Tough Customer: A Hero Club Novel

by Erin St. Charles

  "Right," I say. "Instead of grumbling like a teenager, you should have been chomping at the bit to come help me pick out a tuxedo."

  "You might have a point there," she says, taking a sip of water from her glass. Her expression is truly open for the first time since we met.

  "I take it you're not much of a morning person," I say. "Or is there someone at home who doesn't like to get up early on a Saturday morning?"

  I only saw the inside of her condo unit that one time, but something about the bohemian vibe of the place makes me think there isn't a man in the picture. Or at least, not a man who lives with her.

  "As I mentioned before, when I work as hard as I do, there's only so much time to run your own personal errands," she says. "My personal time is valuable, partly because there's not much of it."

  The waitress arrives with our orders, and we dig in. It doesn't appear Samantha plans to tell me whether she's involved with someone. After a few minutes pass, she asks about the event.

  "So, what is this gala?" she asks. "I don't recall seeing it on your calendar."

  "That's because it just came up," I tell her, thinking of how Marcia Pittman practically coerced me into attending. "Some kind of garden club benefit one of my investors invited me to attend."

  Samantha gives me a thoughtful look, like she isn’t quite sure what to think of this information. Or maybe she isn’t sure what to think about me.

  "You don't seem like the garden benefit type," she says evenly. She gives no indication of whether being the garden benefit type is a good thing, or a bad thing. But her opinion doesn’t matter...does it?

  "What's the garden benefit type?" I ask.

  "I dunno," she shrugs. She reaches for the table menu, the kind that comes with color photos and effusive descriptions. She looks at the desserts on offer, her lips twisted into a pout. She is perhaps the first woman in years that I've sat down with for a meal who so much as considers dessert. Most of the women in my social set don’t eat dessert. I blink at her, wondering what she’ll choose.

  "You seem more like someone who'd support an organization that does community gardening, or something along those lines," she shrugs again. She cranes her neck, looking for the waitstaff. Soon, the waitress returns, and Samantha orders a chocolate lava cake. I tell the waitress to bring me the skillet cookie.

  “You know, up until my brother and father died, I was a social worker,” I tell her. “I had no plans to go into the family business. I was happy to pursue a career helping others, but my family needed me.”

  My mother needed me, and our family’s legacy was at stake. I am ashamed to say, I'm not involved with any charities, other than donations made at the end of the year to maximize the tax benefit. It’s like when I stepped away from my social work gig, I didn’t want to be involved with helping others at all. This gives me an idea.

  "I think this is the type of initiative a professional concierge could handle," I tell her. "Go ahead and put together a proposal for it. I'd want to launch this right after the next opening."

  Samantha blinks at me, clearly gobsmacked.

  "I can barely keep up with what you need already and also take care of my other clients," she argues.

  "That's right," I snap my fingers. "We were going to talk about you firing your other clients."

  Her face freezes. She looks as if she'd like to lay some choice words on me and barely restrains herself.

  "We agreed that I'd be supporting you for the next few weeks only until Sheila is able to work again," she says, making that cute little frown she makes when she's annoyed with me. I don't know why, but I enjoy getting a rise out of her.

  The desserts arrive, and we dig in again. My family's chain is strictly high-end eateries, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate other types of establishments. I have always had a soft spot for Chili's desserts. In fact, I ordered the skillet cookie with the intention of sharing it with Samantha and having her share her molten lava cake with me.

  She pushes the side of her fork through her dessert, catching ice cream, ganache, and chocolate cake in one forkful. She pops the sugary treat in her mouth, closes her eyes briefly to savor it with a near orgasmic expression of joy on her face, and when her eyes open again, she blinks when she catches me watching her. She blushes prettily, then slices her fork through the whole mess for another bite.

  "Good for you?" I ask, waiting for her to take another bite so that I can watch her next foodgasm.

