Asking for Trouble by Rosalind James Page B

“Yeah.”
    “Shoot,” he heard. “Come up. Sorry.” The door buzzed, and he
shoved it open, climbed the three flights to her place, already resigned to a
wait.
    It wasn’t Alyssa who opened the apartment door. It was a
guy. A barefoot guy, tall and thin and with serious bedhead, wearing skinny
hipster jeans and a slim-cut black button-down shirt. A guy who’d got out of
bed not very long ago, wearing the clothes from the night before.
    “Hey,” he said. “Come on in.”
    Alyssa came out of her bedroom looking flustered and . . .
strange. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got in the bathroom yet. I need a
minute.”
    Joe looked between her and the guy. He had no right to be
jealous, and he knew it. He knew it.
Her sex life was no business of his. But he wanted to shove the guy right out
the door and keep on shoving. At a minimum. He pushed his hands into his jacket
pockets and reminded himself to breathe.
    The bathroom door opened on a cloud of steam and Sherry came
out, tightening the sash on a very thin blue bathrobe.
    “Oh. Joe,” she said, faltering to a stop. “I didn’t know
you’d be here today.”
    “Hi,” he said, carefully not checking out the bathrobe.
    Sherry recovered her balance pretty fast. “Bathroom’s all yours,”
she told Alyssa, then looked at her more closely and laughed. “Great hat.”
    Alyssa stared at her blankly for a moment, then put her hand
to her head. Her mouth opened and shut again, and she snatched the thing off
her head, went to her bedroom door and chucked the hat inside.
    “Five minutes,” she told Joe, ducking into the bathroom and
shutting the door behind her.
    “Oh, did you meet Jonathan?” Sherry asked Joe. “Joe,
Jonathan. Jonathan, Joe. Want some coffee?” she asked the guy—Jonathan.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Or we could go out to breakfast, if you
want.”
    She perked up. “Breakfast would be good. I’ll get changed.”
    Ah. Sherry’s . . . guest. Joe felt the tension leaving his
body like air from a balloon.
    Jonathan flopped onto the couch and picked up a magazine
from the coffee table. “Could be a while,” he told Joe. “In my experience.”
    Joe was pretty sure he was right, so he took a seat in an
armchair. It wasn’t too long, though, before Alyssa was back out of the
bathroom door again, and he rose to his feet.
    “Ready,” she said. “I just have to get my boots.”
    “And a coat,” Joe said. “It’s cold out there.”
    She came out of her room a minute later carrying a pair of low
red boots with pointed toes and Western tooling, perched on the arm of the chair
Joe had just vacated to pull them on and zip them up. She was wearing a dusty
red quilted coat that hung open over a ribbed dark-blue sweater that matched
her eyes and clung to her figure fairly convincingly. And a skirt, a flimsy
little gray thing that didn’t come close to reaching her knees, and swooped up at
the sides quite a few inches too, which hiked up a whole lot more during the boot-fastening
exercise.
    “Ah . . .” Joe said, “do you think a skirt is right? I mean,
you might want to look more serious.”
    She looked at him in surprise. “I’m wearing tights,” she
pointed out. “Almost like pants.”
    No. A short skirt and sexy little boots weren’t like pants.
He didn’t know what tights had to do with it.
    “Besides,” she said, “aren’t most car salesmen guys?”
    “Yeah,” Jonathan said. He’d looked up from his magazine to
check her out, Joe saw, some of his tension returning despite his best efforts.
“They’re guys.”
    “And guys like skirts better, right?”
    Joe didn’t know about other guys, but he knew he did. And
Jonathan apparently did too, because he was nodding agreement.
    “Then,” she said. “I’ll distract them, get them off-balance,
and you can look all serious and scary, Joe, and intimidate them. Don’t you
think?”
    “Could work,” he said. “Though if you really want to
distract them, you should put the bear