Calling His Bluff (6 page)

“My children, huh? Were they that bad?” Tyler asked as he poured the wheat-pale wine
into a glass and swirled it. He took a sip, nodded and passed it to his wife, who
took a rather longer swallow before answering.

“I should never have told Chef Paul about Take Your Kids to Work Day.” Paul was her
partner in the crowning jewel of her restaurant conglomerate. Grace narrowed her eyes.
“He just happened to be working on a new dessert menu today.”

“And?” After a couple of decades, J.D. could read his friend’s face at a glance. Tyler
loved listening to his wife, even when she was like this, a little cranky, a little
frustrated and in dire need of five minutes to vent before she could relax. He shook
his head.

“Have you ever seen a couple of toddlers after they’ve taste-tested three cakes, two
ices and a torte?” she asked. “It’s like having two overgrown hamsters on speed, only
you’ve lost their exercise wheel, so they just keep running around the room.”

Sure, Grace was a sweetheart, no question, and a beautiful woman, but Tyler was
grinning
for crying out loud. Charmed to his toes by her cheerful kvetching. And J.D. had
to admit that once he might once have envied the joy his friend took in his family.
After all, hadn’t he spent most of his childhood wishing his own family was normal?

Yeah, well, he’d been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt. It wasn’t until after
you got home that you found out that the colors of your new purchase bled into mud
the first time you tried to throw it in the wash. Thanks, but no thanks. It was abundantly
clear to him that he’d do better to keep his romantic entanglements to an emotional
minimum. It would lower his chances of getting kicked in the teeth, at least. Or of
busting his other tibia. Playing honorary uncle was enough.

J.D. was watching Daniel dive headfirst under a table, chasing the baseball after
a missed catch, when he noticed that Grace and Tyler had stopped talking.

He glanced over his shoulder.

She must have lunged over the bar at him. Grace’s hands were wrapped around her husband’s
neck as they shared what looked like a mind-blowing kiss. Feeling like a Peeping Tom,
he turned back to the kid.

But he couldn’t block out their voices.

“Think your mom will want to babysit tonight?”

“She can be bribed.”

Tyler’s voice was husky and Grace’s laugh scraped low in her throat. Okay, so maybe
he could understand the appeal of
that,
but Grace was one in a million. J.D. decided he’d wait for their conversation to
start up again before he turned around. After a couple of minutes, though, the wait
was getting ridiculous, so he settled for calling out to the ceiling, “Jeez guys,
get a room, will ya?”

Daniel trotted over and rested the baseball, clutched in his two small hands, on J.D.’s
thigh. “Yeah, Mommy. Get a room.”

The kid would probably be using
that
phrase again. He giggled as his parents yelled at J.D.

“Thanks a lot, Damico.” Grace wadded up a bar napkin and bounced it off his head with
a precision throw.

He winked and grinned. “Any time, Grace. That’s what’s so nice about being ‘Uncle’
J.D. I get to hand them back to you just when they’re getting impossible.”

“I should be so lucky.”

But she belied her words when she grabbed her daughter off his lap and proceeded to
torment her by blowing raspberries on her round belly. J.D. slipped his camera out
and framed the shot in an instant, shoving his Nikon back in his pocket before Isa
could stop giggling. He kneaded his thigh when his hands were empty again. Losing
the cast had been frigging awesome and the therapy was helping, but he still ached.
“Wanna babysit tonight?” Grace asked him.

“Not now that I know what you two plan on doing with your free time. I don’t need
the mental pictures, thank you.” He grabbed one of the juice-filled sippy cups Tyler
had set on the bar and passed it down to Daniel, who was waiting at his knee like
a terrier. J.D. figured the boy was old enough for a real cup, no lid, but he’d learned
from past experience that unless he wanted to take responsibility for mopping up any
spills, he’d better keep his mouth shut.

“Besides, I’m off in a couple hours.”

“Let me guess. Malaysia? No, you’ve been there. Zanzibar?”

“Been there, too. Nice island. Spice trade. Big carved wooden doors everywhere. Excellent
beaches.”

“So?”

“Vegas.” He tilted his head back to take another swallow of his beer. “The film I
worked on might, uh, win some kind of MTV award.”

