Flirting With Disaster

by Ruthie Knox

  But now Paul was nervous, and Judah was trying his hand at driving the bus. Never mind that he might end up driving it off a cliff. These days, he had trouble remembering what the fuck had ever made him think a career was the same thing as a life.

  He had to trust someone. His instincts insisted it be Katie.

  “Can we keep it in this room?” he asked.

  “Maybe. I can’t promise I won’t need to talk to Caleb.”

  “If you trust Caleb, I guess I trust you. But I don’t want any of this getting out to the world at large. Even Paul doesn’t know about all of it.”

  Katie glanced at Sean. He inclined his head in assent. “You have our word,” she said.

  Judah leaned forward, running both hands through his hair. “I’ve been getting some … disturbing messages. Not exactly threatening. Not at first. Just … weird.”

  “When did they start?”

  “I’m not sure. They show up different places, sometimes to my public email address, other times in Facebook or on Twitter, you know? I wasn’t in the habit of checking those sites myself, but Ginny will pass along a couple dozen messages most days—the interesting ones, or the ones from people she thinks I might want to write back to for whatever reason. So the strange messages could have been coming in for a while without me seeing them. I got the first one from Ginny in November, right around Thanksgiving.”

  “What did it say?”

  He leaned back and crossed his legs, his eyes skating over her shoulder and fixing on the window behind her. Already getting dark. “It said, ‘Hey, Jude, be thankful they don’t know.’ ”

  “Be thankful they don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  This was complete bullshit, but he said it with a smile, which usually worked. People couldn’t resist him when he smiled. It was one reason he got away with so much unconscionable behavior.

  He made sure to meet Katie’s eyes when he shrugged. Don’t worry about it, his body language said. Probably nothing.

  God, how was he supposed to tell the truth when he was crap at it? Lying was so easy.

  Katie frowned. “Any signature?” she asked.

  “No. That one was an email from a Gmail account. JudahFan, or something like that. Ginny said she couldn’t find any other messages from that person.”

  “You keep the email?” Sean asked.

  “Sure. I’ve got a folder of them.”

  “What was next?” Katie asked.

  “There was another one before Christmas. More of the same thing. ‘Ho ho ho, be glad they don’t know.’ And at New Year’s, there was a third one.”

  “Same sort of message?”

  “ ‘I made a resolution. This year, the whole world finds out what you are.’ ”

  A felon. A fraud.

  “How many have you seen altogether?”

  “Four that I know of.”

  More bullshit, but he didn’t want to tell them about the one that showed up right before he was supposed to go to Louisville. The one that spooked him so bad, he sat in his apartment drinking Jack and Coke and staring out at Lake Michigan for half the night.

  “How do you know you’re not missing any?”

  “I can’t know for sure, but I asked Ginny to keep an eye out for anything short and strange like that. And I’ve been checking the accounts myself, pretty much every day.”

  “So what do you think this is all about? Blackmail?”

  He didn’t have to guess what it was about. He knew. It was about Louisville, Buffalo, Iowa City.

  It was about what he’d done to Ben.

  If he’d known the last time he was in Kentucky that he wouldn’t see the High Hat or Ben Abrams again, it wouldn’t have changed anything. He still would have left. But he hadn’t known.

  He picked at invisible lint on the knee of his jeans. “Maybe.”

  “Do you think you know this person?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think they mean you any harm?”

  He hesitated before he answered, long enough to bring Katie’s eyes up to his. This time, he told her the truth. “I don’t know.”

  She glanced at Sean. He was sitting up straight in his chair, arms crossed, looking like he had no interesting thoughts. But when he caught her eyes, his lips curved up just the tiniest bit.

  They had something, those two. He wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been honest when he and Katie were swapping spit in that suite.

  She leaned forward, pinned Judah in place with her gaze, and asked, “You think this is just about you being gay, or do you have other skeletons in the closet?”

  He jerked as if she’d electrocuted him.

  Jesus! He’d been handling gay rumors for years, and one direct question from Katie had him practically jumping out of his skin. Why not just take out an ad in The New York Times?

  At least her knowing saved his having to tell her. Though it did raise the question of how she’d figured it out.

  He waited until his heart rate had slowed before he smiled and said, “See, I knew I hired you for a reason.”

  “I thought you hired me because you wanted to do me.”

  “I know. Isn’t that sad?”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  “If I were any good at being straight, I’d totally want to do you.”

  “You’re not, though,” she said. “You suck at it.”

  That made him laugh. With her, he had sucked at it. Usually, he managed just fine. Women had their charms. They didn’t fire him up the way men did—didn’t get under his skin or make him crazy with dirty, violent need—but that wasn’t altogether a bad thing. They were nice to look at, soft and willing. They stoked his ego, even when they barely took the edge off his lust.

  “You got me on an off night. And for what it’s worth, you’re the first person in fifteen years to tell me so to my face.”

  “So, what, you hired me because I’m, like, the anti–yes man?”

  Judah slumped back into the couch, all humor abandoned. “No. I hired you because I need you to figure out who’s sending the messages.”

