Brothers? You mean there’s more like you where you came from? Cassie, maybe you just stumbled into the mother lode of hot guys.
“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed the festival.”
“I could take it or leave it,” he said with a dismissive shrug. “What really caught my eye was your film. Machupo. You have a talent, an eye, for capturing the essence of human suffering. I was curious as to what brought it out.”
I grimaced. “A lot of things. I think you’d find it boring.”
“I sort of doubt that. Of course, it’s not an easy thing to discuss at a distance, the way we are right now.”
I nodded. He appeared to be leading up to something, so I kept quiet. In my experience, it’s never a good idea to show too much interest in a guy, particularly a looker like he was. Men love to play hunter, chaser, seeker, while women enjoy the opposite side of the chase equation. I sometimes wonder if that wasn’t the reason that high-heeled shoes were invented. So that women could appear more chase-able while making it more difficult to actually run away.
“Tell you what, Cassie,” he suggested, “would you like to join me for brunch at the hotel lounge?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, feigning a delicate constitution. “It’s early yet, and I never dine with strange men.”
Another smile crossed his face. Goodness, he had long, white teeth.
“My name is Mitchel. Mitchel Thantos. So, now that we’ve been introduced, you won’t be dining with a strange man.”
“What can I say to that but yes?” I raised my coffee to him. “See you in, say, half an hour?”
“See you then, Cassie,” He made a clicking sound with his tongue, a kind of pop. The horse turned and they galloped off.
I still wasn’t sure what to do, what to make of this Prince Charming character who’d just galloped up to me on his makeshift Lipizzaner stallion. His outside appearance certainly looked the part. There was something else about him, though.
Something that struck me as odd, like a couple frames of porn spliced into a Disney flick. Too short a time for you to see it consciously. But long enough that you’d leave the theatre with an unsettled feeling.
A feeling down in the reptile piece of the brain that told you when to eat, when to flee, when to splurge on getting your hair styled, and when to say hell with it all and go on the gosh-darned lunch date.
I kept seeing Mitchel Thantos’ toothpaste-ad worthy smile in a haze of diffused-filter shots. But two lines ran through my head in counterpoint, like a pair of annoying, recurring commercial jingles.
Goodness, he had long, white teeth.
The better to EAT you with, my dear.
What I did next is something that you’ll also find silly, stupid.
So girly.
But when my Scales O’ Decision (term patent-pending, suitable for royalty use) are so equally balanced, I always turn to one source. The ultimate Cassie Van Deene decision tiebreaker.
Chapter Four
So what made up my mind as to whether I should go out with my knight in shining armor?
A Dora Pahnn column.
You know how some people get a guilty pleasure out of reading Dear Abby and applying the prescriptions to their own lives? Well, that crowd looks down their noses at people who follow Dr. Laura. And Dr. Laura’s crowd looks down on people who follow Miss Cleo.
You can guess which group of kids Miss Cleo’s groupies like to pick on. Uh-huh. And you know, Dora’s loopy, new-age-isms are sort of weird. It’s like she writes a year’s worth of advice columns on a bunch of Post-It notes, throws the notes into a blender, and writes whatever gets spit out at the top.
I went back into my hotel suite, picked up my copy of the local paper, and leafed through till I found Dora’s latest. Her article for today rambled on and on about how Jupiter was screwing all six of Saturn’s moons behind Venus’ back, and how unless Jupiter planned to cut it out and stop acting like a damned planetary alley cat, Venus was going to rip him a whole new Red Spot. Fun, but not exactly what I was looking for.
Then my eye lit upon one line. It said: “Dancer of the Sun, proceed with caution. Live, do not be afraid of love, and return to the beginning when all is lost.”
Look, I told you that it was weird. I warned you, really, I did. But that line definitely hit a chord with me – I mean, come on, if I wasn’t the ‘Dancer of the Sun’ after Butch Cassidy’s sidekick in crime handed me the gosh-darned award, I didn’t know what was.
Live, and do not be afraid of love.
