Something Different/Pepper's Way (30 page)

Pepper liked him. She liked him immediately and instinctively. Oddly enough, he asked the question Thor hadn’t asked, which was, “Pepper what?” She went through the story of how she’d gotten her name, wondering in amusement when it would occur to Thor that he didn’t know her entire name. Cody was delighted by the story, returning the favor by explaining that his name had come from an old western novel that his father had been reading in the fathers’ waiting room at the hospital.

“So you’re a friend of Thor’s?” she questioned as they stood a couple of feet back from the fence and watched the canine-equine games.

Cody grimaced slightly. “I think so anyway. We’ve known each other since we were kids.”

Pepper wondered at the answer. Just as she’d picked up constraint in Thor’s voice about his job, she heard the same thing now in Cody’s voice. And her mind came up with a possible answer. “Did you two have a falling out over some girl?” she asked lightly.

“If only it were that simple,” Cody said wryly.

She looked at him inquiringly, not wanting to ask outright but intensely curious.

Abruptly Cody asked, “Were you serious about—uh— working on Thor?”

“Very much so,” she answered steadily.

He looked at her for a moment, then nodded slightly. “I see you are. Well, then.” His gaze went out over the pasture… or over the years. “We were friends all through school, through
college, and just normally competitive over girls—the way all boys are after a certain age. But there was nothing serious for either of us. That was in Texas.”

Pepper looked at him, startled, but didn’t interrupt.

“After school we drifted apart a little—and that’s normal too. We had different jobs, and both of us traveled. Thor settled down up here after his parents died; I was still traveling quite a bit. Whenever I wound up in the Northeast, I dropped in. We still tried to take each other’s money at poker and kept up a running chess game for a while.

“But gradually—” Cody broke off and shook his head slightly. “I don’t know. Something changed. Thor… Thor wasn’t the same. Oh, not unfriendly. Just not overly friendly. Let’s just say that I wasn’t encouraged to keep dropping in on the spur of the moment.”

“But here you are,” she murmured.

“Here I am.” He laughed a little ruefully. “I turn up every few months whether he likes it or not. I don’t always catch him at home, but when I do, I usually stay a day or two.”

“Why?” she asked bluntly. “I mean, why d’you keep coming around?”

“He’s my friend,” Cody said simply.

Pepper stared at the serious man beside her for a moment, then looked out over the pasture. She thought that she might be seeing a different Thor today because Cody was here, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that.

Certainly she wanted to know Thor in all his moods, but she was afraid that this one was going to disturb her. Things were bound to be strained between her and Thor after last night, and any additional tension was not going to be fun to deal with.

She wasn’t able to give another thought to this problem, though. A tiny brown fury suddenly erupted from beneath the
bottom rail of the fence, yapping hysterically and launching himself with murderous intent at Cody’s ankle.

“Hell’s bells!” Cody stared down at his would-be assassin in lively astonishment. “I’m being savaged!”

From behind them a laconic voice said, “Welcome to the menagerie.”

six

THE NEXT FEW MINUTES WERE RATHER
full. While Pepper was rescuing Cody from the clutches of the wantonly protective Brutus, Thor, with a totally deadpan expression, explained Brutus’s attack training. By the time Pepper had the growling Chihuahua tucked under her arm and while Cody’s bemusement was holding him silent, Thor suddenly took note of the other pet cavorting in the pasture with his killer horse.

“What the hell—?”

“It’s all right, Thor; I introduced them.”

“You what?”

“Introduced them. They’re friends now. I didn’t want you to have to keep shutting Lucifer in his stall whenever the dogs were outside, so I—”

“Pepper, that horse is a killer! And he hates dogs.”

“He doesn’t hate our dogs.” Pepper took no notice of the pronoun, and Thor was too upset to notice, but Cody filed it away in his bemused brain. “Stop fussing, Thor. He’s a very well-trained horse. Did you train him? The slightest knee-pressure, and—”

“You rode that horse?”

“Well, just once around the pasture, but—”

Thor erupted. He swore violently and at great length, mostly in English but with a smattering of Spanish and what sounded like a few words of Arabic. He poured wrath over Pepper by the bucketful, and for ten solid minutes never once repeated himself.

