Secrets of a Perfect Night (35 page)

“Yes you are. I could always tell when you were mad. You’d get two little wrinkles between your eyes. You still do.”

She’d rather eat worms than tell him why she was mad. She looked past him and searched the crowd until she spotted Karen and Jen. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to sit with my friends.” She wove her way through the tables, and just as she hung her coat on the back of an empty chair, Mindy announced her next award.

“The award for the person who has changed the most goes to Brina McConnell.” Brina looked toward the podium and stilled. She was shocked they’d remembered her. She glanced at Karen and Jen, saw their trophies, and realized everyone got one. Gee, and for a whole split second she’d felt special. She moved to the front of the room and Mindy gave her a cheap trophy cup mounted on an equally cheap hunk of plastic.

“You look great now, Brina,” Mindy told her.

Brina gazed into Mindy’s blue eyes and decided not to take offense at that comment. She and Mindy had
never been friends, but Mindy had never been purposely mean either. “Thanks,” she said. “So do you.” She made her way back to the table, and as she sat, she cast a glance toward the doorway. Thomas was no longer standing there, nor was he seated with Holly. She gazed around the room and spotted him talking to George Allen. Thomas had put on his ski coat, and he rested his weight on one leg as he flipped his keys around his index finger. He shook his head, then turned and walked out of the banquet room. Brina couldn’t help but wonder where he was going and whom he might be meeting.

“What did you get your award for?” she asked Karen, in an effort to take her mind off Thomas.

“Girl most likely to give birth at the reunion.”

“I bet it took them hours to think up that one.” She looked at Jen. “What’s yours?”

Karen busted up laughing, and Brina hoped it wasn’t for something mean, like the girl who’d gained the most weight.

“Most freckles,” Jen answered through a frown. “I wanted best hair, but they gave Donny Donovan the award for best hair.”

“Isn’t he gay?”

“No, his boyfriend is, though.”

“Who’s his boyfriend?” Brina asked.

“Do you remember a guy who graduated a year ahead of us, Deke Rogers?”

“No,” Brina gasped. “Get out! Deke Rogers? The guy who looked like Brad Pitt and raced those muscle cars? Everyone was madly in love with him.”

“Yep, everyone including Donny.”

She shook her head. “Jeez, why couldn’t someone like George Allen do us women all a favor and be gay? No one would care.”

“True.”

Jen nodded. “Yeah, like no one cares that Richard Simmons is gay, but that Rupert Everett…” She sighed and laid her face in her pudgy hand. “I’d like the chance to turn him straight.”

Brina bit her lip to keep from laughing, but Karen had no such qualm. She laughed so loud she drowned out Mindy’s voice, and so hard Brina feared she would break her water.

After Mindy handed out the last two awards, she made her final announcement. “Of course, everyone is invited to join the lodge in their celebration to ring in the New Year. Five minutes before midnight, a complimentary glass of champagne will be provided, and I know some of you will be first in line to take advantage of free alcohol.”

“Damn right,” someone yelled from the back of the room.

“In the morning,” Mindy continued, over the drunken laughter of a few classmates who were obviously well past three sheets, “we’ll all get together back in the ballroom for our farewell brunch. You won’t want to miss this, we have something special planned.”

As Brina stood and reached for her coat, she wondered what could possibly outdo cheap trophies.

“Are you two going outside to watch the fireworks?” she asked Karen and Jen.

“Heck no!” they answered in unison.

“Too cold.”

“You’ll freeze your butt off.”

Growing up in Galliton, Brina had always loved to watch the fireworks the lodge shot into the sky, but back then, because she hadn’t been a guest of the lodge and had to watch from the parking lot. She’d always wanted a front-row seat; she and Thomas had both wondered what the show was like from the other side. Now as she walked down the packed hall toward the ballroom, her gaze searched for him. When each dark-haired man she passed turned out to not be Thomas, her heart sunk a little. She didn’t know how she could be so angry at a person, yet at the same time, desperate to see his face.

The ballroom was packed with guests and locals who’d paid to attend. The dress ranged from casual to formal, and the band played mostly moldy oldies. Frank Sinatra and Ed Ames were big favorites. Shafts of fractured light reflected off the mirrored ball and onto the partyers below.

