“That’s because I have an older, mature staff. You hire too many young, pretty blondes instead of the best qualified. You and Reno both.”
“Reno?” Sal asked. Reno Gabrini, the owner of the PaLargio Hotel and Casino in Vegas, was their first cousin and Tommy’s best friend. He was also a thorn in Sal’s side. “What are you bringing up Reno for?” he asked. “Don’t you dare compare me to that bozo. I don’t know how Trina puts up with his arrogant ass anyway.”
“The same way Gemma puts up with yours,” Tommy said. “You’re two of a kind.”
“In your dreams, lover boy. In your dreams!”
But just the thought of Sal and Reno’s women got Tommy thinking, once again, about Liz. Chicago, as he called her once. It had been three weeks since she slept in his arms on his private plane. It had been three weeks since she sat in that limo and with those big brown eyes implied that she would be interested in seeing if they could have a go. He thought about her often. A few times he even thought about phoning her. But he never did. Good sense always ruled out and he heeded his own warning. They quit while they were ahead. They had a nice memory. That was all that was going to come out of that particular ride.
“How’s Gemma anyway?” he asked his brother.
Sal nodded. “She’s good.”
“She didn’t come to Seattle with you?”
“Nall, nall, she’s in the middle of a trial. She’s a very in-demand lawyer nowadays. I want her to forget trying criminal cases personally, but she won’t do it. Incarcerated black men don’t get a fair shake, she feels, and they need her. All she’s been doing lately are criminal cases.”
Tommy nodded. “Good for her.” Then he hesitated. “So, what about Chelsey?”
“What about her?”
“Have you guys heard from her, or Liz? Since the party?”
“Hell no,” Sal said. “Liz? Who would wanna hear from her nosy ass? As for Chelsey, Gemma calls her every now and then, but she won’t answer her phone. She’s a train wreck is what she is. You saw how she treated Rodney that night.”
Tommy was surprised that Sal would blame Chelsey. “I saw how Rodney treated her,” he said.
“How he treated her?”
“He called his own daughter a bitch, Sal,” Tommy reminded Sal. “He said she was better off dead, or however he put it. That’s a problem.”
“Okay, I hear you. He was out of line. I told him man to man he was out of line. But Chelse was wrong too. She should have never stayed away that long. But anyway,” Sal said, “let me get to my office. I just wanted to drop by and let you know I’ll be here.”
“All day?”
“Until late afternoon, yeah. Then I’m going to go see your daughter, my beautiful niece, and then scram to Scranton.”
Tommy smiled. “Desi will be happy to see you. She asks about you and Gemma all the time. Mainly Gemma.”
“Very funny,” Sal said, and Tommy laughed. Then Sal left.
But after he left, and Tommy returned his attention to the world outside of his high-rise office window, he couldn’t stop thinking about Liz. Nobody seemed to want to give her the benefit of the doubt. She was no angel, by any means, but he saw her humanity. He saw a wonderful woman inside of that tough exterior. Or, he thought again, he saw her great ass and was projecting great things on her as a result of that fine ass. But either way: he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Even after he sat behind his desk and got back to work, she stayed on his mind. He didn’t know why she was strong on his mind today, but she was. Stronger than usual. And suddenly he felt an urge to want to know that she was okay. He should have phoned her a day or two after their night together, that would have made more sense, but he didn’t trust himself then. If she was still interested, he was afraid he’d set up another get together that could lead to too many more get-togethers that could lead, as it always inevitably did for him, to love and then disaster. He wasn’t going down that road with any other woman, he didn’t care who she was. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Liz.
The only way he was going to shake it, he realized, was to do something about it. He picked up his phone. But it wasn’t as easy as giving her a call. He didn’t have her cell number, her office number, nothing. Gemma or Sal were out of the question, he didn’t want them to know his personal business that way, and his secretary was too. He was tired of his staff gossiping about his various female friends as if they had that right. Nobody was going to be gossiping about Liz. So he did the research himself. He didn’t find her personal phone number, but he did find the number to Kutana’s corporate office in Chicago. He phoned her office.
