Blossom, the Blossom, gave a soft yip when she heard her name, then curled up on the seat and dozed off immediately.
I held back a hand over the seat and waited until hers slid into mine. Shaking it briskly, I said, “Nice to meet you, Ms. Redwine.” I was far less concerned with the etiquette of introduction than I was with checking out her stomach to see if it looked authentic. Paranoia, suspicion; call it whatever. It had kept me alive thus far. Wendy wasn’t the only member of the fairer sex in my lifetime who had demonstrated deadly tendencies. One of the strippers at the club had once stabbed her boyfriend in the bathroom and then had calmly gone out to work another set. I’d been the one to find him. Facedown on the tile with his blood spider-webbing around him as it flowed along the path of the grout, he hadn’t been dead, but he probably wished he had been. She’d taken him down with a deep wound to the belly and then she’d gotten creative. The surgeons had stitched his face together like a patchwork quilt. Other parts of him weren’t so easily pieced together. She’d flushed those down the toilet.
It could’ve been that he’d deserved it; it could’ve been that he didn’t. I had never asked, but it was a lesson I hadn’t forgotten. Anyone could be dangerous—absolutely anyone.
“What should I call you handsome fellas?” Fisher asked as she pressed hands to the small of her back and stretched. “Besides my saviors?” The Georgia accent had the R sound fading before it hit the air.
“Nick and Albert,” I answered promptly before Michael could let slip our real ones. I wasn’t positive that he would have, but hedging my bets was a longtime habit. “You can call the kid Al.” Beside me Michael made an almost inaudible snort to let me know he had caught the Einstein reference.
Turning back, I took the car back out onto the road. She looked genuinely pregnant, but not being precisely an expert in the field, I kept a sharp eye on the rearview mirror. “We’re headed toward Waycross. We can drop you off there.” Can and would; a philanthropist such as I had to have his limits. The sarcasm sounded the same in my head as it would have out . . . sharp and edgy. I didn’t like risk where Michael was involved, and thanks to the past, I wasn’t wild about the unexpected. What was setting up camp in my backseat definitely qualified as one, maybe both.
“Waycross is fine. It’s a little one-horse town, one and a half at the most.” She smiled and patted the mound of her stomach. “Just like me. Horse and a half, right here.”
“What . . . mmm.” Michael cleared his throat, the redness in his ears fading to a pale pink. “What are you doing out here? All by yourself, I mean.”
“Oh, honey, y’all wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” She must have slipped off her shoes as up popped two feet on the console between my seat and Michael’s. The toenails were painted to match her fingernails, a pearlescent rose. Wiggling her toes, she asked Michael, “Albert, would you be a doll and rub my feet? They haven’t been the same since Junior here hit his seventh month.”
The flush was back and it spread to the rest of Michael’s face with the speed of a wildfire. Frozen, his eyes darted from the feet to me and then back again. I had to admit, even slightly swollen they were very pretty feet. Snorting, I took a hand off the wheel to grab his and place it on a foot. “You heard the lady, Big Al. Get to work.”
If I’d seen anything more amusing than a profoundly pregnant woman flirting with my brother, I couldn’t think of it offhand. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me from giving Miss Fisher Lee a good, hard verbal shove. “Go on with your story, Fisher.” I gifted her with an encouraging and completely insincere grin over my shoulder. It made my teeth hurt. “We’re interested. Goddamn interested. Couldn’t be more interested if we tried.”