Tribute

shoulder while her breath came in short, raw gasps. She felt him tremble, found herself pleased she wasn’t the only one.
    “Oh,” she managed, “ God .”
    “Give me a minute. I’ll help you down.”
    “Take your time. I’m fine where I am. Where am I?”
    His laugh muffled against the side of her neck. “Maybe it was something in the spaghetti sauce.”
    “Then we need the recipe.”
    Steadier, he leaned back, took a good look at her.“Now I really want my camera. You’re the first naked woman to sit on my kitchen counter, which I now plan to have sealed in Lucite. I’d like to document the moment.”
    “Not a chance. My contract specifies no nude scenes.”
    “That’s a damn shame.” He stroked her hair back. “I guess the least I can do after playing Viking and maiden is help you with the dishes.”
    “The least. Hand me my shirt, will you?”
    “See, I’ve confiscated your clothes. You’ll have to do the dishes naked.”
    Her head cocked, her eyebrows lifted. On a sigh, Ford scooped up her shirt. “It was worth a shot.”
    HE WOKE in the dark to a quiet house and an empty bed. Groggy and baffled, he rose to look for her. One part of his brain reserved the right to be pissed if she’d gone back across the road without waking him.
    He found his front door open, and saw the silhouette of her sitting in one of the chairs on his veranda with Spock stretched at her feet. He smelled coffee as he pushed open the screen.
    She glanced over. “Morning.”
    “As long as it’s still dark, it’s not morning.” He sat beside her. “Give me a hit of that.”
    “You should go back to bed.”
    “Are you going to give me a hit of that coffee or make me go get my own?”
    She passed him the cup. “I have to decide what to do.”
    “At . . .” He took her wrist, turned it up and squinted at her watch. “Five-oh-six in the morning?”
    “I didn’t deal with it yesterday, didn’t think about it. Or not much. I even left my phone over there so the police couldn’t contact me. So no one could. I ducked and covered.”
    “You took a break. There’s no reason you can’t take a couple more days before you try to figure it all out.”
    “Actually, there are real and practical reasons I can’t take more time. I have subs coming in about two hours, unless I call them off. If I take them off for a couple of days, it’s more than screwing up my schedule, which is, of course, already screwed. It messes up theirs, and their employees’. And subs are always juggling jobs, so I could lose key people for more than a couple of days if I hold them off. If that decision is to walk away, I have to tell them that.”
    “The circumstances aren’t of your making, and no one’s going to blame you.”
    “No, I don’t think anyone would. But it still creates a domino effect. I also have to consider my budget, which is also screwed. I have insurance, but insurance has a deductible that has to be factored into the whole. I’m already over the high end of my projections, but that was my choice, with the changes and additions I made.”
    “If you need—”
    “Don’t,” she said, anticipating him. “I’m okay financially, and if I can’t make it on my own, I can’t make it. If I really needed extra, I could make a few calls, grab a couple voice-over jobs. Bottom line is I can’t leave the place the way it is, half done. I’ve got custom cabinets I ordered back in March, and the balance due when I take delivery. The kitchen appliances will be back in another couple months. Other details, small and large. It has to be finished, that’s not really a question. The questions are do I want to finish it, and do I want to stay? Can I? Should I?”
    He took another hit of her coffee. Serious conversations, he thought, required serious attention. “Tell me what you’d do if you decided to turn it over to someone else to finish. If you left.”
    “There are a lot of places I could slip into without the baggage I have here. Stick a pin in a map, I guess, and pick one. Take some of those voice-overs to thicken the bankroll, if I need to. Find a place with potential to flip. I can get a mortgage. Regular and very nice residuals from Our Family look good on an application. Or if I don’t want the stress of that, I could get a job with a crew. Hell, I could work for Steve’s new New York branch.”
    “You’d be giving up your lofty personal goals.”
    “Maybe I’d just postpone reaching them. The problem is