Love Bite by Sherry Gottlieb

Author:Sherry Gottlieb [GOTTLIEB, SHERRY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446571388
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Jace was looking forward to a weekend of drinking beer and reading; he hadn’t had time to read all week. He had found a special on Harp Lager and picked up a case; he was eager to finish the Andrew Vachss novel on the living room chair.

By the time he actually got out of bed, the mail had arrived; all window envelopes. He made himself a peanut butter and banana sandwich and settled into the chaise on the patio, three beers in a cooler at his feet.

He was on the third beer and the last chapter when he realized the doorbell was ringing insistently. Had it been ringing long? Jace peered out the curtain next to the front door.

“It’s me, Jace; let me in.” Liz was wearing a navy jump suit with red belt, earrings, and sandals. Jace thought the trim picked up the red in her eyes very smartly.

“Liz, what—”

“I must have been ringing for five minutes,” she said as she entered.

“I was outside. You want a beer?”

“Yeah, what the hell.” She sat down heavily on the couch while he went into the kitchen to retrieve two bottles.

“You want a glass?” he yelled.

“Only if you have a clean one.”

Jace washed out a glass, thinking again that he really should get someone in to clean. By the time he returned to the living room, Liz had kicked off her sandals and had her feet tucked up on the couch.

“Sorry to bust in on your weekend like this,” Liz began, “but I needed to see… talk to you, and I didn’t want to wait ’til Monday.”

“That’s what friends are for, remember?” Jace handed her the glass and sat in the chair facing the couch. He took a swig of his beer and waited for her to continue. She stared into her glass, not drinking, silent.

“What’s up?” he finally prodded.

She dug into her pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper which she handed to him. It was a receipt from a hotel in San Francisco summarizing room charges for Mr. and Mrs. Sanford Baker Glass.

“I found it on the bedroom floor this morning,” Liz explained. “ ‘Mr. and Mrs.,’ it says.”

“Yeah, I see.” Jace drank. “Maybe the typist made a mistake.”

“Right. Just like there was a mistake with a room-service breakfast yesterday for thirty-two dollars. Sandy doesn’t usu ally eat breakfast. Thirty-two dollars worth of breakfast would have to include champagne, don’t you think?”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“I did. He said he had breakfast in the room with ‘some other lawyers,’ but his story fell apart when I pressed for details.” She took a long draught of beer. “He finally admitted he spent the night with a stewardess he met on the plane.”

“Oh, shit,” Jace said.

“Deep shit. I don’t know if that’s the truth, either; for all I know, he has a girlfriend up there. I don’t even know that this is the first time he’s done this. He says he used a condom, but he could have lied about that, too.

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