He stared as she jumped up and ran to the studio door, then disappeared through it. She reappeared a moment later, holding both hands behind her back.
“What are you doing?” he asked, feeling strangely anxious.
“I’ve got a surprise for you. Two surprises.”
He sat up on the couch. “What? I don’t need anything.”
She laughed and moved closer. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She brought her right hand from behind her back. In it was a plate of chocolate chip cookies. His mouth watered at the scent of them—until Alex Morse’s warnings sounded in his head. Before he had to make a choice about eating the cookies, Thora held out a cardboard tube like the ones she used to carry blueprints for the new house. Chris forced a smile, but the prospect of discussing the Avalon house did not please him in the least.
“I see that frown,” Thora said, setting the cookies beside him, then perching her perfect derriere on his knees. “You just wait and see.”
She removed a sheet of paper from the tube, unrolled it, and spread it across her nude thighs. Chris saw what appeared to be plans for a new building behind the seven-thousand-square-foot house that was now nearing completion. A rather large building.
“What’s that?” he asked, groaning internally. “A private gym?”
Thora laughed. “No. That’s your new studio.”
His face flushed. “What?”
She smiled and kissed his cheek. “That’s my housewarming present to you. I had our architect consult with an expert in New York. You’re looking at a state-of-the-art video production studio. All you have to do is select your equipment.”
“Thora … you can’t be serious.”
Her smile broadened. “Oh, I’m serious. They’ve already poured the foundation and run the high-tech cabling. Very expensive.”
This was almost too much to absorb after what Chris had endured today. He wanted to get up and pace the room, but Thora had him pinned to the couch. Suddenly, she tossed the plans and the tube onto the couch and hugged him tight.
“I’m not letting you slip back here every time you want to edit your videos. You’re stuck with me, understand?”
He didn’t. He felt as though he had swallowed some sort of hallucinogen. But then, if Alex Morse had not visited his office this morning, none of this would seem anything but a wonderful surprise.
“I finally surprised you,” Thora said in an awestruck voice. “I did, didn’t I?”
He nodded in a daze.
She took a cookie from the plate and held it to his lips. “Here. You need your strength.”
“No, thanks.”
Her disappointment was plain. “I actually made these from scratch.”
“I’m sorry. I’m really not hungry. I’ll eat some later.”
She shrugged, then popped the cookie into her mouth. “Your loss,” she said, her eyes twinkling as she chewed. “Mmm … almost better than sex.”
Chris smelled the melting chocolate in her mouth, watched her swallow with exaggerated pleasure. Alex Morse is batshit, he told himself.
Thora looked into his eyes, then took his hand and cupped her breast with it. “You up for a second round? We can raise the odds by two hundred million or so.”
He felt like an astronaut cut loose from his spacecraft, drifting steadily away from everything familiar. Who could live like this? he wondered. Second-guessing every move in my own house?
He closed his eyes and kissed Thora with desperate fervor.
Alex’s heart leaped when she saw the little red icon turn green, indicating that Jamie had logged on to MSN. She’d been checking for the past three hours, playing Spider Solitaire and waiting for Jamie’s icon to light up.
A new screen like a small TV appeared within her main screen, but the TV was blank. Then an image of Jamie sitting at his desk in his room at Bill Fennell’s house flashed up. The immediacy of the webcam was overwhelming at first. It truly was like being in the same room with the person you were talking to. You could see every emotion in their eyes, every movement of their face. Tonight Jamie was wearing an Atlanta Braves T-shirt and the yellow baseball cap of his Dixie Youth team. His eyes weren’t looking at her, but at his monitor, so that he could watch her image projected from his screen. She knew that she looked the same to him, since she was staring at his image and not the camera mounted atop her screen.
“Hey, Aunt Alex,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”
She smiled genuinely for the first time all day. “It’s okay. You know I’ll be here whenever you log on. What you been doing, bub?”
Jamie smiled. “I had a baseball game.”
“How did it go?”
“They killed us.”
“I’m sorry. How did you do?”
“I got a double.”
Alex yelped and applauded. “That’s great!”
Jamie’s smile vanished. “But I struck out twice.”
“That’s okay. Even the pros strike out.”
“Twice in one game?”
“Sure they do. I once saw Hank Aaron strike out three times in one game.” This was a lie, but a harmless one. Hank Aaron was about the only player whose name she knew, and him only because of her father.
“Who’s Hank Aaron?” Jamie asked.
“He hit more home runs than Babe Ruth.”
“Oh. I thought that was Barry Bonds.”
Alex shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. You got a double, that’s what matters. What else has been going on?”
Jamie sighed like a fifty-year-old man. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Come on.”
“I think she’s over here right now.”
“Missy?” Missy Hammond was Bill’s mistress.
Jamie nodded.
Anger flooded through Alex; she tasted copper in her mouth. “Why do you think that? Did you see her?”
“No.”
