Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  Ginny made it sound like a logical move, but Sean wasn’t getting logical vibes from any aspect of this situation. From what he’d read online, Pratt’s career was in trouble. He hadn’t put out an album in three years, and there were rumors of a drinking problem. An industry website said his studio had been putting a huge amount of pressure on him to produce something. Yet he was wandering around Middle America giving impromptu concerts.

  Add that up with his calling Caleb and Katie to Chicago to meet with him, then failing to show today, and Sean got error messages all over the place.

  “How did he pick the High Hat?” he asked.

  “Oh, I think he played here once, a long time ago. Fifteen years, he said?”

  Pratt was thirty-four. Sean surveyed the room again. The guy must have been a decent musician once, to get a gig like this as a nineteen-year-old.

  The whole setup was hinky. Outside consultant, vague instructions, run-down club with lavish interior, missing musician. A puzzle.

  Sean liked puzzles.

  Extending his hand to Ginny, he stood up. “Thanks for your help. Give us a call when he gets in.”

  Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that he and Katie had a little time to kill. He could find out a lot in a few hours.

  Getting information from people who didn’t want him to have it was his specialty.

  Chapter Three

  “Holy cow,” Katie said under her breath. She craned her head back for a better view of the sculptures perched above the building’s entrance. “Penguins.”

  Sean brushed past her, and it dawned on her how she must look, gawping like Bessie in the Big City. She hitched her purse strap higher on her shoulder and followed him inside.

  As she passed by a giant metal snail inside the lobby entrance, she schooled her face into cosmopolitan blankness.

  Nobody had ever told her there was such a thing as a hotel with an art museum in it. Or was it an art museum with a hotel in it? She didn’t even know. They didn’t have places like the 21c in Camelot, Ohio. They didn’t have them in Anchorage, either.

  Surely that was the point. This wasn’t a lobby where one was meant to feel at home. It was designed to be inwardly gawped at while one remained outwardly cool.

  Sean knew the drill. He appeared to take the place in stride, glancing around with a nonchalance that sat easily on his broad shoulders.

  But then, Sean took everything in stride. The man had the emotional range of a boulder.

  He’d been impolite when he turned off her phone in the car—rude enough to make her mad—but that was nothing compared to the way he’d acted inside the High Hat. Once he’d started talking to Ginny, it was as if Katie didn’t even exist. He’d asked all kinds of questions that never would have occurred to her, and she’d ended up feeling like Baby Sister Katie at the dinner table, listening in as Caleb and Amber talked about grown-up things with her parents.

  Worse, she’d deserved his scorn for once. This was supposed to be her trial run as a field-ready security agent, and one little blip had totally thrown her off her game. She’d been expecting Judah, not one of his employees, and she’d actually found herself intimidated by a tiny slip of a girl with a spray-on tan.

  Go, Katie.

  She could do better. She would. It had been a momentary lapse, the consequence of her surprise and disappointment. Having psyched herself back up in the car on the way over here, she’d been feeling pretty fly again, pretty confident and in charge of the situation, right up until she saw the penguins.

  Sean approached the front desk. It was low, with a row of stools for guests to sit on as they checked in. Four naked-lady sculptures graced the wall in front of him. One of them was touching her own boobs.

  He took a seat and rested both elbows on the counter, leaning in to talk to an attractive hotel employee in low, friendly tones. He’d taken off his jacket, and his posture drew her eye to the wedge shape of his back beneath his lightweight blue sweater and his tight butt in charcoal slacks.

  Sean’s clothes looked expensive. She’d never noticed before, but he looked expensive. He fit right in.

  Katie had crossed the Yukon by bicycle and come face-to-face with an Alaskan grizzly. She’d taken truck keys away from belligerent loggers who’d had too many beers, and she’d lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately, these were not experiences that helped much when a self-fondling naked-lady sculpture was giving you the stink eye.

