Free At the Brink by Anna del Mar Page A

hers?”
    “You could say that.”
    The man scratched his head and gave me another, not-so-friendly look. “You ain’t wishing da lady harm, are you?”
    “Of course not.”
    Vinnie crossed his arms, casually flexing his powerful muscles. “’Cause I’m not above thrashing anybody wanting to harm her.”
    “You don’t have the exclusive there,” I said. “I’d throw a few punches in that brawl.”
    Vinnie nodded approvingly. “Why then, am I right thinking you’re not one of them friends of Martin Poe?”
    “A hundred percent right.”
    “Good,” he said. “’Cause if you were, I was gonna give you a good talkin’ to.”
    “I’ve heard about him.”
    “Oh, so you know,” Vinnie said. “People like Poe give women hardship and men a bad name. You’d think he’d appreciate a kind and pretty wife like he has. But no sir, he don’t. Every penny she makes, he spends. And she’s so nice. Hardworking too. He ought to be culled from the herd, if you get my drift.”
    “Oh, I get your drift all right.”
    He cocked a brow. “You know Lily’s a good girl, right?”
    “I know.”
    “You keep it that way, you hear me?”
    “I hear you.”
    I settled down to wait for Lily. The urgency buzzing in me was distracting, not to mention disturbing. I’d been type A all my life—but this? This was different. I had trouble differentiating between doing the right thing and doing what I wanted, between infatuation and obsession, fixation and compulsion. Was this a positive development or a catastrophic setback?
    Lily dropped her pen when she saw me. “What are you doing here?”
    “Relax.” I picked the pen off the floor and handed it back to her. “I just want dinner and some company if you can spare it.”
    She gulped so loudly that I actually heard it.
    “Not that kind of company,” I said. “Just talk, that’s all.”
    For a moment, she didn’t know what to do. Dressed in her black waitress uniform, with her hair up in a messy bun and hardly any makeup on, she looked cute. She was attractive precisely because she didn’t know she was pretty. Her kind of beauty was rare, down to earth and unpretentious. It didn’t hurt that the black slacks cupped her ass nicely.
    At last, she took a deep breath and looked down to her pad. “What will you have?”
    “What do you recommend?”
    “The linguini with clams is very good,” she said. “That is, if you like clams.”
    “I love clams,” I said. “Do you?”
    “I guess.” She blushed.
    “Let’s have two of those.”
    “Oh, no, I can’t. I’m working.”
    “Vinnie,” I called out. “Lily here says she can’t have dinner because she’s working. What do you say to that?”
    “I say you’re da last customer tonight and she needs some meat on them bones.”
    “You heard him,” I said. “Let’s get dinner going.”
    The food was a pleasant surprise. The sauce was crisp, the clams fresh and the pasta perfectly cooked. It turned out we were both hungrier than we thought. Lily fidgeted when she first started eating, but Vinnie’s Chianti helped her relax. I poured her another glass.
    “Friend of Bill’s?” she asked when I took a sip of my water.
    “Friend of my liver,” I said.
    She gave a startled laugh, a joyful sound that infused me with an instant sense of accomplishment.
    “So,” I said, riding on the high of her laughter. “When did you first become interested in art?”
    “Word is I grabbed onto the brush on the day I was born.”
    “Really?” I said, rolling a forkful of linguini. “How so?”
    “It’s an old, boring family story.”
    “I want to hear it.”
    “The thing is,” she said, playing with her fork, “my father was a painter.”
    “Leonard Boswell,” I said, “not just a painter, but a famous one.”
    “I forgot.” She flashed me a flustered look. “Due diligence, eh?”
    “Due diligence indeed,” I said. “Go on.”
    “Okay, well, Mother used to tell the story. When I was born, my father was