Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  “Whatever you do, however long you live here, you feel the repercussions of every act. They bounce back at you all your life. There’s no getting away from mistakes. You make waves in a city and it gets absorbed. The same wave here can upend your little boat.”

  Steve sat down beside her. “At least here you do something and it has an effect. You have a chance of touching someone, of being noticed, of making a difference, good or bad. Like you said, Jenny, in the city, you can spend your life never connecting, never having your wave reach another person, let alone the shore.”

  “Thank God for it,” she said gruffly. “I don’t need that sort of connection.”

  “Everyone wants to connect to something.” He glanced at her, looked away. “Someone.”

  Her breath jumped lightly in her throat. She almost moaned. He shouldn’t say things like this to her. It was seduction pure and simple, using something far more alluring to her than good hair or a fab after-shave: understanding.

  He bent forward, looking straight ahead, his forearms on his thighs, his hands dangling between his knees. “Why wouldn’t you cuddle up with me out at Storybook Land? Why haven’t you kissed me again?”

  Whatever she’d expected him to say, it hadn’t been that. She kiss him? She wasn’t aware the prerogative had been only hers, but then, Steve Jaax wasn’t the man she would have assumed from his press. He was a little awkward, a little vulnerable, though still incredibly self-assured.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want to be another notch on Steve Jaax’s welding gun holster?”

  “I wouldn’t hit on you. Ever. Boy, it’s hot in here.” He’d started slipping his shirt’s buttons out of their holes, starting at the top but not stopping at the second. Or the third. Or even the fourth.

  This did nothing for her confidence. But he had kissed her, she reminded herself.

  “Why won’t you hit on me?” she blurted out.

  “I only hit on young women,” he said, as if this was a cause for congratulations.

  She looked away from the chest muscles revealed by the open shirtfront. Not many guys in their late forties had chests like that. Not many guys in their thirties. Okay. It was a good chest at any age. “Why is this no surprise?”

  He looked up at her, his head still bent to his task. He smiled ruefully. “It’s easy with young women. They have no expectations.”

  “You mean for a second date?” she asked dryly.

  “No. I mean during the date. A young woman, she’s no more interested in a long-term relationship than she is in who the Bangles were. She’s satisfied if a guy my age can get it up and keep it up long enough to fulfill the sexual contract. With the little blue pill, that’s no problem.” His gaze fell into the blue square of light. “Too bad they can’t make little blue pills for conversation.”

  He looked straight into her eyes. His own seemed to have borrowed light from the fishing hole. He tipped his head in a subtle salute. “Older women like you demand wit and style and … art. I might not be up to the task. I might disappoint. I wouldn’t want to disappoint a woman like you.”

  He reached up and slid the back of his hand across her cheek, sending a reactive shiver down her spine and curling her toes. “Damn, but you’re an elegant creation, Jenny.”

  “Is this where you tell me you’d like to do me in marble?” She tried flippancy but the effect was wrecked by the slight tremble in her voice.

  “No. I don’t want to re-create you in any medium. I want to experience … us. Not you. Not me. Us. I want to make love to you.”

  She stared at him. It was too romantic. Too over-the-top romantic and she was not a romantic woman. She planned and analyzed and weighed cost/benefits. She had goals and schedules. She wasn’t a romantic. Not her. Not Jenn Lind.

  “Why aren’t you with someone? You ought to be with someone. What are you holding out for, Jenny? Art?” he asked, studying her, looking solemn and oddly exposed.

  No, not Jenn Lind. Jenny, however, didn’t waste a second thinking about tomorrow. Jenny cried when she hurt. Jenny had dreams and fantasies. Jenny was a complete push-over.

  “Who says I’m holding out?” Jenny whispered.

  His breath caught. And then he was standing up, pulling her to her feet, and she was shedding her clothes while his mouth fastened on hers in a hot, wet, long kiss, hungrily taking her breath away. She yanked his shirt off his shoulders—and Lord, they were nice broad, heavy shoulders—and down his arms, where one cuff caught around his wrist.

