Snow Job Read online

  “It wasn’t the sort of thing I thought would go over well on a phone call. And I didn’t know you were sleeping in, although I guess I should have assumed you would be. You always do when you get the chance.”

  Elyce wished she’d remained standing. From her current location she could smell Karl’s aftershave, lightly applied though it was. And the clean smell of his hair, which despite his long drive that morning was still a tiny bit damp over his ears and at the back. He always kept it short, but the thick curls took a long time to dry, she recalled, especially in the cold weather.

  “What made you assume I’d be alone?” she asked suddenly, remembering that when he’d seen her last she’d been on a date. Or at least, on what he clearly assumed was a date. Not that she had done anything to suggest otherwise. She had to remind herself now that it actually had been a date.

  Karl shrugged again. “I didn’t. But when I got here I only saw one car, and it was your car. So I figured I was pretty safe.”

  Astro leapt to the couch between them and turned around happily with his captured toy, tramping in a circle before settling down to gnaw at the squeaky. His goal, as always, was to disembowel the toy and remove the squeaker itself, thereby silencing it forever. On the dark brown leather of the loveseat, loose white hairs from his rough coat were already visible. Elyce knew from experience that contrasting dark hairs from Astro’s few scattered black spots would have already been shed onto the light tan duvet that covered her bed. Within minutes of his arrival, it seemed, the house was always covered in dog hair that she never seemed fully able to clean up before his next visit.

  “You don’t want any development on the inlet, right? No matter what it is, you just don’t want it happening?”

  She eyed him cautiously. “Right. It’s a fragile, protected inlet with a specific microclimate. It needs to be left untouched. Anything you build there is going to threaten the—”

  “I get it,” Karl interrupted impatiently. “You made yourself clear about the shrimp thing yesterday. Although you had no trouble eating their cousins at dinner with Andrew Barron, I noticed.”

  “We’re working on a number of cases together,” she replied haughtily.

  “Are you sleeping with him?”

  His question was inevitable, but she bristled as though she hadn’t expected it. “That’s none of your business.”

  In the horrible silence that followed, Astro sat up with a little whine, his bright brown eyes traveling anxiously from one human face to the other as though he wanted them to say something comforting.

  “You want the inlet to stay safe from development?” Karl repeated at last, coldly.

  “Yes.”

  “My grandparents, the McDonald grandparents, are going to be in Breckenridge this Christmas. And my mother still hasn’t broken the news about us to them. She thinks the idea of a divorce in the family would be a huge blow to them, and she’s been avoiding telling them about it all year.

  “Now it’s nearly Christmas and she doesn’t want to spoil their holiday with news like that. She’s promised to tell them after New Year’s, when they’re heading back home. But she realized that if I were there at the cabin without you, there would be a lot of awkward questions. Not to mention the fact that one of the nieces might say something about whatever story I came up with to explain why you weren’t there. But they really don’t get what the separation means, so I don’t think they’ll wonder why you’re showing up with me. They’d still be more puzzled if you didn’t.”

  “Karl. Your mother…honestly.” Elyce sighed, exasperated. She might have accused Karl of concocting the story from whole cloth if she hadn’t known his mother so well. Alice was sensitive to a fault, and this sort of thing was exactly what she would do to avoid delivering painful news. “How is this my fault?” Elyce knew she sounded whiny, but didn’t care.

  “It isn’t your fault.”

  “What does this have to do with the project though?”

  “Quid pro quo. You want the inlet protected. I need you in Colorado for Christmas to keep my mother from making my life miserable, and to keep from ruining the holiday for my elderly grandparents. You come with me and put on a good show of still being happily married, and I’ll ensure that no development happens on that stretch of shoreline.”

  Elyce sat in stunned silence, trying to take in Karl’s offer, absently ruffling the fur behind Astro’s ears. “You’re actually asking me to…to prostitute myself over this? Am I hearing this correctly?”

