One Unforgettable Evening

One Unforgettable
Evening

Dusty Miller

This Smashwords edition copyright 2014
Dusty Miller and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-1-927957-04-2

The following is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or
events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters
and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The
author’s moral right has been asserted.

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Table of Contents

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three

About the Author

One Unforgettable
Evening

Dusty Miller

Scene One

“
Hello. I hope you will
forgive my intrusion.”

“
Huh?” Leon looked at his
wife as if to ask,
‘Do you know this
guy?’

Adelia was shaking her
head.

The stranger was tall, aquiline, with
jet-black hair raked back in long lines and held down with mousse.
He stood beside their table, where the pair had been having a
standard-issue anniversary dinner. He was very
good-looking.

It was their seventeenth anniversary.
It was a number which, as Leon had pointed out earlier, didn’t call
for anything special.

“
Pardon me, sir?” Adelia
was a little bit intrigued, if nothing else, by the question of how
to make this guy go away.

They needed to make an
escape.

She just wanted to get it
over and done with by this point, chalk it up to experience and go
home. The dress she had picked out of her closet, which looked fine
in the bedroom mirror at home, was somewhat frumpy and a little out
of place compared to the chic and expensive frocks she was seeing
all around her. Her shoes were a little too flat and and maybe a
little too
sensible,
and her hair was all wrong, and what did she expect
anyways?

She was a married woman.

Leon looked completely underwhelming
in grey slacks and a golf shirt that didn’t cost him nine dollars,
and that ill-fitting dark blue jacket, now that he wouldn’t let
Adelia shop for him anymore. You couldn’t pay Leon to wear a tie
these days.

It was company branding and all that.
They said it was working out, though.

“
I couldn’t help myself.
It’s just that I was struck by your wife’s timeless, ephemeral
beauty, sir, and I simply had to congratulate the happy couple on
their anniversary.”

Adelia’s eyebrows rose. She’d never
heard the like. His eyes swept over her and then he turned back to
Leon.

“
My name is Thomas
Darban.” Leon rose and they shook hands. “May I send some champagne
over? It would be my privilege.”

Leon’s mouth opened but no sound came
out.

He raised a hand and the
waist-coated waiters, with puffy white sleeves and red pants if you
can believe it, scuttled forward with glasses and a bottle in a
bucket of ice. Leon scuttled a grin, but he’d never taken the
intangibles, the
ambience,
all that seriously. Not here, anyways.

Leon settled back into his
chair. Sometimes silence is golden. But he had to say
something.

“
Mister and Missus Leon de
Marco. This is Adelia, my wife. I’m Leon—obviously.” This was said
with his customary grin. “Pleased to meet you.”

“
Mister Darban.” Adelia’s
voice was unusually low, husky, even.

Like she had something in her
throat.

“
Dom Perignon.
Enjoy.”

Darban nodded pleasantly at Leon and
took another assessing glance at Adelia, blushing and suddenly
looking very pretty in the scintillating light of the
chandeliers.

Leon wasn’t exactly blind
to it,
inept
might be a better word.

And then the fellow bowed, and made a
kind of exit, although his own table was not far away. He was over
by the back wall in a corner booth. She watched him go, and then
looked around.

On this Friday evening, and even in
this grimy but bustling northern industrial town, it was still a
bit early. The place was filling up and the noise had picked up
considerably. There were three or four empty tables, but more
voices sounded in the vestibule, so that wouldn’t last very
long.

“
Who the hell was that?”
The waiter had poured, and so Leon figured he might as well drink
it.

“
How would I know? I
thought you knew him.”

“
Not hardly.” Leon nodded
and waggled his eyebrows at Adelia.

She picked at her desert, but as usual
was having a tough time; conscience versus desire.

Always watching her waistline, and for
what?

For what?

As for the eyebrow
waggling, that was just his substitute for
meaning
in communication.

“
Come on, drink up. I want
to get out of here and beat the traffic.”

Get home and watch the second half of
the game, is what he meant.

She gave him a look, one not without
humour.

He also knew he wasn’t fooling her,
but she was pretty good about such things. They smiled at each
other relatively fondly over the remains of dinner. A waiter
stepped in and grabbed her last plate.

She really wasn’t quite
done with that…
to hell with it.

Adelia picked up her glass and sipped
it slowly, looking around in spite of her better judgment. That
man, Darban, was watching her. She lowered the glass and watched
open-mouthed as he raised his own glass to her, and then drained it
in a gulp.