  He released her just long enough to whip his arm frantically and shed the shirt all the way, his mouth still locked against hers, making a frustrated, anguished, satisfied moan. He unsnapped her bra and fumbled at the straps and she brushed his hands away, ripping it off the rest of the way, plastering herself urgently against him, belly to belly, breast to chest, wrapping her arms around him like a vise. Like she would never let go. He was warm and dense and smooth and hairy and she sighed into kisses that went on and on as his hands swept down her bare sides, gossamer light with an artist’s deftness, straight down over her hips and around under her buttocks. He lifted her up, walking her backward until she felt the rough planks of the fish house wall against her back.

  She wrapped her legs around his waist … and thank God! Thank God, he worked with heavy metals because he made her feel almost light, the way he pushed up into her against the wall and found that ancient, maddening, sob-inducing rhythm, carrying her, carrying them, right to places her memory promised still existed and then—thank God, thank God—straight into a whole new world of pleasure.

  “I’ve got a terrific crush on you,” she admitted half an hour later.

  “Is that bad?” he asked.

  “I don’t have crushes.”

  “You should,” he said, capturing her face between his hands and kissing her lightly. “You should have crushes and infatuations. You should moon around and feel dazzled and rapturous and miserable.”

  “I should?”

  “Yes. No. No.” He shook his head, kissing the corners of her mouth. “I’m too selfish. You should only have a crush on me.”

  She turned so she could hide the smile his words had caused. This was so foolish. So romantic and ridiculous. And yes, she did feel a little dazzled…. Of course, it was hot in the fish house.

  “I may be falling in love with you,” he said.

  She snapped back around and stared at him, startled, her fingers missing the buttonhole she was trying to push her shirt button into. He’d jammed his shoulder against the fish house door and was still gloriously shirtless, though he had, she noted, fastened his jeans back up.

  “In fact, I’m pretty sure I am.”

  She felt her whole face bloom—there was no other word for it—filling with the delight of hearing him say those … The delight faded. Became suspicion.

  “How many women have you said that to?” She dipped her head to the task of buttoning her shirt. She didn’t want to see his expression. She got way too caught up in his eyes and the way he looked at her.

  “Probably too many,” he admitted.

  “So I’m just another in a long line.” She tried not to let it matter. She wasn’t a kid. She didn’t expect anything. She stepped into her slacks and wiggled them up over her hips.

  “It’s not that long,” he protested. “And this is different. You’re older.”

  She felt a burst of heat in her cheeks, thankful for the dim interior. “Wow. Color me wooed.”

  In answer, he reached out and cupped the back of her head in his palm and pulled her face to his for a long, drawn-out kiss. When he finally pulled back, her head was spinning.

  “I told you,” he said soberly, “I like older women. I love your face. I love every grace note every year has imparted, every little bitterness-made line and every one made by laughter.” His gaze swept her face with incredible tenderness and desire. He smiled. “Do you think you could have gotten pregnant?”

  She came crashing back to reality. H
e was just like any other guy after all, worrying that their mutual lack of impulse control might have long-term effects. “Probably not. I’m not exactly in my peak reproductive years.”

  “Oh,” he said. He sounded sad. Disappointed. And weirdly enough, she felt a faint echo of it.

  “Still,” she said, striving for the right balance of casual-ness, sophistication, and maturity, “I can’t believe I could be this irresponsible.”

  “I’m not going to give you anything. I’m clean. Not virtuously clean. Physically clean. But I’m pretty virtuously clean, too. I haven’t … You’re the first in … a long time,” he finished weakly.

  Her sophistication crumbled at his awkwardness. She smiled. He was an original. She had to give him that. “How ever did you convince three women to marry you, let alone to go to bed with you?” she asked, shaking her head. “I would think with lines like yours women would run shrieking.”

  “They’re not lines,” he answered quietly, stepping closer.

