Fooling Around Read online

  The woman who was already in the elevator gave him a quick glance. He picked up disapproval from her too.

  She probably thought he was rude.

  He didn’t give a damn. He just wanted to get out of here. He wanted to get away from people who drove him crazy and treated him like a baby.

  He wanted his leg to be fixed.

  With every fiber of his being, he cursed the moment he’d decided to ski that morning in Aspen. If he’d slept in an hour later, everything would be different now.

  “Are you going to the first floor?” the woman asked. She was standing beside the panel, so it was natural she would ask. The ground floor was already lit up.

  “Yes.”

  He sighed in relief as the elevator started sinking. It was quiet for the moment. The silence was like an old friend.

  The woman was staring fixedly at the panel of numbers, a few strands of her hair slipping out of her ponytail and getting in the way of his seeing her face.

  He wondered if she was sick. She looked like she could barely stay on her feet. Hopefully she didn’t have a contagious illness she could give to him.

  She darted a look over at him, maybe to check if he was indeed staring at her, but she didn’t meet his eyes.

  She was either shy or sick or deadly dull. None of those were characteristics that particularly interested him.

  He watched as the lit numbers reached the fourth floor, and he was starting to move his chair slightly so he could get out the doors without running into a wall—something he’d done a few times when he’d started to use it a few days ago—when the elevator suddenly jerked and then stopped.

  He blinked and turned to look at the numbers on the panel. Both the fourth- and third-floor buttons were lit. The elevator was obviously stuck between the floors.

  He glanced over at the woman beside him, who had evidently realized the same thing. She met his eyes, and they shared a brief moment of exactly the same mix of frustration and helplessness.

  Then she sighed and reached over to the emergency phone beneath the panel. She picked it up and pressed the button. It wasn’t long before Eric could hear the scratchy sound of a male voice on the other end of the call, too low for him to make out the words.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “The elevator stopped between floors three and four. Something is obviously wrong.”

  There was a pause as the man she was talking to answered. Then she said, “Okay. How long do you think it will be?”

  She raised her eyebrows, as if she didn’t like the answer. Eric murmured, “Make sure you make it clear they need to get the damned thing moving quickly.”

  She shot him a quick, narrow-eyed look and said in that same quiet voice, “But we’re perfectly safe, right?…Okay, thank you.” She hung up the phone.

  Eric made a throaty noise, his body tightening at yet another thing to be exasperated about on this ridiculous day. “What did he say?”

  “He said they’ll have us moving again just as soon as they can. It’s apparently a problem with the computer that runs the elevators.”

  “How long are we supposed to sit here?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “Well, you should have demanded an answer.”

  She looked him in the eye again, and this time her expression was cool. “What good would demanding an answer do if he doesn’t have an answer to give us?”

  “He must know enough to give us an estimate. You can’t just let people string you along.”

  She really had quite beautiful eyes. They were a very deep blue. Maybe what people called violet. He found them mesmerizing.

  She said, “Do you really think he’s going to take his time, maybe get a snack or take a nap, instead of doing whatever he can to get the elevator moving?”

  She wasn’t as much of a pushover as she’d seemed at first. He knew that his manner and his physicality—he was taller and broader in the shoulders than most people he encountered—could be intimidating to both men and women, but this woman didn’t appear to be intimidated.

  Of course, it could be because his fucking leg was broken, and she had to look down at him.

  “How the hell do we know? If we’re not moving in two minutes, give me the phone. I’ll talk to him.”

  “And what exactly will you do?”

  “I’ll make sure he does everything he possibly can to get us moving again.”

  “By bullying him? Do you really think that’s the best way to handle a crisis situation?”

  “It’s always worked for me.” He wished her sweatshirt weren’t so baggy. He could see the curve of her breasts, but not enough for him to really get a sense of her body. He wondered what it looked like beneath her clothes.

  She obviously didn’t care about her appearance. She hadn’t dressed attractively. She hadn’t put on any makeup. She hadn’t done her hair in a flattering way. It was like she wanted to go unnoticed.

  He wasn’t used to women like that. Usually they fixed themselves up as sexily as possible and threw themselves at him.

  Of course, this woman hadn’t gotten up this morning knowing she’d be stuck in an elevator with him. She was at the hospital. She was either sick or was here visiting someone. She looked like she’d had a rough day.

  His mild interest in her distracted him for a couple of minutes, but it wasn’t enough to hold him for long. He hated being cooped up like this. His damned cast was itching like crazy, in places he couldn’t possibly reach to scratch. He was hot. Way too hot.

  He shifted in his chair, trying to get more comfortable. He should have accepted that stupid paper cup of water that Kristin had gotten for him. “Give me the phone,” he muttered.

  She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m not going to give you the phone. Calling to yell at them isn’t going to get us out of here any faster.” She dug in her purse and then evidently found what she was looking for. A bottle of water.

  She handed it to him without comment.

  It was unopened and cool, and Eric realized he was parched. He opened the bottle and took a long swig.