Since neither Jen nor Karen wanted to brave the cold, Brina made her way around the outside of the room by herself. A hand grabbed her arm from behind and she turned, half expecting to see Thomas.

“Hey, Brina,” George Allen said above the music.

Disappointed, she didn’t bother with a smile. She didn’t want to encourage him. “George.”

While the band sang something about a lady being a tramp, George made a big show of pulling up his sleeve and looking at his watch. “It’s eleven fifty-three,” he said. “Seven minutes to midnight.”

George had always thought he was a babe magnet,
but he’d always been so wrong. “Yeah, you better go get your free champagne.”

“That’s right.” He rocked back on his heels and stared at her through glassy eyes. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go too far. I plan on giving you a New Year’s Eve kiss.”

“Oh goody,” she told him, but her subtle sarcasm was completely lost on him. “I’ll wait right here, I promise.”

“Okaaaay,” he said, nodding his head, then melting into the crowd.

Brina immediately made a beeline for the deck. She shoved her arms though the sleeves of her coat and pulled her braid from inside. As she buttoned her wool peacoat, she dodged and wove her way through the throng, then she opened the doors and joined the crowd on the deck. The frigid air hit her cheeks and nearly robbed her of breath. She turned up her collar and pulled her thin stretch gloves from her pocket. They wouldn’t keep her hands warm, but if she shoved them in her pockets, she would be okay.

“Two minutes,” the band singer announced over speakers mounted in the corners of the deck. “Grab your champagne and your sweetheart.”

She made her way to the railing and looked over the side to the people below. Her thoughts once again turned to Thomas. It was really too bad he wasn’t around. He’d loved fireworks as much as she had. In fact, he used to make rockets using match heads. Or perhaps he was around, getting ready to watch the show with someone else.

“Brina!”

She leaned even farther over the rail and waved at Mark. He stood in a group of his friends, Holly included. Brina was a bit surprised that Thomas wasn’t with them.

“Come down here,” he called up to her. “We have schnapps to keep warm.”

The last time she’d drunk schnapps, she’d had a hangover for three days. “No, I’m okay.”

“One minute,” the band leader warned.

A bit unsteady on his feet, Mark pleaded, “Pleezze, Brina. Come down or I’ll have to come up and get you.”

Brina looked from Mark to Holly, who didn’t even bother to hide the fact that she was annoyed as hell about something. “Oh, all right,” Brina said, and moved back from the rail. At one time she would have loved to have been invited to stand with those people, and she would have loved the opportunity to annoy Holly even more, but now she just didn’t care.

“Twenty seconds.”

She took another step backward and covered her cold ears with her gloved hands. She didn’t have any intention of meeting Mark and the others. She wanted to watch from exactly where she stood.

The countdown started at fifteen, and around ten, a solid body brushed up against her back and a strong arm reached from behind and wrapped around her stomach. Brina looked over her shoulder, ready to punch George Allen if she needed to. She lowered her hands to her sides and stared up into Thomas’s dark face.

“I knew I’d find you out here,” he said next to her ear.

She didn’t have to ask him how he knew. He, too, remembered all those years they’d stood on the other side, wondering about the view from the deck, and vowing someday to have the money to stand exactly where their feet where now planted.

The countdown continued, three…two…one. From the top of Showboat, the first volley of fireworks shook the ground, the band struck up “Auld Lang Syne,” and Thomas slowly lowered his face and pressed his cool mouth to hers. As bursts of red, white, and gold exploded in the black sky, Brina’s chest felt like it exploded too. Her heart expanded, thumping wildly against her breastbone, sending blood pounding in her head.

Thomas’s chapped lips were slightly abrasive, and he tasted of crisp air and smooth scotch. She thought she should probably push him away. She was mad at him and had a right to her anger, but it was quickly swallowed up within the onslaught of overwhelming emotion and greed sucking away her will to “just say no.” And besides, she rationalized, it was just a New Year’s Eve kiss.

