Free All Jacked Up by Penny McCall Page A

thought I’d take my vacation . . . Yes, the whole three weeks.” She looked over at Jack and knew he was wondering what kind of a loser had three weeks of vacation time saved up. A loser who was in love with her books, that’s what kind. But it wasn’t that. Really. Absolutely. Not the books that took her into work each morning, rain or shine, sickness or health. She just didn’t need vacations like normal people.
    Because she escaped through books. Okay, so I’m a geek, so what, she thought, scowling at Jack because he was probably thinking the same thing. “I’ll be fine, Nancy, really. I’m taking it as a wake-up call, you know? Stopping to smell the roses.”
    “Going for the gusto,” Jack offered, “living the high life.”
    Trust Jack to come up with beer-commercial platitudes. “No, it’s just some guy waiting for the phone—”
    Jack took the receiver out of her hands and said, “Gotta go,” bouncing on the balls of his feet. Antsy.
    Aubrey grabbed it. “Nancy—No, it’s not like that. Oh shoot, she hung up, and now she thinks I’m taking time off to shack up with the first guy I came across because I’ve just had a near-death experience.”
    Jack stepped in close. “Until this is over, think of us as man and wife.”
    “Only if this is a dysfunctional marriage.”
    “Is there any other kind?”
    “Not if you’re involved.” Aubrey brushed him aside, frustrated and irritated and completely sick of him and his little idiosyncracies—Yeah, she could see him as her husband. He kept annoying the heck out of her, like he had some sort of radar . . . “How did you know which way I went?”
    “The squirrels looked pissed off in this direction.”
    She stopped and stared. “You made a joke!”
    He raised one eyebrow and flattened his mouth, managing to refute her observation and look irritated all at the same time. A multitasker. “I don’t need to plant a tracking device on you,” he said. “All I have to do is think of the least sensible thing and I know that’s what you did.”
    “Whew.” She fanned herself. “You had me worried for a second there. Glad you’re back to the charming, one-track guy I’ve come to know and tolerate.”
    “You walked right down the road, just waiting for someone to come along and shoot you in the head,” Jack said, his expression settling back into the one she was used to. Feeling put upon, making his point for the umpteenth time.
    Well, she’d heard him loud and clear, same as all the other times, only she was too busy fighting off the urge to hide to show it. “How would they know where to find me?”
    “I don’t know,” Jack said, “maybe the phone call you just made?”
    “I didn’t tell anyone where I am.”
    “Ever heard of tracing a call?”
    “Do you really think they expected me to call in sick this morning?”
    “So far you’ve done everything predictable, so yeah, I think they’d be prepared for you to call in sick.”
    “So I don’t lose my job. I love that job. I know you think books are a waste of time and anyone who reads them is a loser and a couch potato—”
    “Fine,” Jack said, which surprised her. “What? You don’t think I understand not wanting to lose your job? I’m doing this so I can get my job back.”
    She didn’t need to be reminded of that. All she was to Jack was vindication, and once he got it he’d probably toss her to Corona without a backward glance. “I’m going into the bathroom.”
    “You didn’t do that first thing when you got here?”
    “I was anxious to call work so I didn’t take the time to clean up,” she said, because she wasn’t about to tell him she’d gone in the forest and now she was all itchy, probably covered with poison ivy or maybe infested with a lyme-disease tick. Like she needed another parasite. “Then you came along and sidetracked me.”
    He looked her over, from the shoes up. Her hands followed the path of his eyes, brushing at the drops of dried mud on her