Cody stood with arms folded across his chest, staring at his friend with an expression somewhere between the mildly astonished and the totally stunned, from which Pepper gathered that Thor didn’t often explode.

As for herself, Pepper stood listening politely and waited for him to run down. Having heard quite a few explosions in her time, she was well aware that this one had been detonated by anxiety along the lines of You-could-have-gotten-your-stupid-self-killed-you-idiot-and-why-the-hell-didn’t-you-have more-sense?

She was enjoying it thoroughly.

He finally began repeating himself, and Pepper decided that it was time to interrupt. “Jean’s here,” she said, cheerfully breaking in on a sentence calculated to make her hair stand on end. “I think I’ll go help her with breakfast. You’d better feed Lucifer, Thor, if you can pry him away from Fifi. And send the mutt on up to the house so I can feed her. See you.” She strolled off toward the house, still carrying Brutus tucked underneath an arm.

Venturing to intrude on Thor’s fulminating silence, Cody said mildly, “She’s quite a lady, Thor. Where’d you find her?”

Thor dragged his glare away from Pepper’s retreating back and fastened it onto Cody’s hapless person. “Oh, shut up!” he snapped violently, and stalked away to feed his killer horse.

After the emotional tumult of the day before and his sleepless night, Thor was in no mood to deal with the sudden arrival of Cody. And Pepper’s recklessness where Lucifer was concerned hadn’t helped. And, though she’d been her normal cheerful and absurd self, he’d taken note of the red-rimmed eyes; the image of her crying herself to sleep last night haunted him.

By the time he and a prudently silent Cody entered the house, Thor had himself under nominal control. The slightest spark, and he knew he’d go up like a rocket though.

Ordered cavalierly into the dining room by Mrs. Small, he found that his and Cody’s breakfast consisted of omelets.

“Spanish. Pepper’s recipe. Authentic,” Mrs. Small told him, plunking the plates down on the table.

“Well, where is she?” Thor asked irritably.

The housekeeper looked down her nose at him. “In the kitchen. She’s—”

“Tell her she can damn well get her butt in here and eat with us,” Thor ordered. “No more skipping meals.”

Mrs. Small lifted an eyebrow at him, then returned to the kitchen.

A moment later Pepper came in bearing a plate. “Omelets,” she announced mildly, “are cooked one at a time. I was fixing mine.” Sitting down at Thor’s left hand, she looked across the table at Cody and added solemnly, “He’s so masterful.”

Cody’s laugh changed itself to a hasty little cough, and he bent his attention to his omelet. Thor, feeling a bit like a fool, glared down at his food and dug in.

“My Spanish omelets are very spicy, you know,” Pepper said conversationally just as both men reached hastily for water glasses. “Cayenne pepper.” She ate calmly without recourse to her water.

“You don’t say?” Cody wheezed.

“Unusual,” Thor managed.

“I like food with body. We’re having shrimp curry tonight, by the way. I hope you gentlemen’ll like it.”

Mrs. Small passed through the dining room just then with a dustcloth. “India,” she contributed in a satisfied voice. “Authentic.”

Thor felt a sudden inclination to go off into a corner and have a quiet nervous breakdown. But he couldn’t stay angry. He wanted to burst out laughing at the bemusement on Cody’s face, even while realizing wryly that he himself was probably wearing much the same expression. Damn the woman—why’d she keep on knocking him off-balance like this? He felt like a yo-yo.

“You’ve been to India?” Cody was asking with keen interest in his tone of voice.

“Delhi,” Pepper answered easily. “Beautiful place. Thor, I called Mom yesterday and gave her this number, so I’ll probably start getting calls. Don’t be surprised if my friends sound like nuts.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Thor said definitely.

Laughter lit her eyes. “I’m sure. Oh, and I’ve got at least a dozen clients coming today, so the place is apt to be noisy; they’re all talkers, I’m afraid.”

“Clients?” Cody looked bewildered.

“Dogs.” Pepper smiled at him. “I’m grooming dogs for a friend of mine, and Thor’s letting me use his mudroom.”

“Oh.” Fascination was beginning to grip Cody’s mobile features. “You—uh—groom dogs?”