  She narrows her eyes at my double entendre. "Delicious," she says, holding her napkin over her lips to avoid exposing a mouth full of dessert. "Aren't you going to have yours?"

  "I will," I say, but I'm waiting for her to eat more. Watching her eat is way more fun than eating my own dessert. It's like the diner orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. Only, I'm reasonably sure she's not faking it.

  I take my spoon and work it through my dessert. I touch the bottom of the spoon to make sure it's not too hot, then I lean forward to offer her the first bite. She gives me a look that isn't suspicious as I might expect, just curious.

  "I should use my own spoon," she says, fumbling for it.

  "Nonsense," I say. "Open up."

  I pop the spoon in her mouth. She closes her eyes with another foodgasm expression. She draws back with the bite in her mouth and some of the melted ice cream drips on her lip. Her pink tongue slides out to lick away the cream, and my dick thumps against the crotch of my jeans. I draw back the spoon, lick it slowly, and allow my eyes to connect with hers for a few fractions of a second longer than I would with any other work colleague.

  "Let me try some of yours," I say. I’m her client, and I’m being unfairly flirtatious, but I can’t seem to help myself. I want to see how she'll react.

  She picks up a clean spoon from her place setting. She pushes the dessert toward me, along with the spoon, and says, "Help yourself."

  I'm not one of those assholes who hits on women when there is no interest, but something about the way she helped me with a tuxedo fitting, the way her fingers lingered on my lapels and every other article of clothing that touched me, makes me think my interest is not one-sided. Judging by the furious blushing she does whenever we do anything remotely intimate, there's a mutual attraction between us.

  "What made you want a personal concierge business?" I ask her casually.

  She freezes in the motion of shoveling another bite of chocolate in her mouth. "What do you mean?" she asks.

  "It's not exactly mainstream, is it?"

  She gives me an appraising look. "I've always wanted to own my own business." Under the table, I feel the rhythmic brush of her foot as she bobs it. This is making her nervous?

  "After I left my last job, I decided the universe was trying to tell me something," she shrugs. She seems nonchalant, but the nervous bobbing of her foot is accompanied by her chewing on her lower lip. I make a mental note to Google her later.

  "And how many clients do you have now?" I ask, because she seems to juggle the lot of us, and she's rarely in the office.

  "A few," she says. "You know about Peter Shark. I also work on an ad hoc basis for a few other people."

  A thought occurs to me then, a thought that comes flowing out of my mouth before I can think better of it. "Are all your clients men?"

  She makes the little frown between her eyebrows that she does when she's surprised. Then she gives me a cautious look.

  "Yes… Why do you ask?"

  I ask because I want to know. I ask because I wonder how many of these men harbor inappropriate thoughts about Samantha the way I do. How many other men fantasize about sweeping the contents of their desktops to the floor with one hand and bending her over an office desk with the other? How many of these men fantasize about licking her until she screams their name? I cannot imagine anyone who spent any amount of time with her would not harbor similar fantasies. Because to know Samantha Mack, as a man, means to desire Samantha Mack.

  "Because most men would have an actual wife to do
these things for them," I say.

  "I'd say half of my clients are married," she informs me. Her eyes are narrowed on me, still suspicious.

  "You should dump your other clients," I say, knowing she will never do this, but also knowing the suggestion will rile her up, something I've come to enjoy of late.

  "No, I shouldn't," she said.

  "Fair enough," I say, but by no means am I done with this conversation. I want Samantha Mack all to myself.

  We finish our desserts and after some back and forth. I insist on paying the bill. We part ways, her still eyeing me with unveiled suspicion, and me with a big ass smile on my face. I feel like we've been on a date, and I have to squelch the urge to hug and kiss her.

  As I drive away, she stands in front of the restaurant, watching me with the same level of gravity of an owl perched on a tree limb.

  My phone rings. It is Gina, Brad’s friend, the woman who agreed to go to the garden gala with me.

  I answer the phone, and she sighs.

