privacy.” She shot him a tight smile and put her hand on his shoulder to steer him back there. The two secret service apes lunged forward, one with his hand in his jacket.
Her eyes wide, Marly said, “I specialize in color, not assassination or recreational kidnapping.”
They didn’t crack a smile, but The Hammer did. “It’s okay, boys. I tried to tell you, that really was art camp she attended in her junior year of high school—not an Al Qaeda training program. All she can do is draw me.”
Dear God. They really had done a background check—a thorough one. They knew about…Suddenly furious, she said in clipped tones, “Wouldn’t I have murdered him yesterday morning, boys, scissors to the jugular, if I had such festive plans?”
She turned on her heel and marched away, wishing that her rubber flip-flops would bang across the floor instead of whisper silently.
“Temper, temper,” Nicky murmured before she was out of earshot.
“Ohmigod,” said Shirlie. “She is so, so, kidding around. I mean, she’s not violent. I heard her be really rude to a telemarketer once, but honestly, that doesn’t count. They call at the worst possible times, don’t you think? And they’re so pushy.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I think I’ll just…go get my color done, now. Thanks.”
Marly heard his wingtips clip-clopping across the cement floor, walking on her painted water. And then he was in the doorway, his eyes on her face. The security detail had followed, of course. “Can we leave Frick and Frack outside for a moment?” she asked.
Jack turned his head. “Frick? Frack? Do you mind?” Then he stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
“I’m sensing a definite hostility here,” he said. “Should I have called for an appointment?”
“Yes,” said Marly. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I didn’t give you permission to dig into my background. It makes me angry and uncomfortable.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry. It’s just SOP, I’m afraid. Standard operating procedure.”
“Why? I didn’t come asking for the job—you picked my face out of a magazine! And now those goons probably know the first boy I kissed and the brand of my underwear.”
He opened his mouth to say something and then apparently thought better of it. “Would you rather I left, Marly? The last thing I want is to make you angry.”
The governor is apologizing to me. Me, Marly Fine, hairdresser. How weird is this?
She gave a fierce yank to her braid and then tossed it behind her shoulder. “No. I don’t want you to leave.” Alejandro would kill her. And…she was curious. She might as well admit it. There was a certain level of intrigue to this situation.
“Good. Because I really don’t want to.” Jack smiled that drawer-dropping smile of his. She could feel his sex appeal tugging at her own drawers. God, the guy could be president one day, elected by a vast turnout of howling women in heat.
“Would it make it up to you at all if I told you the first girl I kissed, or the brand of my underwear?”
She made a sound of exasperation.
“Her name was Teresa Miller, and we were twelve. And it’s Neiman Marcus.”
Great. I really needed to know that he wears designer—
“Boxers, by the way.”
—boxers. She held up a hand, palm out. “Too much information.”
She pulled over a hard plastic chair from the corner, and patted the seat of it. “Sit.”
“I can’t roll over, instead?” But he did as she asked.
“Do you want to stay gray near the temples or go more silvery?”
“Silver sounds great.”
“Okay. Then I’m going to go and get the supplies I need to mix the color for you. Can you keep Frick and Frack under control while I do that? I’ve never poisoned anyone by hair follicle yet—still practicing.”
He grinned.
She opened the door, said, “Don’t shoot,” and walked right past the goons. Their expressions were as deadpan as those of the Queen’s Guard. All they needed were some tall dead animals on their heads like their British counterparts and they were good to go.
She mixed her color in a plastic bowl and took it, with a paintbrush, back to the room where she’d stashed the governor. They squinted at the bowl of gook suspiciously.
“Would you like to test it for explosives?” Marly asked. “Sniff it? It smells really nice.”
Frick exchanged a glance with Frack that probably meant, in security-detail speak, that he’d love to crush her windpipe so she couldn’t mouth off anymore. She flashed him a lovely smile and shut the door again in their faces.
“Did you paint the mural in this room?” The Hammer asked. “It’s great. Very…whimsical.”
Marly nodded. “Thanks.”
“You have an art degree?”
“No.” She let the word lie there, unadorned and bald. She wasn’t about to explain about dropping out of college after her junior year to help pay her father’s medical bills. She’d dragged him to an endocrinologist not covered by the welfare program, and it was thanks to that he was alive today. But oh, God, the bills…five months to go until she was at a zero balance with the hospital. Just a short five months.
She really had no regrets. She had her dad, and as Ma had pointed out—not too gently—she couldn’t have made a living as an artist anyway. So here she was, hair-dresser and accused martyr. Her dad hated the fact that she was in debt on his account—of course he’d found out. Ma said she deserved it, interfering like she had and thinking she knew better than the doc at the VA hospital. Always thinking she was smarter than everyone.
Great, Ma—Marly had said, to her shame—then when you get sick, you can rot in the VA. You can be a social security number taking up a bed, aware that the administrative staff just wants you to die so they can give that bed to somebody else.
Marly had no idea why she could never do anything right for her mother. Was it because her parents had waited ten years to have a child and she had drastically changed the dynamic of their marriage? She couldn’t answer that question, and she’d never wanted to put her father in the position of having to answer it.
The Hammer brought her back to the present. “You’re a really talented artist, you know.”
“Thank you.” She sectioned a piece of his hair, slid a piece of foil under it and painted it with the smelly color from her bowl. Then she folded it up and secured it while she went on to another section.
“Ever want to paint canvases or furniture full time, instead of hair?”
“I love what I do, Governor.” And it was true—she did. But had she ever dreamed of more free time to paint? Of course.
“Please,” he said, “call me Jack.”
Oh, right. Because I’m The One. “Okay, Jack. So now that you’ve read an entire dossier on my life and times, why don’t you share some of your history with me?”
“Good point. Where would you like me to start?”
The governor now had little foil wings at each of his temples, which unfortunately didn’t diminish his sex appeal. They just made him look like some kind of goofy—but hot—space alien. She tried not to laugh.
“What’s your secret dream?” she asked him.
“To be a rock star,” he said promptly. “Can’t you see me with head-banger hair and tattoos on my chest and maybe some KISS makeup?”