Page 23 of Make Me Sin (Bad Habit 2)
“I forgot to tell you—jeez, jump a little, why don’t you?”
“Sorry.” I put a hand over my thundering heart. “I was just spacing out. You surprised me.”
She peers at me. “You okay today? You’ve been spacey all morning.”
I clear my throat. “Just . . . yeah. Still not feeling a hundred percent. I’ve got that . . . er, flu that’s going around.”
The wine flu, Kat calls it.
“What’s up?”
She holds out an order form. “That order Big Daddy sent—”
“Oh no, not you, too,” I interrupt, grimacing.
She grins. Behind her trendy glasses, her big brown eyes sparkle. “Yeah. I heard your brother call him that and thought it was totally apropos. That dude is just a big ol’ huggy bear of a man. Grrrr!” She makes a growly bear noise and sticks her butt out like she’s awaiting a slap on it. “Hey Big Daddy Bear, Little Baby Bear has been baaaaad! She needs a spanking!”
“Please never do that again, or I’ll demote you to bucket scrubber.”
Straightening, Trina laughs. “Don’t worry, it’s not me he wants to spank anyway.” She gives me her signature you know what I’m saying, girlfriend face, which is a bizarre combination of pursed lips, wiggling eyebrows, head nodding, and hair tossing that always manages to make her appear as if a blood vessel in her brain has just burst.
I’m too busy rewinding what she’s said to fully appreciate it. “What? Who? Me?”
Rolling her eyes, Trina sighs. “Did you, or did you not, attend elementary school?”
I did in fact attend elementary school. It was a private school that my parents paid thirty thousand dollars a year in tuition for, so I could finger-paint and bang on drums and “learn music, theater, dramatic play, athletics, and environmental awareness, all of which stimulate the senses and support different ways of learning.”
Trina went to public school in Venice, where she was in a girl gang.
I simply answer, “Yes.”
“Okay. So you remember that little asshole kid who would pick on you, and pull your ponytail in class, and try to trip you when you were walking past him at recess?”
I frown. “How did you know about Mikey Dolan?”
“Because every girl has a Mikey Dolan, dummy!”
I stare at Trina. “Did you smoke a bowl before you came to work? Because you’re sounding a little stoney.”
“Ugh. Never mind.” She holds out the order form. “What I needed to tell you was that order from Big—excuse me,” she amends when she sees the warning look on my face. “That order from Mr. Edwards is a no go.”
“Why? What’s wrong with it?”
She shrugs. “The address is wrong, or incomplete. They sent an email from the wire service to let us know. So they need a correct address, or a telephone number, so they can call the recipient. They’re going to hold it until we get back to them.”
I take the order from her hand and review it. It’s for one hundred long stem white roses, which we charge seven hundred dollars for. He’s not kidding around.
“There’s no message for the enclosure card.”
“He didn’t want one.”
Trina and I share a look. The only time men don’t want to include a message with a bouquet of flowers they’re sending is if the woman they’re sending them to is married to someone else, or if he’s a stalker.
“All right. I’ll follow up on it, thanks.”
Exactly how I’m going to follow up on it is a mystery, because there’s this fun little device called a phone that’s missing in the equation. I have no way of contacting A.J.
Directly, anyway.