  Then she speaks.

  Chapter Nine: Samantha

  Two weeks to the day after the tuxedo fitting episode, I am helped out of a hired town car. I am wearing a beautiful halter-style evening gown, am carrying a beautiful beaded clutch, and my curls are flat ironed so that my hair falls in lovely face framing waves. I look damned good, if I say so myself.

  The town car pulls away from the entrance of the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas, and I am left standing there unsure of what to do next. I see the lobby just beyond the revolving doors, the bustle of well-dressed people going to and fro, and I do what many years in corporate America have trained me to do: I follow the crowd. I come to a massive set of closed doors, and a crowd that mills around chatting. I crane my neck this way and that to find the person I am here for.

  Why, exactly, am I here?

  It is a long story, one in which the client I am trying to do less for, nevertheless finds new and inventive ways of giving me more "other duties as assigned."

  I was preparing to run a few of the errands that I somehow never have time to do, because I'm busy doing them for other people. The old saying, "the cobbler's children have no shoes," applies to my situation. I have time for everyone's errands but my own. I greeted the day with the fervent hope that I would be able to take care of a few things that have been left undone for several weeks now. My dry cleaning. The shoe whose heel I broke several weeks ago and took in to have repaired. It’s done, according to the guy I regularly use to fix my clients' shoes; I just haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. The plants that have been living in their nursery containers, in preparation of my potting them up and placing them on my private terrace, so in the mornings when the weather is good, I can sit and, surrounded by my container garden, ease my way into the day with a cup of coffee in one hand and my laptop on my café table to check my email.

  That was my plan for the day when I woke up this morning, but you know the saying, "the best laid plans of mice and men so often go awry?" Well, that seems to be the story of my life as it relates to Lincoln Cooper.

  He called me this morning, "Smack! What's on your agenda today?"

  But before I could remind him not to call me that anymore, and also give him a hard time for calling me so early in the morning, he went on.

  "Never mind, just cancel your plans. I need you today."

  I had just woken up. Like most sensible people, I use the weekends to catch up on my rest. This, apparently, is not something Lincoln Cooper does. Rest, that is.

  "My date for the gala had to cancel," he said. He shuts up then, and I got the distinct impression that he was waiting for this information to sink in.

  "Okay..." I said, aware that my voice was husky with sleep.

  "I need a plus one for the garden gala tonight," he said, as if this explained everything. Silence blared from his end of the connection. I looked at my phone to make sure we were still connected. Yep, there was his name, Tough Customer, and the screen of my iPhone was lit up.

  "Smack?" he said.

  Tentatively, I responded, trying to orient myself. "Yes, I'm here. What do you need?"

  "I need a plus one," was his impatient reply. "I just told you that. You are the plus one."

  "No," I said. "I don't offer plus one services to clients."

  It's the first thing that came to mind. This isn’t an escort service, after all.

  Going to the gala would be a bad idea. Shedding our work costumes for a fancy dress and the tux I helped him pick out would take us too far out of the other professional trappings that serve to dampen the undercurrent of attraction between us.

  I'm a grown-ass woman. I know sleeping with your client or boss is a bad idea. I'd know that even if I had never met Becker, never had that disastrous experience. The man keeps trying to contact me intermittently. I have no idea why, but it seemed to happen in spurts, perhaps corresponding with bouts of high alcoholic consumption. Drunk dialing, if you will.

  So, I knew that no matter what Lincoln said to persuade me, I could not, could not attend the gala with him. I needed to keep my distance from him.

  Yet, despite all my internal pronouncements, I found myself saying, "Yes," to Lincoln.

  "Yes," to visiting Neiman-Marcus and Lincoln's personal shopper to find an appropriate dress, shoes and evening bag, which he paid for.

  "Yes," to spending hours being waxed, threaded, made up, blown out, curled up, manicured and pedicured, again all on his dime.