  But if Sean Owens could fit in here, so could she. She fished around in her purse for her favorite tinted red lip balm and smoothed some onto her lips. Then she took off her own jacket, laid it on top of her bag, and brushed her hands lightly down her arms.

  Straightening her spine, she took a deep breath and let it out on a ten count. Be your best self. That was supposed to be her new mantra. She’d found it in a women’s magazine.

  The blue-and-white-striped top she’d put on this morning reminded her of Paris, and Paris reminded her of her best self. The self she’d planned to be before Levi.

  Her best self studied at La Sorbonne and took lovers whenever she felt like it. She selected her own produce at quaint city markets and drank coffee at sidewalk cafés.

  Nobody could tell by looking at Katie that she wasn’t that woman, or that she’d never stayed in a hotel room that cost more than a hundred bucks a night. Parisian women stayed at hotels like this all the time. She’d order a chocolate croissant from room service, and if it wasn’t up to snuff, she’d complain.

  Katie crossed the room, boot heels clacking on the distressed wooden floor, and sat down. She rested her elbows on the counter next to Sean’s.

  “… almost fully booked,” the woman was saying, “but we do have the Atrium Suite available.”

  Sean glanced over at her, his face blank, then looked back at the woman and nodded.

  “One room?” Katie asked.

  The woman smiled. “Yes, but it’s a spacious suite.”

  “We need two rooms.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s all we have tonight.”

  Sean pulled out his wallet.

  This was all kinds of not good. Her best self tried very hard to remain blasé about the idea of sharing a suite with the man next to her, but … no. Even Parisian Katie couldn’t keep her cool in this situation.

  “We need to talk,” she said. Sean looked down at his arm where she’d inadvertently clutched at it. His bicep was hard as a rock. Naturally.

  She released him, and he handed a credit card to the receptionist. Then he turned around on the stool to face her and lifted one hand, palm up. Go ahead, the gesture said. I’m listening.

  Right. Time to trot out a brilliant explanation for why the thought of sharing a room with him gave her the heebie-jeebies. She considered the possibilities.

  You hate me?

  A tad too direct.

  You make me nervous?

  She sure wasn’t about to admit that.

  “I don’t want to have sex with you,” she said in a fierce whisper.

  Brilliant. Just brilliant. It wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all, but she’d opened her mouth and her stupidest thought had come tumbling out.

  This sometimes happened when she was anxious. In the interview for Ohio’s Junior Miss competition in high school, one of the judges had asked her what her views were on euthanasia, and she’d said something completely moronic about starving children in China.

  Sean grabbed a pen off the desk and used it to write a note on the paper the receptionist had just slid in his direction.

  I DIDN’T ASK YOU TO.

  Ouch.

  Of course he hadn’t. He wouldn’t, seeing as he hated her and all. And since she couldn’t think of anything not-stupid to say—since her eyes stung with tears that she would never shed in front of this man—she was going to spend the night sleeping next to someone whose disdain for her could not possibly be more plain.

  A rugged, remote someone who refused to speak to her for mysterious reasons she wasn’t pr
ivy to.

  But hey, maybe she wouldn’t have to spend the night in a room with Sean. If all went well, she’d be sleeping with Judah.

  The thought cheered her up, and she managed a nod, pushing the receipt in Sean’s direction. Her fingers tapped over his words.

  I DIDN’T ASK YOU TO.

  Why did that needle her so much? Maybe because he’d written it in all caps, his handwriting bold and confident, right above the total estimated room charge, which was … oh, God.

  She turned her back on the counter and took another deep breath. Caleb was going to kill her.

  Non, Parisian Katie said. Caleb ees going to kill Sean.

  This one was all Granite Man’s fault.

  Chapter Four

  Whoever had decided to call the room a “suite” was smoking crack.

  To be a suite, a hotel room had to contain more than one bedroom with its own door. Sean knew this for a fact. He’d slept in plenty of suites.

