down.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You heard us arguing earlier?” she said. “Or couldn’t you hear us well enough through the bedroom window once you cracked it open?”
I could feel her sly smile as if she’d squirted me with a squirt gun filled with holy water. Turning, I hobbled into the living room.
“I’d make a real crappy spy,” I said.
“Yes, you would, Ethan. A very bad spy indeed.”
I noticed then she was holding something in her hand. A copy of my novel, Break Up , it turns out. There was a scantily clad, busty blonde woman depicted on the paperback book cover. She was aiming the barrel of an automatic at a desperate man who was down on his knees, his arms raised to the heavens. The look on her face was one of fierce determination and hatred. You didn’t have to read a single word to know that the man was as good as dead.
“You’ve been doing some shopping at the used bookstore,” I said. “I could have provided you with a copy for free.” Releasing my hand from the crutch grip, I pointed to the bookshelf pressed up against the far windowless wall in the living room directly to my right, the top two shelves of which contained copies of my one and only novel.
“I wanted to support the author with my five-fifty,” she said.
“You’re only supporting the used bookstore owner,” I said. “That book was remaindered years ago, almost as fast as it was released. But that’s very kind of you and your husband.”
She held the book out for me. “He has no idea. Now would you sign it for me?”
I gazed into her blue eyes, until I ran my eyes up and down the length of her body. She was wearing the black button-down shirt that I recalled from an hour earlier, and a worn jean skirt that barely covered her thighs. For footwear she wore Cleopatra sandals, the thin leather straps to which wrapped around her ankles. I guess I never noticed it before, but she bore the blood red tattoo of a broken heart on her left ankle. Three red teardrops were crying, or bleeding, from out of the broken heart.
She noticed me staring down at the tattoo.
“Do you like my heart?” she asked.
“I didn’t notice it earlier,” I said. “Out on your deck.”
We both gravitated out of the living room and into the attached dining room, where my typewriter was set beside the bowl of apples.
“You were looking at other things.” She smiled again. “Until we were so rudely interrupted.”
“Yes,” I said, my eyes locking on the pages I’d written that morning, seeing the name “LANA” on the top page in capital letters. “Interrupted by your husband who’s a top cop, carries a big fat gun, has an ill-tempered partner, and sports a nasty attitude about life.” Slipping my hand from the crutch, I gently took hold of the pages, turned them over on the table.
That’s when she took a step forward, coming even closer to me, apparently without noticing my maneuver with the pages. Or just not caring perhaps. She came so close that her lavender scent became almost overwhelming. It seemed to fill the dining room like a vapor. It made my throat constrict even more than it already had, and my stomach tie itself into knots. Christ, I felt like a teenager again gazing upon his first crush. That’s the kind of power she had over me. When I focused my gaze upon the portion of her cleavage that was exposed under the unbuttoned portion of her silk shirt, I began to grow hard, and I didn’t care in the least if she noticed. In fact, I wanted her to notice.
Again, she ran a hand through her thick hair, and when she lowered it, it brushed against her breast, arousing her nipple so that it immediately became erect through her thin bra and shirt. If I weren’t on crutches, I would have stepped into her then, kissed her on the mouth. Hard. But she must have been thinking the same thing. Or wanting the same thing anyway. Because she came at me, not only with her mouth, but with her free hand, grabbing hold of