The Derby Girl

by Tamara Morgan

  * * *

  “Every time you check your watch, I’m docking you five points.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jared fought the urge to check his watch. It was like when someone told you not to pay attention to your breathing. For the five minutes that followed, every movement of the lungs was carefully cataloged.

  “And any references to my wrinkles will be ten points off.”

  As if her wrinkles mattered. Gretchen could have been swimming in a rhino’s skin right now and still looked like hot sex walking. It was more than the clothes or the shoes, even more than the tattoos—although the ones he couldn’t see were driving him crazy. The snake rose from a shiny gold shoe that lifted her muscular calf before disappearing into the mysterious reaches of her skirt. Her arms were bare, the cream of her high-necked blouse setting off the vibrant patterns that packed her life story.

  And once again, even though the vine poked out the top of her neckline, he couldn’t catch a glimpse of where it led. It seemed a living, breathing thing—taking on meaning beyond the skin.

  He felt comparatively underdressed in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt, but he’d just about given up on suits. He’d squeeze into one for fundraising events, but give him a pair of hiking boots and a sweat-wicking long-sleeved tee any day. He was like Crocodile Dundee in the big city—minus the cool accent and with a scalpel instead of a knife.

  “How many points do I have right now?” he asked, playing along as they paused in the theater lobby, a dating and aged tribute to the silver screen of decades past in red velvet and chipping gold leaf. Seeing as how she’d bought their movie tickets—it had been her idea, so she’d insisted—and refused to let him even buy the popcorn, he had to be rapidly approaching zero.

  “You started off with a hundred. And don’t look so arrogant—everyone starts off with that many.”

  “That wasn’t arrogance. That’s just how my face looks.”

  She handed him the giant bucket of popcorn. Ripping the top off a box of Milk Duds, she emptied the entire contents and nudged him until he gave it a hefty shake.

  This time he did make a face—one of mild disgust. “Is this really something you eat on purpose? Let me guess, you’re one of those people who thinks pudding is a food group, aren’t you?”

  “I happen to be a great cook. In fact, I have official culinary training. And you just lost five points for mocking pudding. That brings you down to forty.”

  “Forty?” He had to hurry to follow Gretchen down the hallway to the theater. Her speed was good for a woman in high heels and a tight skirt, the view even better. It wasn’t until she stopped next to a poster of a sixties-era woman fleeing from a shadow, her mouth twisted in terror, that he realized she was in costume.

  She wasn’t the only one who’d gone all out for the movie marathon, but damn, she outshone everyone else without batting a single heavily made-up eyelash. So far, he could make out one sea creature and two very eerie men in ponchos—men he hoped were in costume and not sending out a silent plea for help. He moved closer to Gretchen just in case, staking his claim with a fierce scowl and first-date-inappropriate proximity. “I thought you said I had a hundred points.”

  “I said you started with a hundred,” she said. “You’ve already lost a substantial amount. You haven’t exactly been a paragon of good behavior since we met.”

  “I did give you free medical advice.”

  “Send me a bill.”

  “You have pretty hair?”

  Her laugh was a promise, infectious and warm. “Forty-five. But you only get to use the hair compliment once.”

  She led them to seats right smack dab in the middle of the theater. It wasn’t where he’d have chosen—he was more of a skulking in dark corners sort of a guy—but they had a good view of the screen and the dozen or so other people who were at liberty to spend six hours of their weekend watching movies about slime creatures and axe murderers.

  If anyone had told him last week that this was how he’d be spending his day off, he’d have laughed in their face. Jared didn’t really do movies or television or computers—most of the pop culture references from the past two decades were beyond him, and he felt awkward being the only person in a room who didn’t understand what a Honey Boo Boo was. Not to mention how much he hated the oppressiveness of the dark without the expansive outdoor sky to accompany it. Or the idea of sharing his date—in full sex-screen goddess costume, he might add—with a room full of strange men and one little old lady who kept telling them to shush.

  But as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, he felt the lightest brush of Gretchen’s leg against his own and found himself timing his hand movements so that their fingers met over the globby, sticky, surprisingly tasty popcorn mess. How long had it been since he’d experienced something like this? The tiny moments of anticipation. Jokes shared in whisper. The heady rush of being near someone without feeling pressured to be anything but himself.

  It was so simple, this points system she’d devised. Assign a numerical value to his sins. Devise a penance. Absolve. Repeat. That was something he could do, something he could master.

  “By the way,” he whispered, eager to show his approval of her plan. “You never mentioned what the points are for. What happens if I run out?”

  Gretchen passed over a small bottle, which, even in the dim light of the black-and-white movie credits, he could see bore the signs of the cheapest merlot you could buy at the mini-mart. He cracked the seal with a grin. It had been, what, fifteen years since he’d swilled this vile stuff?

  “Don’t worry, Doc. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  “Is that my punishment?” he asked. “If I run out of points, I have to buy my own two-dollar wine?”

  “No.” She leaned in so close her breath was hot on his ear. “If you run out of points, I won’t show you my tattoo later.”

  His body rooted to the spot. “Which tattoo?”

