Nick

8

“What was she like?” I asked.

“Fine,” Jackson answered. He lumbered into the room, catching sight of his reflection in the far windowpane and pausing to flex, just the pecs. I rolled my eyes. Jackson could never pass a reflective surface without checking out some part of his muscled physique.

The evening was on the cold side, and I had the fireplace turned on. He sprawled onto the couch beside me and picked up his controller. The large flat-screen TV fired to life as our video game came out of sleep mode.

We were playing a team game, real macho nonsense but stupid fun. We’d been dropped into the jungle and were seeking ancient treasure while fighting off other adventurers, giant spiders, wildfires, and a wraith who wanted us dead. We’d taken a break just before entering a sacred tomb so that he could deliver my note to my tenant.

Unsurprisingly, given how much rent-free space she was taking up in my head, I couldn’t let it be and had to ask him about her.

“ ‘Fine’ as in the slang way of saying she’s really hot, or ‘fine’ meaning she said she was fine, which is girl code for ‘I refuse to talk about this because it’s not fine but I haven’t figured out how I am going to make you pay for it yet’?” I asked.

“My, dude.” Jackson shook his head. “What sort of women have you been dating?”

“Recently? None,” I said. “Before that? Expensive ones.”

Jackson’s mouth curved up on one side. He had very reluctantly been drafted to be my messenger boy. The only reason I even managed to get him to go was by threatening not to finish our quest.

“On your six!” he yelled.

I whipped my character around and took out an enormous arachnid with three blasts from my laser. Zap! I got it right in one of its big red eyeballs. It rolled over with its legs in the air and then turned to dust and blew away.

I glanced at Jackson. “So?”

“You really want to do this now?” he asked. “We’re almost at the entrance.”

I thought about playing it cool and pretending I didn’t care what Annabelle Martin seemed like up close and personal. Yeah, no. Sometimes you just have to be at one with your curiosity, like a cat. Cats were curious and they were still considered cool. Right?

I assumed an indifferent pose and said, “I just want to know if she looks to be the type to have human sacrifices in my guest house living room or not?”

Jackson had started to take a sip of beer and sputtered, inhaling some beverage into his lungs. I paused the game while he coughed. When he could speak, he pointed at me with his beer bottle and said, “You have a dark soul.”

“Don’t I know it,” I muttered.

“No, she’s not having human sacrifices or anything else in her living room,” Jackson said. “She seems . . . nice.”

“Nice?” I asked him. I stared at him like he’d recently whacked his head and was now speaking in tongues. “I saw her. In the hot tub. In her bathing suit. She is not nice.”

He rolled his eyes. “A woman can be attractive and still be nice.”

“No,” I said. “It’s been my experience that those are mutually exclusive traits.”

“Well, your experience is for shit,” he said. He turned his attention back to the game. He was in the lead and I had his back as we navigated the jungle. “You need to raise your standards.”

“My standards are fine. I just like my women to have a certain aesthetic,” I said.

Jackson slowly swiveled to face me. He had one eyebrow raised higher than the other. “Like what? A big ass or something?”

“Not specifically, but I do like them to be supermodel worthy,” I said. I glanced at the screen of our game, trying to maintain a straight face. Why did I enjoy tormenting Jackson with my feigned misogyny so much? It was bad of me, I knew that. He was just such a Boy Scout about these things that I liked to get him all aggro with my knuckle dragger comments.

“So it’s just about looks for you?” he asked. His expression was deeply disappointed. “Well, having seen her up close, I can assure you, she could give any model a run for her money with those big brown eyes, perfect skin, and a killer smile.”

I frowned, annoyed. I used the machete my character carried to hack up some foliage. Totally unnecessary but it made me feel better. “Exactly how close did you get to her? I only sent you to deliver a message, not try to score.”

Jackson’s laugh erupted with a sonic boom. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. I wasn’t. I jumped in my seat. I bit back the urge to slug him. Barely.

“Relax, she just invited me in for a glass of wine,” he said. He pressed on through the jungle.

“She what?”