Brina turned in his embrace. With one arm around her back, he pulled her up on her tiptoes, and he placed his cold hand against her equally cold cheek. Their lips parted, and her eyes drifted shut. The frigid night nipped at her face and ears, and inside her mouth Thomas’s slick warm tongue touched hers. The kiss continued through “Auld Lang Syne” and several
more volleys that Brina felt through the soles of her feet. A hot shiver ran down her spine and her breasts tightened. Neither had a thing to do with the frozen air around her.

Thomas misinterpreted her shudder and pulled back. “Are you cold?”

Since she didn’t want to admit that his kiss left her shaky, she nodded.

“I know someplace warm we can watch the show,” he said, and took her hand.

“Where?”

“You’ll see when we get there.” He led her back into the lodge, through the tangle of confetti and paper streamers fluttering and filling the ballroom. She trusted him and would have followed him just about anywhere, but when they stepped into the empty elevator, she had a suspicion she knew where they were headed, and she didn’t like it. When he pushed the number three button, she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. What had taken place that afternoon had been a mistake, and one she didn’t plan to repeat.

“We won’t see anything from my room,” she said, looking up into his face, lit by the elevator’s fluorescent light.

“That’s why we’re not going to your room.”

“Oh.” The doors parted and they stepped into the hall.

Brina followed him past her room to the last door on the left. He slipped his card into the lock, then reached past her and opened the door. From where she stood, Brina could see very little. The room was completely
dark, except for the burst of color flashing from outside the windows on the far side of the room and making patterns on the carpet.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” she said, without budging. She was afraid if she walked into the suite, he might assume she wanted to jump in his bed. There were so many reasons why sex with Thomas was a bad idea. Right at the top of the list was the fact that she didn’t know how she felt about him, and she certainly didn’t know what he felt for her.

“Why not?”

“Because…” She paused, trying to think of exactly the right way to phrase what she needed to say, but since she couldn’t think of anything, she just blurted out the truth. “I don’t want you to think I’m going to have sex with you. After today, you probably assume I do that sort of thing all the time, but I don’t.”

“Jesus,” he sighed. “First off, I never thought you did. Second, I invited you up here because I thought you might like to watch the show without freezing your toes off. And third, I owe you half a bottle of champagne, and I thought you might want it.” He paused, then said, “We can go back downstairs if you’re uncomfortable.”

Now she felt stupid. “No, I’d like to stay.”

Without turning on the lights, Thomas took her hand. The door slammed shut behind them, and he led her past a grouping of furniture to the windows.

“Wow,” she said as she pulled off her gloves and stuffed them in her pockets. “This is a little bigger than my room.”

He moved behind her to help her off with her coat,
and when he spoke his voice just seemed to hover in the darkness. “The best part is the Jacuzzi. It seats a family of about six, I think. You’ll have to check it out.” He walked away with her coat, and Brina couldn’t help but wonder if he meant she should check it out as in
look
, or jump inside, by herself or with him. Or if she was reading too much into what he said again.

The lodge sent up another barrage, and Brina’s attention was drawn to the fiery corkscrews shooting into the black sky, bursting open like sparkling umbrellas, then falling like rain and hitting the snow beneath. Watching from this side of the lodge was definitely better than standing in the parking lot.

A champagne cork popped and Brina looked over her shoulder to the bar. “I think you definitely have the best seat in the house, Thomas.”

She heard his quiet laugher as he approached on silent feet. “Yeah, beats the hell out of freezing like we used to.” He handed her a fluted glass. “Happy New Year, Brina.”

“Happy New Year.” She raised the champagne to her lips and watched him over the top of her glass. Red light flashed across his face and white sweater. “You should be proud of yourself,” she said, and took a sip.

“Why?”

“Because you always said you were going to make a million by the time you were thirty. I guess you did it.”

“Yes, I did.” He drained half his glass as an especially heavy boom filled the air and vibrated the floor beneath their feet. “I’ve made a lot of money, Brina,”
he continued when the night fell silent once more. “But it’s not the money itself that’s important.”

He’d been watching too many of those talk shows he’d mentioned. “You sound like Oprah.”

He smiled, his teeth a flash of white between his lips. “That’s because Oprah knows.”

“What?”