Lesbian Assassins 3 Read online

  We made it another ten miles down the road before she looked at me again. “Doesn’t it worry you? We haven’t waved a knife at someone in almost a month.”

  That couldn’t be true. I scrolled backward in my head, looking for the glint of steel or the face of a dirtbag about to piss himself. And found a steady supply of cute kids, shiny teenagers, and garden-club ladies instead.

  We’d become the Hallmark-card version of assassins.

  “See?” My partner folded her arms over her chest, a self-satisfied smirk on her face. “We somehow got soft when we weren’t paying attention.”

  The data was definitely making me queasy. Maybe it was just a random blip.

  “We need a quota.” Carly’s toes were back to drumming on the windshield. “Two back alleys a week, minimum. We need to stay in shape.”

  Assholes weren’t always that accommodating, but I got her point. “Maybe we can start visiting some of the guys we text. The ones who require lots of reminding.” A knife blade was a lot more potent than little black letters on a phone screen.

  “I can pull a list of those, make a map.” Her fingers were already flying on her tablet screen. “We can do a tour.”

  I strangled a laugh. “You should be managing a band.”

  She grinned. “Nobody wants to hear me sing.”

  They’d wanted to hear me, once. And then being soft had stabbed that life in the gut and left it to bleed out and die.

  Something my dungeon-door-kicking muse needed to remember.

  I watched another ten miles go by as Carly tapped a new rhythm on her screen, and pondered. We’d talked about adding the knives back in. We hadn’t said anything about subtracting the stuff that made us soft, and right now, we were driving down the road to friends and something with chocolate-cream filling.

  Who we were mattered to us. If we were going to let that change, I wanted to be doing it with eyes wide open. I’d wasted enough of my life squinting at things I didn’t really want to see.

  I sighed. It would have been a cheerier drive if Carly’s inner philosopher had stayed asleep.

  -o0o-

  I rapped my knuckles on the door of Lelo’s apartment.

  Carly reached around me for the door handle. “Since when do we knock?”

  Since we were trying to remind ourselves we were visitors, not tenants. This felt way too much like coming home, with visions of familiar smells and comfortable couches and the container in the top-left corner cupboard that held the makings for killer hot chocolate.

  My partner barreled through the door, oblivious as always to concepts like privacy and personal space and actually being invited across someone’s threshold. She definitely wasn’t from Vermont, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t behavior she’d learned in the wilds of New York City, either.

  “Hey.” The woman in front of the stove turned around, humungous wooden spoon in one hand, slightly crispy dish towel in the other.

  She was at least six inches and a hundred pounds too big to be Lelo. “Hey, Rosie. Burning something for dinner?” The acrid smell had hit my nostrils now. So much for home, sweet home.

  “No, this was a secret recipe Rowena suggested to help my basil grow better.” Rosie took a careful whiff of the pot behind her. “Apparently I failed potions-brewing class.”

  I took my life into my own hands and strolled over to the stove, giving the sexy gypsy a hug on the way by. Whatever was in the pot had some serious legs—it smelled like a New Orleans alleyway in the middle of July. “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what’s in that.”

  “Nope, you don’t.” Rosie looked reasonably cheerful about its demise. “You guys hungry?”

  Not anymore.

  Carly was carefully keeping her distance at the far end of the bar counter. “Where’s Lelo?”

  Obviously not here, or interlopers wouldn’t be burning potions on her stove. I kept a close eye on the interplay happening in the six feet of space between the other two people in the kitchen. Rosie’s brew wasn’t the only thing flammable in here today.

  I tucked myself as out of the way as possible, torn between strategic retreat and the siren call of hot chocolate fixings.

  Rosie turned back to the stove, stirring things that didn’t need stirring. “Lelo’s helping with some insane craft project in Ally’s class.” She shuddered. “Who gives six-year-olds scissors and hot glue guns?”

  I didn’t know who gave them to sixteen-year-olds, either. Lelo’s big sister had clearly decided to live dangerously in her post-Chad life. “So if she’s not back by dark, we need to go rescue her from whatever part of the school ceiling she’s stuck to?”