  The Atrium Suite was big, with two beds and a couch, but that hardly mattered when there was only a six-foot gap between the mattresses.

  This was not a suite. It was a problem.

  Katie dropped her purse on the couch and peeked in the bathroom. Then she gazed at the exposed brick wall, the orange accent pillows, the art books on the glass coffee table, the strange sculpture on one wall that resembled an animal head made of nuts and bolts and weird, twisted pieces of metal.

  She looked at everything but the beds.

  “We should talk about the case,” she said. “Compare notes.”

  Sean nodded absentmindedly, preoccupied with the fact that he’d be able to hear her breathing in the dark.

  Not good.

  He walked to the window and drew back the curtain. Behind him, Katie rolled her suitcase over to one of the beds. He watched the traffic inch by on the street below while she transferred her clothes from her suitcase into the dresser, and he tried to think.

  If his first speech therapist, Mrs. Guzman, could see him now, she’d have his ass on a platter.

  You want to stop stuttering, Sean? If you want it, you gotta talk. You can spend the rest of your life keeping your mouth shut, and maybe you’ll fool some people for a while, but I can guarantee you, when you do try to use your voice, it’s not gonna magically start working. The only way you’re ever gonna get better is to talk.

  His first appointment with Mrs. Guzman had changed his life.

  The judge who legally emancipated Sean from his mother had assigned him a social worker—a kind, harried woman who had agreed with Sean’s assessment that the only thing he needed from the State of California was a speech therapist.

  Even when he’d been living in a shitty one-bedroom in Vallejo, busting his ass to make the rent but crashing in Mike’s dorm room half the time because his neighborhood scared the hell out of him, Sean had managed to save up enough money to send that judge and that social worker a present at Christmastime. He’d asked a buddy of Mike’s to go into the liquor store for him and pick up two decent bottles of wine.

  Mrs. Guzman still got a phone call every Christmas Eve, because she said the only thing she wanted was to hear the sound of his voice.

  She was the first adult who’d made him believe he could get better—the first one who hadn’t gone along with his mother’s cherished charade that he was simply a shy and socially awkward boy, and he’d get over it as he matured.

  Before he met Mrs. Guzman, Sean had spent most of his adolescence in a mild panic, worried someone would ask him a question that required a verbal response. Being silent was the only way he’d known to please his mother.

  It hadn’t worked.

  When he started therapy at seventeen, he’d been ready to try it Mrs. Guzman’s way. For nine months, everything that came out of his mouth had sounded excruciatingly bad. Mrs. Guzman hadn’t cared, and Sean had learned not to care either.

  The more he talked, the less attention he paid to his stammer, and the better he sounded. By the time he’d saved up enough money to enroll at Berkeley on scholarship, he could get by okay in ordinary conversation, in class, wherever.

  These days, nobody but Mike even knew about the stutter. Weeks went by when Sean didn’t think about it at all.

  The problem seemed solved until he’d returned to Camelot to make funeral arrangements for his mother and found his stutter waiting for him beneath his childhood bed.

  Wuh-welcome b-back, Ssssean! N-n-n-nice to sssee you again, assshole.

  It had settled onto his shoulders, sharp claws gripping tight, and made itself at home.

  Not that he’d actually started stuttering again, but the disorder had never been just about the stuttering—that was another thing Mrs. Guzman had taught him.

  It was the anxiety. The fear of opening his mouth and being judged for the way he sounded.

  It was the decision not to talk when he wasn’t sure whether he could do it without stammering. The choice to substitute an easy word for a hard one.

  It was ordering lasagna for dinner instead of penne because he didn’t want to say “p-p-p-penne” in front of the waitress.

  He’d thought he’d beaten all that crap at seventeen, but it seemed he’d simply left it behind in Camelot. Now it stalked him, and it was Katie who was going to make it pounce. If he tried to talk to her, he would stutter like Elmer Ffffucking Fudd.

  He could handle Katie’s hatred, but he didn’t want her pity.

