Risk (It's Complicated Book 2) by Ann Christopher

Author:Ann Christopher [Christopher, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Blue Iris Press
Published: 2015-09-10T05:00:00+00:00

Angela went back to Maya’s room, which had, in the last couple of hours, begun to feel like a demilitarized zone teetering on the brink of renewed hostility. Maya, fresh from her bath, sat cross-legged on the bed, glowering at Angela in the soft lighting of her rejected flower lamp.

“Maya,” Angela said in her most imperious tone, “you may get off your bed and come into my room to call Uncle Justus and tell him good night.”

“I don’t want to,” Maya said, her lips barely moving.

Angela snorted out a bitter laugh. “Of course you don’t want to. You didn’t like your new room, you didn’t want the spaghetti I made for dinner even though you loved spaghetti the other night—”

“I love Uncle Justus’s spaghetti!”

“Yeah, well, Uncle Justus isn’t here!” Angela yelled. Realizing she was dangerously out of control—in the last couple of hours, she’d begun to understand why gerbil parents sometimes ate their young—she took a deep breath and tried to calm down.

“You didn’t want to take your bath,” she continued, counting off on her fingers, “you didn’t want to brush your teeth, you didn’t want to sit on the bed for your time-out, and now you don’t want to call Uncle Justus.”

Angela took another deep breath, the first one not having worked very well.

“What do you want to do, pray tell?”

In response, Maya flopped over backward on the bed, kicking her feet out from under her.

“Fine. Suit yourself. Stay on the bed.”

Ignoring Maya’s groan, Angela stalked off down the hall. But before she could collapse on the sofa, the phone rang.

Cursing, she snatched it up.

“Hello,” she snarled.

A long pause, then, “Duchess? You okay?”

“Justus! Thank God it’s you!” Lowering her voice, she shot a covert glance over her shoulder to make sure Maya hadn’t somehow snaked a listening device down the hallway to eavesdrop. Then she sat on the sofa, sinking deep into its cushions. “Maya’s driving me crazy!”

“Yeah?” He chuckled. “What’d you do to her?”

Having her hands full with more pressing matters, Angela decided to let Justus’s obvious amusement over her misfortune slide this one time.

“I worked my butt off all afternoon trying to put her room together and the little princess says she hates it!” she hissed. “She’s been snotty and disrespectful to me all night! She didn’t even want to call you just now!”

Another long silence ensued. “I thought you were going to hold off on that whole room thing, Angela,” Justus finally said. “Until the magistrate decides where she should live.”

Angela didn’t like his reproachful tone. “I never said that. I promised Maya I’d decorate her room, and I kept my promise. Anyway, if the magistrate gives her to you, she’ll still need a room to sleep in when she stays here.”

“True,” he agreed. “But did you ever think maybe she doesn’t want a new room because she realizes if she has a room with you, then she really won’t be going back to her old room?”

“Oh, God.” That constricting pain Angela thought had receded slightly in the last couple of days tightened across her chest again.

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