  Rosie chuckled. “Ally promised to bust her lose by 2pm, so she should be back in an hour or so.” She paused an uncomfortable beat too long. “You guys made good time.”

  I was done trying to be part of the small-talk rescue squad. I kept quiet and waited for whatever weird shit had landed between my partner and the sexy gypsy to come to a boil or get off the damn stove.

  Carly finally shrugged. “Jane’s got a lead foot.”

  I had no such thing and she wasn’t goading me back into this conversation.

  Rosie looked over at my partner, eyes careful. “How was the wedding?”

  Another shrug. “Fine.”

  The gypsy just raised an eyebrow.

  Carly sighed. “Talia was totally adorable, and I got to hold a baby for a couple of hours and let him drool all over me.”

  I stood in my invisible corner, totally dumbfounded. The yearning in that sigh had been impossible to miss.

  Rosie slid a lid onto her pot and moved it over to the sink, one eye never leaving Carly. “Sounds like a pretty unusual day for you.”

  “Yeah.” Carly met dark, curious eyes for a long, complicated moment, and then stepped to the kitchen window and slid it open in one fluid move. “I’m going up to the roof. Kata practice—I need to work out some kinks.”

  Assassin code for “stay the hell out of my way.”

  I watched the back of my partner disappearing up the fire-escape stairs to the roof. And then I sighed and shifted my gaze to the back of the gypsy florist watching Carly’s disappearing feet, her hands still holding the pot in the sink.

  “I didn’t know that about her,” said Rosie quietly. “How long has she wanted a baby?”

  I contemplated a lot of answers, some of them protective of Carly, most of them protective of me. And finally offered up the truth. “I didn’t know.”

  Rosie reached a fingertip toward the window. “Maybe it’s just a family she wants.”

  Or a life full of sunshine and sticky fingers and the many other things foreign to our assassin selves that had been on flagrant display at the wedding. I held still, murmuring comfort to the small, shocked voice inside my head that had always assumed Carly would hold a knife in her hands until she died.

  Rosie turned away from the sink and offered me a wry smile. “I don’t think she’s retiring from the assassin gig anytime soon. There are a whole lot of battles she still needs to fight.”

  I couldn’t disagree with her—even the small, shocked voice in my head knew Carly wasn’t nearly done yet. But there was a new idea in town now.

  Someday, she might be.

  3

  My current case of itchiness due to too many things changing in my life wasn’t helped by walking into Lennotsville’s little country grocery store and feeling right at home. There was a big-box monstrosity on the corner of town, but this one was close to Lelo’s apartment, had the best cheese selection in three hundred miles, and sourced its produce from local farmers. So said the local foodies, anyhow. I just shopped where they told me to shop and bought what they told me to buy.

  Today, the list ran to what would be two full grocery bags’ worth of food, and not a single bite of it would be consumable without chopping, marinating, searing, baking, or sticking in Lelo’s slow cooker to torture us for an entire day first.

  When I shopped for Carly a
nd myself on the road, I left with two bags of food that could go straight into our mouths, with the occasional detour via a microwave.

  I walked over to the avocado display and started squeezing things as if I knew what I was doing.

  “Those came in fresh today,” said the cheerful face unloading boxes beside me. “I’m going to take some home to my mom so she can make guacamole.”

  The stocker looked to be about Lelo’s age and just about as skinny. I sent a thought of random pity to the parent trying to keep up with feeding a hungry teenage boy. “That sounds pretty good.”

  “Mom’s guac is the best.” He leaned over and glanced around once before offering up a conspiratorial whisper. “She adds a bit of cilantro at the end, and cayenne—that’s the secret ingredient.”

  I was reasonably sure cilantro was leafy and green. And very sure I knew three people who liked guacamole. I threw myself on the mercy of a guy a third of my age. “Any chance you could help me gather up all the ingredients that would make a really good guac?”

  “Sure.” His eyes were full of puppy-dog eagerness. “The manager says it’s really good to help our customers find what they need, and I know exactly what my mom puts in hers.”

