Turnabout's Fair Play (27 page)

“Where does she live?”

“High-rise in downtown. The entire back wall of the apartment is windows that give her a view of all the big buildings. It’s pretty at night—until you’re ready to go to bed and all the blinds have to be messed with just to make it dark enough to be able to sleep.”

“She lives downtown and works in Brentwood?” Talk about backward.

Kirby nodded. “Don’t know where that girl got the notion that she’s a city gal, since she grew up in Green Hills before it was all developed the way it is now, but she seems to love it.”

Loved it enough that she had asked Jamie about this neighborhood. “Well, you won’t have to worry about city lights bothering you here. Cookie made sure when she helped me decorate that I installed blackout blinds under the curtains in each of the bedrooms.”

Coming out of the bathroom, Kirby looked into the room right beside the guest bedroom.

“This is my office. I have wireless Internet in the house, but if you’d like to bring your laptop in here and sit at the table”—he entered the room and pulled the box still holding the few items he’d been forced to pack up under guard the morning he left the agency from the second office chair—“please feel free.”

“I should send Flannery a message to let her know I arrived safely.” Kirby stepped from the doorway of this room into his adjacent room and returned a scant moment later with his laptop case.

Jamie sat on the old, wobbly office chair—having rolled his newer, more comfortable, sturdier chair over to the table for Kirby to use—and turned to his desk. He jiggled the mouse to wake the machine up to check his own e-mail.

A new message from Ainslee. Probably another apology for having gotten him in trouble by mentioning to Armando’s executive assistant that Jamie was spending his last week trying to land new business. He’d deal with responding to her later.

Behind him, Kirby’s fingers began tapping on his keyboard. He still sounded winded, but some color began returning to his cheeks the longer he sat.

Jamie turned around at the cessation of typing. Kirby turned toward him.

“Mr. McNeill, I was hoping to—” Jamie’s cell phone began to trill. He turned to pick the phone up off the desk, looking at the screen as he did so.

“Hey, Cookie. What’s up?”

“Is Kirby there with you?”

He turned back to look at Flannery’s grandfather. “Yes, ma’am. He’s right here.”

“Good. So I guess that means he found your place without any problems.”

“It would appear so.”

“Why don’t you both come over here for dinner tonight? I put a corned beef brisket in the slow cooker this morning.”

Mouth instantly watering at the thought of his grandmother’s corned beef and cabbage, Jamie couldn’t pass up that offer. “With parmesan smashed red potatoes?”

“I picked up the potatoes while I was out running errands earlier.”

“I—let me check with Mr. McNeill and make sure he doesn’t have plans for tonight already.” Jamie lowered the phone and extended Cookie’s invitation to him.

“I don’t have any claim on Flannery’s time this weekend, so I have no other plans and gladly accept.”

Jamie relayed Kirby’s acceptance to Cookie.

“And why don’t you call Flannery to see if she’d like to join us, if she doesn’t have any other plans.”

Jamie stole a glance across the room at Kirby. Would Flannery be more likely to come if her grandfather invited her? No telling. But their time at lunch hadn’t been long enough, and he could do with talking to her again, even if just for a brief time. “I’ll do that.”

He hung up with his grandmother and pulled the phone down to look at the contacts list as he scrolled through it. “Cookie wants me to invite Flannery, too.”

Pressing the phone to his ear, he heard just one ring before she picked up. “What now, Jamie?”

He sure hoped that was
feigned
exasperation in her tone. “My grandmother just called and invited me and Big Daddy”—he grinned at purposely using her nickname for her grandfather when she’d teasingly told him not to in that e-mail—“to dinner at her house. She’d like it if you could come, too.”

Flannery groaned. “I’d love to—because I’d love to experience some of what you’ve seen between the two of them. But I can’t.”

“Big date?” His voice held enough humor that she hopefully wouldn’t notice the catch of vulnerability.

“Don’t I wish. No—a project blew up at work today, and now I’m going to have to spend my whole weekend re-proofreading a book. I can’t let the schedule get off, so it has to be finished before we all get back to work on Tuesday. Which probably means all-nighters tonight and tomorrow night just to get it done. So much for my holiday weekend, huh?”

When she’d said she was passionate about being an editor, she meant it. “I’m sorry to hear that. Have you gotten a break at all since Memorial Day?”

“A few hours here and there on the occasional Sunday afternoon. But…this is the life I chose, so I just have to suck it up and pick up the slack when necessary. Is Big Daddy there?”

“He got here about thirty minutes ago. He just sent you an e-mail to let you know he arrived safely.” Across from him, Kirby nodded.

“Oh—well, I turned off my modem so I wouldn’t be tempted to get online while I’m working. Tell him I’ll call him tomorrow to let him know what the rest of the weekend looks like.” She yawned. “ ’Bye.”

“ ’Bye.” Jamie passed Flannery’s message on to her grandfather, who’d risen and moved over to look at the items displayed on the shelves over Jamie’s desk.

Kirby picked up one of the still-boxed Arthurian action figures, looked at it from several angles, and then returned it to the shelf. He turned and looked around the room. Jamie did, too.

More action figures—all still in collectible condition in unopened packaging—framed posters from several different movies, and the costume he’d made for the movie premiere, which he’d mounted on the wall.

“I see you’re a King Arthur fan.” Kirby sat down again, continuing to look at all of the collectibles in the room.

“Yes, sir. Those are some of the first stories I remember reading as a kid.” Looking at his office decor, he considered that to someone like Kirby, a retired pastor, it probably looked quite juvenile.

“Those were Flannery’s favorite stories growing up as well.”

Jamie went quite still, not wanting to do or say anything that might keep Kirby from continuing.

