Rock Chick Reawakening (Rock Chick 0.5)(18)
I smiled at her.
She smiled at me and wandered away with the box.
I put on my shoes (black patent, platform sandal, one-inch rhinestone ankle strap, tube of rolled open red lipstick for a heel), got up, hitched up my purse on my shoulder, and glided to the makeup counter to while away more of my Saturday afternoon.
The shoe department might let me down in a variety of places.
But any makeup counter from Walgreens to Neiman’s worked for me.
And that afternoon, it so did.
The doorbell rang right in the middle of Julia Roberts having a diabetic fit in a salon chair in Dolly Parton’s garage.
This did not make me happy.
Not Julia having a fit, of course, that never made me happy.
But I was right then not happy about my doorbell ringing during the best movie of all time.
I paused the movie, got up on my bare feet, and marched to the door in my hot-pink Juicy Couture tracksuit with the rhinestone, interlaced “JC” on the back with the crown on top surrounded with an oval of sparkles.
I looked through the peephole and I knew what I’d see because he’d told me he wasn’t going to give up.
But he was interrupting Steel Magnolias.
No one did that.
Not even a tall, dark, rich, hot guy gentleman who opened doors for me.
And right then, even if he was not in a suit but looked just as f-i-n-e, fine in a V-necked, dark-blue sweater that did things to his eyes that, if I wasn’t ticked about Steel Magnolias, would have done things to my coochie, and dark-wash jeans, he had to know that.
So I unlocked the deadbolt, slapped open the latch, and yanked open my own damned door.
“You’re interrupting Steel Magnolias,” I snapped tetchily to Marcus Sloan.
He burst out laughing.
He really shouldn’t have done that.
He really shouldn’t have laughed.
Really.
He was handsome, for sure, just as he was.
But laughter took years off his face.
Years.
I didn’t know how old he was. He looked in his mid-thirties (and I wasn’t going there seeing as he clearly had established his place in Denver at a young age which said something about him and what it said, to a girl like me, was all good).
But right then, he looked like the boy you hoped would neck with you (and you’d let him get to second base) after he took you to a movie.
Though, it was more.
The deep sumptuousness of his laughter felt like everything.
Every diamond in the world laid at your feet.
Every fur piled deep.
Every gold necklace a tangle of beauty twenty feet deep.
Still chuckling, he turned to the side and jerked his head toward my apartment, “Set it up.”
Without a choice, I shifted out of the way as a tall, blond man wearing a black suit, white shirt, and thin black tie walked in carrying a paper bag by the handles in one hand and balancing a baker’s box in the other.
Following him came a heavyset man dressed the exact same way. He’d lost most of his steel gray hair and was for some reason wearing sunglasses even though the sun had gone down, not to mention, he was indoors. He had two bottles of champagne pressed to his chest in one arm, two delicate champagne flutes dangling from the other with…
I narrowed my eyes at them…
Beautiful peacocks engraved in the glass.
Really beautiful peacocks.
Perfection.
Damn him to hell.
I turned my narrowed eyes to Marcus as he moved in, putting a hand to my waist, and this time he used it to guide me where he wanted me to go.
Right smack dab into the middle of my living-slash-dining room.
I let this happen mostly because I was beginning to smell something.
Something so good it forced all of your attention to it.
Which meant I saw the first guy opening lids on food containers, the aroma of what was inside beating back the scent of flowers and filling the room.
“Barolo Grill,” Marcus said and my suddenly food-dazed gaze drifted to him. “Prosciutto and melon. Lobster salad. Truffle risotto. And bombolonis for dessert. With Dom, of course.”
With Dom, of course.
Dom Pérignon and lobster salad in my two-bedroom, not-much-to-write-home-about, uninspired-floorplan-like-gazillions-of-complexes-all-over-the-you-nited-States-of-America, galley kitchen, living-slash-dining-room, only-thing-good-about-it-was-the-master-bath apartment that I’d rented before I started to make a mint off stripping.
“Are you loco?” I asked.
His lips curled up. “No, I’m hungry.” He turned his attention to his men. “That’s good and that’s all.”
They started to move out but stopped when Marcus told them to do it.
His hand slid to the small of my back. “Daisy, this is my man, Brady, and my driver, Ronald.”
In turn, first the blond, then the sunglassed man nodded to me.
“Pleased to meet you,” Brady said.
“Same,” Ronald grunted.
With nothing more, they both took off.
I watched the door close behind them and looked back at Marcus.
“You have a driver?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So he can drive me where I need to go.”
I felt my eyes get squinty again.
He put pressure on my back and guided me to my not-much-to-write-home-about round dinette (that was so going to go when I got my fabulous new pad—there, I’d have a proper, Southern woman’s dining room table, meaning big, gleaming, and covered in fine china, even if I didn’t have any friends to sit at it) where they’d laid out the opened food cartons, baker’s box, champagne, and flutes.