Her executive assistant, some guy named Jerome, finally came on the line to tell him what one of the front line staff could have told him. “She’s not here,” he said.
“Perhaps you can tell me where I can reach her?” Tommy asked.
“And you are?”
What was he? He wasn’t exactly a friend of hers. He made love to her once, but he wasn’t exactly her lover. “An associate of hers,” was the best he could describe it. “From Seattle.”
“Seattle? Oh! You aren’t . . . Are you Tommy Gabrini?” Jerome asked him.
Tommy was surprised, if not stunned that her assistant would know his name. “Yes,” he said. Liz had mentioned him?
Apparently she had because suddenly the assistant was more than willing to tell him all he wanted to know. “I don’t know how much you know,” Jerome said, “but she was injured in Iraq.”
Tommy’s stomach clenched. “Injured?” he asked. “She’s been injured?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Lord, no, Tommy thought. “And it happened in Iraq?”
“Yes, sir.”
What was she doing in Iraq, Tommy wanted to ask, and it angered him, but he was too concerned with her wellbeing to be concerned with the why. “Where is she now?” he asked. “Is she alright? She’s in Iraq you said?” In that hellhole, he thought with alarm.
“She’s not in Iraq anymore,” Jerome seemed compelled to say to reassure what sounded like a very concerned man. “She’s back here now, in Chicago. We were able to get her out of there, to the US Air Force base in Bagram, and then she was airlifted home.”
Tommy could hardly contain his anxiety. He didn’t think he could have been more anxious had that man told him Sal had been injured in Iraq. “But is she alright? How is she now?”
“She’s out of danger, thank God. Although Liz being Liz will declare she was never in any danger to begin with. But it was a terrible accident. From what I understand, rocket-propelled grenades or something hit their convoy of trucks and many American soldiers, or, excuse me, military advisers, lost their lives that day.”
“Jesus,” Tommy said. “It was that bad?”
“It was bad,” Jerome said. “Yes, sir. It was bad.”
But when Tommy hung up from Jerome, he couldn’t concentrate on how bad it had been. His entire concentration was all about getting to Liz.
He called his pilot, and ordered him to ready his plane.
Except for her heels, which sat beside her chair, she was fully dressed. Even nicely dressed in a bright-white Oscar de la Renta pantsuit with a tucked-in purple blouse. She sat in one of two chairs inside her hospital room. All she needed was the release papers and she was out of there.
She remained slouched in her chair, too drained to even put on her shoes. She looked around the now quiet room. Flowers everywhere. You’d think she was Miss Popularity by the number of flowers alone. But she knew better. They all sent flowers. Even her worse employees sent flowers. And some even dropped by. But none of them stayed.
She attempted to reach down and put on her shoes again, but again her energy just wasn’t there. So many days in these hospitals, from the one in Iraq, to the one on the U.S. Air Force base in Afghanistan, to the hospital here in Chicago, had slowed her considerably. She kept telling them that she had only bumps and bruises and all of their test-taking was unnece
ssary, but she was forced to endure it anyway. It was U.S. protocol for journalists who were under the auspices of the military when the accident occurred. And the prodding and poking and laying around and waiting for days on end, sapped her strength. And her joy. It had been a tough week.
Then knocks were heard on her hospital door. Assuming it was the nurse with her walking papers, she said come in as loud as she could, and dropped her shoe again. But when the door opened and the nurse didn’t immediately start running her mouth the way she usually did, Liz looked up. When she saw Tommy Gabrini standing there, she could hardly believe her eyes.
“Tommy?” she asked.
Tommy was so pleased by the sight of her that a big grin crossed his handsome face. He expected tubes and machines and all of the sights and sounds usually associated with hospital rooms housing the very ill. But she had no such apparatus around her. She was breathing on her own. She was, in fact, dressed and sitting in a chair. To his eternal relief, she looked fine. Even gorgeous as she sat there. He was truly happy, and made his way toward her. “Thought you’d get rid of me that easily?” he asked her.
