Lavender's Blue by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer PRE ORDER now live

Liz Danger: Four

After that, I tried to change the subject, but Molly felt so bad about hitting me with the news about Cash that she tried to make up for it by telling me everything awful about the wedding—nobody had seen it coming, Lavender had been invited to consult with Senator Amy Wilcox on fundraising a couple of months ago, and Cash was working as Wilcox's aide, so he'd taken her to lunch afterward, and then she broke off her engagement to some guy in Cincinnati, and then all of a sudden they were getting married really fast, and don't think that didn't cause talk, mostly about how Cash was marrying for money, and it was the event of Burney society although nobody thought it was going to last because Lavender was such a cold fish and Cash wasn't paying much attention to her, spending all his time with Senator Wilcox who was mentoring him and the senator was only forty-something, so who knew what "mentoring" meant—and I kept saying, "Really I don't need to know this," while she talked on. Finally she said, "The Porters are really unhappy about it—".

"I really don't want to know," I told her, and that time she listened to me. "I need to get back to work," I said and asked her to drop me at the garage and then come back to pick me up at 5:30.

I was tense on the ride back to Porters. First Belinda coming in, and then George Pens, both of them bringing back the bad old days, and then the news about Cash, and in a couple of hours, I was going to have to go see my mother to drop off the bear, and I knew she was going mourn my lost chances with Cash. Plus, I had actually been looking forward to seeing the guy, which was just pathetic. That was me in Burney: pathetic and paranoid.

Molly dropped me off, promising to babysit the bear, and I found Will in the first bay of the big garage with his head under the hood of somebody else's car. There were two other cars in the other two bays being worked on and neither of them was the Camry, which caused me to tense up.

"Will," I said, "can I talk to you for a minute?"

He pulled his head out from under the hood. "Hey, Liz."

I smiled at him. "About my car. I really have to get to Chicago fast. I have a contract to ghost write a memoir for a woman who is waiting for me there right now. The ghostwriter before me got fired because he couldn't meet the deadline. Her publisher hired me because I have a reputation for getting things done, but the contract is written so that I will only get a fraction of the money if I don't turn the book in on time, and the due date is July first."

He nodded, patient.

"If I don't make that due date, I get two thousand dollars for delivering the finished book. If I do make the deadline, I get the bonus."

"Yes," he said, "but--"

"The bonus is twenty thousand dollars."

He shut his mouth.

"As you know, being self-employed is no joke. That twenty thou gives me as much security as I'll ever have in my business. I need it. It's not 'gee, it would be nice to have twenty thousand dollars,' I need it." I realized I was getting a little intense, so I took a deep breath and tried again. "If I have to rent a car so I can leave tomorrow, I will, although I can't really afford it. Just tell me you understand that it's really important that I get to Chicago by tomorrow."

He nodded. "I haven't looked at your car yet because this is Betsy Scott's Firebird, and she's due to have a baby tomorrow, so she's going to need it as soon as I can get it done."

I closed my eyes and thought about killing Patsy. He hadn't even looked at my car yet, which meant she had been lying in her teeth, trying to get me to stay.

He glanced at the two mechanics, both working on other cars, but shook his head as he made a decision. "I've got about another half hour on Betsy's engine," Will said, "then I'll look at yours and find out what it needs. I can try to get it fixed tonight, but more likely it'll be tomorrow before I can get it done, and if it's more than I think it is, it's going to take some time. So, my best guess is that you'll have it tomorrow night or day after tomorrow. Saturday."

"Thank you," I said, because that all made sense, especially the part about pregnant Betsy Scott needing her car more than I did. Whatever else was going on, I trusted the Porters when it came to cars. The Porter boys anyway; it was going to be a cold day in hell when I trusted Patsy again. "I'm going to go work in my car if that's okay."

"Sure.It's in the back lot,just inside the gate." Will put his head back under Betsy Scott's hood and I went out to the back lot to face my other problem: AnemonePatterson.