Darban winked at Adelia. Then he rose,
setting the glass down. He turned and left the room, of which the
Royal Armitage had several.

“
Leon?”

“
Yes, honey?”

“
Who
is
that guy?”

Her husband shrugged, shook his head
and concentrated on what he was doing.

Leon sloshed more champagne into his
glass. He’d already had three beers over dinner, about the only
real compensation such nights usually brought. But that was harsh.
It’s just that they were getting older now. He could always try
harder.

As for the booze, he would make her
drive for once.

“
Come on, Honey. Drink
up.” He waved for their dinner bill.

***

By the time Leon had drunk most of the
champagne, although Adelia was tippling a bit herself tonight,
another half-hour had gone by. She’d had her customary one glass of
white wine with the chicken, and now she was hoarding her third
glass of champagne, which was excellent, by the way. But it would
keep Leon from drinking all of it.

The chicken was okay, although somehow
she remembered it as being better than it was.

Leon was hitting it pretty hard, but
that was unusual, and that in itself was a good thing, a thing to
be thankful for. It must be kept in perspective.

The drinks helped quite a bit,
actually. Why rush off?

She stole one or two surreptitious
glances at their benefactor. Tanned and lean, Thomas Darban was
exotic-looking in that he was impeccably dressed in something
genuine, a soft charcoal jacket that fit his shoulders like a
glove. The shoes were beautiful, and his upper legs bulged a bit
inside the thin black trousers. The man walked like a tiger. He was
the only man in the room with a bow tie, a red silk one, and he
appeared to be dining alone, which Adelia thought was a little
unusual.

I wonder what he
wants.

She shrugged the thought
off.

Right about then the lights dimmed in
the dining room, but only slightly, although in the very next room
it was much darker suddenly. Coloured spotlights flicked on, one by
one over there. She craned her head to look. Leon brightened up
when some sparkling riff of piano music started up.

“
Oh, yeah. That’s right.”
He smiled across at her, possibly the most genuine sign of
affection or even liking he’d shown her all night.

“
Yes, dear?”

“
Remember?”

She coloured slightly.

“
I remember.” She smiled
then bit her lip.

All of that was such a long time
ago.

Her jaw dropped as Leon rose,
half-bowed, extended a hand and invited her to dance.

There was a weird air of unreality
about it as the couple followed several other people, through the
dining room, past the eyes of all the other people in there, and
out into the shuffling mass that was the dance-floor.

Well, well,
well.

What’s gotten into
you?

She’d have to get him
drunk a little more often.

As they took their positions and began
waltzing through the first few fumbling steps, Adelia caught a
glimpse of Mister Darban over the tops of heads and through the
archway, sitting there like a tiger poised to spring, in the the
brightness of the Fieldstone Room.

He was watching her still, with those
big dark eyes like just coal.

***

After a couple of numbers, they were
back at their table. Darban must have come up on silent feet. She
twitched nervously.

“
So sorry, Madame! Excuse
me, Mister De Marco, but may I have the honour of dancing with your
wife?”

“
Uh—oh—sure.” Leon looked
at her, realizing that she might have other ideas.
“Honey?”

He lowered his chin, opened his eyes
wide, raised his eyebrows and waggled them.

“
Why, thank you. I would
love to.” She stuck out her lip, gave Leon a pouty look, a slight
headshake, and then turned and took Darban’s hand with a ravishing
smile.

The bit of colour high up on the
cheekbones gave her away.

She picked up her glass and had a
quick slug, giving Leon a tolerant look.

Leon grinned. He nodded and winked at
them indulgently.

Good for her. She’d always had a way
of standing up to him. It’s one of the things he liked about her,
then and now.

She rose, the epitome of grace, with a
polite inclination of her head in Leon’s direction and the couple
went off to the dance floor. As she brushed past, the heat of her
body could be felt on the back of his hand.

Huh. Interesting. Leon was just
contemplating the dregs of the champagne bottle, his wife’s empty
glass and the notion that he had a couple of cans of beer at home.
Also, some real food, in real proportions, proportions not meant
for the habitually anemic.

Leftovers were always good.

Still, this night might work out. She
had been kind of starved for attention lately. He’d been working
like a madman for about the last six months now, and there wasn’t a
whole lot he could do about it.

Right about then the waiter arrived
with fresh glasses, ice and another bottle of Dom.

“
Oh, nice.” Leon muttered
lugubriously, but he was too polite, or merely too slow, to wave
off the man before he could refill his glass.