Liz smiled too, and played along. “Darn,” she said. “I thought for sure I’d seen the last of you.”
But the closer he got to her, the less he smiled. She had been in a terrible attack in Iraq. From what Jerome had told him, a horrific attack that cost lives. She looked fine physically, but there was an emotional toll in her eyes, a terror still there, that tugged at his heart. “Are you alright?” he asked her.
“Oh sure,” Liz said, smiling that go-to smile of hers that never quite reached her eyes. “I’m just waiting for my get out of jail papers.”
But unlike her, Tommy was not willing to play along. He placed her chin in his hand and lifted her face upward, at him. His thumb rubbed the side of her cheek. Her face was still smooth and unblemished. But her eyes. Her eyes told the tale. “Terrible, wasn’t it?” he asked her.
Her eyes fluttered, and there was a moment when he could see how badly she wanted to unload that pain. But he also knew she didn’t get to be her own woman, doing her own thing, by weeping on the shoulder of a man she barely knew. She gently removed her face from his hand. “What brings you to Chicago?” she asked. “And how could you possibly know that I was on vacation in this five-star joint? I didn’t put it on my Facebook page. Not this joint.”
Tommy placed his hands in his pants pockets. Liz looked at him when he did so. He wore yet another expensive suit tailored-made to fit his muscular frame. His hair was as neat as it had been the first time she laid eyes on him, and his big, black dress shoes looked freshly polished. The only sense of urgency anywhere on his person was on his face: a five o’clock shadow. But even that, Liz thought, looked elegant on the man. “So what gives?” she asked. “How did you know I was here?”
Yesterday, he would not have wanted to admit it. But today, after seeing that sadness in her eyes, he didn’t care. “I phoned your office to see how you were doing. Your assistant told me.”
“Rome?”
“Jerome, yes.”
Liz shook her head. “Mister Big Mouth. I should have known. And I know he told it all because he never tells anything halfway.”
“He felt I was somebody who should know what was going on with you,” Tommy said, and stared at her. They both knew she had been talking about him to her assistant, and it had to be more than the fact that he had given her a lift to Dubai. He was past the game playing. Liz was still holding on.
But she was saved by the nurse. There was a quick knock and then she entered with clipboard in hand.
“You’re all set, Miss Logan,” the nurse said as she approached them. “Hi,” she said to Tommy.
“Good evening.”
The nurse removed a small sheet from the clipboard and handed it to Liz. “Here’s your prescription,” she said.
“A prescription? For what?”
“It’ll help you sleep at night,” the nurse said. “It’ll help with the nightmares.”
Liz glanced at Tommy. It wasn’t something she wanted broadcast, but what could she do? He was right. She had been through a terrible ordeal. And those poor soldiers! She folded the prescription.
The nurse smiled and handed her the clipboard. “These are the release papers. Sign there, and there,” she pointed out.
“Gladly,” Liz said as she took the clipboard and pen from the nurse’s hand.
When she had finished, she handed the clipboard back to the nurse and the nurse snatched off a copy of the paperwork, and gave it to her. “Now,” the nurse said, “there’s the final matter of the bill.”
“The bill? My insurance company---”
“Will not pay it,” the nurse interrupted her.
Liz frowned. “Why not?”
“Because you were on foreign soil, you voluntarily placed yourself in a dangerous war zone, and you were under the care and control of the military at the time. They feel you or the government should foot the bill.”
“Why that’s utter nonsense!” Liz said.
“It’s not my area,” the nurse declared. “So don’t take it out on me. I was simply asked to inform you that, before you leave today, you will need to meet with the financial officer to arrange payment for this bill. If it wasn’t so big, I wouldn’t even mention it. But twenty-nine thousand, eight-hundred and fifty-five dollars is a lot of money, even to a hospital this size. Arrangements will need to be made today, and preferably a payment.”