  Karl’s jaw tightened as it had the previous evening. “You realize you’re still technically my wife, Elyce. We’re only separated, not divorced. It would hardly constitute prostitution—even if that were what I was asking. Which it isn’t. What do you take me for?”

  “I’m not sure anymore, Karl. I can’t believe you would try to manipulate me this way. Using your mother? Your grandparents? Is that any way to— What are you doing?”

  Karl lifted Astro from the couch and placed the dog on the floor with hands as gentle as they were rough a moment later, when they grabbed Elyce by the shoulders. “If that’s what you want to think, then that’s the offer I’ll make, Elyce. A little test of your commitment to the environment. Just think of it, all those tiny, helpless little shrimp. And I’m sure there are other habitats there too. I could flatten the whole thing, just bulldoze it and slap some concrete down. It’s all up to you.” He pulled her closer suddenly, locking his arms around her waist and ignoring her efforts to push herself away.

  “Karl, quit it. Just stop.”

  “All up to you,” he repeated snidely. “But I guess your resolve doesn’t extend quite that far. All that land, all those endangered little creatures and you won’t spend a holiday with your own husband to save them. You’d rather live in a world without those things than inconvenience yourself for them. Never mind the fact that you won’t inconvenience yourself to make Christmas a little happier for a group of people who are legally still your family.”

  “That’s a low blow, Karl. You know I care about your family. And this isn’t about them, anyway.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s all about me. And I really couldn’t care less about my grandparents or the damned shrimp right now.” And he lowered his lips to hers too swiftly for her to protest.

  It was just like it had been before—and nothing like it had been before. Fire licked through Elyce’s loins, and Karl took advantage of her inadvertent gasp to delve farther, tightening his grasp as he deepened the kiss.

  Out of habit or long-denied need, Elyce found her mouth parting to admit his advances, even as her racing mind screamed for release. She knew Karl’s kiss like her own breath, knew her own response, but the whole thing had never been angry before, never a defiant battle of wills fought with lips and tongues as weapons.

  She blushed to the roots of her hair when she realized the struggle was turning them both on. When he finally lifted his head, allowing them a pause for air, Elyce hauled herself away and crossed the room to yank open the door and point imperiously at Karl’s SUV.

  “Get out!” she demanded, and then glared furiously when Karl simply smirked at her and remained firmly seated on her couch. Only his slightly rapid breathing gave away the fact that he wasn’t as composed as he seemed.

  “Well, that was interesting.”

  “Karl, I mean it. Leave now.”

  “It really wasn’t what I had in mind, but still…”

  “Karl!”

  “Close the door. It’s already freezing in here, no point in making it colder.”

  After a moment of enraged staring, she slammed the door shut with an impatient growl. “You suck, you know that?”

  “Helpless shrimp. Sweet old people. It’s that simple. Make your choice, Elyce.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You never used to talk that way. Who have you been hanging out with lately, Wife?”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “It’s true though.
But it doesn’t matter right now. Make a choice and I’ll go.”

  “You will? Good. I choose the option where I take you to court.”

  “The land itself isn’t protected there. And the impact statement, which you didn’t bother to read, says the shrimp won’t be harmed by the proposed use. I have the science to back it up. So go on, take me to court.”

  “I don’t care what the statement says, any development is going to change the habitat, and even minute changes could threaten the entire population of shrimp in those waters.”

  “You’ll still lose the case and you know it.”

  She did know it, and it was infuriating to think about. It was the main reason she kept avoiding the impact statement. Because she knew it would likely provide no ammunition and the longer she waited before facing that fact, the better. But the alternative Karl was proposing…

  “Would sex be part of the arrangement?”

  “Part of the quid pro quo? No,” he said firmly. “But you would have to put up a reasonable show of affection for the benefit of my grandparents and the nieces and nephew, and you would have to share a room with me. No sleeping on the couch. Granddad gets up at about five in the morning. He’d find you down there and the jig would be up right away.”

  “I could just say you’d started snoring.”