  She blew softly, the air rushing over his skin and sending shivers through his body that strung his every nerve. “Well, that depends, Dr. Fine. Which one do you want?”

  Chapter Six

  Despite ample handfuls of the popcorn-candy mixture to act as an absorbing agent, the wine hit Gretchen’s system much harder than she expected. It might have been because she’d skipped lunch, but she suspected it had more to do with the fact that Jared kept stealing sidelong glances at her when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  She was getting drunk on male attention. Giddy, even. One more cliché in front of a movie screen full of them. She was the cheerleader running into the dark forest alone, the babysitter who forgot to lock the back door.

  In other words, she was in trouble.

  And the worst part was, she didn’t even care. Let the bad guy come. This time, her purse was equipped with food and drink and a handful of condoms. A different kind of weapon, and one she knew how to wield to maximum advantage.

  “You’re not paying attention to the movie,” she hissed, elbowing Jared generously in the ribs after he spent yet another five minutes staring, enraptured, at her neck. The skin there tingled, pricking to life under his gaze. It was becoming very difficult to concentrate on the movie—all she wanted to do was arch and crane and lean until her neck was firmly planted under his mouth.

  “I can already guess the ending,” he hissed back, his voice overloud. A man in an outfit that was either supposed to be some kind of undersea monster or an eerily accurate tribute to tentacle porn turned to glare at them. Quieter this time, Jared said, “The blonde woman is going to die.”

  “How do you know?” The blonde woman did, indeed, die a gruesome death dosed liberally with Hershey’s chocolate syrup, but that was supposed to be a surprise ending.

  “Because the brunette one is too smart to get trapped. I kind of have a thing fo
r smart brunettes, in case you didn’t know.”

  “My hair is black.” Midnight Ink, thank you very much, touched up every two weeks like clockwork.

  “I know.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s a shame, really.”

  She elbowed him again, but the damage had already been done. Neither one of them was the least bit interested in the movie anymore. They were too busy passing the last bottle of wine—the end of a six pack—and falling into a fit of giggles when the blonde woman met her untimely end at the prongs of a rusty pitchfork.

  “One down, two to go,” Jared said amiably as the credits rolled. He stretched one of his arms—which were quite long, given his height—over the back of her chair and allowed his knuckles to graze against the back of her neck. Smooth and calculated, she knew, but still capable of sending a shiver directly down her spine.

  “Do we really have to stay for all three?” Gretchen complained. Never in her life had she been looking less forward to creatures from lagoons and the bikini-clad women they devoured. Right now, all she could think about was being the bikini-clad woman—and getting devoured by a different kind of creature altogether.

  “Absolutely we do. Don’t think I’m not on to you.”

  “On to me? And what, exactly, am I doing?”

  He waggled one of his fingers. “You’re trying to trick me into leaving early so you can dock points. I had an attending in medical school who was notorious for that. She’d dangle six different ways to skip rounds in front of your face, but woe to the unfortunate soul who took her up on it.”

  Gretchen laughed. “What did she do to you?”

  “Oh, I never skipped.” He looked over, a smug grin on his face. “I’ve always been an overachiever. That’s why I’m determined not to lose any more points. A forty-five isn’t even a passing score, and this is one test I intend to ace.”

  “Fifty,” she offered. “Fifty-five if you’ll sneak out to the roof with me to eat dinner.”

  “Make it sixty and we have a deal.”

  They shook on it as they got to their feet and headed back to the theater lobby.

  Jared still had a decidedly doctorlike handshake, cool and brief, the grip of a man who knew he could put his hands to much better use. The question was—what kind of better use? The whole world already knew they were dexterous at repairing the damages wrought by nature and time, but of more immediate importance was how they’d feel on her body. He was so brusque when he moved and talked, always looking for ways to minimize his use of energy, it almost seemed like he’d be a clinical lover. Push button A, wind knob B, tap tap and done.

  Gretchen was a big fan of knob B. She liked it when a man took a little time to give it a proper whirl.

  “I haven’t snuck to the roof in this theater since I was a teenager—a real one.” She peeked over her shoulder to make sure the barb stuck. From the way a scowl spread across his face, it had. “You have to create a distraction so I can disable the alarm on the door.”

  “Um, I’m more of an ask permission sort of guy. If it’s all the same to you.”

  “Don’t be a killjoy. Half the fun is sneaking up there.”

  He looked down on her with an authoritarian glare. “Trust me. They’ll let us up if I do the asking. Some people find me irresistible.”

  Of course they did. He was irresistible. She was pretty sure she’d let him stick needles in her face, Hellraiser style, if he talked to her in that low, rumbling voice while he did it.

  “Nope.” She shook her head resolutely. “My date. My way. We aren’t getting upstairs unless we break a few laws to do it.”

  A flash in his eyes signaled his appreciation, warming Gretchen from the inside out. He liked the dark side. He just didn’t like admitting it.

  “You drive a hard bargain, woman.”

  “I drive lots of things hard,” she replied, giving herself a mental high five. That was a good one—Freddy would be proud. “Just go put on your haughty doctor face and complain about the temperature or something. Maybe you could captivate them with a story about the jungles of Laos.”