  I squeezed an avocado and picked up two. “How many of these?”

  He looked at the one in my right hand and mostly managed to hide his wince. “Probably six or so, but you want ones that are nice and squishy. That one won’t be ripe for a few days and you’ll totally want to make this tonight so your cilantro doesn’t wilt.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that I wouldn’t be the cook. I was the personal shopper for one, and that was weird enough.

  As we headed over to a wall of leafy green stuff, I spotted a familiar face behind the tomatoes, waving frantically. The teenager with me grinned. “You know Mrs. Beauchamp?”

  I was pretty sure no one set foot in Lennotsville for more than ten minutes without knowing her. “I met her a few weeks ago.”

  “She’s awesome.” He leaned over and whispered for real this time. “Just don’t eat her salsa.”

  I’d been duly warned on that front already. I watched the old lady maneuver her cart around several bins of produce, whacking every last one, and marveled that we still felt safe enough as a nation to let her drive. Or Carly, for that matter—if I was in charge of handing out drivers’ licenses for the planet, the roads would be a lot emptier. I waved a greeting at the incoming tsunami. “Hey, Mrs. Beauchamp. It’s nice to see you again.”

  “Hello, dearie. And hello, Tommy. I see you’re settling into your new job very nicely, but you won’t be late for rehearsal tonight, now will you? 7pm on the dot.” She looked over at me, beaming. “We’re doing a modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello, and Tommy here is such a wonderful tragic hero. He makes me cry every time he stabs himself with that dagger.”

  Great. Amateurs with knives—just what the world needed more of.

  “You’ll come see the play, yes?” Mrs. Beauchamp neatly took me captive by sliding her hand through my arm. “We’re doing dress rehearsals this week and the performances start on Monday.”

  That was four days away—I never planned my life that far in advance. “I don’t think we’ll still be in town.”

  Her face fell faster than a soufflé. “Oh, but you must come. Little Manny—he’s one of the boys on the baseball team who didn’t get a candy basket from Chadwick—he helped paint all the backdrops, and they’re truly magnificent. He’ll be very sad if you don’t come.”

  Manny wouldn’t even know we were in town unless someone told him, but I was pretty sure Mrs. Beauchamp would have the word spread by sundown. “We have work that takes us elsewhere.”

  She patted my hand. “Don’t worry, dear. We have plenty of assholes near here that you can take care of. There’s no need for you to travel so much.” Then she patted Tommy’s hand. “You excuse my language, sweetheart. We old ladies sometimes forget to use our nice manners.”

  He just grinned at her with slightly pink cheeks. “I’ll bring some of my mom’s guacamole to rehearsal.”

  Mrs. Beauchamp lit up like a child on her birthday. “Splendid. Hers is the very best, and you can tell her I said so.”

  I missed whatever got said next. I was a little overwhelmed by the sense of roots, even small ones. And my muse was pleading with me to hear the song of the roots and the seeds that cute grocery stores and little old ladies were shoving into the dirt of the windswept lot that was my future. Maybe one day, I’d know what town I’d be in next Monday.

  It was an idea that felt as foreign and disconcerting as squeezing an avocado. But it didn’t feel entirely bad.

  -o0o-

  Lelo blew in the door with all the energy of a teenage whirlwind and ran headlong into me and the sexy gypsy, sitting in our respective corners, nursing quiet, fraught daydreams in our heads. “Hey, guys. Where’s Carly?”

  I found my voice first. “On the roof, playing with her knives.” Where she’d stayed long enough for me to fetch groceries, clean out the van, and entirely run out of odd jobs to do.

  Rosie looked up from the couch where she’d been reading the same page of a book for the last half hour. “Hot glue anything interesting?”

  Lelo grinned. “I was pretty tempted to glue the Johanneson twins to each other, does that count?” She picked up her phone. “I’ll send Carly a come-hither text.” She worked the screen for a moment and then laughed when the bag on the floor behind her pinged. “Or not.” She grinned over at Rosie. “You could go deliver a come-hither message.”

