expression must have given my thoughts away, for she laughed. “Absurd, isn’t it? I’ve done it all my life, though. Not often, thank goodness, and no, it is not a symptom of some dreadful underlying health problem—though I did have some trouble persuading the E.R. doctor of that. You seem to be doing well.”
“Thanks to you. I, uh…that’s what I wanted. To thank you.”
She smiled that slow, sweet smile I remembered. “Daisy says everything happens for a reason, but I never thought I’d be grateful to Vic.”
“Vic?” I frowned. “You don’t mean Victor Sorenson.”
“Don’t I?” Her eyebrows went up in elaborate surprise. “I thought I did.” She ambled up to my bed, click-click-click.
I glanced down. She was wearing high heels. My own eyebrows went up. Got to respect the moxie of a tall woman who chooses to wear three-inch heels. “Sorenson’s a worm,” I mentioned, in case she hadn’t noticed.
“I’ll agree with you there.” She spoke the way she moved—slow and easy, as if she’d never hurried in her life and didn’t intend to start. “He fired me last night. That’s why I left the resort so late and ended up finding you. Which is a roundabout sort of gratitude, but there you go. Roundabout is probably the only kind of appreciation Vic’s likely to get.”
“I didn’t know Vic kept a paramedic on staff.”
“I was working as a waitress, not a paramedic.” Her voice didn’t change but her eyes did—as if she’d closed a door, gently but firmly, on that subject. “Vic and I disagreed about the fringe benefits of the job. He thought he was one of them. I didn’t.”
The thought of Vic putting his hands on this woman made me furious. “I’ll talk to him,” I promised grimly.
Duncan gave me a level look. “Don’t do anything I’d have to arrest you for.”
“You should consider filing suit against him,” Gwen said seriously. “Sexual harassment is wrong, and firing you for failing to agree to his demands—well, it sounds like you’d have a good case.”
“Oh, he didn’t fire me because I wouldn’t go to bed with him. I think it was the cannelloni,” Seely said thoughtfully. “It didn’t go with his suit. Or maybe it was the chicken-fried steak. There was all that cream gravy, you see. He was not happy about the gravy.”
A laugh took me by surprise. It hurt, so I stopped. “Dumped a tray on him, did you?”
Her mouth stayed solemn, but her eyes laughed along with me. Extraordinary eyes. Not the color—they were blue, pretty enough, but nothing unusual. Maybe it was their shape, sort of elongated, with a flirty tilt at the corners. Or the way they seemed to offer confidences, as if she and I were old friends who didn’t need to put everything into words.
“I found Miss Jones at the bus station,” Duncan said. “She was buying a ticket to Denver.”
A frown snapped down. “You’re leaving town?”
“Why not? I lost my job.”
“But you have a car. What were you doing at the bus station?”
She pulled a face. “The stupid thing decided to die on me. The mechanic says it’s either some gasket or the whole motor, and he can’t say which without taking everything apart, which will cost a fortune. You’d think he could tell the difference, wouldn’t you?”
“Head gasket, sounds like,” I said, my brain clicking away on an idea. “Or the heads themselves. You must have lost compression.”
“You do speak the lingo,” she said admiringly.
Duncan asked her who she’d taken the car to, then assured her that Ron was a good mechanic. Gwen was looking fidgety.
“But your things!” she burst out. “I can understand leaving your car if it wasn’t worth repairing, but surely you couldn’t take everything with you on the bus. Even if you didn’t have furniture, there’s clothes, dishes, bedding…oh.” An embarrassed flush sped over her cheeks. “It isn’t any of my business, is it?”
Seely turned that lazy smile Gwen’s way. “Probably not, but we can’t help being curious about people, can we? I don’t have much stuff, being more of a wanderer than a nester. No dishes or bedding. A few keepsakes and some clothes, yes, but not that many. Susan seemed happy to accept what I didn’t want to take with me.”
“Susan?” I said, only half my brain on what she was saying.
“Another waitress at the resort. I’d been rooming with her, but I don’t think she minded my sudden departure. She’s had her eye on Vic for a while. Well.” She shrugged, a graceful movement that did lovely things to her breasts. “No accounting for tastes, is there?”
Things were falling into place. “You decided to leave more or less on impulse, then?”
“I do a lot of things on impulse.”
“Then there’s nothing waiting for you in Denver? No reason you need to be there right away?”
She used her eyebrows to ask where I was going with all this.
“My brother and sister-in-law think I’m going to need some help after I leave the hospital tomorrow.”
Gwen interrupted. “Not tomorrow, Ben.”
“They can’t do anything more for me here. Besides, hospitals are unhealthy. People get staph infections in hospitals. Now, Gwen and Duncan might be right about me needing a little help—”
Duncan snorted.
“So I was thinking maybe you’d be interested. You need a job, right? And a place to stay while your car gets fixed.”
“I…” For the first time, her composure was shaken. “Weren’t you listening? I wasn’t planning to fix my car.”
I brushed that aside. “Look, if you’re worried about staying with a man you don’t know, I’m not in any shape to give you a hard time.” Gwen muttered something about my being able to give people a hard time on my deathbed. I ignored that. “Not that I would hassle you, anyway, but you couldn’t know that.”
She shook her head. “That’s not it.”
“What’s the problem, then?” I used my left elbow to prop myself up.
Everything went gray. The next thing I knew, Seely was depositing me efficiently back on my pillows. I’m not sure how she got there before Duncan, who isn’t exactly slow off the mark, but she did.
“There’s a line between stubborn and stupid,” she said, looking down at me. “Something tells me you cross it now and then.”
Duncan grinned. Gwen giggled. I scowled. “I moved too fast, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh,” Seely said. “I can see you’ll undo everyone’s work, given half a chance. All right. I’ll take the job.”
Hot damn.