  “I’ve never been to Laos. I did do a year in Cambodia, though.”

  “Well I can’t find either of those on a map—and I promise you that every sullen teenager in this place can’t either. Make it up.” She pushed him in the direction of the ticket counter, doing her best not to show her sudden frustration.

  Frustration was the least of it, if she was being honest.

  The thing was, she had no problems holding her own with this man as long as he needed an ego check. When his reality extended no further than Pleasant Park, where he wooed women with promises of perfect breasts and swaggered around in his tight little pants like he owned the place, she knew exactly what needed to be said and done. He was like stubborn putty in her hands—the warmer he got, the more he yielded.

  It was the rest of his accomplishments that unseated her. She really didn’t know where Laos was. She’d never been on an airplane. Owned no passport. Her education—silly classes, all vocational, none of them particularly impressive—had never led any further than part-time work in the same town she’d grown up in.

  She’d never gotten further than dreaming. Never pushed past hope.

  Ugh. Feeling inadequate was something she got enough from her family. She didn’t need it from her dates too.

  As her only alternative was to say goodbye to Jared altogether, to let those tight little pants go walking away before she got a good look inside them, she needed to suck it up and keep her head high. The rooftop breaking-and-entering stint, at least, was something she could do. Ignore the rules, have a good time, pretend she wasn’t a grown-up.

  She was excellent at those things.

  She lingered near the emergency exit door, pretending to read a poster showcasing evacuation results in the event of a fire, one eye on Jared. With his hands shoved deep in his pockets, he looked more uncomfortable than the man in the tentacle suit as he approached the concession counter.

  Still, he was able to engage the young woman in conversation easily enough, what with his disarming grin and all. When the usher’s attention wandered over to where the pair of them chatted, Gretchen pulled the wire connecting the door’s push handle to the bright red alarm system that flashed overhead.

  When no sound pierced the air, Gretchen let out the breath she’d been holding. It was a piece of luck that they hadn’t updated their alarm system in the decade or so since she’d tried this last. Sometimes she forgot that just because she didn’t make any advancements in her own life, the rest of the world hadn’t stopped bustling forward at an alarming pace.

  “What’d you tell them?” she asked when Jared returned to her side. In another fortunate stroke of luck, both workers headed into the theater, giant yellow flashlights in tow.

  “That there was a couple in the middle row who snuck bottles of wine in, and that I was pretty sure they were breaking at least two Pennsylvania state liquor laws.”

  A burst of laughter escaped her. “The truth, huh? I never would have thought of that.”

  “It’s a little something I’m working on.”

  She pushed open the door and ushered Jared through. A shock of warm air hit her, the balmy summer afternoon a far cry from the hyper-air-conditioned interior of the theater, and she wished she’d thought to bring a blanket. Rooftop picnics required blankets to sit on—especially when the roof in question was as old as this one, with gelatinous tar clinging to her shoes.

  “Not lying?” Gretchen asked. “I wasn’t aware that was something requiring a concentrated effort.” She gestured for him to take the ladder to the roof ahead of her. She wasn’t falling for that trap again.

  But the playfulness of climbing ladders and pressing one’s face into a near-stranger’s ass was nowhere to be found. Jared frowned and looked up at the
sky. “I don’t lie. I just haven’t always been great at telling the truth.”

  Since he seemed preoccupied, she started climbing. “How are those different?”

  He shook himself and followed up. “They’re not. You sure you want to be alone with me on this roof?”

  “Any homicidal tendencies?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Secret plans to lock me up here and make me your sex slave?”

  “Come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea...”

  “Pedophilia urges?”

  “Very funny.”

  She made a quick survey and decided their best bet was to sit on a cement ledge between the big tar patches. Trying not to imagine the damages being wrought on the bottom of her favorite heels, she made her way over and patted the seat next to her. “Just don’t lie to me, Jared, and we’ll do fine.”

  The command seemed to set him at ease. Relief took the place of anxiety in the lines of his face, and just like that, he was in command again. “Consider it done.”

  “Here.” Gretchen reached into her purse, an enormous satchel the size of a small suitcase, and handed him a plastic-wrapped sandwich. He looked at it curiously before taking it. “Dinner and a movie. Do I know how to take a guy out or what?”

  “This is more fun than I’ve had in a long time.”

  She bumped him with her hip. “I thought you weren’t going to lie.”

  “I’m not.” And he wasn’t. In his lifetime, Jared had never been one to put fun first. Sure, he’d had one or two wild adventures back in college—primarily at the hands of Whitney and Kendra and John and stories preceded by a dare of some sort—but no one had ever accused Dr. Fine of shirking life’s responsibilities in pursuit of pleasure. It was his license-to-be-an-arrogant-bastard-free card. All work and no play gave him the opportunity to do whatever the hell he wanted to other people. And they could never call him on it, because he was out there every day, saving lives. Sainthood had a way of concealing sins.

  Gretchen seemed content to chew in silence—yet another reason to be grateful for this resilient, carefree woman. She had no questions about her place in this world. She just filled it, having fun when the mood struck, breaking laws and making sandwiches that tasted like—