“We’ve got at least five left.” He tipped his head at the kitchen clock. “Let’s make it count.” Then his mouth was on mine, and for the next few minutes the only thing I drank in was Michael Ryan Francis Quinn.
Five
“I wish you didn’t have to go…”
Mike and I were standing by the apartment’s front door. He was holding me close, stroking my hair, which was now free of its pins and down around my shoulders.
“Three more hours tops, Clare. Then I’ll be back.”
I nodded, hardly able to believe it. “Wait,” I said as he turned to go, “let me get you a key. Then you can just let yourself in and come upstairs, okay?”
“Okay.”
Mike smiled as he held out his hand, ready to take that little piece of magic metal—the key to a lot more than my front door. But before it left my fingers, a loud, sharp bang sounded somewhere below us. We froze, realizing a door in the stairwell had opened and closed.
Mike met my eyes. “Are you expecting anyone?”
I shook my head, listened to the footsteps on the staircase. “Could be Joy,” I whispered. “She’d be off work by now. Her roommate’s in Paris for the next six months. Maybe after what happened tonight, she doesn’t want to be alone…”
But as the shoes clomped closer, I realized the tread was far too heavy to be my daughter’s. Mike and I waited, staring at the apartment’s front door as a key scratched into the lock, then came the click-clock of the dead bolt, and the door opened.
“Hey, Clare!”
Oh, no.
Short, black hair on a square-jawed face, Roman nose, cleft chin, and a hard body courtesy of his favorite extreme sports: rock climbing, cliff diving, mountain biking, and meaningless sex (not necessarily in that order). My ex-husband beamed at me through the wedge of swinging wood. He pushed the fissure wider, and his cheesy grin fell.
“Quinn?”
Mike blew out air. “Allegro.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing away the ruination of my evening. But it didn’t work. When I opened my eyes again, Matteo Allegro was still standing in the doorway, his right arm in a white plaster cast, his left shouldering an overstuffed athletic bag. He’d come back to stay.
My ex-husband glanced at me, then glared at Mike Quinn. “What’s he doing here?”
“Clare and I have been seeing each other for a month now,” Mike levelly replied. “And you knew that already, Allegro, so don’t be a horse’s ass.”
Matt flipped his key ring. “Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Detective. Because I thought you might be staking out the place to arrest me again.”
Quinn shook his head, looked down at me. The warmth had drained from his blue eyes. The chilly cop curtain was back. “I’ve got to go.”
As he began to turn away, I touched the sleeve of his overcoat. “The key,” I whispered, holding it out again.
“Can’t.” He jerked his head toward my ex. “Not if he’s here.”
I wanted to scream, but it wouldn’t have helped. I stood dumbfounded and horrified, watching Quinn’s sturdy form stride out while my ex-husband sauntered in. As they passed each other through the doorway, Matt purposely bumped the detective with his bulging canvas bag.
“Grow up, Allegro, will you?” Quinn bit out before continuing downstairs.
Matt moved into the duplex’s antique-filled living room and dropped his bag onto the Persian rug. “What’s his problem?”
“He doesn’t have the problem! I do!”
I chased after Mike, following him down to the shop to let him out and lock up again. I tried once more to offer the key, but he absolutely refused to come back with Matt in the apartment. How could I blame him? If the tables were turned, and Mike’s estranged wife had appeared with a legal right to use his living space, I would have felt the same way.
“I could come to your place,” I offered.
“No.” He gently touched my cheek. “It’ll be a while before I’m off. You get some rest. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”
After trudging back up to the duplex, I found Matt in the kitchen, fixing himself a fresh pot of coffee—or at least trying to. With his right arm in that cast, he was making a royal mess of it.
“Clare, this Brita pitcher needs refilling. And the filter needs to be changed.” He shook his head at the spilled water on the counter. “How could you not notice?”
“I’ll give you something not to notice!” I took off my shoe and hurled it at him.
“Hey!” Matt lifted his cast to fend off my flying pump. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Matt, why are you here? Four weeks ago, you moved in with Breanne!”
Breanne Summour to be exact, editor-in-chief of Trend magazine, aka Snarks ’r’ Us, as the blogging chef of one snidely reviewed restaurant famously tagged it.
Breanne and Matt had been dating for about a year now. Given my ex’s desire for publicity and Breanne’s need for a hunky escort to fashionable events, they were a match made in Manhattan, or at the very least the New York tabloids. Every so often, I’d notice their picture in the Post’s Page Six or one of the tony glossies at my hair salon: “Trend’s top editor is looking especially perky tonight on the arm of international coffee broker Matteo Allegro.”
Matt continually claimed his “friendship” with Breanne was just “casual,” which in Matt-speak naturally included casual sex. But then Matt broke his arm, and Breanne turned into Florence Nightingale. This was perfectly fine with me, since the trashionista’s new desire to nest with my ex got him the heck out of my hair for almost a month. So why was he back now?
“You can’t tell me you got tired of five-hundred-dollar Egyptian cotton sheets and a penthouse view!”
Matt shrugged. “Breanne flew to Milan a few days ago for a trade show. I got lonely.”
“You did not. I know when you’re lying, Matt. Your eyes go wide, like a begging puppy dog, and you forget how to blink.”
“Okay, okay…” Matt held up the hand of his good arm. “The truth is…ever since Breanne left for Europe, her housekeeper has been hitting on me.”
“What?!”
“It was subtle at first, but tonight it got weird. And the housekeeper’s a live-in, so there’s no escaping it.”
“Since when can’t you handle a woman making a pass at you?”
“The housekeeper’s not a woman, Clare. His name’s Maurice.”
“Of course!” I threw up my hands. “If it was a woman, it wouldn’t have been a problem. You simply would have slept with her until Breanne came back. Problem solved.”
Matt’s face fell into an “I’m wounded” pout. “That’s just not true, Clare. And it’s not fair.”
“The person it wouldn’t have been fair to is Breanne!”
“Let’s drop it, okay?” he said and pointed to the half-spilled pitcher we used to filter our coffee-making water. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”
“Not!”
I wheeled and limped angrily out of the kitchen, one foot now shoeless, the other clomping loudly along, since I was unwilling to give up a second possible projectile.
Matt followed, his tone more contrite. “I didn’t mean to butt in on you, but a decent hotel room in this town is four hundred a night. Breanne’s not coming back for a few more days, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been footing the tuition bills for Joy’s culinary school. I don’t have much extra cash to throw around. Do you?”
“What are you implying? That I should pay for your hotel room because you can’t tell Maurice the housekeeper to keep his hands to himself?”
“There’s no lock on Breanne’s bedroom door. It was creeping me out. You have to believe me.”
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation!” I checked my watch. “And at nearly one in the morning!”