As he walked into the kitchen, he saw Jane sitting at the counter munching some kind of nutritious-looking bagel with honey squeezed on top. For a moment the homeyness of the scene made it hard for him to breathe. This wasn’t what he wanted! He didn’t want a house and a wife and a kid on the way, especially not with Kevin Tucker holed up five miles away. He wasn’t ready for this.
He noticed that the Professor looked as neat as always. Her gold turtleneck was tucked into a pair of khaki slacks that were neither too tight nor too loose, and she’d pulled her hair back with a narrow, tortoise-colored clip-on headband. As usual, she hadn’t bothered with much more makeup than a swipe of lipstick. There wasn’t one thing sexy about her appearance, so why did she look so delectable to him?
He grabbed a fresh box of Lucky Charms from the pantry, then collected a bowl and spoon. He slapped the milk carton down on the counter with more force than necessary and waited for her to rip into him about the way he’d run off last night. He knew it hadn’t exactly been gentlemanly, but she’d hurt his pride. Now he was going to have to pay the price, and the last thing he wanted to hear at eight in the morning was a screaming banshee.
She raised both of her eyebrows over the tops of her glasses. “Are you still drinking 2 percent milk?”
“Something wrong with that?” He ripped open the cereal box.
“Two percent isn’t low-fat milk despite what millions of Americans think. For the sake of your arteries, you should really switch to skimmed, or at least 1 percent.”
“And you should really mind your own damned business.” The Lucky Charms clattered into his bowl. “When I want your—” He broke off in mid-sentence, unable to believe what he was seeing.
“What’s wrong?”
“Will you look at this?”
“My goodness.”
He stared incredulously into a mound of dry cereal. All the marshmallows were missing! He saw lots of beige-colored frosted oat cereal, but not a single marshmallow. No multicolored rainbows or green shamrocks, no blue moons or purple horseshoes, not a single yellow whatchamacallit. Not one solitary marshmallow.
“Maybe someone tampered with the box,” she offered in that cool scientist’s voice.
“Nobody could have tampered with it! It was sealed up tighter than a drum when I opened it. Something must have gone wrong at the factory.”
He sprang up from his stool and headed back into the pantry for another box. This was all he needed to make a lousy morning worse. He emptied his old cereal in the trash, ripped open the new box, and poured it in the bowl, but all he saw was frosted oat cereal. No marshmallows.
“I don’t believe this! I’m going to write the president of General Mills! Don’t they have any quality control?”
“I’m sure it’s just a fluke.”
“Doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a fluke or not. It shouldn’t have happened. When a person buys a box of Lucky Charms, he’s got expectations.”
“Would you like me to fix you a nice wheat bran bagel with a little honey on it? And maybe a glass of skimmed milk to go along.”
“I don’t want a bagel, and I sure as hell don’t want skimmed milk. I want my Lucky Charms!” He stalked into the pantry and pulled out the remaining three boxes. “I’ll guaran-damn-tee you one of these is going to have marshmallows in it.”
But none of them did. He opened all three boxes, and there wasn’t a single marshmallow in any of them.
By now the Professor had finished her bagel, and her green eyes were as cool as the missing marshmallow shamrocks. “Perhaps I could make you some oatmeal. Or Wheatena. I believe I have Wheatena.”
He was furious. Wasn’t there anything in life he could count on these days? The Professor had him spinning mental cartwheels; Kevin Tucker had materialized out of nowhere; his mom had moved out on his dad; and now the marshmallows were missing from five boxes of his favorite breakfast cereal. “I don’t want anything!”
She took a sip of milk and regarded him with perfect serenity. “It really isn’t healthy to start the day without a good breakfast.”
“I’ll risk it.”
He wanted to whip her up off that stool, toss her over his shoulder, and carry her up to his bedroom so he could finish what he’d started last night. Instead, he yanked his keys from his pocket and stalked out to the garage.
He wouldn’t just write the president of General Mills, he decided. He was going to sue the whole damned company! Everybody from the board of directors right down to the shipping clerks. By damn, he’d teach General Mills not to ship out inferior cereal. He jerked open the door of his Jeep, and that was when he saw them.