Ms. Simon Says by Mary McBride Read Free Book Online Page B

the daylights out of you.”
    “He looks tired forever,” Lena said in her perpetually thick and dour accent. “He looks like he never sleeps. You will get sick, Mikhail, I warn you, and then where will you be? You’ll see.”
    Mick rolled his eyes in Shelby’s direction. “My mother hens,” he said, somewhat sheepishly.
    “I can tell.”
    Lena pointed to Shelby. “This is lady in picture on bus. Ms. Simon Says. No? Only without the mustache.”
    “No,” Mick replied. “She just looks like the lady on the bus. This is my sister.”
    All three of them looked surprised, Shelby most of all. Her light brown eyes opened wide.
    “Your sister!” all three of them exclaimed.
    “Honey, you never said anything about a sister.” Hattie stepped back, then stared from Mick to Shelby and back again. “She don’t look nuthin’ like you.”
    “Half sister,” Mick corrected himself. Half ass was what he was thinking. All he was trying to do was maintain a low, even invisible profile for the woman he was protecting, so he’d said the first thing that came into his head. Stupid. But he was stuck with it now. “Different fathers.”
    Shelby was looking at him as if he’d just dropped fifty or sixty I.Q. points. He could only hope she’d instinctively know why he’d lied—for her own good—and that she wouldn’t dispute it.
    “So,” Lena said to her, her pale Russian eyes growing slitty with suspicion, “you two have same mother, then.”
    “Um. Well. Yes,” Shelby answered. “The same mother. Yes, we do. Good ol’ Mama. Bless her heart.”
    With a deep sigh of brotherly relief, Mick grasped Shelby’s arm and turned her in the direction of his car. “Come on, sis.”
    Hattie stopped them with an insistent “Hold on now. Wait a minute. Don’t you be rushing her off that way. There’s something I want to say to this sister of yours, Mick.”
    He halted. What? What now? “Okay. But we’re in a hurry,” he said, hoping to speed the woman up. Hattie tended to be pretty long-winded if given the slightest encouragement.
    “What hurry?” Lena demanded.
    “We’re...uh...we’re late for...uh...” Shit. His mind went blank all of a sudden. He probably
had
lost a dozen or so I.Q. points over the course of the past few hours.
    “For a family reunion,” Shelby said, coming to his rescue with a level voice and a totally straight face.
    “Family is good,” Lena said, nodding sagely.
    Hattie, however, was not to be denied. “This won’t take long,” she said. She practically ripped Shelby’s arm out of his and marched her up the sidewalk, near the building’s front door, where she appeared to launch into a multigestured harangue. Mick couldn’t hear what she was saying, nor could he even imagine what the woman felt so compelled to tell his “sister.”
    “Family,” Lena murmured as she, too, watched the animated monologue taking place several yards away. “Family is good. Important. You have pretty sister.”
    Sometimes Lena sounded so much like Natasha, of Boris and Natasha fame, that it was all Mick could do not to laugh, but he limited himself to a smile while he looked at Shelby Simon. She was more than pretty. Aside from her shiny dark brown hair, and those long legs, and the suggestion of Victoria’s Secret breasts beneath her tailored white shirt, there was the sparkle of intelligence in her whiskey brown eyes and a suggestion of confidence and inner strength in her posture. She was probably five feet six inches, give or take an inch, but she stood as tall as any WNBA player.
    Not that her looks mattered, he reminded himself. Still, if he had to spend a significant length of time with an endangered female, it was nice that she was fairly easy on the eyes.
    Hattie walked her back down the sidewalk and turned her over to him with a wave of her hand.
    “I said my piece,” she announced. “You children go on now and have yourselves a big ol’ time at that reunion.”
    After several fleshy hugs