sugar were going to wreak havoc on her totally empty, painfully gnawing stomach. She wondered what the chances were of getting Jake to stop somewhere for her to grab a breakfast sandwich or something.
It didn’t take her more than fifteen minutes to brush her teeth, take a super-quick shower, and anchor her hair in a loose knot at the top of her head. She dressed in a loose tank top, casual shorts, and practical shoes, since she’d be doing manual labor at the theater. When she opened the bedroom door, she thought she smelled toast and hurried to the kitchen.
“Oh, man, Jake…you have no idea how hungry I am and how good that smells.”
“Well, considering the mess in the garbage and the smell of burned something lingering in the air, I was able to put two and two together that you didn’t get much to eat last night. Helga warned me your cupboards were bare, and since you don’t have a car…” He spread his hands as if to say obviously. “I brought some bread for you and thought I’d make use of it.”
The toast—from the sun-dried tomato sourdough—tasted like ambrosia, and she unashamedly ate four pieces with butter, trying not to moan too loudly at the deliciousness.
“So good,” she said, wiping up the crumbs and putting the plate and knife in the sink. “Thank you again.”
“I guess you’re ready to go now,” Jake said.
“Yes. You sound disappointed. Why? Didn’t I primp long enough?”
He shrugged. “I liked what you were wearing a few minutes ago a lot better.” And then he gave her a sudden, devastating smile—one that made heat rush straight down her body to her toes, then back up again right to her center.
Vivien didn’t know what to say, so she fumbled for her phone and bag and started for the door. “Well, a nightgown isn’t very practical for digging around an old theater, is it?”
“You call that a nightgown?” he muttered, following her out the door with the headpiece in hand. “Looked more like a piece of—what did you call it?—scrim to me.”
It took till they got to the theater before Jake was able to think about anything but the sight that had greeted him when Vivien opened the door to her cottage. She’d been a vision of rumpled bourbon hair, sleepy sloe eyes, and filmy peekaboo negligee that left little to the imagination—and he had one hell of an imagination.
Hell, how was a guy to concentrate on blows to the back of the head and vandalized cars and theatrical threats with that sort of distraction sitting next to him in the car—and clearly unaware of its potency?
“So…when did Helga ask you to pick me up?” she asked as they pulled into the parking lot at the theater. She’d been strangely quiet during the seven-minute drive. “And don’t you have to work this morning?”
“I’m off today—I have a weird schedule—and I was conscripted into being her DD last night,” Jake told her. “I think she knew she wasn’t going to want to get up really early today, so she asked me when I dropped her off last night.”
When Vivien didn’t reply, something told him it was imperative he elaborate. It was almost as if Mathilda was kicking him under the table. “Uh…so, I should tell you that I was—we were—staking out the parking lot here last night.”
“You were?” She whipped her head to look at him, but there was still a funny look in her eyes. “You and Helga?”
“Baxter and I. I mean, I was, and then I asked Bax if he wanted to hang out too. And Helga caught us with a case of B-Cubed in the car, and she confiscated it under the guise of it being official police business, but it turned out she was off-duty at the time, and so what really happened was that she got to drink several of my beers and I had to drive her—and Bax, who also got to drink some—home while getting to drink none of it myself.”
Now Vivien was looking at him as if he’d sprouted another head. She narrowed her eyes and said carefully, “So…you and Baxter were hanging out here and Helga managed to swipe an entire case of your beer? And get a ride home?”
“That about sums it up. See, there’s her cop car still parked back there. She threatened to arrest us for having open containers in the car—”
Vivien burst out laughing. “She is such a badass. I’ve told her a hundred