  Another partial truth. He was 80 percent sure he knew who was sending the messages. He just needed somebody else to make him believe it, and more than that, to do something about it. He needed a push, and he wanted Katie to be the one to deliver it. If that made him a coward, so be it. He’d been called worse.

  “We saw the fifth one,” Sean said.

  You’re going up in flames.

  His stalker had apparently tired of the holiday theme.

  Judah crossed his legs, avoiding Sean’s eyes for a moment. “No one’s seen that one but me,” he said finally.

  “But us,” Sean amended.

  “Does it mean something?” Katie asked. “The flames bit?”

  Another fake smile. I’m as clueless as you guys are. “I don’t know.”

  Katie let her skepticism show. “We’re wondering if we should bring in the police.”

  Judah spread his hands wide, palms up. “Look, I’m not going to tell you no on that, but I’m really hoping you won’t. This isn’t a police kind of thing. There’s no definitive threat, and what evidence I do have, the police wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with.”

  “But they would at least investigate it,” Katie said. “You’re famous, Judah.”

  “I know exactly what they’ll do. They’ll come by, take a statement, shake my hand, ask for a few autographs. Somebody will leak the threats to the media, and everybody will get a cheap thrill trying to decide what the messages mean and whether I’m secretly queer, and then the police will call me up after two or three weeks to tell me they’re keeping an eye on the situation, but there’s nothing much they can do.”

  “And you think I can?” Katie asked.

  “You’re the person who’s supposed to help me.”

  “Supposed to according to who?”

  He shrugged. “Just supposed to.”

  “Like
… God? The Lord chose me to assist you?”

  “No,” he said. “It was Jamie who told me to call Caleb. He’s a good singer, but he’s not the Almighty. It’s not like I hear celestial messages or anything.”

  “Good thing.”

  Judah grinned, but the smile faded as he played with the crease in his slacks. “It’s more like fate,” he suggested. “Or karma. I have no idea, Katie, honestly. I just know. It has to be you.”

  If she weren’t long dead, his grandmother would be laughing so hard at him right now. She’d despaired of the way he ignored his instincts.

  Jude, honey, you need to listen to what the universe is trying to tell you. You’re part of a bigger plan, and you won’t be happy unless you follow it.

  He’d dismissed her, dismissed the possibility of anything bigger than himself. Judah Pratt knew what he’d been put on this earth to do. He was going to be a singer. A guitar player. A bard. He’d be Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton.

  Instead, he’d become a joke.

  Maybe Katie couldn’t help him. Maybe she’d call up People and sell the story and retire to the Bahamas with Sean. Was that really the worst thing that could happen?

  He’d thought so once, but he didn’t anymore.

  He was at her mercy.

  Katie glanced at Sean. His right hand rose a few inches off the arm of his chair and flipped over. Open palm, fingers extended. Go ahead.

  “All right,” she said. “We’re in.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The conversational ball really got rolling after that.

  Judah wanted to know how she’d known he was gay. That was easy enough to explain, though Katie could tell her answer made him uneasy.

  She wanted to know more about why he’d gone all Hand of Fate on her, and why he thought fate would choose an uneducated, inexperienced chick from Camelot, Ohio, to help out the Sexiest Man Alive. Judah didn’t have a decent answer. He just mumbled something she couldn’t quite follow about his grandma and trusting his instincts.

  As far as she could determine, it once again came down to her being the chosen one because he had a feeling about her. Which she scoffed at, because scoffing was her default mode. And because, well, yeah. Judah was a few eggs short of the full dozen.

  She liked that about him.

  Sean wanted to know a million different things about Judah’s accounts and passwords and when the messages had come in and whether there were copies and backups and a lot of other technical gobbledygook that neither she nor Judah could make heads or tails of.

  They worked it out. Sean got his hands on Judah’s laptop and free rein to pull Ginny in and make her do his bidding, so long as he didn’t tell her anything secret. He parked himself in the far corner of the suite and started doing his clicky-typing thing on Judah’s computer, leaving Katie to talk Judah into spilling the Reader’s Digest version of his life story.

  He claimed it would go down better over a drink, so they declared it happy hour and mixed up gin and tonics from the minibar. Katie tossed Sean a beer. He caught it one-handed without looking up from the screen, which was for some reason the single sexiest thing she’d ever seen anyone do in her life.

  She’d developed a geek fetish. Next thing she knew, he’d pull out a graphing calculator, and she’d faint from lust.

  When she finished up with the besotted staring, Judah was watching her and smiling like the Cheshire Cat.

  “What?” she asked, bristling at being so obvious.

  “I knew there was something going on with you two.”

  “Nuh-uh.” It was, Scout’s honor, the most intelligent thing she could think of to say.

  Judah made a grandmotherly tsk-ing noise and said, “Two men at once, Miss Clark. It’s scandalous.”

  “Omigod, whisper, please, if you’re going to humiliate me. I wasn’t with Sean in Louisville.”

  “He kissed you right in front of me,” Judah pointed out, lowering his voice to something at least approaching a whisper.

  “That was for your benefit. I believe the idea was to mark me as taken.”

