Just For Kicks. Susan Andersen

for almost three years, but I’ve moved up the ladder as far as I can go there because my boss isn’t planning on retiring any time soon. And although I’ve freelanced at a couple other casinos who like my work, I don’t plan on spending the rest of my life in this town. As for the condo, I’m subletting from a guy who took a job in the Middle East. I was unhappy with my old place and this unit had sat empty for so long that he was happy to sign a contract saying I could give a month’s notice at any time. Which I plan to do just as soon as my dream job comes through. So I don’t see where this move will be doing Niklaus any favors.”

      Not that he wouldn’t take the kid with him when he went, of course, but he felt no need to verbalize the fact since his mother knew him well enough to understand that that was a given without having to be told. Still, it would be yet one more case of Niklaus having to pull up stakes and move in a long succession of them. Wolf knew only too well what that was like.

      He gave Maria a sober look across the table and shook his head. “I’ll do it, Mom, and I’ll try my damnedest to do a good job. But if I were you, I wouldn’t look for Niklaus to be thanking us any time soon.”

      YOU GOT THAT RIGHT , Niklaus thought furiously, digging his tense shoulder blades into the six-paneled wood of the entry door he’d quietly shut behind him. He had stood there long enough to overhear most of the conversation, and betrayal bit like a rabid dog deep in his gut. Grandma Maria—the one person he’d always felt he could count on—had failed to mention when she’d come to collect him from his and Mom’s latest home in Evansville, Indiana, that he wasn’t coming home with her and Grandpa Rick. Not that he’d been all that crazy about the idea of living in Bolivia, where Grandpa was currently stationed, but at least with Grandma he felt safe.

      He gripped the black-and-white soccer ball to his hip with a force that drove the blood from his fingertips. His free hand fisted tightly at his side and tears burned like acid behind his eyelids.

      He squeezed his eyes tightly shut. I am not going to cry, he vowed with silent ferocity. I’m seventeen years old—or near enough, anyhow—and I will not goddamn cry like a baby.

      He forced his shoulders to relax and pried his fingers loose of the fist they’d formed, shaking his hand out. What the hell. What was another fucking move? It wasn’t like he and his mom hadn’t been flitting from place to place, anyway, for as long as he could remember. He must have been—what?—twelve, thirteen years old when he’d first realized he was probably more mature than Katarina would ever be.

      He’d known forever, though, that Grandma Maria was in his corner, that she would always be there for him when Mom got particularly flaky. He never had to be the grown-up in the group when he was with her. Yet here she was, suddenly fobbing him off on his uncle. What the hell kind of bullshit was that?

      And because of his friends? Sure, they dressed kind of Goth, had lots of piercings and tattoos, and occasionally smoked a little weed that one of them managed to score. But they were just regular kids, and at least with them he didn’t have to be the everything’s-okay-so-don’t-you-worry-about-me happy camper the adults liked to believe he was.

      If he had known Grandma Maria was going to dump him on Wolfgang, however, he might have attempted to bridge the gap between his friends and her during the week she and Grandpa Rick had spent with them while Mom was packing up to move in with her newest asshole boyfriend. Too late now, though. He’d expected this to be a quick stop to see his uncle Wolf and stay in a cool Las Vegas hotel for a few days before continuing on to Grandpa’s La Paz embassy. Instead, he was being dumped on a guy in whose company he’d spent maybe three or four months combined out of his entire lifetime—without so much as a single discussion or anyone asking what he wanted. The only thing he knew about Wolf was that he was one of those tight-assed über-authoritarian types. Hell, Mom didn’t refer to him as Dr. Gloom for nothing. The guy hardly ever smiled.

      For a minute, Niklaus considered grabbing his bag out of the trunk of Wolf’s boss car and striking out on his own. He could take care of himself. Shit, he’d been doing the job most of his life, anyhow. But he took a couple of deep breaths and stayed put.

      He had a blueprint for his future, and being a teenage runaway wasn’t part of it. He’d lived hand to mouth most of his life already and he didn’t intend to do so for the rest of it. A kid on his own without an education was looking for nothing better on the employment front than to say, “You want fries with that?” He planned to graduate frigging high school, then get himself a soccer or academic scholarship to a university so he’d have some options. That would be a big improvement over what he’d had most of his existence.

      But in fucking Las Vegas? What was he likely to find in the way of a decent soccer program in a city that was a hundred frigging degrees most of the time? What if the high schools here didn’t even have soccer teams? His schooling had already been screwed up so many times, it wasn’t even funny. Every time he’d gotten ahead academically, Mom had either up and moved them or packed him off to wherever Grandma and Grandpa currently resided. That had meant yet another school with yet another system for him to learn.

      He was so goddamn tired of it he could spit.

      Feeling his shoulders starting to creep up around his ears again, he forced himself to relax. Only thirteen more months to go and he’d be eighteen. Ten months after that, he’d have his diploma and be starting university.

      So he’d stay with Dr. Gloom. And if his uncle abandoned him in Las Vegas when he took off for his frigging dream job, well, he’d be just that much closer to his goal, wouldn’t he?

      And hopefully by then, if he wasn’t quite close enough, Grandma Maria would be willing to take him back again.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      “SO THERE I WAS Tuesday morning, girding my loins to swallow my pride and ask Jones for more German commands,” Carly said, winding up the story of Rufus’s amazing progress over the course of the past couple of days. It was Thursday night, and she and her best friend, Treena McCall, were headed to work. “And you gotta know, Treen, that this took some major attitude adjustment on my part after the way he’d talked to me Monday night.” Wheeling her car into a slot in the Avventurato parking garage, she shot a glance at the redhead in the passenger seat. She cut the engine and yanked on the parking brake, then turned in her seat to meet her pal’s interested gaze more fully.

      “Yeah,” Treena agreed. “Having seen you in action with Wolfgang, we’ve gotta be talking serious adjustment.”

      “As a heart attack, toots. So, anyhow, I did the girding thing—and guess what?” Indignation ruled all over again. “The bum’s disappeared!”

      “That rat!” Treena’s tone was full of the appropriate best-friend outrage. But her tongue was firmly planted in her cheek when she demanded, “What do you bet he did it just to piss you off?”

      “That was precisely my first thought,” Carly agreed. Then she laughed. “But all right, so maybe I’m not even a blip on Jones’s radar, while I continually overreact when it comes to him.”

      “Ya think?”

      “I don’t know what it is about him. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve never run up against a disagreeable man before.”

      Treena’s lips ticked up in her habitual barely there, one-sided smile. “Just not one with such a great butt.”

      She didn’t even have to think twice. “Yes! His is truly world class and, omigawd, it’s been forever since I’ve had sex. So how fair is it that a guy with the finest ass ever designed to spin a girl’s thoughts to getting a grip on it for a little hootchie-kootch, turns out to have the personality of a gorilla accountant?”

      Treena shook her head in sad commiseration. “Life’s a bitch.”

      “Tell me about it.” She was never attracted to men she didn’t like. They could be Adonis come to life, and it didn’t matter—if they were jerks they left her cold.

      Wolfgang Jones wasn’t even close to Adonis