Page 11 of Immortal By Morning
“Is that because your boss is difficult to get along with?” Delacort asked with interest.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Abril said carefully, not because it wasn’t true, but because Gina was her boss. She wasn’t going to insult her boss. In fact, she was always very careful to never paint Gina in a poorlight, no matter how irritated she got with her sometimes petulant, tyrannical behavior. Well, usually, she thought with a pinch of guilt. Unfortunately, in a moment of camaraderie with Officer Peters as they’d waited by the skeletons... Well, it had been freezing cold, and they’d been chatting to pass the time and she may have mentioned that Gina had a problem holding on to employees, otherwise she’d have someone to take the dog inside for them.
Abril was not going to say that again. Heck, she was more than a little shocked that she’d even said it the once. The cold must have been affecting her so that her brain had not been functioning properly.
“Peters said you did,” Delacort told her gently.
Abril cursed under her breath and then smiled with chagrin. “Okay, I may have told him that she has a little trouble keeping employees, but, really, she’s a good person. She’s very creative, very talented, very intelligent, and she can be charming. Unfortunately, she’s always very busy and has a dearth of patience, which can make her abrasive at times when dealing with certain issues.”
“Very diplomatically stated,” he told her with amusement and then changed the subject. “So, you are staying here for how long?”
“Until Gina comes back,” she said simply.
“Which is when?”
When Abril hesitated, he asked, “Youdohave an end date for her vacation, do you not?”
Abril blinked at his turn of phrase. He had a very old-fashioned way of speaking. So did his partner. Neither of them had yet used a single contraction. She found that curious, but didn’t comment on it and simply said, “She has a return ticket for two and a half weeks from now.”
“But?” he queried, gaze narrowing on her.
Abril rolled her eyes. She was very aware that her expressions pretty much gave everything away in life. She’d never be a good poker player, or make her way as a con artist. Giving it up, she said, “But that’s not a guarantee that she’ll be back two and a half weeks from now.”
Delacort’s eyebrows inched up his forehead a bit. “She does not stick to her plans?”
“It’s more like her plans are a sort of loose guideline,” Abril corrected. “Shewillset a date and time for things to happen. However, if something pops up to interfere with those plans, she’s open to changing them.”
“Riiigghht,” Delacort drew out the word, and then asked, “You do not have a problem with being expected to stay here indefinitely and at her whim?”
Abril smiled faintly at his expression. He was looking almost offended on her behalf. He wasn’t the first one to have that reaction. But he was the first one to have it so soon after meeting her and before they’d become friends. On the other hand, she supposed she didn’t normally tell people things like that right off the bat either. Shrugging those thoughts aside, she let her smile widen. “I mean what’s there to have a problem with? There’s a pool here, a hot tub, a games room, an exercise room... I mean, it’s kind of like an exotic luxury hotel.”
“Only without the staff to look after you.” His tone was dry.
“Which means I don’t have to tip anyone,” she pointed out lightly.
He smiled reluctantly, and then asked, “You do have your own home, though?”
“Oh, right. You probably need my address for your report, don’t you?” she said with realization. “I have a little studio apartment in the city.” She rattled off the address and then grinned at the expression that covered his face. It was somewhere between horror and dismay. Her apartment was actually only a half a block away from the police station, an area that was possibly the worst part of the city. That was rather ironic to her mind. She would’ve thought that the police station being so close would mean it was an area where people behaved and crime was low. Unfortunately, it was just the opposite. The area was mostly populated with halfway houses and drug dens, with a few apartments and a lot of older houses offering rentals. It really was a bad area. She’d encountered strung-out junkies, passed-out drunks, and countless used needles on her way to her car in the mornings, and worse while making her way inside at night. But her studio apartment was newly renovated, lovely, and cheap because it was hard to get tenants there.
Seeing the struggle Delacort was having with the fact that she lived in such a dumpy area, Abril explained, “I used to have a penthouse in a better part of town, but with the hours I worked, sometimes I didn’t even get home. I would just sack out on the couch in my office and get up the next day to continue working. In the end, I was paying a lot of money for a place that I only got to sleep in at the best of times, and sometimes not even that when I have to travel with Gina to deal with customers and clients.”
“Do you have to travel a lot for work?”
“I probably spend a third of the year traveling for work,” she guessed, and knew it was a conservative estimate, it was probably more than forty percent of the time. “Anyway, it seemed a waste to pay so much for a place I rarely got to enjoy, so I ended up getting rid of the penthouse and just getting the little studio apartment to sleep in for now. It saves me a heck of a lot of money, which I’ve just been socking away in the bank and investing.”
Smiling faintly, she told him, “I could probably buy a house right now if I wanted. It would just be a waste of money because I’d rarely be there.”
“You’re very practical,” he commented solemnly.
“That’s me. The incredibly practical chick,” Abril said lightly, and then her tone becoming more serious she said, “I’m very detail oriented. It makes for a good executive assistant, but also makes me boring.”
“I do not see you as anywhere near boring,” Delacort countered at once.
Abril was pretty sure her eyebrows flew right up off her face at that point. She managed to pull them back down and act as if she wasn’t terribly flattered as she assured him, “Well, you’d be the first person to say so.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You’re just saying that because I’ve got multiple skeletons in my garden. Well, my boss’s garden anyway,” she corrected herself.
