“Sure. What’s your asking price?” She couldn’t afford the lawn care.
“At least what I paid for it.” They moved through the gigantic kitchen with its intricate stone and tile work and professional-grade appliances. She followed him past the pantry and laundry room, and above a built-in mud bench next to the back door, two sets of keys hung from hooks. One set had a Mercedes emblem, the other unmistakably the keys to a Hummer. “I’m probably going to regret this,” he muttered as he grabbed the Mercedes keys with the thumb and forefinger of his bad hand.
Chelsea slid around him and opened the back door, holding it for him as he carefully stepped down. A shiny gold Mercedes S550 sedan sat in the middle of his five-car garage. The lights blinked, the locks deactivated by the key fob. One of her previous employers had driven a S550. Only older. This one was brand-spanking-new. She shut the door behind them. “Ooh. Come to Mama.”
“You’re going to drive careful. Right?” He turned, and she almost ran into his chest.
“Right.” A hand’s width separated her Gaultier from plain white cotton, and she ran her gaze up his T-shirt, over his throat and stubbly chin, to his mouth.
“I’ve driven this car one time,” she watched him say before she looked up into his eyes staring down at her. “Three days before my accident, I drove it home from the dealership.” He might be a jerk, but he smelled wonderful. Like some sort of manly soap on clean manly skin. He held up the keys, then dropped them into her waiting palm. “I’m not kidding about killing you.”
He looked serious. “I haven’t had a ticket in about five years,” she said as she followed him around to the passenger side. “Well, maybe a parking ticket, but nonmoving violations don’t count.”
He reached for the front passenger door as she reached for the back. “I’m not sitting back there.” The hard splint surrounding his middle finger hit against the door, and he couldn’t grasp the handle with his other fingers. Chelsea pushed his hand aside and opened the door for him. “I can open my own freakin’ door,” he barked.
“I’m the chauffeur. Remember?” Really though, it was just easier and faster if she did it. She watched him slowly lower himself into the car, one corner of his mouth tightening as he pulled his legs inside. “Do you need help with your seat belt?”
“No.” He reached for it with his left hand. “I’m not two years old. I can buckle my own seat belt. I can feed myself, tie my own shoes, and I don’t need help taking a piss.”
Chelsea closed the door and walked around to the side. “Ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars,” she whispered.
The new-car smell filled her head as she climbed inside and dumped her purse in the back. Soft beige leather caressed her back and behind. She sighed and pressed the ignition button. The motor purred like a content little kitten. “You have the premium package.” She ran her hands over the leather-covered steering wheel. “Heated everything. GPS. A place to plug in your iPod. Nice.”
“How do you know about my premium package?”
She ignored the innuendo. “I’m from L.A. We get heated seats and steering wheels even though it hardly ever drops below sixty degrees.” She pushed the garage opener clipped to the visor, and one of the doors slid up. When she engaged the GPS system, it lit up and asked in a perky female voice, “Hello Mark. Where to?” She glanced at his stony profile as she requested the medical center. Then she buckled her seat belt and looked behind her as she backed the Mercedes out of the shadowy garage and into the sunlight. “Whenever I drive an expensive car out of someone’s garage, I always feel So alwayslike Ferris Bueller. I swear I can hear the music in my head.” She lowered her voice and said as deep as possible, “Bow bow—oooohhh yeeeaah.”
“Are you high?”
The garage door closed and she slid the car into drive.
“No. I don’t take drugs.” There’d been a time when she’d toyed with drugs. Experimenting with this and that, but she’d seen firsthand the horrible waste of addiction and she’d chosen not to go down that road. “You’ll be happy to know that I passed a drug test to get this job.” She eased her foot off the brake, rolled past her Honda, and proceeded down the driveway. “Apparently they’re careful about whom they hire.”
“Obviously.” He leaned his head back and brushed his thumb along the handle of his cane. “They sent me a nurse who’d rather play chauffeur.”
“Turn right,” the GPS instructed, and Chelsea headed for the 520. “One mile north. 8.8 miles till destination.”
“That’s annoying,” Mark grumbled as he leaned forward, and messed around with the GPS screen until the voice command option was silenced.
The Mercedes rolled along the asphalt as if it owned the road. For a few seconds, she debated whether to tell him that she wasn’t a nurse. If he found out later, he might get mad. Then again, maybe if he found out later, he’d like her and it wouldn’t matter. She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, sitting over there like the Grim Reaper. Yeah, right. “Listen, Mark—May I call you Mark?”
“Mr. Bressler is good.”
She returned her attention to the road. “Listen, Mr. Bressler, I’m not a nurse. Not technically a health care worker either.” Since he was probably going to get mad anyway, she went for broke. “You’ve been such a pain in the ass—with all due respect—that no one in the Chinooks’ organization bothered to fill me in on what I should do for you. I suspect that no one expects me to last more than ten minutes. I was just handed a schedule and told good luck.”
For several tense moments, stunned silence filled the car. “You’re not ‘technically a health care worker.’ Do you have any sort of medical training?”
“I know CPR and I played a nurse on TV.”
“You what?”
“I played a nurse on The Bold and the Beautiful.”
“If you’re ‘not technically a health care worker,’ what are you?”
She glanced across the Mercedes at him. Morning sunlight penetrated the leafy pattern of the tree-lined street and poured in through the windshield. The gray shadows brushed his face and slid across his blinding white T-?shirt. “I’m an actress.”
His mouth parted in shock. “They sent me an actress?”
“Yeah, evidently.”
“Take the 520 West,” he advised, even thoughsor, even the navigation system was showing her the same thing.
Behind her sunglasses, she rolled her eyes and took the freeway ramp to Seattle. “I’ve been the personal assistant to various celebrities for more than seven years. I have a lot of experience putting up with bull crap.” Arrogant whiners, the lot of them. “An assistant is better than a nurse. I do all the work, you take all the credit. If something bad happens, I get the blame. There is no down side.”
“Except that I have to put up with you. Hovering around, watching me. And you don’t even have the qualifications to take my pulse or wipe my ass.” He opened the console between the seats and pulled out a pair of silver-rimmed aviator sunglasses.
“You seem to be a healthy guy. Do you need someone to wipe your ass?”
“You offering?”
She shook her head and passed a minivan with a my-kid’s-smarter-than-your-kid bumper sticker. “No. I draw the line at any sort of personal contact with my employer.” She glanced over her left shoulder and merged into the faster lane.
“You just cut off that van full of kids.”
She glanced at him. “Plenty of room.”
“You’re driving too fast,” he said through a dark scowl that might have intimidated other people. Other people who weren’t used to dealing with difficult egomaniacs.
“I’m only going five miles over the speed limit. Everyone knows five miles doesn’t count.” She returned her attention to the road. “If you’re going to be a backseat driver, I’m going to make you sit in the backseat like Miss Daisy.” It was pretty much an empty threat and they both knew it. Her brain scrambled for a response if he called her on it. The key to assistant survival was to remain physically and mentally nimble and anticipate your bigheaded employer’s next move.
“You must not be a very good actress if you’re in Seattle babysitting me.”
Her nimble brain hadn’t anticipated that from him. She told herself there were ten thousand reasons why she
