Janet Evanovich - Naughty Neighbor

It wasn’t working fine, she wanted to scream. They might as well be at opposite ends of the earth. The only things they really agreed on were sex positions. And to top it all off, there was Kurt.

Kurt was a strange person, living in a disgusting apartment. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was doing illegal things. He answered his door with a gun in his hand. And he was Pete’s friend! How could she reconcile this? Kurt was a slimeball.

She tapped in her security code and inserted her door key. Maybe Pete was a slimeball, too, she thought. Maybe he just hid it better because he had more money.

The following morning Louisa swung through the doors of the Hart Building, wondering what had gone wrong. She’d intended to be firm about not making love. She’d slept in her own bed, alone. She’d gone through all her familiar rituals alone…making her coffee, reading the paper. Then when it had come time for Pete to wire her for sound, she’d lost all resolve. He’d popped the top button on her blouse, and she’d gone into sexual hyperdrive.

She made a small disgusted sound and slid a glance in his direction. She suspected he’d seduced her as much out of sport as need. He was half a step behind her, with the receiver in his hand and his headset slung around his neck. He winked and smiled, and she felt like strangling him. He stopped to read a plaque on the wall when she turned into Maislin’s office.

She’d called ahead to make an appointment, and Stu Maislin was waiting for her. He was a large man with a face like a bulldog and a personality to match. He wore a nine-hundred-dollar suit and a seventy-dollar silk tie with a gravy stain two inches below the knot. He didn’t look friendly. He motioned her into his inner office and closed the door behind them.

“So,” Maislin said. “Let’s talk business.”

Louisa unbuttoned her coat and resisted the urge to feel for the transmitter. “I need a job.”

“Maybe I don’t have any job openings right now.”

“Maybe I should look for a job in the Attorney General’s office.”

“You trying to blackmail me?”

“I’m trying to persuade you that I can be a team player.”

He considered her answer and nodded. “You might fit into my office with an attitude like that. I could put you on as an aide.”

“An aide would be fine. I can start tomorrow morning.”

He gave her a long look. “Real go-getter, aren’t you?”

“My rent is due.”

“Just don’t get too ambitious, you know what I mean?”

The threat inspired a rush of anger. She took a beat to calm herself and gave him a cool smile as silent acknowledgment that she understood his message.

Pete was waiting for her in the hall. He caught the murderous look in her eyes and gave her wide berth. He didn’t attempt conversation until they were in the car. “That seemed to go well,” he said.

“He’s an arrogant bully. He abuses his staff, throws his weight around in Congress like a Mafia don, and has no scruples.”

“Anything else?”

“He had a gravy stain on his tie.”

“That clinches it,” Pete said. “I’m not voting for him.”

“You can’t vote for him, anyway. You don’t live in his state anymore.”

“I could move back.”

It was a flip answer, but it stirred questions in Louisa’s mind. “Would you ever do that? Go back?”

He didn’t need time to think about it. He shook his head. “No. Not to live. I can barely survive a four-hour visit.”

Nothing had changed, he thought. There was the same feeling of fatalistic impotency, and he hated it with a passion. His father and brothers were old beyond their years. They complained, but saw no reason for change, no opportunity for improvement. His successes were suspect. What had been good enough for his father and grandfather, brothers, cousins, classmates, hadn’t been good enough for him. It generated confusion among his friends and relatives. Pete would have preferred resentment. At least resentment was an aggressive emotion.

“Four hours isn’t very long.”

“Ahhh,” he said, sighing, “it’s a lifetime.”

Louisa thought the statement held finality and enormous sadness. “Is it that bad?”

“I used to be afraid to take a vacation. I was afraid that if I stopped writing, even for a few days, I’d never get started again. It was much easier to believe in the power of inertia than in my own talent, my own ambition. For a long time, I was afraid to go home, because I was afraid I might stay. Now I simply find going home to be…tedious. No one is comfortable with me.”

Louisa winced. “I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean to inspire pity. A lot of the discomfort is my own doing. I could refrain from trying to ram my ideas down the throats of others. It’d go a long way to make me more popular.”

“Not your style,” Louisa said. “You’re a crusader.”

He’d never thought about it exactly in those terms, but he supposed she was right. He wasn’t sure it was flattering. “Are crusaders annoying?”

“Yes. That’s part of their charm.”

He parked the car and they got out.

“Do you think I’m different today?” Louisa asked him.

He trailed after her, assessing the hint of her backside under the black wool coat. He looked at her hair, her shoes, her purse. She seemed the same. “Is this a trick question?”

“I feel different,” she said.

He curled his fingers into her lapels and pulled her very close. “I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t felt you yet.”

Her jaw went slack. The man had a one-track mind. She gave him a look normally reserved for the perverts who hung out on Fourteenth Street. “Not that kind of feel.”

He unlocked his door and ushered her into his lobby. “I know what you mean. You’re referring to the fact that you’re taking charge of your life. You’re being a little rebellious and very brave.”

“Yes!”

“It isn’t so much that you’re different. You’re still the same person. It’s just that you’re more of some things and less of others. You’re making choices about your personality.”

He turned her in the direction of his stairs and gave her a little push.

“When I was a kid I let my emotions rule me. Whatever I felt was out there for all to see-anger, frustration, childish exuberance. I was self-indulgent, did everything to excess, and was intolerant of anyone who did less. I stole more cars, went out with more girls, drank myself into oblivion at every opportunity, and was the worst student, worst soldier, worst reporter ever. I was also the best student, best soldier, and best damn reporter ever. I was fearless from bloated ego and lack of caring.