  She could smell him, a distinct scent, a warm male aroma. She’d read articles in Psychology Today about how when a woman became … romantically interested her sense of smell became heightened, accentuated, so when she realized that he smelled like a bottle of the world’s most subtle and evocative and delicious something, she knew what it meant: she was in such trouble.

  Her cell phone rang.

  Chapter Forty-two

  11:40 a.m.

  Oxlip County Hospital, Room 323

  “Where’s my butter head?” Dunk spoke in a low voice into the receiver. He’d been waiting since seven o’clock this morning to make this call, shortly after his own little phone conversation with those assholes who’d stolen his butter head. He’d had to wait this long because Karin, concerned with his elevated blood pressure, had been hovering all morning. He’d finally gotten rid of her on some trumped-up errand but she could show up at any second. He didn’t have much time to get his point across.

  “I don’t have it,” Jenn Lind replied.

  “I didn’t think so,” Dunk snarled. He was nervous and edgy. “Too bad. Because, unfortunately for you, Steve Jaax has just raised the ante on the sculpture.”

  There was silence on the other end. Immediately Dunk was suspicious. The knowledge that Steve Jaax had actively entered the equation pounded at his confidence. “He there? With you?”

  There was another pause, then: “I’m in an ice fishing house. With Steve Jaax.”

  “You and him in cahoots, Ms. Lind? Because that would not be wise,” Dunk bit out.

  “No,” she clipped back at once.

  This deal had to go through and it had to go through now. If the idiots who held the butter head realized Jaax would go up even more for that damn sculpture, he’d be out of the running. Luckily, it hadn’t occurred to them that anyone would pay more than what Dunk had already offered: fifty thousand. And he’d made damn sure they understood that if he even got a sniff that they’d been going back for re-bids, he was pulling his offer off the table. That had seemed to do the trick. The plans were to make the exchange outside town. The thieves had informed him he would recognize them because they’d be wearing ski masks. He’d told them he had better recognize them because they’d have a fucking butter head with them.

  He’d just have to talk Jenn Lind into doing him one more service, as a chauffeur, before he cut her loose.

  “It would even be a career-killing move, if you understand my drift. In fact, if Jaax even knows about me, it could cause you all sorts of grief.”

  “We’re not. He doesn’t.” Her voice was tight and small. She was scared. Good.

  “He’s offered the guys who have it forty thousand dollars.”

  She drew in a shuddery breath. “That’s a lot.”

  “You bet,” he agreed. “Now I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to offer these jackasses fifty thousand. It’s a preemptive bid. And they’re going to take it unless you say something to Jaax and he comes back with a higher offer, which would be so stupid because that’ll only mean you’ll have to come up with even more money to beat whatever his next offer is.”

  “I can’t … see how I can bring that off.”

  “I don’t either, but you better figure out a way and you better do it quick. You better have that money by tomorrow evening, toots, or kiss bye-bye to your career.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You do that, Jenn Lind. You do that or you’ll be staring at that picture of you in a lip lock with your girlfriend all over the Internet.”

  He smiled as he seated the phone in its cradle.

  Karin Ekkelstahl, who’d volunteered to take a double shift in order to spend more time with a quickly healing, and thus imminently leaving, Walter Dunkovich, paused outside his hospital room. She took out her compact mirror and, after giving a quick glance around to make sure no one caught her primping, rolled up the lip gloss she’d purchased at the drugstore along with the magazines Mr. Dunkovich had requested. She suspected she was acting like a fool but a man hadn’t looked at her with the sort of appreciative interest Dunk had expressed in years, not since she’d divorced Einer, retaken her maiden name, and gained all that weight. Dunk liked her weight; she could tell by the way his eyes roved over her chest whenever she bent over him to readjust his pillows. And he had the added recommendation of not giving a squirrel’s patootie about Jenny Hallesby—Oh, excuse me, Jenn Lind—like every other celebrity-struck half-wit in town.

