A Highlander's Obsession (Highlander's Beloved) (36 page)

He didn’t apologize for being late or attempt to shake hands. He gave Mazie a smirking top-to-bottom scan. “Hey—you’re not bad. Setups usually turn out to be complete dogs.”

Mazie had spent an hour and a half getting ready for this date—
she’d tweezed her eyebrows, for Pete’s sake
—and the best this dud could come up with was
not a complete dog
? The only possible response to a comment like that was to bite the guy’s ankle, but Mazie restrained herself because Chad’s large feet, jammed into sandals, didn’t look any too sanitary and she’d probably contract ringworm of the gums.

“So tell me about yourself, Margie,” he said when they’d settled across from each other in a booth.

“It’s
Mazie
,” she corrected. She hated the phrase “Tell me about yourself.” It sounded like a Human Resources person interviewing a job seeker.

Okay, Chad, here’s a fun fact about me: I was convicted of murdering my husband and sentenced to life in prison
. But that was sort of a conversation bomb. Best to start out bland and boring. “Well,” Mazie said, “I’m thirty years old—”

Chad slapped the tabletop, grinning. “Radical—an older chick.”

Mazie bristled. “Older?”

“I just, like, turned twenty-six. I usually go for the younger ones—eighteen, nineteen, you know? But you’re not bad for your age. I mean, try everything in life once, right?”

“Sure. Damn the torpedoes.” Mazie decided that the only way she was going to survive this date was to view it as a sociology experiment: Exactly how bad can a bad date be?

Really bad, as it turned out.

The waiter brought their drinks, a beer for Chad and water for Mazie, because she didn’t want to muddle her wits with alcohol. She had the feeling she was going to need all of them.

Chad sipped his beer. “So. Are you from Milwaukee?”

“Not originally. I grew up on a farm in southwest Wisconsin, went away to a state college, majored in music—”

“Music!” Chad drummed a riff on the tabletop. “I’m all
about
the music. You know about My Sphincter, don’t you?”

“Your … umm … 
what
?”

“My band, babes.
My Sphincter
. It’s apocalyptic.” Apparently they’d hit the daily double with this topic, because Chad was off on a running rant, explaining how the Music Industry, who hated genius musicians like himself, had conspired to keep his band from cutting a record deal out of sheer jealousy. Eons passed, great glaciers covered the earth and retreated again, brain cells died, salads and entrées arrived, and Chad still nattered on.

At last the waiter brought the bill. “Okay if we go halfsies?” Chad asked, eyes slightly glazed from the strong Mexican beer. “You owe—lemme see, jeez, I’m bad at math.… Let’s just split down the middle, okay?”

Chad had ordered three beers, an entrée, and a liquor-drenched dessert, while Mazie had had a quesadilla and a salad, but she decided not to quibble. Anything to get her out of here.

“Unless—you know, you want to pick up the whole thing,” Chad suggested without a twinge of embarrassment. “I’m kind of tapped out right now—the band got stiffed at the last place we played, if you can believe it.”

Yup, she could believe it, but Mazie dug deeper into her wallet, slapped bills onto the waiter tray, then dived into her coin purse to scrape up the tip. She’d just lost her job and had planned on that cash to carry her through the week. But this was a small price to pay for the life lesson she’d just learned. Her fifteen-year-old self had been right.
Never, ever go on a blind date
. And when she saw Juju Danda, who’d brokered this date, she was going to wring her neck.

Getting up from the booth, Mazie smoothed her skirt and shouldered her handbag. When she looked up, she was shocked to see that the tip had disappeared.

She stared at Chad, incredulous. “Did you—”

He shrugged, grinning. “They ripped us off on the drinks, man—you could buy that
brand for a buck a bottle at the supermarket.”

“Waiters live on their tips!”

“Not my prob.”

“Put it back.”

Sulkily he replaced the money, muttering about women who got off on emasculating men. Mazie steamed out of the restaurant. Uninvited, Chad slouched along beside her.

“Can you give me a ride?” he said. “I don’t got wheels. A buddy gave me a lift to get down here tonight.”

“I don’t have wheels, either,” Mazie said, teeth gritted.