Jackson wagged his eyebrows at me. “What’s the matter? You don’t care if I hook up with her, do you? After all, she’s clearly too nice to meet your ‘aesthetic.’ ”

“I don’t care,” I scoffed. “It’s not my business. It’d just make things awkward if I have to throw her out.”

“For breaking your rules,” he clarified.

“Yeah.” I really hated that he’d managed to turn this around on me.

“What did your note say?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Because she was worried you were going to throw her out,” he said. We’d reached a cliff and we were both clicking away at our controllers as our characters scaled the face of it. “You didn’t, did you?”

“No, I just answered her question about the hot tub,” I said. My thumb was starting to cramp as I tried to navigate the terrain.

“What question was that?”

“Whether it’s off limits. It is.”

Jackson shook his head. He reached the top of the cliff and paused to turn and look at me. “For a guy considered to be one of the sharpest businessmen in Phoenix, you are dumber than a bag of dirt.”

“What?” I protested. My character reached the top, finally, and I turned to look at him.

“You have a beautiful woman, living on your property, wanting to use your hot tub and you tell her no,” he said. “That takes a special kind of stupid.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it. He had a valid point, which I didn’t want to admit. Instead, I went on the offensive. “And I’m telling you, the hotter the woman, the crazier she is. It’s a fact.”

He shook his head and resumed playing. “Nick, I say this as your trainer and your friend, you have got to get out of the house. You’re becoming the epitome of everything a woman does not like in a man these days.”

“Bullshit. I never had any trouble before,” I said. “They certainly seem to enjoy my picking up the check.”

He pointed at me again. “That, right there, isn’t cool. Besides, it sounds like you were dating the wrong sort of women.”

“There’s a wrong sort?” I turned my attention back to the game as Jackson led the way into the tomb. I knew better than to be the first man to enter. They were always sacrificed in these games but Jackson was a newbie, so it was his painful life lesson to learn.

“Of course there’s a wrong sort—argh, damn it!” He turned outraged eyes on me. “You knew! You knew that zombie was hiding in the tomb. You knew he was going to lop off my head and you let me go in anyway.”

“Maybe.” I shrugged.

“Yeah, well, now you have to wait for me to respawn before we can continue,” he said.

He tossed his controller onto the coffee table and I did, too, because, frankly, I was much more interested in getting all the intel on my tenant than I was in acquiring virtual nonbankable treasure.

“Just tell me this,” I said. “Do you think she’s going to be a problem?”

He frowned. “In what way? By using your off-limits hot tub? Why exactly is that, by the way? I just don’t get it.”

“Because it’s disruptive,” I said.

“Of what?” he argued. “I’ve been living here for six months, and the only time you use the pool is for exercise, and you only use the hot tub after a hard workout.”

“Which is often. Listen, I never wanted to rent the guest house,” I said. “You know this. I didn’t want anyone around while I recovered, but I owed Miguel a favor, so—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You agreed so your debt would be square,” he said. He took a long sip of his beer. “But I really don’t see why—”

There was a knock on the door, interrupting whatever Jackson was going to say.

“Excuse me.”

I whipped my head around half expecting to see Annabelle Martin, the subject of our conversation, standing there, but it wasn’t her. It was Lupita. I was certain the flicker I felt wasn’t disappointment but rather indigestion.

“Hi, Lupita. What is it?” I asked.

“There is someone here to see you, and I . . . I wasn’t sure what to say,” she said. She looked ill at ease, and I knew it was because I hadn’t allowed any visitors inside the house in over nine months. I was like the proverbial wounded animal. I didn’t want anyone to see me weak or in pain.

I wondered if it was Annabelle, coming to argue her case to use the hot tub. I felt my curiosity surge. At a distance, she was lovely, and I found I was eager to see her up close, especially after Jackson’s description of her.

“Who is it?” I asked. I tried to keep my expression neutral in case Annabelle was standing in the hallway behind Lupita.

Nothing prepared me for my housekeeper’s answer, however.

“She says she’s your sister, Lexi.”

My heart stopped, and for a stone-cold second, I was certain I was going to blink out again.