“My buddy, the rock star.”

“Shut up, Tyler. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

Grace was swaying with Isa and pelting J.D. with questions about whether he’d meet
U2 and what he’d be wearing. J.D. tried to explain that it wasn’t what it sounded
like. It was
not
a big deal. The film had won an MTV technical award of some kind. The director must
have had some kind of belated guilt attack about the whole thing with Lana. Either
that or the fact that his coffee table book of photographs had driven a surge of interest
in the film had apparently gotten his name on the invite list for the ceremony. Which
was, with various other non-flashy awards, being conducted a month before the main
show and would probably involve wine from a box and a choice between underbaked chicken
and overcooked steak.

“It’s just an excuse for a party, really,” he explained. “Everyone gets dressed up,
drinks too much and pretends for a night that they’re as famous as the people on the
other side of the camera.” Time for a change of subject. “So where’s your little sister,
Tyler?”

“Sarah or Maxie?” Grace asked as she snagged a handful of pretzels from a bowl on
the counter.

“He better be talking about Maxie.” In response to his wife’s look, Tyler said, “J.D.
has already seen plenty of Sarah.”

A man had to defend himself. “Hey, the whole thing was your idea.” He turned toward
Grace. “It was your husband’s idea to have me check her out, and now he’s pissed because
I gave her one lousy kiss.”

“I asked you to check
on
her, not ‘check her out,’” Tyler retorted with air quotes.

“Stop!” Grace threw her hands in the air. She pointed at her son. “You, go to the
kitchen and ask nicely for some tortellini and broccoli. You can pretend to eat the
broccoli if you go now.” Daniel went. Grace passed her youngest back to J.D. and ducked
behind the counter to pour herself more wine. Propping her elbows on the bar, she
rested her head on her interlaced fingers and grinned at J.D. “You, tell me about
that kiss. No, wait. First things first. Why were you checking her out?”

“
On,
checking
on,
” Tyler protested. “I wanted J.D. to see if he could feel her out.” As he snagged
the baby from J.D.’s lap, he gave his friend a sharp look and said, “I said
out,
not
up,
buddy. Don’t get any ideas. I told him how we’re a little concerned about Sarah.”

“Worried sick and not a little pissed off is what he means,” Grace added in a helpful
and pleasant tone of voice. J.D. knew that Grace and Sarah had formed a close bond
from day one. The two women joked that they didn’t need to bother with the “in-law”
part of the phrase “sister-in-law” since they were already sisters, separated at birth.
“We’ve been trying to get her in on the planning for Susannah’s birthday, but she’s
been blowing off all our calls.” He knew that the Tyler kids went all out for their
mom’s birthday every year. It was a family tradition that he couldn’t imagine Sarah
skipping out on, but maybe she’d been busy with work. “Plus, it just wasn’t like her
to miss Daniel’s birthday last week.”

Or maybe it was serious.

“She forgot her godson’s birthday?” Shoot, he could find her right now and tie her
to a chair until she explained what was going on with her.

“Well, not exactly. I mean, she sent over a gift and a card, but she made up some
excuse about why she couldn’t make it to the party. We haven’t seen her in weeks.
If she blows off Susannah’s party, I’m calling the police.”

J.D. settled back into his seat with a sigh. She’d remembered the boy’s birthday,
hadn’t she? She came from a terrific family, but everyone needed a break from time
to time. With a family like his, that break was better made permanently. All the same,
he could see why Tyler and Grace were worried. Sarah had always been the responsible,
quiet one, despite her unbelievably bad taste in high school boyfriends. She’d dated
a kid who was busted for stealing equipment from the AV club in the hopes of making
a porno, after breaking up with a guy who was caught taking bets on the football team.
What were the odds?

Still. The memory of an ace of hearts etched on smooth skin flashed before him. Maybe
he didn’t know Sarah as well as he thought he did. Maybe none of them did.

“What did Aunt Sarah send you for your birthday, buddy?” he called to Daniel as the
boy wobbled back into the room clutching a bowlful of pasta. Spotting a disaster in
the making, he scooped the kid up and deposited him in a chair, pushing his bowl away
from the edge of the table.

“A book ‘bout dinosaurs.”