“She does everything,” Thor told him ruefully. “And she’s good at games. Don’t play poker with her.”

“She’s that good?” Cody asked as if she weren’t present.

“She cheats. Cardsharp.”

“Imagine that.” The blond man turned his thoughtful eyes back to Pepper. “An expert at sleight of hand, are you?”

Smiling, Pepper rose with her empty plate and started around the back of Thor’s chair. Pausing for only a moment, she demonstrated marvelous legerdemain by neatly removing a coin from Thor’s ear. Still smiling gently, she tossed the coin to Cody and went out to the kitchen.

Cody stared down at the quarter while Thor cautiously felt his ear.

“Thor,” Cody said in a contemplative voice, continuing to gaze at the coin, “where
did
you find her?”

“I answered an ad in the paper,” Thor said carefully, and then broke apart.

However he’d responded to Cody during the past years, Thor was clearly unable to be “not overly friendly” with Pepper’s strongly felt presence raining absurdity on all of them. From breakfast the day was duly launched along those lines, and it would have taken a stronger man than Thor to resist laughter.

It began with the deluge of the “clients,” all arriving within ten minutes of one another. Without Tim, her helper, Pepper had something of a struggle on her hands trying to get all the dogs into their wire kennels. Such a time, in fact, that one toy poddle and two Pekingese escaped her and invaded the den, where Thor and Cody were playing a game of chess.

“Grab ’em!” Pepper yelped from the doorway. “Chico eats pillows and Malfi’s Rising Star
refuses
to be housebroken!”

Neither Thor nor Cody wasted time in wanting to know which dog was which: both lunged for the invaders. Thor scooped up a golden Peke that already had its teeth into a pillow on the couch, while Cody dexterously snared the tiny black poodle that was sniffing thoughtfully at the leg of the
coffee table. Pepper cornered the remaining brown Peke near the fireplace.

“What the hell?” Thor managed, firmly removing the pillow from sharp little teeth.

“Sorry,” Pepper gasped, trying not to laugh. “They got away from me.”

“Obviously.”

“Which is which?” Cody asked, subjecting his poodle to a critical stare. “Have I got Malfi’s— What was it?”

“Malfi’s Rising Star. Yes, you’ve got him. Thor’s got Chico, and I’ve got Duchess. Whose move is it?”

Thor glanced automatically down at the chessboard. “Cody’s.”

“Move the bishop,” Pepper told Cody. She tucked Duchess under one arm, Chico under another, and somehow managed to retrieve Malfi’s Rising Star from Cody before leaving the room.

Cody stared down at the board for a moment, then decisively moved the bishop. He grinned at Thor. “She’s right. Mate in three moves.”

Thor made a rude noise and sat back down to try and win back the ground Pepper had cost him.

Their game was relatively undisturbed for a while, Thor getting up only once to check on the sound of the motorcycle that heralded Tim’s arrival. Then the phone began to ring. Thor answered it since Mrs. Small was busy in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“Hello there. Is Pepper around, or have you buried her?”

Thor took the receiver away from his ear to stare at it for a moment, then replied to the cheerful masculine voice. “She’s here. Hold on a minute.”

“Sure.”

Thor yelled to Mrs. Small, who passed the message on to
Pepper. She came in the den with a harassed expression, drying her hands on a towel.

“I wonder why Noah didn’t leave poodles off his ark?” she murmured despairingly to the two men, then picked up the phone before either could attempt an answer. “Hello? Oh, hi! No, I was just bathing Malfi’s Rising Star. Don’t laugh; he’s a prize-winning poodle. Who? Oh, that was just Thor.”

Thor, listening intently, lost his knight in an absent move and sent a glare toward Pepper. She smiled gently at him and went on with the conversation.

“Yes, Yes. What? No, that was Istanbul. Of course, I’m sure! Well, I bought the thing, didn’t I? It was Istanbul. No, the sari came from India. What
is
this anyway? You taking inventory? Oh. Oh, I see. Well, tell Marsha that saris come from India and sarongs from the Orient. Yes. Okay, fine. See you.” She hung up the phone, smiled faintly at the two men staring at her, and headed back for the mudroom.