“Carol?”
“Carol. The man I told you about.” She patted my hand and gave me a brilliant smile. “Alexander must have said something quite unforgivable if he’s rattled you this badly. You do remember that you are here to meet the man I think is perfect for you?”
“I—” I looked back to where Alex was stalking behind us, a familiar frown affixed to his face. “Well, yes, but I thought…that is, I assumed…”
Isabella glanced at me out of the corner of her eye as she steered me toward a candlelit sitting room. “You thought I meant Alex? Lord, no! He’s the last man I’d pair you up with.”
Well, hell, was it that obvious?
“This is Carol Coventry, Alix. Carol, this is my summer tenant Alexandra Treebark. Alix is here to do research for a book she’s writing.”
I stared at Isabella, aghast at her cruel joke.
Treebark?
I was about to correct her when she grabbed Alex’s arm and insisted he look at a new print she had framed. I watched them leave the room, then turned back to the man who had stood to shake my hand.
“My name is Karl,” he said with a wry smile and offered his hand. “Karl Daventry. You have to excuse Isabella, she has a terrible memory for names. I assume you must be an Alicia or Allison if she’s calling you Alix.”
I shook his hand and smiled. He really was quite
pleasant-looking—a bit taller than me, dark hair and eyes, long English face, and a cute little skull-and-crossbones earring. He was nice, but…I couldn’t help but think he wasn’t perfect. Or maybe he
was
perfect, but perfect in that white-bread, bland, unexciting sort of way. Even his earring was the perfect balance of hip and different, and yet not silly-looking or offensive.
“Actually, my name is Alix, although my last name is Freemar, not Treebark. That’s a little odd about Isabella’s name hangup. Does she do that to everyone?” I couldn’t help but wonder about Dr. Bollocks and the Muttsnuts newlyweds.
He smiled. It was a nice smile with nice teeth. Perfect teeth, in fact. I waited for a wave of emotion to roll over me at the sight of his perfect smile—love, lust, happiness, excitement, pleasure—any emotion would do. I waited while he speculated as to the cause of Isabella’s little memory problem, then I waited some more while he told me about the joys and sorrows of being a dentist (it explained his perfect teeth).
I was still waiting for Karl to generate some sort of emotion within me, something—
anything
—when Alex and Isabella returned. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I glanced over at them; Isabella was laughing up at Alex, her arm tucked around his, her head of silver-blond hair contrasting beautifully against the stark black of his suit. He was smiling back at her in a way that made me want to rip his traitorous lips right off his face and do a spot of Riverdancing on them. In clogs.
The evening went downhill after that. My eyelashes underwent a hideous mutation into giant clumps of sticky black tar that clung with a fervor I hadn’t expected
from eyelashes to the skin just above my eyes. It made blinking a dangerous experience.
“Erm…you’ve got something there,” Alex said softly to me, gesturing toward my face. We were all sitting at Isabella’s glass dining room table, enjoying her scampi fettuccine, my wine, and fresh basil-garlic rolls that were so good they made me want to weep with joy. Isabella’s table was all in white and silver, matching her ensemble perfectly. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had chargers, candles, napkins, and accoutrements to match all of her evening wear.
I stopped counting the candles on the table and looked to my right, where Alex was sitting at the foot of the table. “I’ve got lots, buster, but don’t be thinking you’re going to be trying it on for size, because you’re not. At least, not now. Well, maybe a little later, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Not completely.”
His face was a study in puzzlement, with surprise, confusion, and finally a tiny flicker of annoyance all taking a turn in the spotlight. He narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice as he stared pointedly at my left cheek. “You have a black smut on your cheek.”
I crossed my eyes trying to look down at my cheek, but couldn’t see anything. “Oh. Thank you. Just forget I mentioned trying anything on for size.”
I reached up to see if I could feel it and encountered a blob. It was a dung-beetle-size ball of mascara with several eyelashes stabbed through it. “Great,” I muttered, the blob of mascara on my fingers. “Now my eyes are going to be bald.”
“You’re very outspoken,” Alex said sotto voce in a tone that indicated it was not a compliment. “Are all Americans like you?”