“So where do you live?”

“Brady.”

“That’s cool—just around the corner. I’ll walk you home.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Hey, no problemo. I’m nothing if not a gentleman.”

Where was a cattle prod when you needed one?

Ordinarily Mazie enjoyed walking. The east side of Milwaukee was the hippest part of the city, the haunt of musicians, artists, writers, students, and the Legalize Marijuana crowd. Its streets were lined with small ethnic cafés, bars, and boutiques, and everything was a mere Frisbee’s throw from Lake Michigan’s beaches and parks. But tonight the presence of Chad, slouching along beside her, blatantly checking out every female they passed, poisoned the atmosphere.

Mazie lived at the epicenter of the east side, on Brady Street, in a first-floor flat at the rear of Magenta’s, a boutique that catered to drag queens. “Well,” Mazie said, turning to Chad. “Thanks for a … an evening. Good night.” She made the mistake of opening her door. As she stepped into her entryway, Chad lunged in after her, trapping her against the foyer wall, groping her breasts and pressing himself against her.

“What are you
doing
? Stop it!” Mazie knocked his hands away.

Chad looked at her like a puppy who didn’t understand why he shouldn’t pee on the rugs. “What’s with you? I figured we were gonna hook up tonight.”

Mazie glared at him. “You thought we were going to—
hook up
?”

He shrugged. “Well, yeah—a guy does you the favor of showing up for a date, it’s like,
expected
that you’re going to get it on. You gotta deal with the reality, babe.” He came at her again, eyes half-lidded, hands like tentacles.

Mazie snatched an umbrella out of the hall stand. It was small and pink and looked incapable of keeping rain off a Brussels sprout, but it had a lethally sharp point that made Chad squeal when she jabbed it into his ribs. “Deal with
that
reality, you creep!”

A tall man hulked up out of her apartment. A small dog shot out between the man’s legs, growling like an Irish boarhound, launching himself at Chad. The tall man grabbed Chad by his collar, spun him around, and wrenched his right arm up behind his back.

“The lady said
stop
. Want me to explain what that means?”

Still maintaining the arm-breaking grip, the man frog-marched Chad down the steps, paused for a moment as though considering whether to rip his head off, then settled on giving him a shove that sent him staggering down the sidewalk.

Once he’d satisfied himself that Chad was gone, the man turned back to Mazie. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course I’m all right,” Mazie snapped. “I was doing fine on my own. How’d you get in here, anyway?”

“Key.” He set the spare key that she kept taped to the drainpipe into her palm. Their hands touched briefly and Mazie felt a rush so intense, it made her toes curl. It had been that way from the first moment this man had live-trapped her in his station’s camera van nearly a year ago. His name was Labeck. Bonaparte Labeck—he went by
Ben
. Broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, he had dark, badly behaved hair, chestnut brown eyes, and skin that now, in mid-August, had turned a deep, ruddy bronze. He was saved from being pretty-boy handsome by a twice-broken nose, but he still turned women’s heads wherever he went. It was his self-confidence, the way he moved, some mysterious mix of toughness and warmth that made him utterly irresistible.

But not irresistible to
her
, Mazie reminded herself. She was completely over him. He could strip and do the funky boogaloo in the middle of her kitchen floor and she wouldn’t experience a single twinge in her twingey parts. She wore an invisible protective anti-Labeck shield these days. That jolt when their hands brushed—classic Pavlovian response—was something that could be unlearned as easily as learned.

“I tried to call you,” Labeck said, “but your phone—”

“Is kaput. So whatever was so urgent, you had to break into my apartment to tell me?
You no longer have key rights to this place.”

“
Key
rights?”

Turning her back on him, Mazie stalked out to the kitchen. Ben followed, making himself right at home, leaning against the kitchen counter, watching as Mazie picked up Muffin’s water bowl and refilled it from the tap. She refused to look at him, but she could feel his gaze roaming over her, checking out her legs and boobs and making her despise herself for the way she automatically sucked in her stomach and stuck out her butt when she bent over the sink.
Stop it!
She could avoid looking at him, but she couldn’t help inhaling him. He smelled like lime and cinnamon and that unique Ben Labeck scent, sort of like warm sand.

