Undone by Moonlight Read Online Free

night?”
    “No.”
    “Sure?”
    “Very.”
    She pushed a small glass filled with orange juice toward him.
“This will help.”
    Shrugging, he drank the juice in a quick swallow.
    As soon as he set the empty glass on the bar, she pushed
another one in his line of vision. This one held tomato juice, complete with
celery stalk artistically leaning against the side.
    He curled his lip. “I don’t like—”
    “Drink it.”
    As he often found in her presence, he did as she ordered,
though he would swear he hadn’t made a conscious decision to do so.
    Surprisingly, the juice wasn’t bland, watery tomatoes. The
drink had a spicy kick, as if she’d made a Bloody Mary without the shot of
vodka. Though he had a feeling, based on the determined look on her face, that
he could use the added buzz.
    “The vitamins in oranges, tomatoes and celery are good for
you,” she said.
    He also had the feeling she’d told him that before. Not
surprising. This wasn’t his first ride around the block with hangovers. “Goody.
You know how I like to take care of myself.”
    “Eat the celery.” When he started to argue, she added, “Think
of the celery as a carrot for the bacon reward.”
    He chomped the stalk in two bites, then grabbed two slices of
bacon from the plate before she could come up with some other healthy barrier to
his fat-laden breakfast.
    His obedience bought him silence, as she said nothing while he
inhaled the food.
    “You’re not eating?” he asked when he paused long enough to
notice she wasn’t.
    “I had a spinach omelet earlier.”
    In his opinion, the only place for something green in eggs was
in children’s stories that rhyme. But also knowing she’d go back to the subject
of last night, he commented, “You’ve got a nice place.”
    “Thanks. Because of all my pageant winnings, I went to college
on a full scholarship, so my parents gave me the money they’d been saving for
school.”
    “Pageant? Like bikini contest?” He could certainly imagine her
figure earning piles of cash.
    “No, like Miss America. You know, evening gowns, crowns and
sashes, questions about world peace.”
    She was a beauty queen; he was a master marksman. If ever two
people were less compatible, he couldn’t imagine who, when or where. “You have a
lot of roses in here.”
    “When your name is a flower, you have to go with it.”
    “So why not lilies?”
    “Too obvious. You’re not going to divert my attention from
asking about last night, by the way.”
    “I figured it was worth a shot.”
    “How about if we start with an easy question? Who hit you over
the head?”
    He shook his head. “No idea.”
    “Okay, not a good start.”
    “Everything’s pretty fuzzy.”
    “I’ll bet. How ’bout we start from the beginning? What’s the
last thing you remember clearly?”
    He struggled to think back. “I picked up my suit from the dry
cleaners.” His only suit, come to think of it.
    “You were coming to the wedding,” Calla said, gazing at him
with wonder.
    “I was invited.”
    “So you were. After dry cleaning?”
    “Hung around my apartment awhile, fixed my neighbor’s ceiling
fan, then went to the bar down the street to watch football.”
    When he stopped, she asked, “Did you get into an argument with
somebody at the bar?”
    “No, I—” What? He recalled watching
the Syracuse-Rutgers game of all things, but had no idea what happened
afterward.
    “Try to picture yourself.”
    When he did, he was rewarded with a sharp jab of pain to the
back of his skull. Wincing, he shook his head.
    She slid off her stool. “Why don’t you take one of your pain
pills? You’ve eaten now, so you can—”
    “What pain pills?”
    “The ones the E.R. doctor prescribed, but you didn’t pick up,
instead choosing to drown yourself in whiskey.” She pursed her lips in censure.
“Which was not prescribed, by the way.”
    He grabbed her wrist as she started off. “No, thanks. They’ll
make my thoughts even more