I shrugged and looked covertly around the table but didn’t see anywhere I could dispose of the blob. I’d be damned if I ruined one of Isabella’s nice linen napkins with it, but I really couldn’t sit with it in my hand all night. “It depends. I come from a family of outspoken women. We believe in calling a spade a spade. Why, does that bother you? Don’t tell me you are one of those guys who gets into playing head games with people—the kind who is into power trips?” I peered at him suspiciously. “You’re not one of those weirdos who goes in for bondage and domination, are you? ’Cause if you are, I’ll tell you right here and now, there’s no way in hell I’ll put a dog collar on.”
His eyes widened and he started to shake his head.
“And don’t expect me to wear stiletto heels and call myself Mistress Cruella, either, because this girl doesn’t go in for that.”
“I never said—”
I pointed my blobby finger and shook the black ball of mascara at him, half hoping it would go flying off of its own accord. It didn’t, of course. They should glue the tiles on the space shuttle with old mascara. “And if you’re into being dressed up in diapers and being spanked, well, just don’t come running to me to get your jollies! Well, OK, maybe the spanking, but no diapers! I draw the line at diapers!”
A dull color tinted his cheeks a faint pink. I watched, fascinated, feeling a bit wicked and very powerful with this skill at making him blush, before I realized that no one else was speaking. I looked over at Isabella and found her and Karl looking at Alex with speculation. I peeked at Alex out of the corner of my eye. He was glaring
at me, his fingers twitching like he wanted to get them around my throat.
“Strangling someone is a felony,” I murmured at him when Isabella turned back to Karl. “You’d go to jail for the rest of your life.”
“It might be worth it,” he growled, and looked away.
I was about to poke him when I realized the black blob of mascara and eyelashes was still holding steadfast to my finger. My opportunity to dispose of it came a few moments later. Under the cover of laughter from Isabella and Karl over an amusing anecdote, I wiped it on the side of my plate, hoping it would blend in with the arugula. It didn’t. It clung to the rim of the plate, proudly sporting its growths like a great, hairy black gonad. I stared at it in horror, but I didn’t know what else to do with the damned thing. I looked around the table frantically, but there were no tissues or anything else I wanted to ruin with the beastly thing. My palms went all sweaty when I glanced at Isabella—she was speaking with Karl, but I knew that the minute she looked over at me, she’d see the horrible malignant growth sitting there on my plate. I swear I could see its feelers waving around in the warm air generated by all of the candles. I watched it carefully, horrified that it might start moving of its own accord.
“Alex?” Karl asked.
“I’ve never seen it before in my life!” I shrieked, startled. Three pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I laid my fork across the hideous thing, but the eyelashes it held hostage poked through the tines.
Isabella looked a bit taken aback, but Karl looked downright worried. I didn’t look at Alex. I had a feeling
he had seen me with the thing, and would think the worst of me.
“Sorry. Daydreaming. You wanted to know something, Karl?”
He glanced over to Alex. “Actually, I was asking Alex what he thought of the Wolves and Dons game.”
“Oh, hockey.” I glanced down at my plate. Had the fork moved a little bit?
“Football, not hockey, Alix,” Karl said with a smile.
With the attention off me, I picked up my fork and tried to think of an excuse to take my plate with me to the bathroom so I could dispose of The Entity.
“It’s a bit confusing with so many Alexes here,” Karl laughed, raising his eyebrows at Alex. I looked at Alex as well, expecting to see him respond to the comment, but he was staring at the atrocity on my plate with the look of horrified fascination one wears when passing a particularly bloody accident.
“Is something the matter, Alexander?”
I whipped my head around so fast that I almost knocked a candle over with my hair. Isabella was leaning slightly to the side to peer through the forest of flames to see what it was that had generated such a look of horror on Alex’s face.
“It’s nothing, Isabella,” he replied, pulling a handkerchief from an inner pocket.
While the talk turned to local sights that I shouldn’t miss in my quest to visit all of the tourist attractions within the greater London area, Alex’s hand disappeared under the table. I felt it nudge my knee. I groped for the handkerchief, sent him a look of ardent gratitude that promised him the moon and the sun if he only cared to
take me up on it, and with cautious glances all around the table, wrestled the thing off my plate.
I had only to dispose of the handkerchief, since I was fairly certain Alex wouldn’t want it back. I noticed a painting across the room and leaned forward to wave toward it. “Is that a Monet print, Isabella?”
