DO OR DIE Countdown: Day twenty-one
I wear glasses.
I remember getting them — it was way back when I was in first grade. I was six years old and I walked out of the optometrist’s with a pair of blue plastic cat-eye frames, and I remember looking around with astonishment and being stunned that I COULD SEE INDIVIDUAL LEAVES ON THE TREES! It was beyond cool. And yeah, there was a period where I wore contact lenses, but in recent years, I’ve gone back to glasses.
They’re more than just a way for me to see the world around me. They’re a useful life prop. I like the way I look in them. And I can take them off to blur the world around me, or to give myself a moment to gather my thoughts as I wipe the lenses on the bottom of my shirt, a la Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In DO OR DIE, I decided that the heroine, Phoebe Kruger, also wore glasses. She’s a lawyer, and as a woman in a still predominantly man’s world, she also uses her glasses as a prop in a variety of ways. But when I sat down to write this book, I wanted to make sure that her journey didn’t include any kind of “make-over,” where she lets down her hair and loses her glasses in that somewhat typical “librarian to sex kitten” conversion. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that romance trope. I just didn’t want to go there with this book.) So I made sure that Phoebe started the book very confident in both her physical appearance and her intellect. She is a smart, mostly-savvy, quick-to-learn, real-sized woman who likes herself. And wears glasses.
But it was funny when I started writing the book just how quickly I forgot that this character wore glasses. I had to write a note to myself, and put it on my computer, so Phoebe’s glasses didn’t mysteriously disappear, twenty pages into the book. Funnier still is the fact that, as a glasses wearer, I am one hundred percent aware, one hundred percent of the time EXACTLY where my glasses are. If I take them off and put them down, I take a moment to stop and pay attention so that I never forget where I’ve put them. (If I forget, I will never find them, because I won’t be able to see them!!!) I have established places throughout the house for my sunglasses case, and for the glasses that I wear for long-distance view, like when I watch TV or go to the movies or a show.
It didn’t take me that long to get used to keeping track of Phoebe’s glasses, too — but I kept the note to double-check my figurative math.
With that in mind, here’s an excerpt from DO OR DIE, from Phoebe’s point of view, from relatively early in the book:
He’d pushed her in.
Ian Dunn had pushed her into the swimming pool.
Phoebe sputtered and coughed as she flailed her way up to the surface. Her wet clothes were heavy and she only managed to get a quick bit of air before the water closed over her head again.
She was in the deep end, and it was pretty freaking deep, and she struggled to get the strap of her bag up and over her head, because it was helping to weigh her down. She wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer to start with, and the cut of her jacket made it hard to move her arms, so she kicked her feet, which did little more than dislodge her shoes. Still she somehow again broke surface, and she tried to see which way she needed to swim to get to the shallow end, but she ended up gulping water instead of air, which was not good.
“Oh, for the love of God,” she heard Dunn say before she went under again.
There was no way that she was going to drown in someone’s backyard swimming pool, but now she was gagging and choking, her lungs burning, and the urge to inhale was strong even though she was underwater, and she had to get back to the surface, but she couldn’t.
And the consternation and annoyance she was feeling took a solid turn into a flash of full panic—holy God, was she really going to drown in someone’s backyard swimming pool?—when she suddenly felt Dunn join her in the pool with a rush of force and bubbles.
She felt his arms go around her and he unceremoniously hauled her up out of the water so she could breathe. Air, air, real air! She flailed as she coughed and spat and choked, and the terror wasn’t gone because she still couldn’t stand and there wasn’t much of Dunn to grab onto because he had her from behind in a rough version of a lifeguard hold. She felt him pull her through the water, and even though she couldn’t see much of anything through eyes that were both stinging from chlorine and tearing from the coughing that still wracked her, she tried not to fight because she knew he had to be taking her to the side of the pool. And sure enough, he kept one arm around her, looped just under her arms, as he grabbed for the edge to keep them from both going under again.
And still, Phoebe could do little more than cough and wheeze and hack as her lungs burned and she replaced water with air, thank God. She felt Dunn maneuver his leg beneath her, attempting to support her butt with his rather massive thigh, as if she weighed little more than a child.
It served to boost her up a bit more out of the water, which was good, except when he tried to loosen his hold on her, which made her turn toward him in alarm and grab him more tightly.
Before jumping in to rescue her, he’d taken off his shirt and his jeans and probably his boots as well, and her hands slipped against the wet smoothness of his shoulders and back. He was a large man, and there was a lot of smooth skin beneath her fingers, covering a vast expanse of very firm muscles.
“I got you,” Dunn said into her ear. “You’re good.” His voice changed then, and Phoebe knew that he was talking to the man who’d come over the back wall—the one that Dunn had drawn her Glock on before he’d tossed her into the pool. Why on earth had he tossed her into the pool? “Who the hell lives in Florida but doesn’t learn to swim?”
“I know how to swim. I just don’t do it particularly well,” she tried to protest, but her voice was weak and the man who was outside the pool spoke over her.
“Who the hell buys a house in Florida—in cash,” he said, with a ton of snark in his tone, “but then doesn’t live in it for more than a few days before vanishing off the face of the earth?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Dunn said. “How are you?” He didn’t wait for the other man to respond. “Help me get her out of here.” He spoke into her ear again. “Come on, honey. Loosen your death grip on me, and use those hands of steel to grab onto my brother, Aaron.”
