In a Fix by Linda Grimes Read Free Book Online Page A

it—my legs stopped working. My hand dropped away from my mouth as I tried to steady myself, and I’m afraid some unqueenly guffaws may have escaped the confines of the room.
    Within seconds the door swung open. Trey’s eyes widened when he saw us there, me splayed on the floor, one arm pulled upward by Billy’s attempt to disrobe me, and Billy bent over me, reaching down my back to unhook my bra. We froze.
    “What’s going on in here?” Mark looked positively flummoxed. Mr. Unflappable himself. Not much, but it was something. I supposed it was time to come clean.
    But first I had to enjoy it a little more. “Care to join us, big guy? The more the merrier.”
    Billy was the first to recover. “Trey! Help me. I think Edith has had a stroke or something. She started talking nonsense and ripping at her clothes. I thought I’d better get her to lie down.” The boy was quick.
    Mark was over me in a flash, pushing up my eyelids to look at my pupils, moving one finger back and forth in front of my face to see if I could track it. “Can you smile for me, Edith?”
    No problemo. In fact, I was having trouble not smiling.
    “Good. Now can you lift both your arms for me at the same time?”
    I did.
    “Great. Now can you tell me how you’re feeling?”
    “I’m feeling like you’re a big jerk, Mark .”
    His eyes narrowed, and Billy jumped in with, “Mark? Is that you? What are you doing here?”
    Mark looked over his shoulder at Mina. “I’ll explain later, Ciel. Or maybe I’ll let Billy here do that.” He stood up and booted my royal posterior. Not hard, but still.
    “Ouch! I’m not Billy. I’m Ciel. Mina is Billy.”
    Mark looked from me to Billy and back again. “At the risk of repeating myself, what the hell is going on here?”
    I pulled myself up and shrugged, rebuttoning my shirt. “Nothing. Billy stole Mina from me and wouldn’t give her back, so I had to take the Queen—” Something occurred to me. “Hey, did you know Trey might be Mark all along?” I asked Billy. If he had, I was gonna kill him. Twice.
    “I did not . If I had, I never would’ve gone after him.”
    “Thanks a lot. See if I ever hire you again,” Mark said.
    “Only because I’d have trusted you to get out of the mess yourself,” Billy explained, with a pretty Mina-smile, and then turned on me. “In any case, you shouldn’t have followed me. For God’s sake, you saw me take the gun. I had it covered.”
    “Yeah, well, it didn’t look ‘covered’ to me. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
    “Jesus, Ciel, I’d just gotten there. I was still assessing the situation.”
    I got right up in his pretty face, and jabbed his shoulder with my age-spotted hand. “Right. Because it’s so easy to ‘assess’ when you have a gun pointed at you. If you’d tried to go for yours, you could’ve been killed, and Trey—I mean, Mark—too!”
    “I had it under control,” he said, voice escalating to match mine. “Mark would’ve been free in another minute even if you hadn’t arrived when you did, and believe me, the two of us wouldn’t have had any difficulty taking down the Swede.”
    “And how in the hell was I supposed to know—”
    A piercing whistle made us both wince. Trey’s ocean-blue eyes were stormy, and the non-Chiclets were nowhere in sight. “Both of you—quiet.” We obeyed. Very few people didn’t obey Mark when he used that tone. For the space of two hard looks—one for Billy and one for me—there was silence. “Now, then,” he said at last, softening it with a hint of amusement around his eyes. “I’m hungry. What do you have to eat around here?”
    *   *   *
    Half an hour later Mark, Billy, and I were seated around the glass-topped dining table, drinking beer, ready to chow down on newly delivered pizza. We had closed all the blinds and dropped our assumed auras as soon as the delivery boy left, a huge smile on his face at the size of his tip. All things considered, it was just less confusing