  “No deal. Besides, you’ll want to be up in the bedroom where it’s warm. Once the fire dies down you’ll freeze in the living room with all those windows.”

  “True,” Elyce conceded. She had spent enough winter nights in the cabin to know, after all. Even with costly, efficient central heating, the great room couldn’t really hold its heat at night in the winter without the fire blazing. It was, she supposed, the price of the spectacular view. “You could sleep on the couch and say I was snoring.”

  “Again, no deal. So will you do it or not?” He sounded cold again, impartial, as though the outcome didn’t matter to him. Elyce couldn’t help but envy his ability to sound so calm, when she knew full well he wasn’t.

  “If I agree, what are you going to do with your plan instead? You’ll just move the development, is that it? Where?”

  “I have some other options. Less ecologically delicate options. So are you agreeing to this?”

  Elyce hesitated. It wasn’t that she distrusted Karl, exactly. True, she had felt betrayed when he gave up a junior partnership at an environmental law practice to take the reins of a major real estate development company. But she didn’t think he would deliberately renege on an agreement like this. Her fear, she admitted, had to do with her own wayward response to his advances. Could she withstand the temptations that those nights would present, and the guilt of spending so much time with Karl’s kind and affectionate family who had all made it clear they would welcome her back?

  On the other hand, would it ever be this easy again, the cancellation of a potentially harmful construction project? For the price of a few days of her time, probably considerably less time than she would have spent for a trial, she could achieve her goal and then be on her way with her mission accomplished. And, as Karl pointed out, she would also be helping his mother and grandparents, for whom she still had a tremendous fondness. At least, she would be helping them in the short term.

  Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded. “All right. I’ll do it.”

  Chapter Four

  It took Elyce almost a week to get up the nerve to tell her parents she wouldn’t be spending Christmas at their home that year as planned.

  The following Thursday, eating dinner under her mother’s watchful eye, she raised the issue and prepared to combat her mother’s automatic assumption.

  “You’re trying again? Honey, that’s wonderful! You know how we feel about Karl, we’d really been hoping you two would work it out.”

  “No,” Elyce protested immediately. “It’s nothing like that. It’s just a favor. For Alice, really. She hasn’t told Karl’s grandparents, her parents, about the separation yet. I now it’s crazy, it’s been almost a year. But now she’s worried that if they find out it will ruin their Christmas, and evidently she’s very concerned about how they’ll take the news, so…”

  Her mother’s brow was furrowing in an alarming manner. Elyce’s father, sensing blood in the water, excused himself quietly from the table with a little nod of support Elyce’s way. He too liked Karl, but he knew better than to get between Elyce and her mother at a time like this.

  “So you’re going to participate in a lie, Elyce? Let them all think that you and Karl are back together and then drop the bomb after the holiday? How will that help anything? You know I think your mother-in-law is a dear, but this?”

  Elyce knew her mother had never thought of Alice Nash as a “dear” anything, but wisely kept silent about the comment. “I know it’s a little unorthodox, but they’re nice people. And she means well. I do hate to think of the McDonalds finding out such bad news when they get to the cabin and I’m just not there. Nobody in that family gets divorced. It really would be a blow.”

  Sharon Anderson contemplated her daughter through narrowed gray eyes as she stood up and began gathering dishes from the table. Petite and slim, with a tightly marshaled blonde bob and an air of constant briskness, she tended to tense up visibly in times of confrontation. Now her quick, choppy movements told of her anxiety, even more than her voice. “And what are the sleeping arrangements going to be?”

  “Mom!”

  “Well?”

  “Well what? We won’t be doing anything together but sleeping. But the whole point is to act like we’re still married. If we insisted on separate rooms I think it would sort of defeat the purpose, don’t you?” At her mother’s continued disapproving glare, Elyce shrugged helplessly. “I said I’d do it, Mom, I can’t go back on that now. What do you want, anyway? I thought you liked Karl.”