I played that line in counter to the other two that were still circulating in my brain like a bad case of Mariachi music, and it sort of masked the effect. It canceled out the bad-juju vibes I was getting from the old reptile brain.
I went to the bathroom, showered, and got dressed for lunch with the handsome man who’d asked me out.
Freeze Frame.
Hey there. It’s me again, Cassie. Sorry to step in and crunch the narrative again with my black leather Jimmy Choos. But I’m in the film biz, remember? And this is the part, right here, where you’d be getting a montage sequence.
Nothing wrong with that, you know, because an awful lot of B-movies and ‘up-all-night’ video schlockfests do montages. Hey, a lot of good movies use them. The only problem is, it’s a visual kind of thing, not a written one.
So I’ll give you the key images for the next six months, and see maybe if you can hold the images in your mind. Play them in a slow-shift sequence, where one image does a fade-in and fade-out. Make the shots all medium-length, shallow depth to blur the background and focus in on the one thing I want you to see, and that’s the couple getting together (and maybe getting it on). You’ll want to light it in such a way that the sun is always shining like God rebooted the entire world to run from eight to ten o’ clock in the morning.
And…Cue Montage.
Mitchel and me, talking for two hours over plates of lobster ravioli smothered in a steamy, sweet saffron cream sauce.
Our first ‘official’ date the next evening. I could barely squeeze into my black cocktail dress, but bless him, he didn’t seem to mind.
Back in Los Angeles. He’s in the front row, applauding as I give a speech to the Screen Writers Guild.
We’re on the pier that stretches over the cold Pacific in Santa Monica. We’re riding the merry-go-round like a couple of kids, and when he kisses me, the giddy feeling from my bellybutton on down ain’t from the ride, that’s for sure.
Ah, here’s an oldie but a goodie in any romantic screen gem: the obligatory shot of us at a carnival, sharing a bulbous pink bouffant of cotton candy.
Jump cut to a night shot of my condo, overlooking Malibu. White stucco walls, trailing strands of bougainvillea, black iron curlicues for balcony railings.
And…end the montage.
The light’s a hazy, erotic blue and someone’s foleyed in the slow, dreamy melody of a saxophone.
We’re making love. His body’s like a flesh-covered plane of granite, a clean-smelling furnace of body heat, a friggin’ pile driver that pounds me into climax after climax like I’m jumping the crest of Mulholland Drive on a throbbing, snarling Harley Night Rodder. I don’t know where he’s learned how to move against me, inside of me, but it makes me giggle like a sixth-grader and explode on the inside like a nova.
Later on, when we’re both lying together, tangled in the silky white sheets, he takes my hand in his. His eyes gleam in the dark like a cat’s.
“I’d like you to meet my family,” he purrs.
“All right.”
Freeze Frame.
Aw, SHIT.
Thanks. I just had to get that off my chest, therapy buddy.
Chapter Five
A couple of months later I’m back in Utah, driving up the winding country road to the Thantos’ family ranch. The family was throwing a big party that evening. Partly to welcome me, partly to celebrate some anniversary of the ranch’s opening. I pulled my rented Jaguar convertible up to a pair
of carved stone gates decorated on either side with a fresco of that Greek guy who’s doing a bodybuilder’s power lift move with the globe on his back.
I pressed a silver button on the intercom box. Before I could speak, the gates swung open on their own accord. A young man who shared Mitchel’s features waved me in from the driveway ahead. With a lazy toss of one arm, he motioned off to the right and directed me to where I could park the Jag.
The young man, who had to be one of Mitchel’s brothers, strolled over casually in my direction. I got out of the car, straightened my black skirt and off-the-shoulder blouse. It was rare that I wanted to make a good impression on people — most folks can take a flying leap, so far as I’m concerned — but I was betting Mitchel’s family mattered a great deal to him.
“You must be Cassandra Van Deene,” he said. His voice was cultured, urbane, the kind of voice you hear a lot on National Public Radio. He took my hand and kissed it like I was newly minted royalty. “My name is Gabriel, and I am honored, simply honored to meet you.”
