in real estate. What was your book about?” he asked, still watching the magical waving of the bells. “A French pirate who marries the disgraced daughter of a wealthy plantation owner in order to hide from a rival bent on killing him?”

Khela forced her face and body language to reveal none of the exhilaration she felt at Carter’s excellent summary of one of her books.

“Actually, it’s about one of the
femmes tondues
, a woman accused of being a ‘horizontal collaborator’ during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II,” Khela said with a touch of defiance. “She traded her body for food, and ended up with a baby sired by the enemy. At war’s end, she and many women like her were punished by having their heads shaven publicly, and then, often with their babies in their arms, they were paraded through town so everyone could participate in their humiliation.”

“What about the men?”

“They were the ones who did the shaving.”

“No, I mean the male collaborators. What happened to them?”

Khela blinked. “Some were executed, some were beaten.”

“None of them got sheared?”

“I’ve found no record of that in the course of my research.”

“Seems like they would’ve wanted to execute the women, too.”

“ 
‘C’est par le ventre des femmes que la nation prospère, les femmes doivent être pures et préserver leur corps des étrangers afin d’éviter la détérioration de la nation,’ 
” Khela said. “It means—”

“ ‘It is in the belly of women that the nation prospers, women must be pure and preserve their bodies of foreigners to avoid the deterioration of the nation,’ ” Carter translated. “I guess it was better to humiliate them for not keeping themselves pure but keep them alive to make more French people just the same.”

This time, Khela’s shock and delight registered in the form of a big smile.

“What?” Carter shrugged. The tips of his ears turned pink. “I took French in school. Some of it stuck.”

“It’s just that…you surprise me,” she said.

Khela stared at the last quarter inch of champagne in her glass, but she looked up when the bells signaled Carter’s movement toward her. “Surprise you how?”

His scent again invaded her senses when she inhaled before speaking. “Did you read it?”

His gaze traveled slowly over her hair before moving to her face. “Read what?”

“
The Pirate’s Princess
.”

Another casual shrug. “I had some time in the weeks you’ve been avoiding me.”

“I haven’t been—”

“Then you must be cheating on me.”

“What?” The bells accentuated Khela’s outcry.

“This has been the longest you’ve ever gone without calling me for a repair, so either everything is running smooth as chicken spit in unit A, or you got yourself a new Mr. Fix-It.”

“You’re deflecting,” Khela said. “You don’t want to admit that you read one of my books.”

Carter wrinkled his nose as he scratched it. The tips of his ears practically glowed, even though he crossed his arms over his chest and took a more imposing stance. “So what if I did?”

“Did you like it?”

“It held my attention.”

More than appreciating his forced indifference, Khela liked the fact that his ears looked as though they were on fire. “What was your favorite part?”

Carter exhaled, blowing his cheeks out, and fixed his eyes on the exposed pipes in the ceiling. “I don’t know, let me think.” He took his chin between his thumb and forefinger, drawing Khela’s attention again to his mouth. “There were lots of good parts. I mean, you’re a very good writer.”

“I guess I surprise you, too.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Carter agreed. “That you do.”

“Did you like the scene in the captain’s quarters aboard the pirate ship?”

Carter visibly swallowed, his Adam’s apple slowly rising before settling into its normal position. The bells nearest him seemed to be laughing at him. “Which, uh,” he coughed a little, “which scene was that?”

Khela’s bells began to buzz when she leaned in closer toward Carter to say, in a lowered voice, “It’s the scene when the pirate figures out that his marriage of convenience and his bride actually mean far more to him than he’d been willing to admit. When he realizes that he wants his bride more than any other woman he’s ever met. And he has to satisfy that hunger or go mad.”

“That was a good scene,” Carter said, studying her lips. “Wasn’t my favorite part, though.”

