was coming from downstairs, the basement level. She leaned over the railing, listening. It was something with a hard beat, but the sound remained muffled, indistinct. Maybe there was a TV room down there. Her curiosity increased. She left the railing and started down the stairs, catching herself on the second step.
No, she told herself sternly. Bad idea. Mind your own business.
So she turned and retraced her steps back to the utility room, where she dished up the food and took it to her hungry cat.
“Mrow?” Wigs left off stalking the cleaning robot to get to work on his dinner.
Now what?
Her stomach growled again. Jed had said that she should make herself at home in the kitchen. She’d grab something to eat and then get up close and intimate with that glorious tub.
It was weird, raiding the refrigerator of the stranger she now worked for—and lived with, essentially. But the food looked good. She heated up a plate of roast chicken, mashed potatoes and mixed veggies and set herself a place at the table that would have looked just right in the castle of a medieval king. She even poured a glass of the pinot grigio she found in the door of the fridge—hey, the bottle was open. Why not? Pulling back one of the big, studded leather chairs, she sat down and smoothed her napkin in her lap.
Definitely weird. Just her, all alone at the massive slab of a table in the giant great room.
She’d just lifted her glass and taken a nice, big gulp of wine when Jed asked from behind her, “You all set up, then?”
Startled, she choked. Wine sprayed out her nose. Coughing and gagging, she shoved back her chair and pressed her napkin to her face. It wasn’t pretty. Ragged, hacking sounds alternated with desperate wheezing as she tried to catch her breath.
“Breathe,” he commanded. He was at her back by then, pounding on it with his enormous hand, instructing, “Slow, easy. That’s the way.”
After a terrifying minute or two wherein she wondered if she would ever breathe again, her throat loosened up. She sucked in a decent breath of air at last.
“Okay?” he asked warily.
After wiping the last of the wine from her cheeks, she turned to faced him—and almost choked all over again at the sight of him. Shirtless, he had on a pair of low-riding training shorts that displayed the sculpted tops of sharply cut V lines. His big, chiseled chest was dusted with manly hair and dripping sweat. He had a towel slung around his neck, one end of which he was using to wipe more sweat from his forehead.
Mystery solved: there was a gym in the basement. She’d heard his workout music.
Somehow, she managed to croak out accusingly, “Don’t you ever sneak up on me like that again.”
For that she got a lifted eyebrow and a disdainful “I never sneak.” And then he asked again, “You okay?”
“Splendid. Thank you.”
And just like that, he turned and walked away. She stared at his broad, sweaty back as he strode to the staircase. He went up, pausing to look down at her just before he reached the first landing. “Zero-eight-three-zero hours tomorrow. Be ready to work.”
Like she was some scatterbrained child incapable of remembering the simplest instructions.
Four thousand a week, she reminded herself. Four thousand and a jetted tub. She nodded, sat back down, picked up her fork and did not glance toward the stairs again.
* * *
The next day was just as Elise had expected it to be. Endless.
She typed and she typed some more while Jed alternately paced and loomed over her, sometimes shouting loud enough that she winced at the sound, now and then murmuring so softly she could barely make out the words. Luckily, she had excellent hearing and managed to get down every whispered word he said. Already, it was something of a point of pride for her that she could keep up with him and never have to speak while at the keyboard, not even to ask him what he’d just said.
He finished the scene he’d tested her with the day before. Jack McCannon, Jed’s ongoing main character—and, Elise suspected, his alter ego—ended up killing the man at the station, whose name was Gray. Elise felt a moment’s pity for Gray, whom Jack eliminated through the clever use of a ballpoint pen to the throat. Jack, apparently, was quite creative vis-à-vis weaponry. He killed Gray with a Bic and kept fishing line in his pocket. Because who knew when he might need to tie someone up or strangle them with a makeshift garrote?
After Gray met his end, Jack evaded a pursuer and then met a contact at a café. They drank espresso and Jack received critical information stored in a minichip invisible to the naked eye. The contact, Lilias, caressed his face and transferred the minichip to his cheek. Lilias was gorgeous. Jack had history with her. Intimate history. Jack considered having sex with her again, but decided against it due to time constraints and the fact that he really didn’t trust her. The men Lilias slept with often turned up dead.
There was a scene at a shooting range. Jack was a crack shot. Who knew, right?
And, yes, already Elise found herself keeping up a snarky mental commentary on Jed’s work-in-progress as she typed away. The typing really was like breathing. She didn’t have to think about it. Even with the yelling alternating with growls and rumbles, she found Jed’s voice easy to sink into, as if she’d been listening to him all her life, as though some part of her mind knew what he would say before he formed the words. It left her the mental space to have a little fun at Jack McCannon’s expense.
Not that Jed wasn’t good at what he did. Now and then she got so involved she almost stopped typing to enjoy the story. The action scenes were spectacular—really edge-of-your-seat.
How many books had Jed written? Four or five, she thought she’d heard. Maybe she’d have to try the first one just for the heck of it. It wouldn’t hurt to have a little background on the job.
They worked until six thirty that evening. When Jed finally dismissed her, he stayed behind in the office to look over the day’s pages. She fed Wigs his dinner, raided the refrigerator and called Tracy in Seattle to see how she was settling in and report on her new job with Jed.
Tracy knew her too well. “But you hate typing,” she pointed out. “What is going on? I really don’t get this.”
“It’s amazing money and it’s only for four months.”
“But what about Bravo Catering?”
As she’d been doing for weeks now whenever she and Tracy talked, Elise evaded the question. “I’m getting there. This came up, is all. And I thought, for this much money, why not?”
Tracy wasn’t buying. “Just how broke are you? I can lend you—”
“Trace. Stop. It’s tight, but I’m managing.”
“I never should have left you.”
“Yes, you absolutely should have. It was time and you know it.” They’d grown up together, literally. Their mothers had been best friends. She and Tracy had shared the same playpen as babies. Then when Tracy’s parents died in a house fire, Tracy had moved in with the Bravos. In every way that counted, Elise and Tracy were sisters, bonded in the deepest way.
They’d gone to CU together and had come home to open their catering business and live in adjoining apartments. But Tracy had always been a science nerd and what she’d never told Elise was that her real dream had nothing to do with planning weddings, designing perfect dinner parties or creating tasty menus that stayed fresh on a steam table. Not until after the fire had Tracy finally confessed that she dreamed of a career in molecular biology.
Well, Tracy was getting her dream now. She’d enrolled in a master’s program at the University of Washington.
“I should come home, at least for a few weeks. The semester doesn’t start until mid-August.”
“Come home for what?