A slight frown wrinkled her brow as she turned to look. “Monet? No, I did that myself. It’s a watercolor of wildflowers in Scotland.”
I stuffed the handkerchief down the front of my dress while everyone was looking at the picture, then flipped my hair back over my shoulder and would have given a sigh of relief had Alex not chosen that moment to go insane. He threw his napkin over my head and started beating my skull.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” I yelled, and struck out with my fists. I connected with someone a couple of times, presumably Alex, since the response was a deep, masculine grunt of pain.
As the napkin was pulled off my head, I jumped from my chair and grabbed Alex by his lapels, shaking him while yelling that he was an idiot. He held me off with one hand, cradling his right eye with the other. As soon as I let go of him, he sank back into his chair, groping blindly for his napkin. I picked it up off the floor and threw it at his head.
“You rat! How dare you treat me like that? Well, I’ve got witnesses to your assault, and don’t think I won’t use them!”
I spun around on my heel and would have made a highly dramatic exit except Mr. Mad as a Hatter ruined it.
“Your hair was on fire,” he said in a distracted tone. I
looked back. Isabella was standing at his right side, pressing a wet napkin to his eye and making tutting noise at him. Karl was on his other side, offering to see if the couple of blows I had landed had damaged his teeth. I reached to the back of my head to swing my hair around and show him it was just fine, but what my hand pulled forward was an alien thing made up of ragged, charred,
stinking
strands of hair. Most of it wasn’t even there to be pulled forward.
“My hair,” I whimpered. I may not be vain about many things, but I do have nice waist-length hair. It’s not an exciting color, but it’s thick and it has a lot of body…or it did, before the raging inferno took most of it.
“You’re going to have a black eye,” Isabella told Alex, and pressed his hand over his eye to hold the compress in place while she came to examine my hair. She tsked over it. “You’ll have to have it cut. There’s not much of it left past chin level.”
“I never cut my hair. It hasn’t been cut in anything but a trim in over five years,” I said, my lower lip definitely quivering. I felt like bawling, I honestly did. There is just so much humiliation a girl can take before she starts wailing.
“I know a very good stylist,” she said, patting my arm in encouragement. “I’ll ring him up tomorrow and tell him it’s an emergency.”
I stared at the motley strand of hair that was the sole survivor below my ear on the right side of my head. “Isabella?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for dinner. I’ve had a lovely time, if you can forget the embarrassment of walking around with my dress tucked up into the waistband of my pantyhose,
the huge black blob of mascara that has probably melted through Alex’s hankie and is even now coating my breasts, and of course, setting fire to my head. I would like to go home now.”
“Of course you would,” she said soothingly. “I’m sure Karl would be happy to walk you downstairs.”
“Certainly,” he said, standing up from where he was trying unsuccessfully to get Alex to open his mouth.
“It’s not necessary,” Alex said with a little grunt as he stood and set the wet napkin down next to his plate. “I think I’ll go as well. I’ll make sure Alix gets to her flat safely.” He glared at me out of an eye that was starting to swell. I winced. Isabella was right—he was going to have one hell of a mouse.
“I can walk down a flight of stairs by myself,” I said with dignity, and turned toward the door. Alex grabbed my arm, muttering something about Isabella needing to increase her insurance on the house while I was staying.
He said nothing else as we went down the flight of stairs, and stood equally silent while I fumbled to unlock my flat.
“I’m sorry about hitting you,” I said as I opened the door. “I thought you had lost your senses or something.”
“I’m not accustomed to losing my senses at a dinner party,” he said, gingerly feeling first his eye, then the area below his cheekbone. He looked pitiful—wounded, and needful, and sexy as hell. I told myself that since I had caused the problem, it was my responsibility to fix it, so I grabbed his hand and dragged him inside the flat and closed the door.
“Sit,” I told him, and nodded toward the chaise as I started for the tiny kitchen. “No, wait, lie down. It’ll help take the swelling down.”
He stood in the middle of the room for a minute, then gave a little sigh of resignation and sat down on the wicker chaise. It creaked ominously as he lay back on it, careful to keep his shoes off the cushions. I poked around in the tiny freezer compartment of the refrigerator and ousted a pint of ice cream.