Chapter Three:
Sitting as his desk later that night, shirt sleeves rolled up to the forearm, in his comfy black leather swivel chair, glaring at the stack of paperwork in front of him, Don Flack decided that he was not, under usual circumstances, a man to be easily ruffled; at work, with his family, even getting hassle in the supermarket – he could take care of a problem without even the slightest flinch. This Garcia chick, however, with her long swooshy hair, even longer legs and her damned infectious laugh was really sticking on his mind and getting on his nerves. God, she was pretty. She just flounced in out of nowhere and started winning everyone over with her incredibly sunny disposition and easy-going smile. Well, Flack was having none of it. He was a tough, hardened, cynical New Yorker. He didn't care how many times she looked up from her work to smile at him as he walked past those glass walls umpteen times a day: he would not encourage this...thing, whatever it was, to go any farther. He didn't need it, honestly he didn't.
Relationships had never really been his forte anyway. He'd always been hailed as some sort of ladies' man, but he wasn't really; it's just that he never gelled with any of the girls he'd been with. Some were either too bossy, too high-maintenance, too quiet, too willing, or else they'd found fault with him: he was too manly, too confusing, not a good enough dancer, his place was a mess, his mother called him too often. There was always something.
The last time someone had been occupying his mind this much was in tenth grade, when he'd spent all summer fawning over Stephanie March, trying to gather a crumb of courage to ask her to the dance, and then when he did, she'd turned him down flatly in favor of David Allen, a poetic type of boy, with a thick carpet of hair falling into his eyes. Shortly after that, Stephanie dyed her hair black and mastered the art of frowning.
Rachael was different though. She was funny, intelligent, practical, gorgeous, not bossy, not a nag and definitely not high-maintenance. This was definitely some sort of clinging infatuation that wasn't going away easily.
And it definitely wasn't curing his paperwork issue, either.
XOXOXOX
A shrill, incessant BEEP! roused Rachael from her sleep and, with a long groan, she turned round and slammed her hand down on the square, white alarm clock. It was the one she'd taken with her from England, and the one she'd had since she was sixteen. With a cautious glance, she realised it was ten minutes to seven...and she groaned again. Not having to work until nine-thirty, she had been planning a bracing jog around Central Park, and then a steaming hot cup of slow roasted coffee and a ham-lettuce-and-tomato-bagel afterwards. After that, a shower turned up as hot as it could go, and then she'd be fresh and rejuvenated for the day ahead. However, as her eyes drifted shut, everything went a bit hazy, and she swiftly decided that she could postpone this jog for another ten or so minutes.
The next thing she knew, she'd stretched out, yawned and opened her eyes to the blue and green arrows on her clock pointing to eight-thirty-five she gasped and shot up out of her bed, leaving a cluster of fluffy blankets on the floor behind her. Cursing under her breath, she ran into the bathroom, took a freezing cold five minute shower, brushed her teeth, dried her hair, and pulled on a pair of black skinny jeans and a deep blue v-neck sweater that fell just below her hips. She'd concluded that a simple pair of black pumps would be wiser than the heels for getting around in. It took fifteen minutes to get to the lab from her apartment, so she set off and hailed a taxi.
The taxi driver - Alberto Falcone...Rachael had always had a fondness for checking out the little license on the dashboard. - was a short, dark man in his late forties with definite Italian heritage. "You in a hurry, Miss?"
Rachael glanced up from her current task of rifling through her bag. "Yeah...kind of...didn't leave myself with much time this morning."
Alberto nodded. "You from England?"
"Yes." They were stopped at a set of traffic lights, and the traffic was, for lack of a better word, intense.
"My old man travelled there when he was a kid. Met a lady there, but she broke his heart. They had plans to marry 'n everythin'. She waited till she had the ring, then she ran off with a Lord or a Duke or something high-falootin' like that. Fortunate though, on account of my Pa going home on a boat, standing lookin' over the edge, when a girl walked up to him, sayin' she'd thought she hadn't seen him in a long time and how had he been keepin'. Turns out, they'd lived in the same town, and she'd worked in her daddy's bakery, the one my Pa always went to, and she baked his bread for him every morning, so needless to say, she'd noticed him. He didn't recognize her without her little baker's hat and all." Alberto cleared his throat and rolled his window down a fraction.
Rachael had been sitting, ensconced in the story, but then it had come to an abrupt halt. "What happened then?"
"She's kept on bakin' his bread for the last fifty-two years, and never a cross word." Alberto flashed Rachael a smile in the rear-view mirror. Rachael bowed her head and smiled to herself. "You spoken for?"
"No, definitely not." She laughed.
"Shame." Alberto shook his head, slowly. "For him, I mean." He swiftly added.
"What about you? You got someone to bake your bread?"
Alberto let out a long, luxurious laugh. "Yeah, ha! Her name's Laura, a real doll, you know. We've got four kids, one lone boy in a sea of three girls. God love him."
Rachael nodded. "I have a brother, too. My family are all still in England, though."
"And yet, here you are...out exploring the world, making your own way. Well, more power to you. Kids these days don't see enough of the world. They don't think outside the box." Conversation quietened down as they started moving, and Alberto turned the radio up slightly, but not so loud as to come across as rude. As she made her way into the lab, Rachael was pleased that she'd missed out on her early-morning start; otherwise she mightn't have been so enlightened.
XOXOXOX
In the lab, Rachael had been snowed under for hours, and eventually – after skipping breakfast - she'd been forced by her empty stomach to take her lunch. She sat in the break room, idly flicking through one of those glossy magazines that had been left lying around.