  While he was drinking, the woman reached back into her purse and pulled out a large pamphlet about dealing with grief that looked like some generic thing the hospital passed out.

  She waved it in front of her face as a fan. She was obviously just as hot as he was.

  “You’d think they’d turn the temperature down a little, since we’re trapped in here,” she murmured. She angled herself so that the air she fanned was blowing onto him as well.

  She must be doing it on purpose, since she’d changed positions before he’d started to feel the breeze.

  The water helped, and so did the fanning. He felt a little better. But he was still bad-tempered enough to mutter, “That’s another thing I could have spoken to the little man about.”

  To his surprise, she chuckled. “What makes you think he’s a little man?”

  “He sounded like a little man.”

  “I bet everyone sounds like a little man to you.”

  “Women don’t.” He gave her a halfheartedly flirtatious look, but mostly because it was second nature to him. He wasn’t really in the mood to pick up a woman at the moment, even one with eyes as gorgeous as hers.

  She shook her head and glanced away from him, but she continued fanning air in his direction.

  He shifted again in his chair in a vain attempt to scratch his leg under his cast, and in the process the sweatshirt that the nurse had insisted on tucking beside him fell to the floor.

  The woman leaned over to pick it up, putting it back into place without saying a word or making a fuss about it. “I’ve never been stuck in an elevator before.”

  “Me either,” he admitted. He wished Kristin and his nurses knew how to do things like this woman did—not making a big deal out of them, not fussing or ordering him around, not getting on his nerves. “Are you a nurse?” he asked, suddenly realizing that she might actually work here.

  Her eyes widened. “No. Why d
o you ask?”

  “Just wondering if that’s why you were here.”

  She shook her head and stared at a spot in the air. “No. I was…visiting…someone.”

  There was definitely something odd about her response, but she looked closed off, guarded, so he didn’t question her any more. She’d had that pamphlet on grief. Maybe someone she was close to had died.

  When the phone rang, she snatched at it quickly. “Hello?”

  It might have been the same voice on the other end of the call, but once again he could hear only a faint buzz.

  The woman sighed. “What’s taking so long?”

  Eric groaned and reached out for the phone. She gave him another narrow-eyed glare and backed away from him. “Okay,” she said in response to the man. “Just please get us out soon.”

  “Damn it,” Eric bit out—not particularly softly. “What’s taking so long?”

  “The, uh, gentleman I’m in here with is getting rather impatient,” the woman added, just before she hung up the phone.

  “You’re not going to get results being so nice,” he barked. He didn’t like not being able to talk to the person himself.

  “Being mean isn’t going to accomplish anything except upsetting people. You don’t have to be an asshole to get things done.”

  He’d been called an asshole more times than he could count. It didn’t even faze him. He wheeled his chair around, trying to get close enough to take the phone from the wall so he could do some talking himself. In the process, he hit his foot on the wall, which caused an intense wave of pain to sweep through his body.

  He swallowed, closing his eyes until it dispelled.

  To his surprise, the woman didn’t ask him if he was all right. She just moved his chair slightly so his foot wouldn’t hit the wall again. As she did so, she reached over and adjusted his leg position slightly, which was surprisingly more comfortable.

  Who the hell was she, if she wasn’t a nurse? And why couldn’t the people he hired manage to help him out as unannoyingly as she did?

  He looked at her sharply, but she just looked away.

  A phone rang just then from inside her bag, and it must have surprised her, since she fumbled it slightly as she connected the call. “Hey, Marie,” she murmured after checking the screen.

  Her face was strangely tight as she listened to Marie speak. Then she said, “I know. I’m on my way. I’m stuck in an elevator right now….Yes, I’m okay. It isn’t a crisis. They’ll have it moving again soon….I need to go to the funeral home to prepare for Mom’s…Yes, I know how upset you are….No, I can take care of it myself….It’s Woodlawn Funeral Ho—” She sighed and gave a little shake of her head. “Okay. I’ll call you later.”

  Her mother must have just died, Eric realized, feeling a sinking in his chest. The last thing she needed was to be stuck in an elevator. Or have a relative who evidently wasn’t helping at all.

  He was about to make a sympathetic comment, so she wouldn’t think he was completely heartless, when the elevator suddenly started to move again.

  “Oh, thank God,” she breathed, stuffing the pamphlet and her phone back into her purse.

  Eric didn’t believe in God, and if he had, he wouldn’t have had many thanks for him at the moment. But he was deeply relieved when the elevator doors finally opened on the ground floor.

  The first thing he saw was Kristin and the nurse, and they both came at him, fluttering and anxious, as if he’d been miraculously saved from a life-threatening situation.

  He tried to turn around to see the woman who’d been with him in the elevator, but she’d slipped away immediately. He saw the swish of her ponytail as she left by the front door.

  That was who he needed for the next three months. He needed someone exactly like her to help him out. Someone who wouldn’t drive him crazy. He’d never make it that long with the assistants he currently had. He’d end up firing his entire staff and alienating everyone who’d ever liked him.

