Risking It All. Beverly Bird

by Philadelphia standards, for the units, probably just to irritate them.

      All the same, the rent had required everything Grace could scrape together each month from waitressing. She’d been planning on picking up a second job when she’d found Jenny Tower standing outside Penn Center Station looking lost, overwhelmed or maybe ecstatic—Grace had yet to figure out which. Jenny was straight off a series of buses and trains from some farm outside Topeka. She had landed in Philly with nowhere particular to go and no real plan. Grace had taken her home with her if only to talk some sense into her.

      That had been two years ago. Jenny had spent the better part of those two years sleeping on a sofa bed in the living room. Grace had had the apartment first so she figured she had the right to the only bedroom. Her rent had immediately dropped to five hundred a month. Then, a few months ago, Sam Case—who’d rented one of the two-bedroom units on the second floor—had married Mandy Hillman, who had the two-bedroom unit on the first floor. He’d moved downstairs and Grace and Jenny had taken over Sam’s old apartment. Now Jenny had her own room.

      Sylvie Casamento was right there in the middle of all of them to keep her disparaging eye on anything that even remotely concerned her and a lot that didn’t. And at the moment she was very interested in the man in the cab. She was already inching toward the car to peer inside. Who knew what McKenna would tell her given the chance?

      Grace turned back and yanked open the door again. “I changed my mind. You’re coming with me.”

      “No, thanks,” McKenna said. “I’ll just wait.”

      “That wasn’t an option. Now,” she added in a fierce undertone when he still didn’t move.

      “On second thought, yes, sir, I’m on my way.”

      Grace headed past Mrs. C toward the lobby, then she stalked across the pretty black-and-white tiles and the ferns there. She scooted past Sam and Mandy’s door and took the stairs two at a time to the second floor. She was on the landing before she finally heard McKenna behind her. She did not hear Sylvia Casamento. With any luck, the woman had walked on with that nasty beast she called a feline.

      Grace burst into her apartment as if all the demons of hell were trying to grab her heels. Jenny was sitting on the sofa, watching TV.

      “I’ve got to go out again,” Grace told her quickly.

      Jenny’s gaze came around to find her. “Hmm? How come?”

      Then all six-foot-two inches of green-eyed, blond-haired Aidan McKenna finally strolled in behind Grace. “I need her,” he explained conversationally.

      There were a few things in life that Grace knew she really didn’t tolerate well. One of them was having a stranger touch her. Surprises weren’t high on her hit list either. In the past half hour, McKenna had done both.

      When she wheeled on him, she felt all the telltale signs of an imminent temper tantrum. He was looking around as though contemplating where to sit.

      “You will not move from that spot,” she told him.

      “So what’s the price of admission?”

      “There is none. I’ll only be a minute. There’s no need for you to come in.”

      “He’s already as in as a bug in a rug,” Jenny pointed out.

      Grace whipped back to look at her roommate and McKenna waltzed right past her. “Hey!” she shouted as he sat beside Jenny on the sofa.

      “You know, I never understood that expression,” he said to Jenny.

      Her head was starting to hurt again. Grace drove her fingers into her hair. “That’s because she said it wrong. Bugs aren’t ‘in.’ They’re ‘snug.’” She knew. She’d made it a point over the years to understand English colloquialisms and catalogue them in her memory. It was just another way of banishing her past. And why in the name of heaven was she discussing this anyway? Jenny always tortured analogies—it wasn’t worth the time or effort to try to set her straight.

      But McKenna wasn’t willing to let the subject go. “‘In’ can be ‘snug,’” he said. “In my experience anyway.” Then he grinned wickedly.

      Grace felt the heat of his look—and the innuendo of his comment—all the way to her bones. Something started to vibrate at the core of her. “Stop that.”

      “Stop what?” he asked innocently. Then he glanced at Jenny again. “Does she mellow out toward the wee hours of the morning? I just ask because we’re about to spend the night together.”

      “She’s kind of muzzy around the edges when she first wakes up in the morning,” Jenny replied. “Sort of like—you’re what?” She gasped when his comment hit her.

      “Stop! Both of you, just stop!” Grace shouted. Oh, God, she thought, he’d made her shout again. “Don’t speak to him,” she told Jenny. “Don’t encourage him. And you—” She pointed at McKenna and then at the door. “You wait in the cab.”

      “You just told me to wait in here.”

      “That was because Mrs. Casamento was outside. Now I’ve changed my mind.”

      “Is Mrs. C outside?” Jenny shot off the sofa. “I owe her ten bucks. She let me borrow her laptop the other day.”

      Grace wasn’t sure which part of that threw her off more—that crotchety, nasty old Mrs. Casamento had a laptop, which she had actually charged Jenny for the use of it, or that Jenny had borrowed it at all when Grace had one right here in the apartment. Grace settled on the latter. “Why didn’t you use mine?”

      Jenny headed to the door. “Because you’re proprietary.”

      “And easy to provoke,” McKenna added.

      “You stay out of this!” Grace pressed her palms to her cheeks.

      “No, no, that’s not true.” Jenny addressed McKenna. “Grace is unflappable. She never flaps. She’s a port in a storm.”

      “Couldn’t prove it by me,” he said.

      “I got you out of jail, didn’t I?” Grace yelled, at the end of her rope.

      “That was flapped,” he said to Jenny. “As in the antithesis of unflappable.”

      Jenny smiled happily. “You must have a way with her.”

      Grace turned for the bedrooms then she stopped and looked back again. “You didn’t borrow my laptop because I’m proprietary?” she asked her.

      “You get edgy about your things when they cost you a lot of money.”

      “I believe she just called you cheap,” McKenna pointed out.

      “I’m not cheap. I’m responsible. You ought to try it sometime.”

      “I’m trying it right now. I’m not paying for that cab you’ve got waiting downstairs, am I?”

      “Damn it!” Grace veered for the hall again and this time she made it to her room if only because visions of escalating cab fare propelled her.

      Her bedroom was dove-gray and spartan. She liked things clean and neat. It was virtually impossible to misplace something without clutter to camouflage it. She’d spent too much of her life never knowing what might happen to her next. She needed order.

      Jenny tended to turn the rest of the apartment on its ear. There was never any telling what she was going to bring home or what she might do with it once she got it here. But in this room, there was only a double bed with perfectly pressed pewter sheets and a comforter a couple of shades darker. There was her desk—and her needed laptop—and a single dresser with a photo of her family on the farm in Maruja tucked into the top drawer where she kept her lingerie.

      Grace was tempted to reach for the photo now, a crazy effort to center herself again. She hardly ever took it out, rarely looked at it. The