She turned around to face him, narrowing her eyes, and because she was so furious at him her words came out in disjointed chunks. “Saturday night, you—you came on to me, seduced me, made me think … I thought you—and then you just … just pulled one of your disappearing acts!”

“I was at Y sports camp—”

“Oh, so that makes it okay? Just drop out of my life whenever you feel like it, and when you drop back in, beat up my dates. You don’t want me, but you can’t stand the thought of another man having me, is that it? Well, for your information, I don’t need you jumping in, playing the big macho superhero!”

“I’m supposed to just stand by while some troglodyte mauls you—”

“
You’re
the troglodyte, Ben! You want to yank me by the hair into a cave and use me whenever you please, then go off and catch fish or whack a stupid ball around or chase skirts—oh wait—I forgot! Now that you’re the Sexiest Man Alive, women chase
you
—”

“That is so completely—wrongheaded, crazy, illogical—”

“You need to leave. I have to work on my course.” Mazie yanked open the laptop on her counter. Then her eyes snapped to Ben. “I left this open. You’re always going around closing things that don’t need closing. You snooped in my stuff!”

“If you don’t want people seeing what’s on your screen, you shouldn’t leave it open.”

“Oh, right. Blame the victim.”

Color rose in Ben’s cheeks. “Typical Mazie Maguire. You don’t close your laptop, you never put lids back on jars, you don’t keep your phone charged—and you sure as hell don’t check the guys you go out with to find out whether they’re psychopathic rapists.”

“What a busy life you must lead, keeping track of other people’s faults.”

“At least I don’t waste my time smashing dwarfs—or is that Beethoven with the pointy red hat up on your screen?”

“They’re not dwarfs, they’re gnomes. I’m gnashing gnomes and I’m damn good at it.”

“No, you’re not. You’re only at level fifteen. My four-year-old nephew is already at twenty-nine.”

“Lucky for him he didn’t get his brains from his uncle.”

Ben turned and stalked out of the kitchen. Infuriated, Mazie snatched up the ergonomic mouse he’d given her for her birthday and chucked it at him. It whizzed past his head, barely missed his ear, bounced off the wall, and dropped to the floor.

He halted for a moment, back still to her, then opened the door and walked out.

What had she been
thinking
, throwing that mouse? If it had hit Labeck’s hard skull, its delicate wiring might have been damaged. She needed to test it out, make sure it was okay. Just one game of Gnome Gnash, because she deserved some fun after the horrible night she’d had. A gnome appeared, stuck his tongue out, and wiggled his hips tauntingly. Mazie blasted him off his toadstool. Take
that
, you little rodent! Another gnome appeared in the corner of the screen, stealing her horde of mushrooms. Mazie fired but missed.

Damn! Labeck was right. She
was
bad at this.

She clicked on the TV. Apricot Ames, the hostess of
Milwaukee Tonite!
, appeared in front of a wall-size mural of downtown Milwaukee. Taken at dusk, the mural showed the city at its most glamorous, the skyscrapers ablaze, their glow reflected in the river.
Milwaukee Tonite!
glowed in bright blue neon on the set, but Apricot herself outshone the neon. She was a tall blonde with a thin face, fat lips, and hard hazel eyes beneath acres of fake lashes. “Goo-o-d evening, viewers,” Apricot cooed, leaning forward to display her bounteous cleavage. “Welcome to another edition of
Milwaukee Tonite!
, the program that tells you what’s hot, what’s hip, and what’s happening around brewtown—”

“Oh, drop dead!” Mazie flung a dish towel at Apricot. “Everything is
your
fault,” she hissed at the TV image.

A purple gnome scampered across the computer screen, bent over, dropped trou, and mooned Mazie. She zagged a lightning bolt at his butt and he exploded in a puff of violet smoke.

If only it were possible to zap real-life problems that easily, Mazie thought. Why couldn’t
you dial back real life to
beginner
level and start over again? She would scroll back three weeks, back to when her life had been normal, back to the day before that evil woman on Milwaukee’s most popular local show had proclaimed Bonaparte Labeck “The Sexiest Man Alive.”