“Right back at you,” I said. “I’m the one who’s honored. Not many people remember my full name.”
“Oh? I think Cassandra’s quite pretty.”
“Yes, but nobody listens to you if your name’s Cassandra.”
The joke went over Gabriel’s head by a country mile. He just nodded and offered me his arm, which I took, even though it made me feel like a debutante at the local ball.
Even in the rapidly failing light of the evening, I saw that the Thantos ranch was a rambling, sprawling piece of property, with rolling hills split into neat portions by wooden fences. The ranch house itself was a double-deckered rectangle of wood and glass. The C-shaped driveway made of green-flecked gravel rolled up to a wraparound porch anchored at the end with eight-spoked Conestoga wagon wheels. Throw in the set of white Doric pillars framing the front door, and the whole place looked like Tara from Gone With The Wind, only done up with dude ranch trappings.
The breeze shifted, carrying with it the sticky brown sugar scent of barbeque sauce and the bitter tang of ale hops. To one side of the house, the family had strung up an open-air pavilion lit by strands of outdoor lights that hung like creeper vines along the pavilion’s frame and up the trunks of the nearby trees. I heard music, the clinks of glasses and bottles, people talking animatedly, and the distant neighs of horses.
“I guess Mitchel must board his horse out here,” I ventured, as we drew closer to the party. “Maybe he’s out riding?”
“He’s coming. He just got called out on a last-minute assignment.”
“He gets a lot of those, from what I can tell.” I was silent again for a bit so I could give Gabriel a once-over. He lacked Mitchel’s muscle, and his build was slighter, thinner all over. Gabriel’s sensual pink lips stood out against his pale white cheeks and light-colored hair that teetered between sun tea brown and ash blonde.
He wore a sweater similar to Mitchel’s, a white ribbed thing with what I thought was a family crest. Gabriel’s was green, emblazoned with a skinny L-shaped knife or something. But that wasn’t what made him interesting to me. He shared Mitchel’s quiet, powerful gait and the serene, unhurried air that only the filthy rich can ever truly attain. The feeling that there was no need to hurry, no deal to be made. The world would wait on them.
I’ll admit, it was attractive. And it made my mind flip into flash-fantasy mode as to what it’d have been like had I met Gabriel first. Flash fantasy? Uh-huh, maybe more like ‘flesh fantasy.’ He had the same hottie genes as Mitchel, after all. Or the same pheromones. My mind snapped back to the present as I realized that Gabriel had spoken up again.
“Mitchel’s got a difficult job,” he said. “We all do, really. How much has Mitchel told you about us? The family, I mean?”
“Not a lot.” I frowned. Dammit, he had a point. Here I was, making the bedsprings creak at all hours of the morning with this guy’s brother and I’d barely had the wit to ask about what he did, what his family was all about. It wasn’t like me, not at all. I’m usually very bad about nosing around in people’s friggin’ medicine cabinets when I’m invited over.
Maybe the mind-blowing sex was consuming my brain, blowing out the circuits like on an old, overworked fuse box.
“Our father passed on a long, long time ago. Our mother is…what’s the term I’m thinking of? ‘Estranged.’ So everyone you meet at the party here is a friend or a co-worker. People we’ve all known for a long time. But no direct relatives other than us brothers.”
“Mitchel said you were the youngest,” I prompted. I heard another horsey nicker in the fading light, the muffled clop-clop of hooves on grass, the smell of hay and horses.
“I am. Raphael’s the oldest, then Uri, then Mitchel, and finally, I came along.”
He sounded a little melancholy about it. I squeezed his bicep, and he actually looked a little shy. I liked him. Gabriel could’ve used a good sun bronzer and a couple solid meals, but the look kind of fit him.
“I hope you didn’t get picked on too much as a kid.”
“Not too much,” he admitted. “But yeah, when you’re the youngest, you kind of have to clean up after everyone else is done with their work, if you know what I mean.”