J.D. shook his head, reassured. That was Sarah. If the girl wasn’t trying to splint
the broken leg of a squirrel, she was sitting somewhere with her nose in a book.

“I don’t know. All I can say is that she seemed fine to me. Better than fine,” he
added with a grin.

“Watch yourself, buddy.”

“Aha, which brings us back to that kiss,” Grace lunged for the topic as if it were
one of her children about to run off a cliff. “C’mon, J.D., fess up. Pretend you’re
a girl and give me all the gory details.”

“The man
is
wearing a ponytail,” Tyler said as he swooped his baby girl through the air on a
roller coaster ride before handing her off to Grace.

J.D. tugged on his hair where it was tied back with a leather cord. He was starting
to think that this entire conversation was a remarkably bad idea. “What kind of details?”

“Was it good?” Grace, cool and classy woman that she was, looked like she was about
to start breathing heavily and maybe drooling. She bounced her daughter on her hip.
“Did she enjoy it?”

Tyler stuck his fingers in his ears and started humming “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

“Aw, Grace, I was just fooling around. I don’t know if she enjoyed it or not.”

“Well, did she stick her tongue down your throat or just sit there like a bump on
a log?”

The visceral memory of that kiss slammed into him and his stomach dropped like he’d
just crested a hill at high speed.
She damn near climbed me like a tree
was what he wanted to say. At first she hadn’t moved and he thought that he’d crossed
a line, that he’d pushed the teasing too far this time and pissed her off. But then
her mouth had melted beneath his and a second later he’d felt her hands gripping his
hair as fiercely as his own were pulling her up higher against him.

Even Lana showing up in Chicago with her fantasy that they were still married couldn’t
block that memory, although the hassle of dealing with his ex-wife’s efforts to track
him down and lure him back as some kind of career move had complicated his life enough
to be distracting.

He’d avoided thinking about that kiss ever since that night because each time he did,
he relived the entire thing in every snatch-your-breath-away detail, and he wasn’t
comfortable with the fact that its impact hadn’t faded at all in two weeks. To recover,
he kept forcing himself to strategize about how to convince Lana that that door was
closed for good.

Thank god Tyler was humming.

“She definitely didn’t just sit there.”

Grace’s “Excellent!” was drowned out by Tyler’s “Dude, that’s my sister!”

“Shush.” Grace stopped her husband’s mouth with her palm. “So tell me, what’s the
plan?”

“Plan? There is no plan. It was just one lousy kiss!”

Tyler chorused, “That’s right! No plan!” and punched a fist in the air as he poured
water from the soda gun into Daniel’s sippy cup one-handed. J.D. shook his head and
said, “The last genius step of this plan gave me these—” he yanked up a sleeve to
show off the scratches where the damn alley cat had nailed him “—and still poops in
my house.”

“Hey, I just thought you’d
borrow
a cat. Not go all Great White Hunter on me.”

“Yeah, well, give me a couple of painkillers and I come up with all kinds of great
ideas.”

“It was just an excuse to get her over there. I asked J.D. to talk to Sarah. The two
of them always got on like secret pals when we were growing up,” he explained to his
wife.

“Okay, A, that was a decade ago.” The door creaked open, drafting cold air inside.
J.D. was grateful for whatever customer would put this conversation on hold. “And,
B, I just felt sorry for Sarah because she was always mooning around about some guy
she liked.”

“Mooning around?”

The new arrival’s voice was female. And deadly.

Yeah, he had a feeling that his gratitude that someone had walked in on this conversation
was going to be very short-lived. He gritted his teeth, smiled and prepared to take
his punishment like a man.

J.D. swiveled around on his stool in slow motion, but not even one hundred and eighty
degrees gave him enough time to figure out a way to take back the words that had just
come out of his mouth.

“Hey, Sarah. You look, um…”
Scary,
would have fit neatly at the end of that sentence. Her eyes were slits and her heeled
boots clicked sharply on the floor, measuring out a straight line that brought her
slowly closer to him, step by precise step. “So, figures of speech are funny things,
aren’t they?”

“I was mooning,” the words were ground to a powder between clenched teeth, “over
you,
” she stabbed him in the shoulder with a pointed finger he was pretty sure she wished
were a knife, “you jackass.”