  "Yes," to being driven to an exclusive, vintage hotel to rub elbows with rich people for the benefit of an already well-funded botanical society.

  When I enter the ballroom, I see Lincoln right away. He looks great in his tuxedo, strikingly handsome while speaking with an attractive redhead who is smiling as much as she can given the fact that her face has clearly been Botoxed, and her expression doesn’t go past the immediate area around her mouth. She has a hand on his forearm and when he moves slightly away, I don't miss the way her fingers dig into the fabric of his suit jacket. The possessive display gives me a weird sensation in my chest, but before I have time to process what I'm feeling, Lincoln spots me.

  When he walks toward me, his broad shoulders filling his tuxedo jacket to perfection, he looks me up and down in the age-old manner of a man mentally undressing a woman.

  He introduces me to the redhead, whose name is Marcia Pittman, a potential investor in Lincoln’s expansion plans. We exchange pleasantries, then Lincoln excuses himself from Marcia’s presence and steers me through the crowd to introduce me to a few of the muckety-mucks in attendance.

  He grabs a champagne flute from a passing waiter without missing a beat. During the cocktail hour, I get a nice surprise in the form of Tamara Knowles, a classmate from business school, along with her husband, Darren. Tamara and I chat until the cocktail hour ends and resolve to get together soon.

  After the cocktail hour, we sit and eat a forgettable dinner consisting of boneless, skinless chicken breast and some kind of vegetable medley. After dinner, the official program begins. I sit in the seat next to Lincoln's empty one as he takes the stage to give a few off-the-cuff remarks. The redhead sits on the other side of the empty seat with a boy-toy companion seated next to her.

  You see, Lincoln's company has donated to the botanical society, and the botanical society wants him to make a few remarks about the worthiness of the charity. But he doesn't stop with the expected, bland remarks.

  "On behalf of the Cooper Restaurant Group, I encourage everyone here to join us in our mission to bring community gardens to underserved communities," Lincoln says.

  As he goes through his speech, he details the issue of poor communities having access to fresh produce at a reasonable cost. He tells the audience that the small investment will have an enormous impact on the poor communities in our city—even more than the botanical society ever could. He ends his speech with a plea to the audience to open their checkbooks and give generously to the initiative.

  The a
udience stares at him. This is clearly not what they thought they were signing up for.

  "Well!" Lincoln shouts, making feedback shriek from the microphone. "We can feed everyone in the city by showing them how to provide for themselves."

  He removes the microphone from its stand, steps out into the audience, and starts working the crowd. He singles out people who are seated at their tables, and starts asking each one what their name is, and how much they plan to give.

  After he finishes his speech, I hear slow claps coming from various points in the audience. Then the energy spreads until the crowd is on their feet giving a gracious applause.

  When Lincoln arrives at our table, several people shake his hand and pat him on the back.

  "They should've done this years ago," says the redhead wearing an elegant, silver evening gown.

  "That's the kind of initiative I can get behind,” says another attendee. “I always thought these things were boring affairs for the overprivileged. Not anymore."

  His idea is like the one I pitched to him during our tuxedo selection interlude. But Lincoln has taken this entirely to heart, and his words have inspired others.

  I am glad I agreed to attend. I'm even proud to have been his date.

  Instead of taking his empty seat, Lincoln takes my hand and leads me to the dance floor.

  "That was quite the speech," I say as he pulls me into his arms. "Looks like you have inspired a lot of people. I think people really will open their checkbooks for this cause."

  "Actually, you inspired me," he says, pulling me closer to him as we sway to the music. "By the way, you look beautiful tonight."

  "Thank you," I say, feeling bashful. My face heats, and I imagine I'm red to the tips of my ears.

  I am struck by how naturally our bodies move together, how safe I feel in his arms, and part of my foolish heart begins to consider what it would be like if we were truly together. What would it feel like to feel this safe all the time? He smells of his own masculine musk and some sort of expensive scent I recognize because I've purchased it for clients before.