  “I believe you squeaked.”

  “I didn’t squeak.”

  “You did.”

  She had. She’d totally squeaked. It had been an accident, but the truth was that Sean was just that great a kisser. He’d compelled her to squeak, and he hadn’t even used his tongue. Now if only she could get him to do it again …

  “We’re supposed to be talking about you,” she said.

  “Okay. You think I’m a bad kisser? I didn’t make you squeak.”

  “That’s not what I meant. We’re supposed to be talking about your sexual orientation and your life story and why someone is threatening you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Can I tell you something I’ve never told another woman?” Judah asked, leaning closer and looking earnest.

  “Of course.”

  “Your boyfriend’s hot.”

  He waggled his eyebrows, a 1980s gay stereotype come to life, and she laughed and shoved him. Sean glanced up from the laptop and gave her a blank look that made her want to climb up on the coffee table and do a striptease, just to provoke a reaction from him. She stuck out her tongue instead. He went back to work.

  Judah slumped against the couch with a wistful half-smile. “He is, though, honestly. He has that lean, rugged cowboy thing going. Hopelessly straight.”

  “You can tell that by looking at him?”

  “No, honey, I could tell that by watching him look at you. That man wants to nail you to the nearest flat surface.”

  “You think?” she asked, glancing over at Sean again. He was running one hand through his hair, completely absorbed in his work. His hair was getting unruly. If he kept working for a few more hours, it would be sticking up all over the place by bedtime. No wonder he kept it so short.

  “Aww,” Judah said. “That’s sweet.”

  “What’s sweet?” she asked, only half paying attention because Sean was still distracting her with the way he slumped when he worked on the computer. Like a seventeen-year-old boy. She wanted to find him a desk and give him a lecture on ergonomics. But not as much as she wanted to watch him and think about how hot he was.

  “You’re a goner.”

  That got her attention. “No, I’m not. I hardly know him.”

  “You are, too.”

  “I’m not,” she insisted. “I haven’t even slept with him. And if I did, it would be a just-for-fun thing. Like you were going to be, until you went all gay on me.”

  Judah smiled his lady-killer smile and said, “I’m not all gay. I’m at least twenty percent straight.”

  “Okay,” she said, “now we’re getting somewhere. I want to hear about that twenty percent, and then I want to hear about the other eighty. Tell me all your dirty little secrets, Pratt. Help me figure out who wants your head on a platter. Talk.”

  “All right. Where do you want me to start?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me about your family. You’re an only child, right?”

  “Yep. Just me and my parents and a little house in Pella, Iowa. Home of the Tulip Festival, Central College, and Pella Windows and Doors.”

  “Sounds wholesome.”

  His lip curled. “It was.”

  “Were you a wholesome kid?”

  “For a while. Until I wasn’t anymore.”

  “When did you go off the rails?”

  He leaned back, crossed his arms behind his head, and started telling her a rehearsed-sounding story about a prank he’d pulled at church when he was twelve. She’d read the same story in a magazine once, so she let her mind wander a little. She understood that he needed to get warmed up before he told her anything too personal. Everybody did.

  It worked this way tending bar, too, or chatting with folks on a hike or on a river. You started with the easy stories and worked your way in.

  Meanwhile, the wheels were turning somewhere in the recesses of her brain, and Fretful Katie was doing h
er thing, tossing out the confidence-lacking, mind-fucking questions she specialized in. Do you really think you’re the sort of person who can pull off a meaningless fling? It’s not like you’ve ever had one before. Even if Sean does want you, it’s not like you can turn into a different person overnight just because you’re no longer wearing a ring. You think you can sleep with Sean and not fall for him?

  Do you even want to?

  When the story ended, she laughed on cue and coaxed Judah into telling another one, but she couldn’t keep her head in the game.

  It irritated her, because she needed to be good at this, for Judah’s sake and her own. Sean was the last thing she should have been thinking about.

  She just couldn’t stop.

  “Excuse me,” she said after a few minutes. “I’ll be right back.”

  She walked over to the minibar and poured herself a refill on the G&T. Raising it to her lips, she looked at Sean and banished Fretful Katie to the dungeon where she belonged. You are twenty-eight years old, and you haven’t had sex in twenty-one months. This is not rocket science. This is car maintenance. This is a freaking oil change. Now shut up and do your damn job.

  Fretful Katie shut up.

  “Sorry,” she said to Judah when she returned. She handed him a fresh drink. “Where were we?”

  “I was telling you about my first dog. You were pretending to be interested.”

  “I’m totally interested. I just needed to fortify myself for the serious stuff coming up.”

  “You think there’s serious stuff?”

  “I know there is. Serious stuff always comes after the dog.”

  “My dog got hit by a car.”

  “Sometimes it comes during the dog.”

  Judah smiled and told her a story about how the dog had eaten his birthday cake when he was ten and puked on the carpet in the middle of his party. Katie told him how her brother had crashed his car into their dad’s truck during her eleventh birthday party. They kept swapping stories, making each other laugh, polishing off their drinks and a couple of pizzas Judah had asked Ginny to order.