Death's Savage Passion Read Online Free Page B

Writers of America,” I said. “For sex discrimination.”
    “This is number nine,” he said. “In the last six months.”
    “Which means what?”
    “Which means in the last six months you have asked me to sue nine separate organizations for sex discrimination, including the American Kennel Club. If I remember rightly, you objected to pick-of-the-litter rules. For God’s sake, McKenna, you don’t even own a dog.”
    “Not the point,” I said.
    “Exactly the point,” he said. “Also, you told me the MWA had a whole slew of female directors, or officers, or whatever they are.”
    “That’s not the point either,” I said.
    “What is the point? How do you sue an organization for sex discrimination when half their officers are female?”
    “Romantic suspense,” I said. “They hate romantic suspense.”
    “I hate romantic suspense,” Nick said. “But Patience. Remember: recourse to law. Sex discrimination is bad, I don’t approve of it, but there is a difference between what is and what is not a situation to which the proper response is recourse to law. I sued the telephone company for you, didn’t I?”
    “Not for sex discrimination.”
    “Never mind what we called it when we went to court. It was sex discrimination. You wanted the policy changed, I got the policy changed. Right?”
    “Right,” I said. I fished a cigarette out of my bag.
    “Quit,” he said.
    “What?” The lighter was defunct. I started hunting for matches. Camille, brown and gray kernels of dry cat food clinging to her fur, jumped onto the bed and started playing with the Walkman earphones. It took her exactly one third of a second to tie her paws into immobility.
    Nick started to untangle her. “Quit,” he said again. “If you don’t like it, for whatever reason that may be, quit.”
    “Well, no,” I said. “Where would I hear the gossip?”
    “This is about gossip?” Nick said.
    “Well,” I said.
    “Don’t quit,” Nick said. “Don’t sue either. Untie the cat.”
    I said, “Oh.” There wasn’t anything else to say. I found a matchbook (Mamma Leone’s; Phoebe must have got it for me) and lit up. Nick had all six feet eight inches of himself sprawled across his papers and his hands in Camille’s fur. He is a remarkably good-looking man, powerfully built in the shoulders, slender and elegant in the hips. Even Amelia, who ranks men a rung below Godless Communists in the natural order of things, can’t resist Nick.
    I turned my back to him and lay my head on his chest. “Sorry I’m so contentious,” I said. “I’ve just had five hours of romantic suspense.”
    “So have I.” He gestured to the papers on the bed, then plunged his hands in and came up with a paperback cover proof for a novel called Dangerous Liaison. The cover painting showed a man and a woman on a windowsill ledge over a four-story drop. He had his arms around her waist and was bending her backward. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and four-inch high-heeled sandals.
    “Marvelous,” I said.
    “Romantic suspense and the lack of romantic suspense,” he said. “I’m either putting people into it or filing bankruptcy for people who didn’t get out of category romance fast enough. It’s all I do anymore.”
    “Phoebe’s bringing you clients,” I said.
    “Phoebe’s bringing me clients,” he agreed. “Believe me, I’m grateful. I’ve got my own office. I’m making enough to get married on, even to you. I will tell you, however, that I’m getting sicker than you’ll ever know of romantic suspense.”
    I ignored the crack about marriage. Nick was always making cracks about marriage.
    “I just don’t understand it,” I said. “Two years ago, three romance lines had hundred-million-dollar years. How could things change so fast?”
    “Market saturation and editorial incompetence.”
    “Thanks.”
    I felt him shrug. “Right at this moment, every category romance line is in trouble. At least two of them are