Just For Kicks

CHAPTER THREE

SHE’D FORGOTTEN. For a few moments there, Carly had actually let down her guard and forgotten that Wolfgang Jones was nothing but a judgmental, dog-hating jerk.

Okay, sure, Rufus was a trial, more so than any other pet she’d ever owned. But if Jones would just give her some breathing room, she knew she’d find the breakthrough she was seeking in her pup’s training. She always had with the other animals she’d rescued.

She was terrified, though, that she wouldn’t find this one quickly enough. She’d been lucky up until now that everyone in her building had turned a blind eye to the covenant stating that each unit in the condo was only allowed one pet.

Jones could change that in the blink of an eye. He had the power of the rules on his side, and he was such an obvious letter-of-the-law freak that it wasn’t even funny. All he needed was to lodge one formal complaint and she could lose not only Rufus, but two of her other babies, as well.

The idea made her sick to her soul and her hand shook slightly as she fit her key into the lock. Furious that Mr. Grim-and-Grimmer could bring her to this, she couldn’t prevent shooting him a dark look. He was so unyielding, both physically and mentally. And as much as she hated having to explain herself, she choked down her pride and did so, keeping her tone neutral when she said, “It’s not Rufus’s fault, you know. He’s a good dog at heart. I found him abandoned on the side of I-15 and I’m guessing he had a pretty rough puppyhood, so it’s taking him a little longer than usual to settle in.” The tumblers disengaged and she opened the door.

As she stepped over the threshold, her dogs greeted her with a rendition of their nightly frenzied, glad-to-see-ya dance. Rufus continued barking as he leaped up on her. And while Buster was older, quieter and more restrained, he still insisted on getting close enough to lean heavily against her uninjured leg, his tail wagging enthusiastically. Her cats jumped down from their respective perches and flowed across the room to weave in and out of her feet, meowing for their dinner. It was loud and messy and her favorite part of the day.

Wolfgang clearly wasn’t as enchanted. She caught the expression on his face when Rufus jumped with joyous abandon all over his beautiful suit.

Predictably, Jones was not amused.

She swallowed a snort. As if she’d ever seen that particular emotion on his face, anyway.

“Sitz!” Wolfgang snapped.

“Zits?” she repeated in confusion. But Rufus abruptly quit barking, and when she turned to look at her suddenly still dogs, she saw an almost human look of discombobulation on their furry faces. Then, as if it were a synchronized event, they both plopped their butts on the floor and stared up at the tall blond man with rapt attention. Even the cats paused for a nanosecond before resuming their demand for dinner.

Wolfgang turned to her, his posture erect, his face a blank canvas that somehow still managed to project disapproval. “You’re right, it is not your dog’s fault,” he agreed. “It’s yours. Exert some damn control.” And picking a brown dog hair from his slacks with one hand, he reached out with his other to grasp the knob on the door. Gently he pulled it shut.

She stared at the blank panel that had been firmly closed in her face and felt her blood pressure spike from normal to stroke level in two seconds flat. If there’d been a mirror handy she wouldn’t have been surprised to see steam blowing out her ears like cartoon factory whistles. Gasping for oxygen that seemed to have been sucked clean out of the foyer, she gritted her teeth against her choler.

To no avail. “You. Fascist. Son of a. Bitch!” Furiously she swung her bag of melting ice at the door.

Her animals scattered and she limped around to face the suddenly empty entryway. “Sorry, you guys,” she said guiltily. “I’m sorry. But, God, have you ever met such a miserable human being?” What a lousy time for Treena to be gone. Ordinarily she’d be heading down to her friend’s apartment to vent and spend a comforting twenty minutes assassinating Jones’s character. Instead, she sucked it up, shoved down her self-pity and limped into the kitchen to start opening cans and bags.

Hearing the sound of kibble being poured and the can opener whipping lids from tins brought the babies out of their various hiding places. And the familiarity of having Buster and Rufus do their doggy dinner jig while Rags and Tripod rubbed up against every available surface as they waited for her to put their bowls on the floor soothed Carly’s ragged nerves.

