“Nine days,” I said. “Only nine days, and then I’m leaving LA.”
“I like this arrangement. You’re exactly what I needed to get my mind off Tabitha.”
My leg twitched. At the mention of some other woman’s name, the urge to flee had surfaced. What was that all about?
“Tabitha broke your heart?”
“She took my heart out of my chest, rented a moving truck, filled the moving truck with pianos, and ran forward and back over my heart repeatedly.”
I stifled a giggle.
He continued, “It gets better. She rented the moving truck using my credit card, too.”
“Wait, are we still talking in metaphor? This is getting complicated.”
His fingers caught in my hair tangles and yanked at my scalp, making me yelp and grab his hand.
“Easy there, wild beast.”
“Tabitha’s fault,” he growled.
Her name again. The urge to get away was almost unbearable.
I rolled away from him, off the bed, and out of the bedroom. I hustled, butt-naked, around the apartment gathering my stuff and getting dressed.
I could just leave! Good idea, Peaches!
I’d thrown on my clothes and was hopping on one foot, trying to get my shoe on for a getaway, when keys jingled on the other side of the apartment door. A second later, someone was opening the door. Scratch that. Two someones. Tall, leggy, brunettes—a matching set.
One of them scowled at me and said, “Who the f**k is this whore?”
The other one smiled and tucked her brown hair behind her ear, then extended a hand to me. “Hello!”
I just wanted to slip out, without a weird confrontation, so I had to think fast. Glancing around the apartment, I spotted a red broom and dustpan.
“I am cleaning lady,” I said, using a (probably offensive) accent I made up on the spot.
The two girls stared at me, one looking as amused as the other looked irritated.
I continued, waving my hand in a swirl, “Out of Lemon Pledge. Have to go… store. Buy more. He no buy, tsk tsk.” I shook my head, really getting into character. “Bachelor. Always messy. With the beard hairs on the sink.”
The mean girl turned to the nice one, saying, “Seriously, Tabitha. Now he’s f**king the cleaning lady? This has got to be rock bottom.”
“No rock bottom,” I growled. “No f**king cleaning lady.”
I resisted the urge to cram my shoe up her butt and slipped it on my foot instead. What confused me most was that the nice girl was Tabitha, Keith’s ex-girlfriend. Who was the mean girl, and what pooped on her Pop Tart?
Miss Nasty said, “Your hair’s wet. You just had a shower, so stop lying.”
I put on a huge, stupid grin. “I clean shower real good. I get right in and scrub, scrub, scrub.”
“Ladies!” Keith called out, drawing our attention. He was dressed and looking every bit the model in a tight-fitting gray, V-neck shirt and light brown chinos. My jaw actually dropped at the sight of him. Damn, he was sexy.
Miss Nasty demanded to know who I was, where he’d been, what he was doing, and about a million other things, all peppered with swear words and spewing out of her nasty mouth like a volcano of ugly.
Keith came around to my side and draped his arm over my shoulders. “My housekeeper and I are in love,” he said.
My jaw dropped again. Now, despite what had just happened in the minutes leading up to here, I’m not big on lying, even for the purposes of a hilarious farce, but the look on Miss Nasty’s face was all it took to bring me over to the dark side.
“So in luff,” I said, still in my pretend-broken English. “I no resist big, handsome man. So sexy, like horse.”
Miss Nasty snorted. “Like horse! Keith! This is what rock bottom looks like. Here you are. I hope you’re happy, wallowing in your filth.”
I nearly cracked up. “No filth. I clean real good.”
Tabitha had already ducked away, into the kitchen. Some dishes clattered, and she returned to the area by the front door where we were standing, holding a popcorn-sized green glass bowl. “Got what I came for,” she said cheerily.
“Nice to meet you,” she said to me. “I’m Tabitha, by the way.”
“You break heart,” I said, hugging my arms around Keith protectively and putting on an exaggerated frown. It was surprisingly easy to play this role of Keith’s cleaning lady. The broken English forced me to slow down and think about what I was saying more than I usually did.
Keith squeezed me tight against him and kissed me affectionately on the side of my forehead. “And then you fixed my heart,” he said to me.
“I did? Oh! I did.”
To the other girls, he said, “Yeah, this has been going on ever since you both moved out. I didn’t tell you, because we weren’t sure where it was going until now.” He leaned down and rubbed his nose against mine, then gave me a quick kiss on the lips. “Ursula is moving in with me,” he announced.
In unison, the brunettes said, “Ursula?”
I nodded. “Family name. You no like?”
They seemed skeptical, but there were so many lies being flung around, they didn’t know what to disbelieve first.
Keith said, “Ursula, this is Tabitha, my former girlfriend, as you’ve figured out. And this other charming young woman, who seems to have forgotten the manners we were raised with, and needs a dose of cayenne to remind her, is my sister, Katy.”
I pointed to him, then Miss Personality, aka Katy. “Keith, Katy. Brother, sister. I get. Keith is nice.” I gave her a dirty look, my eyes nearly squinted shut, like I was putting a curse on her—a curse I would have learned back in my homeland, wherever that was. “Katy is like kitty-cat who is not so nice.” I held my hands up in a clawing gesture and hissed.
Katy’s mouth knitted up, erasing her lips entirely from her face.
Tabitha edged closer to the door. Considering she was the ex-girlfriend, she was taking everything rather well. “Come on, let’s go already,” she said to her friend.
“Not yet,” Katy said, her lips still thin with tension. “Ursula, you’re invited to dinner tonight, with our parents, at their house.”
“No, no. Too much,” I said, which wasn’t a lie at all.
“Sounds great,” Keith said, squeezing me tight against him. “I’ve been meaning to introduce her to Mom.”
“Hah!” yelled Katy, making me jump.
She opened the door and the two of them were off, without another word.