  Rosie took just a second too long to respond. “Sure.”

  Lelo’s eyes got careful, fast. A teenager finally reading the swirling currents in the apartment. “You okay?”

  A shrug. “Mostly.” And then a smile, one that said a gypsy had picked herself up by her bootstraps and set herself on more solid ground. “Yeah, I am.”

  The kid met her eyes for another long, skeptical moment and then nodded. “Okay. Then go get Ms. Sharp Edges up there and tell her we have Baumkuchen and business to take care of.”

  Rosie slid out the kitchen window with more grace than I’d ever managed and headed up the fire-escape stairs. Lelo watched her go and then looked over at me, a ticker-tape of questions running across her forehead.

  I just shook my head—I had no idea what we were dealing with. The energy between Carly and Rosie had always been a little spiky, but it had just grown a forest full of porcupines, and I wasn’t sure whether it had sprung from innocent comments about weddings and babies or something entirely murkier.

  I did, however, know enough to stay the hell away from newly hatched porcupines.

  Two minutes later we heard feet clomping back down the metal stairs. Carly crawled in first, looking flustered and ready to eat nails.

  Rosie came through right on her heels, looking as calm as the proverbial summer’s day.

  Lelo stared at her gypsy friend for a moment and then wisely stuck her head into the bowels of the fridge.

  Rosie and Carly headed for opposite ends of the couch and plunked down in unison—and then both stared straight at me.

  Phew. Calm Zen on the left, riled thunderstorm on the right. This was going to be one heck of a business meeting. I wasn’t at all sure that a hermit and a teenager were up for dealing with whatever was brewing on the couch.

  Lelo walked over with the ginger footsteps of someone treading through a field of baby chicks holding ticking explosives. She carried a laptop, but her face clearly said she didn’t plan to be in charge of whatever was happening next.

  Which was too darned bad. She’d made herself our erstwhile assistant with some combination of Velcro, hot glue, and stubbornness, and she could darn well reap what she’d sown. I shook my head and crossed my arms. One flannel-clad hermit in non-negotiable retreat.

  It almost worked. And then I saw Carly’s eyes and what rode under the bluster she was tossing around like the banana guy in a monkey cage. Two baby
blues, an inch away from going under. Assassin in the deep end, and this one had just remembered she couldn’t swim.

  Shit.

  I looked over at Rosie, trying to work out if she was friend or foe in this particular moment. And got nothing beyond the calm, thoughtful mask she’d first sat down with. Whatever was going on, clearly she wasn’t planning on riding to anyone’s rescue. Which, in theory, I supported—we’re all supposed to be capable of standing on our own two feet in this life, and I’d seen far too many sad stories that got their start with a woman who didn’t believe she was capable of standing on hers.

  In this exact moment, however, I’d have been happy to hand over the responsible-adult gold stars and go hide in the corner. Usually I know who the enemy is, and anyone who pushes too hard on my partner generally gets lumped into that category. When Rosie was involved, things got a whole lot less clear.

  However, I wasn’t going to pick a fight with two hundred pounds of determined woman unless I absolutely had to, particularly when I really liked her—and when a quiet voice in my ribs thought she might be the most wondrous thing that could ever happen to the woman I called my best friend.

  “So.” Lelo cleared her throat loud enough to be heard on the rooftop deck. “I have this thing to show you.”

  Life abhors a vacuum. I silently applauded the kid and the guts it had taken to walk into that particular silence, and then I sat still. This wasn’t my bomb to disarm.

  It was Rosie who finally moved, and she did it with a smooth slide back into her usual skin. Her hand reached out to touch Carly’s arm, casual and easy. “You’ll want to see this. Want some iced tea first? I made the one with lavender and lemon.”

  A certain assassin’s favorite—she’d drunk gallons of it the last time we were here.

  Carly’s thunderstorm hiccupped violently, its epicenter just under a sexy gypsy’s hand, and then began to disperse. “Sure.” She offered up a small smile laced with apology and confusion and something that looked achingly like hope. “I love that stuff—thanks for making it.”