She got them situated, then found a corked bottle of wine in the fridge and poured herself a glass. Her ankle was throbbing again, so she tossed back a couple of aspirin. Then, noticing the trail of water where her bag of ice had sprung a leak from its unscheduled bash against the door, she grabbed a Ziploc bag and transferred the dripping contents into it. Deciding that the water on the floor would dry just fine without her help—and that she had been pushed quite far enough for one night—she hobbled into the living room.

Where she stopped dead. “Oh, crap.”

Several of her throw pillows were torn apart. An explosion of feathers, foam and shredded silk festooned her furniture and covered the hardwood floor. She didn’t know how she’d missed it on her way to the kitchen but could only assume her fury over Jones’s behavior had temporarily blinded her. “Rufus!” she yelled furiously.

The dog slunk out of the kitchen and crept past her, his belly close to the floor, to huddle in the foyer. Looking over his shoulder at her with big brown eyes, he started to crouch in a way Carly was much too familiar with.

“No!” she snapped. “Dammit, Rufe, if you pee on top of this, you are a dead dog.”

But when the pup got nervous, he piddled, and a puddle began to form on the Italian tile between his hind legs.

Of course. It had been that kind of night.

She clenched her teeth against her chin’s sudden desire to wobble. She would not cry, dammit. She wouldn’t!

But neither would she clean up the mess right now. Collapsing onto an overstuffed chair, she propped her foot on the mismatched footstool and gingerly arranged the ice over her swollen ankle. Then she knocked back her glass of wine in one long gulp.

Rags jumped up into her lap and circled twice before sprawling over her thighs in a warm bundle of long black fur. His purr kicked in with the first stroke of her hand down his back. Tripod leaped onto the arm of the chair and walked along it with surprising grace for a cat with only three legs. Sitting down close to her, he batted at a strand of beaded fringe on her costume, then ignored her in favor of licking himself clean.

His actions reminded her she was still wearing her costume. Swell. In addition to everything else, now she’d probably have the wardrobe mistress on her case. Hopefully the news of her injury would keep her off the woman’s shit list. Otherwise she’d have to make a special trip back to the casino tomorrow just to return the garment and wig—and never mind that it was her day off. Not to mention that she’d have to bum a ride or call a cab just to get there, since her freaking car was still in the casino garage.

Buster came and laid his brindled head on her knee. She raised the hand she’d been stroking Rags with to scratch between the tufts of fur that stuck up atop the dog’s head. Rufus remained in the entryway, but no longer did he look contrite. Instead, he was now seated in front of the door, staring at it expectantly. She realized with a sudden shock what was likely keeping him there.

“You little bugger! Are you looking for that cretin to come back?”

The dog’s ears suddenly perked up and he began to wriggle on the tiles. A sound Carly knew too well rumbled threateningly in his throat.

“Please, Rufus, no more,” she begged. “No more tonight, okay? Trust me on this, the last thing you want to do is to bring yourself to Jones’s attention again.”

But it was no use. The young dog danced in place as sharp, staccato yaps erupted from his throat like an automatic weapon laying down a line of fire.

The pain in Carly’s head 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 he hung up a short while later, he thrust both hands through his hair, stared blankly at the wall across the room and swore. If he were a superstitious man he would be invoking that ancient mantra of being careful what you wished for.

Because suddenly he had a much bigger problem on his hands than a space-cadet neighbor with dangerously compelling sex appeal.

His parents were coming to visit him. And they weren’t coming alone.

CARLY KNOCKED ON HER second-floor neighbors’ door the following morning.

Ellen answered. “Well, hello, darling,” she said warmly, and stepped back, opening her door wide in welcome. “Come in.”

But when she did as the petite older woman directed, Ellen’s brow furrowed in concern and she reached out to cup a protective hand around Carly’s elbow. “You’re limping!”

“Yeah, I got knocked on my keister at the casino last night by a little old lady with a big purse.”

“Is that Carly I hear?” came a gruff male voice, and Mack, Ellen’s soon-to-be-husband, came into the foyer, folding the sports section of the Review Journal and tucking it beneath his arm. “I thought I recognized that voice. How are you, sweetheart? You’ve been hurt?”

Her heart warmed at the older couple’s concern. Her own mother would have treated her daughter’s injury as a nuisance whose sole purpose was to wreck her day. Or she’d have gotten her maid to take care of Carly. “I twisted my ankle. The swelling’s already a lot better this morning and I’m hoping I’ll be good to go by the time my weekend’s over.”

