and ankle pounded in rhythm with Rufus’s hysteria. “No speak,” she whispered, giving the command they’d learned in obedience school.
Which, of course, Rufus had failed.
“Dammit, Rufe, you’re going to get us all in trouble.” Infuriated that she was actually intimidated by the thought, she raised her voice. “No speak!”
The pup kept right on barking.
Of course Mr. Hotshot Know It All Jones had made him shut up with a single word. “Zits!” she snapped furiously, then felt like an idiot. Yeah, like that’s gonna work for you, Jacobsen. It was probably the deep voice that made it work in the first place.
But to her amazement the barking stopped and Rufus raced over to stare up at her eagerly.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered, and a choked laugh escaped her. “Oh, my God! You respond to that, huh? I knew Jones spoke German! I mean, that’s gotta be German, right? He can’t have meant zits as in acne—that just wouldn’t make sense.” She gave her head an impatient shake. “Oh, who cares, who cares?” With her fingers splayed across Rags’s back to keep him from tumbling to the floor, she leaned forward and scrubbed her knuckles atop Rufus’s head. “Good dog! Good, good dog!”
Buster, whose chin had been bumped from her thigh, bumped Rufus in return and insinuated his head beneath her hand when the younger dog stumbled aside.
“Yes, you, too,” she agreed, amused at his way of getting his own despite Rufus’s more flamboyant attention-grabbing behavior. She scratched the older mutt between his ears. “All Carly’s chillen are good, good boys.”
She gently displaced the animals and struggled to her feet, feeling slightly rejuvenated. She could at least wipe up the piddle and pick up the worst of the pillow innards. She’d clean up the rest tomorrow.
Then a sudden thought struck her, and looking at her assemblage of pets, she laughed out loud. “Whataya know, kids? It looks like we have a breakthrough, and it’s all thanks to the bastard next door. Maybe the guy isn’t completely useless, after all.”
THE PHONE WAS RINGING as Wolf let himself into his apartment. Restless, he ignored it to pace from room to room, stripping off his clothing and discarding it with none of his usual care. He shed his jacket and dropped it over the back of one of the stools at the breakfast bar separating the kitchen from the living room. He wrestled down the knot on his tie before yanking the neckpiece off through his collar and lobbing it toward the nightstand in his bedroom. When it got hung up on the reading lamp, he disregarded the possible snags to its expensive silk and strode back into the living room, pawing open the buttons on his shirt as he went. Disgruntlement rode him like a bareback rider on a trick pony. Christ, what was his problem? He didn’t get it.
All right, that wasn’t true. He knew exactly what the problem was. Or more accurately, who.
Carly Jacobsen.
“Dammit!” Undecided whether his outburst was intended for the menace next door or the frigging phone, which continued to ring despite the lateness of the hour or the fact that six rings ought to indicate that he had no desire to answer it, he stalked over to the breakfast bar and snatched the receiver off the hook. “What?!”
“Wolfgang? Is that you?”
“Mom?” She was the last person he’d expected to hear at the other end of the line. His mother wasn’t a stay-up-past-midnight kind of woman—and it was even later in La Paz, Bolivia, where she and the old man were currently stationed.
The wireless receiver tucked into his shoulder, he only listened with half an ear as his mother launched into the courteous preamble with which she began all telephone conversations. Pulling his shirttails from his waistband, he shrugged out of the garment and tossed it toward the leather couch. It fluttered to the hardwood floor before it even got halfway there, but he ignored the slowly settling billow of dark cotton to scowl at the wall that connected his condo to his neighbor’s.
God, she irritated him. With her complete lack of organizational skills and her promptly stated opinions, her sloppiness and long legs and that can’t-be-bothered irresponsibility. He hadn’t seen much of her place, but what he had glimpsed was a mess. And not one damn thing even matched. It was a profusion of colors and patterns, with debris all over the place and all those motley cats and dogs.
And red nail polish on her toes.
He snorted and went to pour himself a scant two fingers of Scotch. He tossed the drink back in one neat swallow, and umm-hmmed to his mother as he used the edge of his thumb to rub away an errant drop he felt trickling down his bottom lip. All right, he’d admit that perhaps that last thing was a little picky. Lots of women wore red nail polish. Not the woman he was eventually going to settle down with, though. He was close to achieving part one of the Plan—his dream of being the Security and Surveillance honcho who sent others to take care of problems rather than being the man who was constantly sent. And when he accomplished that, it would be in a real town, not fantasyland Las Vegas. Once he kicked the dust of this place from his heels he’d hit the road to his future without a backward glance.
When the career aspect was settled, he’d start to work on fulfilling part two of his agenda, finding the right woman with whom to share his success. Maybe a nice kindergarten teacher or something. You could bet the bank that a woman like that—stable, reliable, refined—would wear pale pink polish on her toes.
Then something his mother said jerked him back to the conversation. “What? Dad’s retiring again?”
“For heaven’s sake, Wolfgang,” his mother said with brisk gruffness. “Haven’t you listened to a thing I’ve said?” Sweetheart that she was, however, she spared him from having to admit he had not. “We’ll be moving to Rothenburg, Germany, in a month’s time—perhaps two—if the offer we made on a lovely little biergarten is accepted.”
When she put his father on to enthusiastically impart the details of the establishment they expected to buy in the quaint medieval walled town, Wolf’s attention drifted again. Dammit, Carly Jacobsen was breaking the covenant rules with her apartment full of pets, and he’d be well within his rights to turn her in.
It was a shame that, for all the healthy respect he had for the rules, he’d never been and didn’t intend to turn into a whistle-blower. He’d simply have to do his best to stay out of her orbit and hope that one of these days she’d actually bestir herself to give her out-of-control dog some proper training.
So it was settled. He’d made a decision and was prepared to implement it. That should take care of this unusual restlessness.
It pissed him off when it didn’t.
Who needed this irritation? Wasn’t it enough that he dealt with problems every single moment he was at the Avventurato? He shouldn’t have to cope with this shit when he came home, as well. He had decided his course of action; it was therefore time to move on.
His father put his mother back on, and with a start he suddenly realized they were calling from his sister’s place in Indiana. Instead of demanding to know if Katarina was once again unloading responsibility for her son, Niklaus, onto his mother, however, he envisioned the showgirl next door. With her you-can-just-kiss-my-ass blue-eyed glare and that fuck-me body.
Then he snapped upright. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said, finally giving the telephone conversation his full attention. “You want me to do what?”
When