  “I do like Karl, sweetie,” Sharon said with a defeated sigh. “But what matters is whether or not you like Karl. What I want is just for you to be happy. That’s all, just happy. That’s pretty much all your father and I have ever wanted for you kids.”

  “I know, Mom. And I am happy, really. I’m just trying to help Karl’s family, I feel like I owe them that much. This is not going to be a big deal. Besides, I think Riley enjoys having you guys all to himself for Christmas.” Elyce held the door to the kitchen open for her mother, who sidled by carrying an improbable number of dishes balanced on her arms.

  “Honey, Riley is a fifteen-year-old boy,” Sharon pointed out. “He doesn’t truly enjoy any event where his parents have to be in attendance. That’s just how fifteen-year-old boys are.”

  Elyce’s younger brother Riley—who was already a good deal taller than she was, nearly as tall as their father, and therefore objected to being called her “little” brother—was actually a fairly amiable teenager who got along well with his parents, as he did with everyone else. But Elyce admitted her mother was probably right. Even Riley couldn’t be all that thrilled about spending a holiday with only his parents for company, although she wasn’t sure she would have been much better in his eyes as a hip holiday companion. She was fourteen years older, and Riley often seemed to see her as more of an aunt than an older sister.

  “When I come back I’ll take him off your hands for a day or two while he’s still off from school, and let him practice his driving. I know you hate to do it and there’s plenty of open road out by my place.”

  “Well, now you’re just bribing me. But I’ll take what I can get. Rinse those bowls all the way off before you put them in that dishwasher, young lady.”

  Elyce bit her tongue and refrained from saying, “I know, Mother.” It was hard to stop herself, but she liked to think she was growing too old for that sort of thing. Though not too old to roll her eyes and sigh noisily when her mother took her to task for failing to properly dry the handwashed items before returning them to their cabinets and drawers. Some things never changed.

  * * * * *

  Once the agreement had been m
ade, the time seemed to slip by at an astonishing pace. Elyce had dragged her ski clothes out of storage, taken one long look and promptly decided she needed to indulge in a new set of gear for the slopes if she wanted to be even remotely in style on the trip. She loved to ski, but had to admit a large part of her attraction to the sport would always be getting to wear the cute outfits.

  Her first effort to find the perfect new ski bib and parka, however, was fruitless. Late on a Friday, with only eight days left before she was to leave for Colorado with Karl, she ventured out again and had better luck. Buried on a sale rack, she found a sleek aubergine faux-fur-trimmed number that contrasted nicely with the dark blonde of her hair and the dark green of her eyes.

  She had accepted another dinner invitation from Andrew for that night. But when Elyce returned home from her shopping trip, planning to spend some time getting ready to go out, she found an urgent message from Karl on her machine, asking if she could take Astro for the weekend. He had an unexpected business trip, he said. Neither Emily nor Will was able to take the dog until later in the weekend and the kennel they had always used was unfortunately booked solid. Glancing at the clock with an exasperated sigh, Elyce picked up the phone and dialed Karl’s number, so familiar because it had been her own for years.

  “Will you be able to watch him?” Karl asked with no preamble when he picked up the phone.

  “Hello to you too.”

  “Hi. Sorry. Caller ID, I knew it was you. So can you take ’Stro? I hate to ask, but I don’t have anywhere else to send him.”

  “Of course I can take him.” She toed her shoes off and tried to struggle out of her jeans with one hand while holding the phone with the other. “Are you going to bring him by, or what?”

  “Yeah. You’ll still be there in about an hour?”

  “I’ll have to be. He can’t stay in the house alone, he’ll eat through the doorjamb.” Elyce spared a glance at the front doorframe, which still bore the marks Astro had gnawed there on the one previous occasion she’d tried to leave him alone inside the house. Even that short trip to the store had resulted in mid-level destruction before she’d returned. Leaving Astro for an entire evening while she was out on a date was unthinkable. “Just bring him by, I’ll be here.”