It was so typical of the way her week had been going that Liz didn’t even bother to argue with the woman. She had a battle on her hands all right, but it was going to be with her insurance company, not this nurse.
“Do you have the bill with you?” Tommy asked the nurse.
“Yes, sir,” the nurse responded.
“May I see it?”
The nurse didn’t bother to ask Liz’s permission. “As her boss, I’m sure you can understand our position,” she said to Tommy as if she just knew he was Liz’s boss who paid the bulk of her health insurance premiums anyway. She therefore snatched a set of papers from the bottom of her clipboard, and freely handed them to him.
Tommy pulled out his reading glasses, put them on, and then studied the bill. Liz looked at the forward nurse. “Don’t you think you should have asked if I wanted him reviewing my personal papers?” she asked.
“Since he’s your boss,” the nurse said, “he has every right to know.”
Liz frowned. “My boss? Since when is he my boss?”
The nurse began to lose her coloring. “I just assumed---”
“Yes, I know what you assumed. You are mistaken.”
The nurse looked alarmed. “Oh, Miss Logan,” she suddenly said, “I do apologize, ma’am. I just assumed, I mean, I should not have assumed. He could be your husband for all I know.”
Now she was fishing, Liz decided. But she was going to end up with an empty rod if she thought she was going to get that kind of personal info from Liz. Especially when Liz looked over at Tommy and forgot all about that nurse’s indiscretion when she saw that he had pulled out his checkbook. Her already big eyes stretched larger. “What are you doing?” she asked him.
“I’m paying the bill,” Tommy said as he leaned over the tray table at the foot of the bed, and began writing a check.
“But stop,” Liz urged him. “You can’t just pay that bill. That’s almost thirty thousand dollars. I have every intention of disputing that bill!”
“You aren’t disputing the bill,” Tommy said as he wrote. Then he looked at her over his reading glasses to make sure she confirmed his statement.
“Not the bill, no,” Liz admitted, “but I’m going to dispute who should pay for the bill.”
Satisfied, Tommy continued to write.
“Why are you still writing? I’m going to dispute it, Tommy.”
“And while you’re disputing it,” Tommy responded as he carefully removed the check from his checkbook, and then handed it to the nurse
, “this hospital will have been paid. If you win your dispute, the insurance company will reimburse you, and then you’ll reimburse me. Everybody will be satisfied. Everybody will go home in a limousine.”
But the nurse wasn’t feeling Liz. That black woman had this great looking, obviously rich man willing to just whip out a check and pay her bill for her, and she was complaining? She should shut up and be grateful. She should count her lucky stars to have a man like that interested in her. He wasn’t her boss, but he was doing this for her? The nurse was floored. But happy too. The ladies in the Finance department, who often had a time collecting on debts, were going to love her. “Thank-you, sir,” she said, and clipped the check to her board. And then she said her farewells and got out of that room before the girl talked him out of it.
Liz looked at Tommy. Her look was a wary one. “I really do appreciate what you just did. But . . . I don’t have thirty thousand dollars laying around, Tommy, especially not this year when the magazine has had three consecutive months of lukewarm sells. If the insurance company continues to deny the claim, it could take me quite some time to pay all of that money back.”
Tommy considered her. “Did I ask you to pay it back, Liz?”
Liz frowned. “You don’t have to ask me! Nobody’s giving me thirty thousand dollars for the hell of it. And yes, by paying that bill I no longer owe this hospital, and I’m grateful for that. But I owe you now, and that may be worse. At least the hospital gave me something for their money. I haven’t given you a thing.”
Tommy continued to stare at her. “You think I want something from you?”
Liz stared at him. “That’s what worries me, yes.”
“Good,” Tommy said with a nod of his head. “I would have been very disappointed in you if you would have taken that much money and not be concerned. Now put on your shoes and let’s get out of here.”
Liz was puzzled. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say? If your insurance company refuses to pay, then that’s my loss, not yours.”
Tommy Gabrini 4: Dapper Tom Begin Again Page 10