His brother?
Phoebe looked up, way up, at the man standing at the edge of the pool. Up closer like this, even without her glasses, which were now at the bottom of the pool, she could see that he was younger than Dunn by quite a few years. His hair was shorter and lighter, and his eyes were more green than blue. And even though he was tall, he wasn’t quite as super-sized. He was more sculpted, more . . . elegant. More slender and beautiful and less raw-boned. Less Stone Age and more Bronze Age—but still the kind of man who enjoyed living in a cave. He was completely, obviously, absolutely Ian Dunn’s brother.
“Aaron, Phoebe.” Dunn kept the introductions cursory. “Phoebe, Aaron.”
With a great deal of unhidden disgust, Aaron held out his hands and Phoebe let go of Dunn and reached for him. He took her by the wrists, and she did the same, and with Dunn pushing from the pool, she was up and out of the water and plopped inelegantly down onto the pink brick pavers, still working to spit the last of the chlorinated water out of her raw and burning lungs as her hair dripped into what was surely her makeup-streaked face.
Former SEAL that he was, Dunn wasn’t going to need any assistance getting out of the pool, and Aaron didn’t try to help, instead stepping back so as not to get splashed. But Dunn first dove to the bottom to collect her glasses, and then her bag and shoes, which he set beside her—as if they weren’t completely ruined and useless. Her phone, her wallet, the files she’d taken for one of the other cases she was supposed to be simultaneously working on . . .
“You pushed me in,” Phoebe accused him in a voice that was raspy and raw as she put her glasses on with shaking hands, while he used the edge of the pool to thrust himself up and out, water sheeting off of him.
She expected him to deny or at least make excuses: It was an accident; I tripped; I didn’t mean to . . . But instead he said, “Yup. Sorry. It had to be done,” as he used his hands to squeegee off his face and push back his unruly hair.
From her vantage point, looking up at him through the water- spotted and slightly blurry lenses of her glasses, he was quite literally larger than life. Right at that moment, with his hands up on his head, his muscular chest bare, and his boxer shorts clinging to him in a most revealing way, water matting the hair on his chest and his legs and his eyelashes, he was ridiculously attractive. Even with his more conventionally handsome younger brother standing next to him.
Of course the fact that Aaron was looking down at her with unconcealed dislike in his pretty hazel eyes might’ve had some- thing to do with it, as if she weren’t a person but instead a pile of excrement left on his pool deck by a wart-covered troll with an intestinal ailment.
“Phoebe who?” Aaron was asking Dunn. “Who the hell is she?”
“Phoebe Kruger.” Dunn glanced down at her. “She says she’s my lawyer.”
“I am your lawyer,” she said, still in that raspy voice, taking the opportunity granted by the eye contact to ask, “It had to be done?”
But Aaron was even more incredulous than she was. “Your lawyer works for Davio Dellarosa?”
“No,” Dunn said, but then corrected himself. “Well, she might. But it’s more likely that she works for Manny. We just met this morning, so . . .”
“I don’t,” Phoebe said. “Work for Manny. Or Davio. Or any other random Dellarosa.” With her ability to breathe mostly back, she started to peel her wet jacket from her shoulders—until she realized that the water had made her white blouse transparent. Neither man noticed, since Aaron had gotten way up in his brother’s face.
“What the hell, Eee?” he asked. It was then that Phoebe saw that he was holding her Glock. Dunn must’ve put it down when he’d shucked off his jeans and boots and shirt, and Aaron had it now. He held it like he knew how to use it, which wasn’t comforting at all. “You think she works for the Dellarosas, so you bring her here . . . ?”
“It really doesn’t matter who she is or who she works for,” Dunn said, wringing out his shorts as best he could.
“Damn straight, it doesn’t matter,” Aaron retorted. “She could be motherfucking Mother Teresa, and you still shouldn’t’ve brought her here. The more people who know where we are, the more likely one of them will tell someone who’ll tell someone else, who’ll pass along the info to that motherfucking maniac who—”
“Probably already knows exactly where you and Shelly live,” Dunn calmly finished for him. “Aaron, it doesn’t matter who Phoebe is or who owns her. It doesn’t matter if she does legal work for Manny Dellarosa or washes his dishes or even sucks his dick. Or does all three simultaneously. Because Manny knows. He knows, because I made a deal with him to keep you safe. He’s been keeping Davio in line.”
Aaron was silent at that, just staring at Dunn.
Phoebe raised her hand, her need to set the facts straight winning out over her desire not to upset the man who held her handgun. “For the record,” she said, “I’ve never so much as met Manny or Davio Dellarosa, let alone—”
“Since when?” Aaron interrupted her to ask his brother. The expression on his face was terrible, and Phoebe closed her mouth, focusing instead on becoming as small and invisible as possible. Just as she’d had no desire to drown in someone’s backyard swimming pool, she hated the bitter irony of being shot and killed with her own deadly weapon. “This deal you made . . . ?”
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Read DO OR DIE’s cover blurb at https://suzannebrockmann.com/upcoming/do-or-die/
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Here it is, the cover art for 