  She frowned at her image in the little round mirror and inexpertly coated her chapped lips. As she did so, she heard Dunk talking to someone in tones that were so hard, nasty, and unfamiliar that she stopped midapplication and listened.

  What she heard made her blanch.

  Chapter Forty-three

  11:50 a.m.

  The Lake, Fawn Creek

  “Who was that?” Steve asked curiously.

  Jenn thanked God for the dark interior, and the fact that her back was turned, so he couldn’t read her face. She had to think. “A guy from AMS asking about the cooking shoot.”

  “Oh.” She felt his hands on her upper arms and then he was gently turning her around, his gaze searching her face. “Jenny, I got a confession to make.”

  She had a little confession of her own to make. But part of her resisted. The smart part—the part that shouted at her that she still had a chance of making this whole thing work, a small, small chance, but a chance and that to tell Steve now would only make things worse. Probably for her.

  “I bought the butter head last night,” he said in a rush. “The men with it called after everyone had gone to bed. I was hungry, so I was in the kitchen, and I answered the phone and it was them and I made an offer and they accepted it.”

  Yeah, until their next pigeon offered more. She tried to look surprised. “Why didn’t you tell us this morning?”

  “Because of what you said,” he answered, “after we found the butter ear. You implied you wouldn’t sell it to me or give it to me and I need it.”

  “Need? Why? And no bullshit about it being your epiphanal work. It’s a twenty-two-year-old chunk of carved butter, which, people keep telling me, is freaking forever in butter sculpture years, missing at least one ear,” she declared in exasperation. That damn butter head was going to ruin her life. “Why do people want this thing?”

  He looked at her miserably. “Look, I don’t know why anyone else wants this thing. I only know that your folks want it for sentimental reason because your dad told me so. And they’re going to get it back, too,” he said earnestly. “I’m not going to take off with it. It’s your parents’ and they can have it. I just need a few minutes alone with it.”

  “Okay,” she said, “that’s creepy.”

  “It has a key in it.”

  That stopped her cold. “A key to what?”

  “A mausoleum crypt.”

  She sighed. “Okay, back to disturbing.”

  “No, it’s not really,” he said. �
�As part of the divorce settlement, my ex-wife Fabulousa demanded this very famous sculpture I had made and for which she’d modeled. I wasn’t about to let her have it just so she could turn around and sell it to some drug lord just to spite me. Which is what she planned to do. She told me so.

  “So I found this guy who, for a very reasonable price, broke into our town house and stole it. He then purchased a mausoleum crypt—see? See? Not so disturbing, huh?—and stuck the statue in it. He paid for the crypt in full, in cash, and paid like a zillion years’ worth of—what would they call it? Association fees?—in Fabulousa’s name, knowing that her private detectives would be looking into anything with my name on it but never think of searching under her name, her real name.

  “Afterward, he sent me the key to the crypt. Unfortunately, I had the key on me while I was sculpting you in butter and when the bounty hunter showed up I—”

  “Stuck it in the butter head,” she finished. It was all starting to come together for her.

  He nodded, delighted with her acumen. “Exactly.”

  “Who else knows about that key?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No one. Except the robber and he’s dead. Appendix burst a little while after I paid him off, the poor bastard.”

  “Are you sure? I mean …”

  He shook his head firmly. “I’m sure.”

  “You don’t know a guy named Walter Dunkovich?”

  “Nope.”

  Crap. She was willing to bet—no, she wasn’t—but if she did bet, she’d bet that Dunkovich knew about that key.

  “I called Verie last night. He’s supposed to be arriving today with the money and I promise it will be worth every penny of it.”

  “Is it worth a lot? This crypt statue?”

  “I’m not going to sell it. It was my breakthrough piece. I was able to capture the innocence, the drama and vulnerability, a sweetness in her …” His voice trailed off and he shrugged. “Of course, it was all a lie. Man, did that mess with my head for a while. But, no, it’s not for sale.”