  He suddenly had an idea. It was crazy, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t do it.

  He’d done crazy things before, things that made no sense to anyone else. After he’d torn up his knee, everyone had said he should just rehab it for six months and he might be able to play football again. But he’d known it wasn’t a sure thing, and even if he could eventually come back, he’d never be as good as he had been. His father, who had been a high school football coach all his life, had just died of a heart attack, and Eric had been having trouble working up a lot of enthusiasm for the sport anyway. He’d already had this idea for the video game, so he’d given up on football and started making money in a different way. His decision had been the right one, since his knee had never gotten back to full form. If he’d pressed on, he’d have been stuck on a low-level team, and making anything of himself would have been a struggle.

  People had thought he was insane back then—his friends, teammates, coaches, and mother all telling him that he was overreacting to the injury and his father’s death—but he’d done the best thing for him, despite all of their skepticism.

  His instincts seldom steered him wrong.

  Maybe his new idea now was a little crazy, but all of his instincts told him it was right.

  So he was going to do it.

  He brushed Kristin’s anxious questions away and said, “Shut up for a minute. I need your help with something.”

  She ignored the tone, since she was used to it. She actually looked pleased to have something to do. “What is it?”

  “I need you to find out who was with me in the elevator.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a woman with me. She came from the same floor we were on. I need you to find out who she is. Her mother just died.”

  “The hospital isn’t going to tell me—”

  “Well, find out another way. The funeral will be at Woodlawn Funeral Home. Just ask around. Someone will know.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.” Kristin had long ago learned not to question the reasonableness of any of his requests. She just did them. It was one of her good qualities, whereas taking care of incapacitated people obviously wasn’t.

  “Good. Thanks,” Eric said. His leg was actually a lot more comfortable in this new position. Why the hell hadn’t someone figured that out before now?

  If he was going to make it through the next three months, then he’d need a different sort of caretaker. It didn’t matter that he had no idea who the woman was. He wasn’t going to let her get away.

  Chapter 2

  Julie got back to her parents’ slightly shabby three-bedroom ranch house and collapsed into her mother’s old rocking chair by the front window.

  She sat there, staring out into the quiet suburban street, for a long time.

  She was too tired to work. Too tired to talk to anyone. Too tired even to cry.

  Her laptop was on the desk in the corner. She had papers and online discussion posts for three classes to grade. The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes, and she needed to start getting ready for the funeral.

  She didn’t want to do any of it, though.

  Marie was contacting everyone to let them know about their mother’s death. Not that there were many other people to contact. They didn’t have a large extended family, and her mother’s social circle had been small.

  Julie tried to picture herself getting up, cleaning the house, arranging for the funeral, burying her mother. And then what? She couldn’t even imagine a life for herself now. The last six years had been spent devoted to her parents. With them gone, she had nothing left.

  No job, no PhD, no husband, no apartment, no commitments. Just three boring online classes to teach, made up mostly of students trying to jump through another hoop to get their degrees.

  She couldn’t summon up enough motivation to even get out of the chair.

  She kept staring at a pair of socks, which she’d taken off last night and never put into her laundry basket. Her mother always lik
ed the house to be kept neat. She should really pick up those socks.

  When her phone rang, she assumed it was Marie, but instead it was Ned, the nice guy she’d gone out with several times a few years ago, before she’d become too emotionally drained for a social life.

  She blinked at the phone for a few seconds before she finally picked up the call. “Hi, Ned.”

  “Julie. I heard the news. I’m so sorry about your mother.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She wondered who he’d heard it from, and then she realized that Marie had probably been on the phone for the last two hours, seeking sympathy from everyone she knew.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” Julie said. Those socks were still bugging her. She needed to do something about them. “It’s hard, of course, and I’m exhausted. But overall I’m doing okay. We’ve been expecting it for a while now.”

  “Yes. That makes sense. Is there anything I can do?”

  “No. No. I think I have everything under control.”

  “Okay. Well, I won’t keep you. Just let me know if there’s any way I can help. And after a while, when you’re feeling better, maybe I can take you out. I’m sure you could use a break.”

  “Sure,” she said, surprised by the offer. Was he still interested in her, after so long? She couldn’t imagine why. “That would be nice. Thank you.”

  After she hung up, she wondered about Ned for a minute, until she let him slip from her mind. He was a decent enough guy, and it was nice that someone found her attractive, but she’d never been very excited about him.

  The socks were driving her crazy, so she managed to heave herself to her feet, go pick them up, and carry them into her room. After dropping them in her laundry basket, she stared around at the small room. There was a twin bed covered with a worn quilt and a cheap dresser and nightstand. A small TV rested on the dresser, and a lamp that always flickered on and off on the nightstand. It was a dull, ugly room, having been inexpensively redone as a guest room after she’d gone to college. When she’d first moved back home, she hadn’t expected to be staying long, so she hadn’t done anything to make it prettier or more comfortable. And later, when she realized she’d be here for the long haul, it just hadn’t seemed worth the effort.