“That’s right, they moved your days off to Tuesday and Wednesday, didn’t they?” Mack said. “I guess if you had to get hurt, you at least had good timing.”

“That was my thought, too.”

“Meanwhile, I’m sure it hurts like the devil,” Ellen said, and waved her into the living room. “Go in and sit down. Do you want some ice for it?”

“No, thanks. Maybe I could put it up for a few minutes, though. It feels better when it’s elevated.”

“Of course. Mack, help her get settled and see that she’s comfortable. I’ll go pour us some coffee.”

The stocky, gray-haired man ushered her into a chair in the beautifully appointed living room and cleaned a stack of papers off a hassock, then dragged it over for her foot. “Do you need me to walk the dogs?” he inquired as he slid a throw pillow beneath her heel.

Delight flooded her at his thoughtfulness. “Aw, Mack. Have I told you recently how much I adore you?” she asked. “But, no, thank you. I managed to hobble out with Buster and Rufus earlier, and I’m hoping my ankle will be up for a longer walk around the grounds this evening.”

“Let me get this straight.” Mack gave her a speaking look over his reading glasses. “You took the dogs out with a bum foot and Rufus didn’t bolt on you?”

“Here we go.” Ellen entered the room with a tray that held not only three cups of coffee, but her home-baked cookies as well, beautifully arranged upon a paper doily that graced a delicate china plate.

“Carly took the dogs out for their constitutional this morning,” Mack informed her.

The older woman turned to look at Carly, her eyebrows arching toward her stylish salt-and-pepper bangs. “And Rufus didn’t take advantage of your bad foot and take off?”

Carly laughed. “I know—isn’t it miraculous? That’s really the reason I’m here.” She accepted a mug of coffee and picked a sugar-dusted chocolate cookie off the plate. “He started to. He was making his usual Great Escape beeline for the parking lot, but I said Zits! and he came back.”

“Zits?” Mack snorted. “What kind of word is that to make a dog who’s never listened to a thing anyone’s ever said suddenly pay attention?”

“Not zits like a pimple,” Ellen said with a look of enlightenment. She turned to Carly. “Sitz, am I right? It’s German for sit, I believe.”

“Is that what it means? How cool is that? Rufus knows German.” Another rolling laugh escaped her. “Not only knows it—Rufus loves German. He responds to it as if it’s his native language and actually pays attention. Well, he didn’t actually sit, but he came back, which is more than he would have done yesterday. So I wondered, Ellen—” she looked at her retired head-librarian neighbor “—do you think you could look up a couple of other German commands for me on your computer?”

“Oh, darling, I’d love nothing more. Unfortunately, my cable provider is in the middle of merging with another company and my computer hasn’t let me connect to the Internet since last night. When I called the cable company about it this morning they admitted it was a problem at their end but couldn’t give me a concrete time when they’d be back up and running. It’s frustrating. But this news about Rufus is certainly an exciting breakthrough.”

Carly felt as though her heart were grinning. “Isn’t it great? And as much as I hate to admit it, I have Mr. Stick Up the Butt to thank.”

“Who? Oh, Wolfgang, you mean?” Mack leaned forward. “So if he already came up with this, why not just ask him for more commands?”

“And admit the one he issued while he was busy insulting me worked? That’ll be a frosty day in hell.”

“Of course, what was I thinking?” the father of two grown daughters said with a shrug. “I forgot for a minute there that I was dealing with a female.”

“That’s very amusing, dear,” Ellen told him dryly. But the two exchanged a glance so full of love that Carly set down her coffee cup.

“Enough about me,” she said. “Do you have the photos back from your trip to Italy yet? And how are the plans going for the wedding? Pass those cookies and catch me up on the latest.”

But even as she looked at vacation pictures and listened to her friends’ plans, she admitted something she’d give a bundle to ignore.

A cold day in hell had apparently arrived. Because for Rufus’s sake she was probably going to swallow her pride for a second time and ask Wolfgang Jones for help, after all.

CHAPTER FOUR

WOLF PACED THE AREA outside the security checkpoint at McCarren International Airport. The plane was late—and he couldn’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing.