Free 18mm Blues by Gerald A Browne Page B

bitter. “The coffee maker needs to be scoured. She can’t lower herself to do it. I’ve been putting it off just to see how long she’ll put it off.”
    â€œMeanwhile I suffer,” Grady said after a swallow. He tongued egg yolk from the corner of his mouth.
    â€œPoor you,” Doris said.
    Eunice was Harold’s secretary and so-called assistant. She’d been with Harold for eight, going on nine years. A short woman in her late thirties apparently not at all self-conscious about her flat chest. She dressed more than a degree too tight and too severely, avoided bright colors, overdid her eyes and had never learned the art of lipstick, just smeared it on, hit or miss straight from the tube usually without the aid of a mirror. She often looked as though she’d just been brutally smacked.
    Eunice disliked Doris, had from the minute Doris came to work at HH. Over the past four and a half years she’d done her best to have Doris fired, most recently only two months ago. It seemed to be a plot constantly on her mind, just waiting for Doris to slip up in some way. Grady tried not to take sides, however Doris was so likeable and loyal to him that he was tempted to pick Eunice up, shake her and tell her to stop being so goddamn territorial. Another thing about Eunice that vexed him was her evident disinterest in gemstones. For all she cared she might as well have been working in a bank.
    Not so with Doris.
    She had a love for gems, not to own them particularly but to enjoy looking into them and knowing them. She’d spent nearly a half of a week’s pay on a first-rate, color-corrected ten-power loupe that she wore every office hour on a gold chain around her neck, the accoutrement of a professional. And when she asked Harold to have the firm help pay for her Gemological Institute of America courses and he didn’t see any reason it should, she was determined to save up for them. Grady discreetly gave her the tuition money as a birthday present six months in advance.
    Doris was more attractive than pretty, but she stole a few degrees for herself by making the utmost of what she had. Legs, for instance. She had superb legs, knew it and never hid or handicapped them. And waist, a waist so narrow it appeared cinched. She played it up with fashionable belts and with blouses that had sheer midriffs. Naturally, such a slender waist complemented all adjacencies—hips, buttocks and breasts. The latter she used as a visual revenge whenever Eunice got an accurate shot off in their ongoing feud.
    Grady liked Doris.
    She loved him. And was outright about it, told him early on and since had reminded him every time she felt the need.
    Grady could have taken advantage. She wanted him to, encouraged him to. When it happened to be one of his lonely times or when they were both riding a crest because of having pulled off an exceptional deal, possibly Grady was within a couple of words and a certain touch of getting into that kind of complicity. He’d kissed her twice on the mouth, once rather lingeringly. She’d groped him once, about a year ago. Not an inadvertent brushing grope but an intentional full-handed helping that caught him so unaware he flinched. She’d laughed. He’d laughed. Her explanation for that sudden aggressive behavior was her imagination needed something substantial to go on. She hadn’t helped herself to him like that since, however he expected she might, and the anticipation was rather enjoyable.
    While Grady devoured the sandwich, Doris picked up the sales report from his desk. Scanned it. “No one took the pinks,” she observed brightly. “I thought the pinks would be grabbed right up.” The pinks, as she called them, were ten matched two-carat sapphires, round cuts of an intense pink color. Of all the gems in the HH inventory they were Doris’s favorites. On her way-down days, PMS days or just whenever she came in in need of some