Well, it has been more than a little while since I've updated. Writing is kind of like going to the gym ... you don't realize just how many muscles you do or don't use until you don't do it for a long, long time. This has hurt, but in a good way. It is just a beginning to make sure I didn't break something too important because we all know that November is coming.
~~~~~
“Babe.”
I, Stephanie Plum, consider myself to be multi-lingual. I
speak English, naturally. A smattering of Italian, courtesy of the neighborhood
and a fondness for the world’s most perfect food, pizza. Bergese, not
necessarily a language per se, but it could be one. Come one, everyone who is
raised in an Italian American home that is in the berg speaks Bergese; it is commonly
known as guilt. It is a combination of
body language, tone of voice, sighs, and a lack of words. The lack of words
provide the context of what I haven’t been doing lately of which I should feel
guilty: no husband, a job no one really approved of, and no big plan for either
one in the foreseeable future.
My final language is Babe, the single word that had so many meanings:
good, bad, sexy, impatient, unruffled, and always me. I have been the recipient of long and complex
salutations from Ranger Manoso. Ranger
is a man of few words. Much like
Bergese, it is a combination of understanding the body language, the tone, the
inflection, and the incredibly short sentence structure. Why waste an entire
sentence when a single look sometimes combined with a solitary word would
suffice? Plus, each word out of his
mouth seemed to fill the room with pheromones or hormones that short circuited
most of the brains of the female of the species. When we first met, I either
babbled constantly or was left mostly mute.
Now, I still babbled but I could mostly control my own thoughts.
I glanced up from the list I was composing to notice he was
leaning against my kitchen counter, arms and legs crossed, and a slight upturn
of his lips. Tonight was different, he wasn’t in either basic black or some
form of cammo. Ranger was in jeans, the well worn and painted on kind. The
white, lightly striped oxford shirt set off his light chocolate coloring. I am sure others might think he had mocha
latte colored skin, I preferred to think of it as the color o a Snickers bar,
fresh from the freezer. You know, not quite milk chocolate but yummy and
delicious all the same. Yummy but full of not always great consequences and
dangerous to those who should leave such things alone. Me? He wasn’t dangerous
to me, much. Sure, we had had our night
a long time ago. And, yes, he had ruined me for other men, especially Joe
Morelli, but my wounds had been licked and I had mostly healed.
He quirked his eyebrow. As a kid, I spent hours in the
mirror trying to both quirk my eyebrows and wiggle my ears. I could manipulate
my ears just a fraction not so anyone else would notice. The eyebrow thing? Not
so much. I usually looked more startled than curious. I would have better luck
stenciling an eyebrow that way, but then I’d always look lopsided and a bit
deranged. Then again, a bit deranged wasn't
necessarily a bad thing. I am a bounty hunter and it wasn't necessarily a bad
thing to look intimidating.
“Yo,” I said. Hey,
two could play trade long, elegant nonsequitirs. Besides, I was in the middle
of a project. A list. A possibly life changing list. The list wasn't for or
about me, it was for my sister Valerie’s daughters. I immediately lowered my
head to the notebook page and bounced my pen on it to clarify my thoughts.
“Why is a bra better than a man?” he asked.
Ranger is silent and stealthy like a cat. I hadn’t heard him
come behind me so he could read over my shoulder.
I covered the list with my arms, looked up and glared at
him. Val’s daughters were getting to the age when they were going to know the
facts of life sooner than later, not that I was planning on having that talk with
them. But I could put my vast knowledge from my past career as a lingerie buyer
to good use by explaining the finer points to them.
“Exactly why are you here,” I asked asI shot a look at my watch,
“At five-thirty?” Was he after a favor? Usually if he wanted a favor it was in
the form of a distraction and he showed up after nine, sometimes ten o’clock. Was
he bored? Was he lonely? Nah. This was Ranger, he was never bored and from what
he had told me about his family he would probably never be lonely.
“Dinner? It’s been a while.”
“I don’t know about you, but I had dinner just last
night. I even had it the night before.”
Once dinner might have been construed to mean the prelude to a possible
something. It had been so long since we had been alone together in a situation
that might have been misconstrued as a date that it was probably the prelude to
a work discussion.
“You know you’ve got to eat.” He took the three steps from
my kitchen table to the refrigerator, opened it, and shook his head. “Your
hamster could starve to death on what you keep in here.”
Two whole sentences and one was an attempt at humor. Something was either very wrong or possibly
very right.
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