Sweet Sinful Nights(26)
What will you be wearing?
Okay, he was getting somewhere, if they were talking about clothes. Brent grinned to himself as the cab lurched to a stop at a red light. Maybe he wasn’t entirely at square one. Because he knew this woman. Knew how she liked to flirt. How she liked to play. How she liked to keep him on his toes.
What do you want me to wear?
As the cab started up again, he clutched the phone and peered out the window, forcing himself not to simply stare at the screen and wait for a reply. As he scanned the billboards and neon signs, he spotted one up ahead with a body in motion. A dancer leaping through the air. He read the details on the sign, and something clicked. “Yes,” he said triumphantly out loud, and he had the answer to the question Julia had posed to him—what matters most to Shannon. He was about to begin a quick Google search when she replied.
Honestly, you’re pretty hot in nothing. But I don’t think you should parade around naked at dinner, and I keep hearing the new restaurant in the Cromwell is fantastic. There’s a four-month wait, though. And I know you hate waiting. But maybe you can get us in...
Like there was a chance in hell he wouldn’t.
Consider it done.
The cab arrived at his hotel, and several phone calls later, he’d pulled it off. He knew enough people in Vegas, so he’d called in some favors and secured the reservation for the woman he wanted most in the world. He also had something else for her, thanks to a couple of extra minutes spent Googling and ordering, but he’d wait until dinner to give her that gift. As he got into bed, he wrote to her, letting her know he’d pick her up at seven-thirty on Saturday. Her response was swift.
Impressed. Also, no need to pick me up. I’ll meet you at the restaurant.
Damn. She hadn’t given up her address yet. But that was okay. He had a way to earn it when he saw her that weekend. He laughed to himself at the realization that he was thirty-one years old and excited as hell about a dinner date.
But then, the dinner date was with her.
*
Tanner Davies snapped his fingers to get the waitress’s attention. The woman with the bouncy ponytail doubled back to their table. “Yes?”
“I said I wanted sweetened iced tea. Take it back,” he barked, making a get this out of my face gesture with his fingers. “This is unsweetened.”
“Right away, sir,” she said, with a deferential nod.
Tanner, the landlord, turned to Brent, and shook his head. “Fucking waiters. Anyway. Like I was saying, the neighbors are worried about you, man. They think you won’t address their concerns properly.”
Brent nodded at the owner of the building he’d already leased space from in Tribeca. They were at McCoy’s in midtown, rolling up their sleeves to discuss the latest two-steps-forward-three-steps-back routine that New York was pulling.
“With four clubs open in the first year, I think that shows how serious I am. We just opened Saint Bart’s, and that follows our first club in Vegas, as well as our clubs in Miami and San Francisco,” Brent said, carefully detailing the progress his business had made during the first twelve months.
Tanner shrugged dismissively. He might as well have just said who gives a shit? Brent wasn’t so sure if Tanner was the enemy or just the gatekeeper of all the problems the city kept heaping on him. Permits were shooting up in cost. Hands needed to be greased. The zoning commissioner threw up roadblocks. But New York was a linchpin in Brent’s plans for Edge. It was vital to the growing success of his operation, and Brent needed Tanner to help him win this city over, even though just then he wasn’t sure if Tanner was even on his side.
“So what’s the real concern?” Brent said, opting for directness. “And what can I do to help ease them?”
Tanner scratched his jaw, and cleared his throat. “Look. I’m just the messenger here, so don’t shoot me. But the neighbors don’t trust you. They think you’re a flash in the pan. Impulsive even. They see you as the bad boy of comedy who hosted a foul-mouthed TV show. And they worry you’re just some former TV celebrity who’s going to bring a lot of noise and crowds into their neighborhood at night,” Tanner said, and Brent reined in the flash of anger he felt over that word—impulsive. “And they want to know why they should allow another club in their neighborhood, especially one run by someone with a high profile.”
“The location is zoned for a nightclub,” Brent said, pointing out the obvious, because that was the reality of the property. Rather than deal with intangibles, Brent wanted to try to focus on the facts. “You had one in the building before mine and it went out of business.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying to them,” he said.
“And how do they take it?”
Tanner sighed, a frustrated stream of breath that seemed to peter out of him. “Not well.”
Irritation knotted in his muscles. He didn’t even know who was friend or foe. He might not ever know though, so he shifted gears. “So I need to prove to them why it should be my club?”
“Yeah. Why you and not some other nightclub.”
Brent launched into his pitch about Edge. He wanted to make sure the landlord would go to bat for him. “Because we don’t attract the raunchy crowd that the previous club drew. You won’t find twenty-one-year-olds puking outside the loft apartments at three in the morning. We don’t cater to the whole deejay culture that attracts the crazy fans. My clubs are upscale and classy. They have a certain mystique, a lush sensuality, but it never crosses over into trashy. Edge is seductive, it’s sexy, but it’s never raunchy.”