07 Uncorked - Chrissy McMullen Mystery Read Free Page A

defensive.
    She turned toward the supposed villain, who remained on the floor, knees clamped together. Her eyes grew wide again. “Lieutenant Rivera?”
    “Hello, Mrs. Al Sadr.” His words sounded a little more normal but still had a good deal of that am-I-dead-yet tone to it.
    “Christina, what have you done to him?” she asked and rushed forward. She'd liked Rivera ever since he’d been instrumental in saving her sister from an abusive husband, but I’d been instrumental, too, and I never elicited the kind of adoring glances he did.
    “I didn’t know it was him,” I repeated.
    “There is another whose testicles you wished to crush?” she asked, glancing up at me as if I was the bad guy.
    “No. Well, yes, but—”
    “Good God, McMullen, will you put on some clothes?” Rivera hissed again.
    I glanced down, glanced at Al Sadr, glanced at his wife.
    “Excuse me,” I said, and setting the still-spinning fan carefully back in its allotted position, I slunk along the wall toward my bedroom.
    By the time I had dressed and worked up enough nerve to reenter my own kitchen, Rivera was sitting alone at the table. He looked up, eyes dark and malevolent over the chipped coffee mug that housed my favorite maxim: Mornings are for masochists.
    “I didn’t know it was you,” I said.
    He exhaled something that sounded like a chuckle. “I guess things could have been worse, then.”
    I swallowed, cleared my throat, tried to do the same with the guilt. “Ramla made you coffee?”
    “Tea,” he said. “She couldn’t find any coffee.”
    I nodded. That was probably because I didn’t keep any in the house. I didn’t believe in wasting my daily allotment of caffeine on such an inferior form. It’s chocolate or die for me. “How are you feeling?”
    “My balls were just rammed up my esophagus,” he said. His Chrissy muscle twitched again. “How do you think I feel?”
    His tone made me a little testy. I mean, seriously, the man had just broken into my house and scared the hell out of me. “Like an ass?” He stared at me a second, then snorted and took a sip of tea. He didn’t like tea. The thought improved my mood a little.
    “Remind me not to worry about you anymore,” he said.
    “You don’t worry about me,” I countered, and remembered to hate him. It was easier when he wasn’t curled up on my linoleum like a dying salamander. “We’re not seeing each other anymore. Remember?”
    His eyes were as shadowed as midnight dreams. “That’s right,” he said, but there was something in his tone that threatened to suck me in, to roll me under. Fortunately, at that precise moment, I remembered with unexpected clarity that my current boyfriend, one Dr. Marcus Jefferson Carlton, had an IQ of 141. He was a published author, an accomplished yogi, and a dynamite chess player. Unfortunately, he was also incommunicado while he was traveling in another country with no one to keep him company but Sam, his trusty publicist.
    “What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Hoping this tea will put out the fire in my balls.”
    “I really did think you were someone else.”
    “Yeah? You always greet your new beau with a knee to the gonads?” I gave him a snotty smile and preened my tone to match. “Not at all. Dr. Carlton is a perfect gentleman.”
    “Is he?”
    “Yes.”
    He chuckled a little. “Well, I guess opposites really do attract then, don’t they?”
    “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
    He caught my eye again. “You swung at me like I had Spalding tattooed on my forehead, McMullen. Sometimes perfect gentlemen take offense to that.”
    “Well, perfect gentlemen don’t come crashing into a woman’s house like a crazed gorilla.”
    “I never claimed to be a gentleman,” he said, and something about his tone made me remember the first full night we’d been together. Part of it had been spent at the very table at which we currently sat. Part of it had been spent on that very