  “You know, I’m feeling kind of grimy from the road trip,” she said. “I think I’ll take a shower.”

  Fantastic. Because it wasn’t hard enough to have to smell her and hear her and look at her all the time. Now he had to think about her naked and wet on the other side of a door, the hot spray slicking back her hair and dripping off her soap-slippery breasts, bringing a flush to her skin …

  Just fucking fantastic.

  As soon as he heard the water going, he picked up his phone and dialed Mike’s number. Anything to distract himself.

  While it rang, he toed off his shoes and stripped out of his sweater. The room was hot. Or possibly that was the fault of his raging hard-on.

  Mike proved a worthy distraction. Last quarter’s financial numbers were in, and they sucked. There were rumors that two of their competitors were merging, and a third competitor wanted to buy them out. Mike wanted him to fly back to California as soon as possible. Sean promised to come on Monday.

  There wasn’t much he could do before then, so he settled down on the bed with his laptop to concentrate on the far more interesting task of learning as much as possible about Judah Pratt.

  He poked around old newspaper articles and fan-site bulletin boards for signs of problems with alcohol, sex, money, crazed fans—anything that might tell him what direction a threat to Judah could come from.

  After a while, Katie came out of the bathroom and opened a drawer. Sean managed not to look at her. If he concentrated on work, he didn’t have to think about the fact that by refusing to talk to her, he was sparing his pride at the cost of treating a very nice woman like shit.

  He concentrated hard.

  He was only dimly aware of her opening and closing drawers as he pulled up Judah’s most popular fan site and started scrolling through threads in the forum. She moved around the room, a white splotch in his peripheral vision. Not a person. Hardly real at all.

  It was only because he wasn’t paying attention to her that he spoke.

  “Top of the fridge.”

  Katie spun around. She’d been searching for a corkscrew, and some part of his brain had apparently noticed.

  She looked on top of the fridge and located the Rabbit corkscrew he’d seen on the way in. “Thanks,” she said. After a moment of fumbling with it, she figured out how to work it, removed the cork, and poured herself a glass.

  Sean resumed his work, curious about what he’d just done.

  He’d erased her as a person, and then it had been possible to talk to her. Could he do it again?

&n
bsp; Make her anonymous. Not the girl you fixated on in high school—not the Katie Clark who was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise miserable two years.

  Make her nobody.

  She plucked a microbrew out of the fridge and removed the cap. When she put it on the table by his left hand, he didn’t look up. He let a few minutes go by, then took a drink.

  Your PA brought you a beer. A waitress. A stranger.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “What are you working on?” she asked.

  For a second, he thought he might be able to do it. To open his mouth and let the words come out, perfectly clear, perfectly ordinary. He inhaled and relaxed his tongue.

  He thought about sibilants and fricatives.

  Then she smiled, and he choked.

  God, that smile.

  With a shake of his head, he went back to clicking and typing. It wasn’t going to happen.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “You were talking to me a few seconds ago, and now you’re not? Could you type me up a list of rules, maybe? Because I have no idea where I went wrong with you, and I’d really like some help figuring out how to get you to include me in the circle of people you speak to.”

  He kept his eyes on the screen, and his hands returned to the keyboard for a burst of machine-gun-fire typing.

  “No list, huh? No rules?”

  He shook his head without lifting his eyes, and he thought, I’m not even supposed to be here.

  When his mother died, he’d flown to Camelot thinking he’d stay a week or two. Someone had to take care of the funeral, and it seemed that someone was him. Afterward, he’d found out she had named him her heir and executor—a surprise, considering they’d effectively disowned each other. But he’d accepted the charge as the least of what he owed her.

  For a few weeks, he’d tried to handle the estate while also running Anderson Owens. He’d spent most of his time cooped up in the tiny house he’d grown up in, a headset in his ear and his computer open on his lap, firing off emails and talking to people on the other side of the country.