"Oh, hey there! Rachael Garcia! You're the new lab-girl, right?" A pretty brunette with a ridiculously mesmerizing smile walked into the room wielding a plate of salad from the lab's cafeteria. She set her plate down and extended her hand to Rachael. "I'm Detective Angell...you can call me Jess, though."
"Oh, hello." Rachael's mouth was, embarrassingly, still half-full of her chicken-and-bacon sandwich.
"England! I was told you weren't from here, but I couldn't remember where. And how're you liking the change?" Jessica Angell seated herself directly across from Rachael, removed the saran wrap from the top of her plate and pulled a plastic fork from her pocket.
"Oh, yeah, it's brilliant. I love it. Everyone's so nice, and the work's fantastic."
Det. Angell grinned again, almost surveying Rachael. "Hmm. You've made a very good impression already, I'll tell you that. I just had to stop by to meet the newbie I've been hearing about all day."
"Sorry?"
Mysteriously, Jessica shrugged and popped a leaf of lettuce in her mouth and wouldn't say anything else on the subject. "Have you met Lindsay yet?"
"Briefly, she seems nice. In fact pretty much everyone I've met has been great."
Jess cocked an eyebrow in Rachael's direction. "Pretty much everyone? Okay, so who hasn't given you such a warm welcome?"
"Oh, it was nothing, really, just a misunderstanding." Rachael laughed, noting the look on Jess's face she figured that she wasn't going to get away without an explanation of the said 'misunderstanding'. "Detective Flack was giving Adam a hard time about some evidence." Rachael could feel her cheeks heating up remembering his last comment before he had left the room; she just knew that she was more than likely starting to look like a beetroot. "Ahem, like I said it was a, ah, misunderstanding."
Alright, so Jessica had heard about the 'incident' that had happened in the lab the day before, not many people dared to speak back to Don Flack, especially not any of the newbies. She just wasn't sure if Rachael knew that she was the talk of the building for not just for being the new girl!
They talked on for another twenty minutes, both had delved into talking about their families and Rachael had briefly talked about her time in Miami at which point Jessica was summoned by her pager.
In her wake, Detective Angell left a highly discombobulated Rachael wondering who, if anyone, she had made a good impression on.
XOXOXOX
Shortly after Angell had left, Rachael found herself wrapped up in her thoughts. Her thoughts had turned to her apartment. Even after being in New York for over a month she was yet to finish unpacking and making the place her own. The bedroom and bathroom were the only rooms she was happy with and only because they didn't have boxes strewn around. She had managed to bag herself the perfect little place in Manhattan that she had dreamt about having since she discovered that she was moving to New York. It was small, but it wasn't like she really needed all that much room with it being just her living there alone.
She took a sip of the now room-temperature Diet Coke that had been sat in front of her for the last forty minutes, spotting Mac coming her way, then she quickly took a glance at the clock above the door, noticing the time. She panicked as Mac got closer. She'd been so ensconced with analyzing all thoughts coming and going in her rambling mind that time had gotten the better of her and she was supposed to have been back in the lab ten minutes ago. Fantastic. Late to start and now late back from lunch...this wasn't exactly the most shining day in her history of employment.
"Rachael, I've been looking for you."
Rachael shot up out of her cozy, deep-red seat with the wooden arm rests. The furniture in the break room wasn't attractive, but it was functional, and it was exceedingly comfortable. "Mac! I'm sorry...I just, I completely lost track of the time. I was just about to head back to the lab." Rachael managed to stop herself before she got carried away and started rambling again.
He shot her a reassuring smile. "It's fine Rachael. I hear from Adam you did a lot of work on the McGillis case today. You deserve a break after that. Actually I wanted to speak to you about the request you've put in for doing some field work?"
Rachael felt herself relax slightly on realizing she wasn't in trouble. "Um...yes, I did a little bit of field work in Miami, and well, I was hoping that you'd let me get out there. I mean, I know I've not been here long at all, but, you know, it was just a...a thought." She tried her very best to look entirely composed and resolute.
Mac couldn't help but laugh at Rachael's rambling. "Rachael, I know, but I've had a word with Lieutenant Caine and he's told me how good you were in the field. Plus with Lindsay only here part time right now I could use an extra pair of hands. We'll sort out all of the relevant paper work but I can't let you out right away."
Rachael grinned, a sudden burst of glee overwhelming her. "Mac, that's great. Thank you. So, so much."
She had adored the field work in Miami, while it wasn't much. The lab was fine...if you wanted to spend every day looking around at a bunch of microscopes and glass walls. Sometimes you needed to actually see the thing firsthand, to actually go out, find the evidence and just know that you were helping someone. Of course, she wasn't an enormous fan of the blood, gore and the fact that she was always in the company of a dead body, but she figured, in time, that it would work itself out.
XOXOXOX
Nikki A/N: Hey!! So the next installment of the story, hope you all like it! I have to give all the credit for this to Mary for this peach of a chapter, which I love! Again, big thanks to all who have reviewed and added alerts so far; But we really would love some more!!
Mary A/N: Hola! May I just say that I really quite like this chappie...particularly Alberto Falcone. No idea where he came from, but I like him. Myself and Nikki would like to say a massive thanks to everyone who reviewed and alerted, because we are supremely pleased to get feedback...but we definitely need more than one review before we post chapter four, so please press the button and we might just get a bit more Flack in the next chappie ;) Thanks!