“Oh?” Khela said, cocking an eyebrow and tilting her head slightly. She moved to brush a tendril of hair off her face just as Carter reached forward to do the same. Their hands met, and the artwork next to them seemed to shudder, the bells level with their point of contact leaping forward with such force their clappers stood out straight like tiny little tongues, their connection to the board the only thing keeping them moored in place. The bells in the vicinity of the area where Carter’s hand covered Khela’s started a quivery reaction that stirred every bell all the way out to the borders of the box.

Taking a firmer grip on Khela’s hand, Carter pulled her farther away from the piece.

A short, bald man in an iridescent turquoise suit hastened toward them. “It’s perfectly safe; nothing to worry about,” he said. “It’s just my Hot Box.”

“I’m sorry?” Carter said.

“The bells are attached to a very sensitive panel that reacts to electrothermal emissions,” the man said. “It literally responds to your body heat. This is the most activity my work has ever generated.” A proud grin bloomed beneath his hooked nose. “Apparently, you two make beautiful music together.”

The loose knot of Khela’s and Carter’s hands tightened. They looked sideways at each other and saw that they both were wearing the same sappy smile. They jerked their hands apart and struggled to find a response to the man’s innocent but dead-on observation.

“I’ll bet you’ve been waiting all day to say that,” Khela scoffed as Carter drawled, “Man, you call that music? Sounds like a batch of alley cats bein’ deep-fried.”

“I should find Daphne before she flies off to Wales with the auctioneer,” Khela said quickly.

“Yeah, I better find my wingman, too,” Carter said, backing away. “I, uh, should probably go and settle the bill for my cake.”

“Sure,” Khela said, moving away. “Bye.”

Carter and Khela went their separate ways, the distance between them increasing. No longer powered by Carter’s and Khela’s body heat, the bells ceased their otherworldly movement and faded into cold silence.

* * *

Carter and Detrick eased their way through a noisy crowd of Red Sox fans packed shoulder to shoulder in Boston Beer Works.

Nearby Fenway Park was dark on Yawkey Way while its beloved team scrapped with the Yankees in New York, but a Red Sox home run elicited cheers from the Beer Works patrons that surely carried all the way to the Bronx.

“Maybe we should have gone to Jillian’s,” Detrick shouted.

“We’ve already got a table here,” Carter called back, following the pretty young waitress as she forged a path through a sea of fans in red.

She led them up a ramp to the small square tables lining the front of the restaurant. A brass railing separated the dining area from the various bars, where Sox fans sat on stools or stood, their eyes glued to the television sets mounted throughout the restaurant.

“Is this okay?” the waitress asked, placing two plastic-encased menus on a small, square table. “It’s the best I could do,” she said, her loud, nervous chortle sounding just like Scooby-Doo’s. “Those Northeastern guys look like they want to kill me for bumping you ahead of them.” She mimed an exaggerated slashing gesture across her throat. “Oh, well, anything for one of my regulars.”

“I’m not a regular here,” Carter told her.

“You could be,” she said with a wink. “I know how to treat my regulars.”

“The table is great, thanks.” Carter took the chair; Detrick slid onto the leather-covered bench seat against the plate-glass window.

“Can I get you a drink to start?” the waitress asked, her big brown eyes fixed on Carter. “Name your brew. It’s on me.”

“I’ll have a Sam Adams—whatever’s on draft,” Carter said.

“I’d like to take a look at the drinks menu, if—” Detrick managed to get out but the waitress was already moving away with a bubbly, “I’ll get that for you right away.”

Carter caught her by her apron. “My friend wants to look at the drinks menu.”

The waitress noticed Detrick for the first time. Her cheeks reddened, she apologized for ignoring him, then hurried off to give him time to decide which specialty beer would best suit his palate.

“Sorry about that, Detrick,” Carter said.

“You’d think I’d be used to it by now.” Detrick shook his head, his shaved dome catching the bright gleam of the overhead lights. “I don’t know what it is the ladies see in a ’Bama-fried cracker like you. That little minx is ready to curl up in your lap and lick cream from your chin.”

Carter chuckled lightly. “Whatever it is, it don’t work on all of ’em,” he said, emitting a long sigh as he stared at the television set propped high in one corner.