“It took a bullet in the leg and the death of a good friend to slow me down. I made some decisions while I was lying in the hospital. I decided there was some value to restraint, self-discipline, moral responsibility. It seems to me you’re coming at it from the other end. Basically we’re people with passionate personalities, but you were taught control as a child. You got lots of strokes for playing by the rules, so you rolled along as the good girl, always eager to please your parents, your teachers, your bosses.”

She stopped at the top of the stairs. “Are you trying to tell me I’m not a good girl?”

He eased her coat off her shoulders and hung it on the coatrack. “Like Mae West once said, ‘when you’re good, you’re very good, but when you’re bad, you’re better.’”

“I think Mae West was referring to her sexual talents.”

Pete grinned, moving in on her like a jungle cat going after something unsuspecting and tasty. “That too.”

She took a step backward, but his hands had already freed her blouse from her skirt. “Hey!”

“We don’t need you to be wired anymore. No sense wasting the battery.”

He’d worn his share of listening devices and knew the best way to remove them was in one fell swope. He grabbed an end of the surgical tape and yanked.

“Yeow!”

“Sorry about that.” His fingers skimmed over the stinging flesh, soothing and arousing. “Feel better?”

She could only blink at him.

He unhooked her bra and caught the transmitter as it fell out. With his other hand he cupped a breast, thinking clandestine operations were a lot more fun with Louisa as a partner.

She was paralyzed. A wild animal caught in the beam of a searchlight, held captive by his fingers.

Louisa could barely breathe for the sensations pulsing through her body. He knew all her secret pleasures. He knew how and where to touch and kiss. And he knew the words she liked to hear…words of endearment, words of passion.

He rummaged through the freezer and pulled out a bag of homemade raviolis he’d gotten from the Italian deli on Connecticut. He set a pot of water to boil and scrounged a box of crushed, sun-dried tomatoes from the over-the-counter cupboard.

“You’re really very domestic,” Louisa said. She was at the table, wearing his big terry robe, feeling very lazy. She was resigned to the fact that she had no willpower when it came to the sexual attraction between them and had reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t hurt to enjoy it.

He looked around the apartment and laughed out loud. She was right. He’d become domestic. If someone had said that to him ten years earlier, he’d have broken his nose.

“I used to live like Kurt.”

“What happened?”

“You know how some people find religion late in life? I found middle class.” He threw a frozen ravioli in Spike’s direction, and the cat attacked it.

Louisa didn’t want to burst his bubble, but he wasn’t exactly middle-class. She was on intimate terms with middle-class and knew for a fact that owning a luxury sports car and a three-thousand-dollar tux was not typical middle-class.

She supposed he meant he’d found middle-class values, but she wasn’t so sure of that, either. The men in her parents’ neighborhood didn’t feed their cat stick for dinner, and didn’t hang out with wiretappers. She amended that last part to illegal wiretappers. After all, it was Washington.

He dropped a handful of ice cubes into a goblet, poured cola over it, and gave the drink to Louisa. He was still feeling the aftershocks of their lovemaking-violent ripples of affection that grabbed him in the gut and sent panicky messages of love and commitment to his brain. He wasn’t ready to deal with messages of commitment, so he got himself a cold beer and took a long pull on the bottle.

“Tell me more about being different.”

She tried for casual reserve but had no luck. The excitement bubbled out at the first opportunity to discuss her new plans. “I want to return to school. I want to be a lawyer.”

It caught him by surprise. He hadn’t expected a career change, but now that he thought about it, it made sense. He’d gone through a similar metamorphosis. He ran it through his mind one more time and nodded. “You’d make a terrific lawyer.”

“You really think so?”

“Yup. I think you should go for it.”

She’d badly wanted someone to say it, to encourage her. She flashed him a brilliant smile and felt her eyes mist over for a split second. She lowered her lashes and sipped her drink, embarrassed that she’d almost burst into tears at the thought of becoming a lawyer. It was amazing how such a powerful dream could be buried so deep that it had been all but forgotten.

He saw the joy and the emotion and had a hard time not crying along with her. He gave himself a fast lecture on macho behavior, took a hard breath, and steadied his voice.

“Okay, so it’s settled,” he said. “You’re going to be a lawyer. What else is different?”

“I’m more assertive.” She shook her finger at him. “Don’t try to push me around. I won’t stand for it.”

He pretended to be offended.

Louisa ignored him. “I want to be treated like an equal in this pig project.”

“You want to be an equal to Kurt? Honey, even I don’t want to be an equal to Kurt.”

“You know what I mean.”

He knew exactly what she meant. She didn’t want him being overprotective of her. It was an unreasonable demand. He could more easily stop breathing than stop wanting to keep her safe.

“I understand your point of view,” he said. “From now on you’re one of the boys.” It was an outright lie, and he didn’t feel the least bit guilty about making it. There was more to love than truth, he told himself. There was survival.

Louisa didn’t like working for Stu Maislin. The atmosphere in his suite of offices was oppressive, his administrative assistant looked like a bookie, and she suspected her phone was bugged by both Kurt and Maislin. It was like living in a goldfish bowl filled with piranha.

She was on her third day on the job, and she was still wearing a wire at Pete’s insistence. He was outside, somewhere, listening to her every word. To say she had no secrets was an understatement.