Shimmy Bang Sparkle(73)
“Hello!” Stella said. She smoothed her hair and smiled, her lips kiss-reddened and her lipstick smudged. I wet my thumb and took a step toward her to patch her up. Stella’s eyes glistened and her breathing quickened as I touched her. Her eyes darted to the maid and back to me as if to say, We should probably take this back to the room! Priscilla sat down beside the maid, sniffing her nylons. But I wasn’t going anywhere, and after a few gentle rubs, Stella looked as good as new.
I turned to face our reflection in the door. It was time for our first date. I was absolutely ready. But as the doors were just sliding shut, there was the thump, thump, thump of footsteps, followed by a guy saying, “Hold that door!” And a tanned hand shot between the doors to open them back up.
There he was. The sheikh.
Stella coughed delicately in the general direction of the stack of towels on the back of the maid’s cart, and I lowered my eyes, sizing him up in my peripheral vision. What immediately caught my attention was what he was wearing on his feet and the ridiculous contrast they made to the rest of us in the elevator. The maid’s orthopedic sneakers. Stella’s gorgeous heels. My Italian whatevers.
And the sheikh’s gold Crocs.
Of fucking course.
As the doors rolled shut, the elevator instantly began to smell like the fragrance room at the Axe Body Spray factory. The smell was so thick, so acrid, that I could feel it on my tongue. The maid rubbed her nose, and I saw a smile, a painful near-laugh smile, start to creep up Stella’s cheeks. She lifted her eyes to me, and I gave her a look to say, No fucking laughing, cutie. If you start, we’re hosed.
She nodded and lowered her eyes again. The maid sniffed hard, her nostrils thick with a sudden rush of protective snot. I blinked hard. It was the closest I ever hoped to get to being maced, that was for damned sure. The maid pounded on the button for the lobby, but the elevator didn’t move.
Yet again the door rolled open, offering a burst of mercifully fresh air. The maid inhaled like she’d been given a whiff of smelling salts, and Stella made a little meep and tried to cover it with a cough. At first, nobody appeared outside the door, but then I heard a shuffling. Or a swishing.
It was the bodyguard. He held the Zero Halliburton, just like we’d known he would.
He was massive, and he looked even more massive in his cheap, too-tight suit that didn’t fit him right anywhere, especially under the arms, which were dark with half circles of sweat. He lumbered into the elevator, thighs rubbing, and stood right in front of the sheikh. His hair plugs were the worst I’d ever seen in my life, and I’d met some seriously macho motherfuckers in my day, guys with a deep and abiding phobia of early male-pattern baldness. This guy’s plugs took the prize. They were like porcupine quills—spiky and separate like that. In the reflection on the door, I watched him study Stella, then the maid, and then me. His eyes went right to the tattoo on my neck. He didn’t even glance at my face.
But regardless, the situation was less than ideal. Though we weren’t exactly doing this job with ski masks, I didn’t want his eyes on us if we could help it. Especially not on her. What we really needed was a distraction, and I seriously contemplated laying a kiss on Stella right there and then. Maybe I’d walk her back into the maid’s cart and send all the tiny bottles of shampoo tumbling.
But before I could make a move on her, Priscilla waddled over to the sheikh and gave his bare, hairy calf a sniff. She lowered her ears and looked up at him. Her snout barely cleared his ankle. Her tail was straight and rigid. Very slowly, she maneuvered herself around to face me. She looked up at me—and our eyes connected in total human-canine connection. And then she squatted, closed her eyes, and let loose with a long and magnificent piss. All over the sheikh’s golden Croc.
Stella still had laugh-tears in her eyes when we dropped Priscilla off for Yappy Hour, and she was occasionally overcome with a sudden snort even as we headed out to the poolside bar for drinks. I, too, was fighting back laughter, because over and over again I kept replaying it in my head. It was like Priscilla had saved up on pee for days; when the sheikh moved his right foot, she backed her ass up onto his left one in one continuous stream of dog urine so potent, it overwhelmed the cologne with something that smelled a whole hell of a lot like wet pretzels.
We walked down the flagstone steps and headed for the poolside bar area, a classy looking tiki hut surrounded by small café tables. I picked the table that had the best view of the pool and the back of the hotel so we could get a sense of what we were up against for tomorrow. I pulled her chair out for her. As she sat, I got a killer view of her cleavage. Then I sat across from her, looking out at the water. She was still laughing a little. As her head fell back, the beautiful creamy line of her throat made a perfect curve, interrupted only by the string of decoy pearls that I had asked her to wear. Because fuck, they looked good on her—even hotter because she’d made them. Even hotter still because they were concrete proof of her—so sweet, so nice, so lovely—being nothing but trouble with a capital T.
Once she let all the laughter out, she inhaled and fanned her face with her slightly spread fingers. “OK. I think I’m OK. Probably.”
“It’s OK if you’re not,” I said. “I could watch you laugh all damned night. That’s why I first noticed you, that laugh.”
She blinked away the shine in her eyes. “What! Really?”