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Richard the Lionhearted. Sometime in the middle of the night, she’d dubbed him with the name. Her Richard. Suddenly she didn’t feel the bite of Harriet’s tone as much.
    â€œAren’t you going to check it out?”
    â€œYeah. Thanks for telling me.” Madison tried to smile brightly in appreciation.
    â€œWell, don’t sound so cheerful about it. Someone did a really nasty job.” Harriet seemed to relish the idea.
    An unpleasant tingle nipped her neck. “Where have you been?”
    Harriet glared as if Madison had accused her of something. “At a client’s. I’d have told you when I left if you’d been at your desk.”
    Cheeks flushed, eyes a glittering blue that didn’t quite match the orange-red of her dyed hair, and her dress a bright pink, Harriet glowed with color. And animosity.
    If you can’t find anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. That being one of her mother’s favorite axioms Madison had taken to heart, she said nothing. Harriet wouldn’t have grabbed an olive branch anyway. Madison had tried often enough to know what to expect. Harriet simply didn’t want her advice or her help and, in recent months, had seemed downright hostile.
    â€œAren’t you going to call triple A or the cops?” Harriet pushed and shoved.
    â€œYes. Thanks for letting me know.” That was pleasant enough. Madison tried for a little bit more. “I wouldn’t have found it until I left for home.” After her date with Richard. It would have made for an unpleasant ending to a pleasurable evening.
    Harriet made a noise of disgust, shrugged her shoulders and walked away, the nylons on her inner thighs rasping with her angry stride.
    Madison breathed a sigh of relief. Harriet was her greatest disappointment, the one person in all the world Madison couldn’t seem to like no matter how hard she tried. Nor had she been successful in getting others to like Harriet. When Madison suggested Harriet lighten up, Harriet had adjusted her attire rather than her demeanor, abandoning her black, gray and navy-blue suits for more colorful dresses and skirts. With disastrous results. The girl had become the office laughingstock, and her attitude took a dive. Madison had tried to extol her virtues to others at every opportunity, but she’d found little to draw from. If only Bill hadn’t overhead that “Chicken Little” comment she’d made to Harriet and turned the nickname into yet another curse. Madison had racked her brain for a solution to the Harriet problem but nothing worked.
    Right now, however, she had her tires to worry about.
    She couldn’t call her brothers. They’d freak like loving but overprotective mother hens. They’d been that way since her stroke. Not that she blamed them. She figured that worrying about her allowed them not to worry about the possibility of having a stroke themselves. She was sure that wouldn’t happen, but the thought must have occured to them. So she let them worry about her to their hearts’ content. Except for now, when she couldn’t let them interfere with her date with Richard.
    She whirled the Rolodex, stopping at the C s. Dialing, she leaned her elbow on the desk to stop the tremble in her hand. The shakiness in that hand and the fact that one corner of her mouth wasn’t quite as high as the other were the only noticeable effects of her stroke. The doctors attributed her miraculous recovery to her youth. Madison just said a prayer of thanks to God and counted every minute of her life as more wonderful than the one before.
    Then the ring was answered and Madison asked for her favorite tow truck guy.
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    â€œW HAT DO YOU MEAN you’re not calling the police?”
    â€œCalm down, T. Rex.”
    Laurence didn’t feel like a dinosaur. He felt like the fire-breathing dragon Madison sometimes called him. She would have gone to the garage alone if he