“It always annoyed her sisters that when they were told to play together, she never wanted to play school or house or with baby dolls. She wanted to act out the stories from Arthurian legend. When she was quite young, she would pretend she was Guinevere—after all, that was the female character who had the most stories about her. But then as she grew older and she read more than just the children’s versions of the stories, she changed who she pretended to be. She wanted to be Reggie or Raggie or something like that. And when I asked her why, she told me she didn’t like the fact that Guinevere cheated on King Arthur. And then she told me she liked Sir Gawain better anyway. So she wanted to be this other character, because this other character was the girl Sir Gawain ended up marrying.”

“Ragnelle.” Jamie could barely breathe.

“Yes—that’s it. I should have guessed you’d know it. She made up all kinds of stories about this Reg …”

“Ragnelle.”

“Ragnelle. Yes. She made up stories about Ragnelle because, she said, there wasn’t really much about her in the legends. Once she hit her teens, when she still indulged in this playacting, her older sisters teased her unmercifully about it. For a while, I believed she gave it up. But then she told me when she was fifteen or sixteen, when I saw her highlighting something in one of the books, that she was studying it for the story she was writing. But she made me promise not to tell her sisters, because she didn’t want to be teased about her continued interest in the stories.”

It couldn’t be—could it? No. There must be thousands of fans out there who wrote Ragnelle-centric stories. He’d thought, maybe, that the e-mails he and the writer had been exchanging sounded a little like Flannery—but that had just been wishful thinking. Hadn’t it? He’d read too much into them in his desire that she wouldn’t be so freaked out by that part of his life.

There was absolutely, positively no way Flannery was LadyNelle, his favorite fan-fiction author. Was there?

Flannery grabbed Liam and set him down on the floor for the umpteenth time. “No, you can’t lie on the keyboard.” For all that Ragdolls were supposedly “floor cats,” Liam liked to be up—on the bed, on the coffee table, on the sofa, on the treadmill, and especially on the desk if Flannery had docked her laptop to be able to use a real keyboard, mouse, and monitor for working. Fortunately, the kitchen counters were too high for him to heft his considerable bulk up onto—which was a good thing. The idea of a cat walking around on the surfaces where she might set food down grossed her out.

Liam started his crying
meow
, winding around and between Flannery’s ankles. She glanced at the lower corner of the screen.

How had it gotten to be seven thirty already?

“Sorry, buddy. Didn’t realize how late it was.” She pushed the wooden-slat chair back and stretched, feeling her back pop in several places. The movement dislodged the pencil she’d used to hold her hair in a bun. She grabbed it before it could fall completely out, shook her hair out, massaged her scalp for a moment, and then finger combed her hair back and twisted it around into a tighter knot before sticking the pencil back through it.

She fed and watered Liam, then stood with the fridge door open for several minutes—long enough that she started to feel chilled. Closing the door, she turned and opened the top left drawer in the island.

Chinese. Thai. Chinese. Pizza. Pizza. Chinese. Chicken wings.

Blech. Why were these the only options for delivery? She could call in an order to Past Perfect and run up the block to go pick it up…but that would steal time from her work—and necessitate energy she just didn’t have.

The doorbell rang. Had she ordered delivery and lost all memory of it? She skirted around Liam, who took up considerable space at his food dish at the end of the island, and answered it.

Jamie grinned at her from the hall. He hefted two canvas grocery bags. “Cookie sent me with leftovers.” He stepped into the doorway and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Hey, do I smell coffee?”

He entered and left her standing there, holding the door open. He set the two bulging bags on the island then crouched down. Liam lifted his head from his bowl and meowed at Jamie. Jamie scratched the cat behind his ear and along his jaw.

Flannery could hear Liam purring from where she stood—with the door still open. She closed it and drifted over to the bar.

“How did you get in here? There’s security. The concierge—”

Standing, Jamie held up a building security card. “Your grandfather loaned me this.”

He washed his hands and dug into the first bag, setting disposable plastic containers on the island’s granite countertop beside the sink. “Let’s see…we’ve got corned beef and cabbage—packaged so that you’ll have a good four meals from that. Roasted red potatoes”—he pulled out a lumpy, foil-wrapped package—“which need to be eaten tonight. We’ll warm those up in the oven in a minute. Irish stew she made earlier this week—again, four meals’ worth.”

He stacked the four containers of stew next to the four containers of corned beef and cabbage and then pulled out a large glass casserole with its own plastic lid. “And a leftover shepherd’s pie that didn’t get eaten last night.” He grinned at her across the island. “You can’t call yourself Irish and not love my grandmother’s shepherd’s pie.” He moved on to the second bag and continued pulling more plastic containers out.

Flannery hoisted herself up onto one of the tall bar chairs and rested her chin on her fist. Having grown up with a father who did most of the cooking—because of her mother’s long hours first as a medical student and then as an intern and surgical resident—contentment and coziness embraced her at the sight of a man working in the kitchen, relaxing the muscles in her shoulders and neck.

“Where are Big Daddy and your grandmother? I thought you were all having dinner over at her house.”

“There’s some big-band, swing dance thing that she’d heard about that one of the churches in town holds every month for their senior adult group. So Cookie asked Big Daddy to take her dancing.”

Her grandfather…dancing? Flannery wished she were there to see it. But then, she would have missed watching Jamie working in her kitchen.

Jamie stepped to the other side of the walk-through kitchen and studied the back of the stove for a moment before pressing some of the buttons on the black panel between the knobs for the five burners.

The appliance started beeping at him, and he looked over his shoulder at Flannery. “How do you get this thing to preheat?”

She shrugged. “I think the manual’s still down in it.”

He opened the oven and pulled out a deep metal pan that had a plastic sleeve filled with stuff taped to it. Straightening, he turned to face her. “Flannery, did you just get this range?”