Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(7)
Before he pulled away, he placed a light peck at the corner of her mouth.
“What’s your name, beautiful girl?” His voice was low and gruff.
Buzzing from the kiss as much as the wine, she briefly considered keeping up with the coy, but decided it was stupid. “Carmen.”
That grin had become downright obnoxious in its cockiness. “Beautiful. Well, Carmen, you were wrong.”
“About what?”
“This was our Woody Allen meet-cute.”
2
Theo stood on the sidewalk and watched Carmen walk, not too unsteadily, into the building. When she went in the front door, he looked up and scanned the windows. About half of them glowed from the interior lights of their apartments. He wondered if the lights were already on in hers. He wondered, too, if it meant he was stalking her if he stood where he was and waited to see if new lights came on.
She really was a beautiful girl. He’d found himself studying her as he’d sat across the little table. Her beauty was the kind Italian Renaissance painters had tried to capture. Botticelli, maybe. She looked Italian, too. Long, straight, thick hair, so dark brown it was nearly black. Olive skin. Big, brown eyes under naturally arcing eyebrows. High cheekbones. And a mouth—God, that mouth. Full lips, with just the slightest downward turn at the corners—that mouth and those eyebrows gave her an intelligent, sardonic aspect, one which apparently suited the intelligent, sardonic personality behind the beautiful face.
She was tall—taller, he thought, that any woman he knew. And though she’d been dressed casually, in jeans and a light pullover sweater, she’d filled out both perfectly.
He was filling his own jeans out pretty well at the moment, too.
It had charmed him to no end to watch her ease from cold aloofness—hostility, even—to warm good humor as her wine had worked its magic on her. Her wit was sharp and quick, a no-bullshit approach to conversation, even after the ice had melted. He liked that. Since Orchids had become a critical darling with modestly successful sales, he most often was told what people thought he wanted to hear. After a while, that had created as much of a complex in him as hearing nothing but criticism would have.
He could certainly go home and tell Elias and Jordan that he had spoken with a beautiful girl.
And kissed her, too.
It wasn’t that he’d been a monk since Maggie’s death nearly five years ago. In the past couple of years, he’d let friends, colleagues, or Jerry, his agent, fix him up occasionally. For functions and dinners and whatnot. But he hadn’t felt much of anything for the women he’d been paired with. He’d kissed them goodnight and left them at their doors. Just now, with the mysterious Carmen, was the first time he’d had his tongue in anyone’s mouth since he’d become a widower.
There might have been some monkishness, actually.
That had been a kiss worthy of throwing off the horsehair shirt, though. Wow. Carmen was here for the summer. He’d like to see more of her, he thought. Maybe a few weeks in Paris with a beautiful girl, with no commitments or complications, was the thing he needed to dispose of the monkish trappings completely.
His boys were right. He spent too much time alone.
A light went on at the top floor of the building. A few seconds later, Carmen came to the window and pulled the draperies closed. Flush with his stalkery success, Theo turned smartly on his heel and headed back toward the flat he was staying in, which was only a few blocks away.
oOo
He woke the next morning to the aroma of baking cinnamon. Eli was up, then. Theo tossed back the comforter and walked to the en suite bathroom. He was naked; his boys were grown and, anyway, knew to stay out of his bedroom.
When he was done in the bathroom, he grabbed his jeans from the floor near the bed and pulled them on, closing them as he left the room.
He’d been staying in this huge apartment now for nearly a month, and he’d almost lost the urge to roll his eyes every time he came through the living room—or, as Hunter Anders, its owner, called it, the salon. The décor was ostentatiously opulent, and this western boy who’d been raised in a dilapidated bungalow on the wrong side of Cheyenne was still afraid to sit on the furniture, most of which looked like it had been looted from Versailles. Not his taste at all.
But beggars shouldn’t be choosers, and he was here on Hunter’s euro. The grant that was paying the bills for Theo to focus on writing his next book had Hunter’s signature at the bottom. The apartment was an added bonus, because he’d made some kind of favorable personal impression on the old man, who lived primarily in Manhattan and rarely traveled far from home anymore.
Theo turned and looked out the central window of the salon—which was filled from top to bottom by the Eiffel tower. The window was surrounded by a golden, rococo frame, like a portrait.
It was shitty to grumble about a few florid, gilt chairs when that was his view while he was sitting on them. He shook his head at himself and headed to the gourmet kitchen.
Elias, his eldest child, all broad muscle and virile blondness, stood at the tall oak island, wearing nothing but grey sweatpants, beating the bejeezus out of a bowl full of eggs. He’d developed a love of cooking when he was still young enough to need to stand on a chair next to his mother while she taught him her tricks. They’d watched the food channel together for years and had yelled at the television during Iron Chef, or whatever those competition shows were called, sounding like he did on Sundays watching the Broncos.