Tell Me More by Janet Mullany Page B

you.”
    She removed her fencing mask. “You would?”
    “Sure. But why doesn’t the cat catch them?”
    “Sometimes he does. I don’t think he’s much of a hunter. That’s real nice of you, Patrick, but you can’t use glue traps and they have their own peanut butter—”
    “Consider it a term of my rental. Why do you wear a fencing mask?”
    “One time a mouse wasn’t dead and when Hugh found it he let it go and it ran up his leg and bit his knee.”
    “Inside his pants?”
    “No, he wasn’t wearing… I mean, it was summer. Shorts.” She smiled. “I’m very grateful. Really. I have another trap over there. You’ll need the flashlight. It’s dark in that corner. I just hope they enjoy the peanut butter. It’s not organic, but it’s quite good.”
    “Of course.” He found another small corpse with an expression of surprise on its face, or what looked like it. Under her cringing supervision he smeared more peanut butter onto the traps and reset them.
    All the while he wondered what she was wearing beneath her jeans and sweater.
     
     
    “Thank you for the flowers,” I said to Willis.
    “I’d hoped you might call me.” He snatched two glasses of wine deftly from a circulating waiter and handed one to me. Around us the party was in full swing, held in the large open space in the middle of the radio station. Once the building had been a small parochial school and this had been the assembly room. I’d lost sight of Patrick, who’d been appropriated by Liz Ferrar.
    I shrugged. I’d sent a polite email thank-you to Willis. I wasn’t about to make up any excuses. I took a small sip of the wine—not much, I had to be on air in ten minutes.
    “So, lunch,” he said as though I’d made some sort of encouraging response.
    “I’m flattered and all that, but you’re not really my type.”
    He grinned. “You’re very direct. I like that.”
    Oh, crap. I couldn’t win with this guy. So much for honesty. “Oh, I think Bill is going to cut his cake. I’d better—”
    “Not for a while yet. So how about it? Lunch tomorrow? I’ll pick you up at twelve?”
    Before I could come up with a conventional sort of response about checking my schedule, he grabbed my hand. “Look, I know you think I’m a flake because I’ve cut a few trees down in my time. We have different values. You’re a sort of hippie—”
    “No, I’m not. My mother is a hippie. Just because I work in radio—”
    “Whatever. I make money. I like money. I like spending money on girls.”
    “Jesus, Willis, listen to yourself. I’m not a girl.”
    “Woman, then. Women.”
    “And I don’t like the idea of being some sort of money pit. What’s in it for you anyway?” I almost hoped he’d say fucking but even he wasn’t that crude.
    “Jo.” His thumb caressed the back of my hand and to my astonishment it made me feel…well, probably more the way I should have felt during a night of fucking with Jason, the permanently erect. “I’m interested in you. I know you’re going to say I don’t know you, but I’d like to. We have different values. So what? It keeps things interesting. I have money and I guess you don’t. So let’s pool resources.”
    “And what do I bring to this interesting relationship?”
    “Willis! So glad you could come!” Kimberly bore down on us, deftly reorganizing her wineglass, plate, purse, napkin and various other odds and ends to kiss Willis’s cheek without pouring zinfandel down his pants. “Jo was just talking about y—”
    “No, I wasn’t,” I interjected before Kimberly encouraged him any further.
    “We’ll talk soon, okay?” And she was off in a cloud of social fairy dust, leaving me fuming and Willis in firm possession of my hand.
    “We’d have fun,” he said.
    My instinctive retort was to say I wasn’t into fun but I hesitated. Some fun might be good. I had a serious sort of job with strange hours and a very odd sex life—and I could seduce the pants off Willis and tell