“Done with what work?” I asked, frowning.
“Just a second.” He made that same click-pop noise with his tongue that Mitchel did, and the hoofbeats resolved into a fine-boned mare with a slender, tan body and a silvery mane. He crooned to her, “You’re a good girl, aren’t you, Muerta?
And Muerta really was a sweetie, she came up to Gabriel without hesitation and nuzzled his hand when he held his palm up. He stroked her mane for a moment as I watched. She was a palomino – at least that’s what I think the color is called.
He whispered something in Muerta’s scoop-shaped ear, and gosh darn it if she didn’t whinny in response and trot off again. I think even Lassie would’ve been impressed.
“Mitchel likes you, trusts you,” Gabriel said, as we drew closer to the lights and music of the party. “I hope that you will do the same for him.”
“You’re protective of each other,” I said, giving his arm a firm squeeze. “You’re a hunk of a man, and Mitchel’s lucky to have you watching his back.”
I leaned in to give him a peck on the cheek, but right then, I heard somebody clearing their throat. I turned, and standing behind us were three men, all dressed in white-ribbed sweaters and slacks, looking for all the world like the Harvard crewing team.
The man in the center was Mitchel. His eyes were narrow, suspicious, and glinted with barely concealed anger.
Chapter Six
Mitchel locked his eyes on his younger brother with a hostile scowl. Gabriel silently stood his ground, and I felt something dark, something feral pass between them. Like two predators sizing each other up.
Finally, Gabriel moved slightly to one side as Mitchel stepped forward, put his arm around me protectively. When he spoke, his warm, deep voice was unchanged, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Only his eyes remained glacier-cold.
“I see you’ve been chatting with Gabriel,” Mitchel said, “I should have warned you about him, he’s a real smoothie.”
I looked back and forth between the two cautiously. “Now, Mitchel, he was a complete and total gentleman.”
“He just wants you to think that. Believe me, every woman on the planet has a date with him at one point.”
Gabriel shrugged expressively. “It’s true, I can’t deny that.”
A throaty chuckle came from the man on Mitchel’s right. He was tall, imposing, with a flushed-looking face like a cliff of red granite. His sweater had a scarlet shield with a sword on it. Opposite him stood a shorter, rail-thin man with haunted-looking eyes that said I need a cuppa java, stat. His shield was black, and had a set of scales on it. I think that meant that he was a Libra.
“Allow me to introduce my two older brothers,” Mitchel said. He indicated the slighter man first, followed by the othe
r. “This is Uri, and where you think you see a towering wall of muscles, that’s actually our eldest, Raphael.”
“Charmed,” Raphael said.
“My dear,” added Uri, “Mitchel and Gabriel have superb tastes.”
I blushed a little right then, but what can you do when you’re surrounded on all four sides by hot guys? Even Uri wasn’t bad looking in the slightest. He just had a more haunted look than the others, with eyes by way of Gary Sinese.
Mitchel led me through a wooden gate and we made our way through the crowd of revelers, smiling and nodding to everyone who knew us. Well, everyone who knew him. At least four or five people came up to shake his hand in person, each making appreciative sounds over me. A trio of women who looked like three generations of the same family gave a collective swoon as he waved to them.
And way out at one of the tables in the back, for a moment I spotted Gabriel with a platinum blonde hourglass of a woman. She wore dark glasses and dabbed at her eyes with a cloth as Gabriel leaned over to whisper quietly in her ear. I held back a snort. Mitchel had been telling the truth, Gabriel seemed to be quite the lady killer.
But even that moment of annoyance faded away in a heartbeat. The man I was with this evening — my man — smiled at me, and everything else sort of faded away in a dreamy dissolve frame. A cool evening breeze waltzed through, tickling my nose with the smells of night jasmine, freshly worn leather, cologne infused with bergamot. And then the aroma of ribs and chicken cooking on the grill filled the air, making my mouth water.
“I’m so glad you invited me,” I said. “Your brothers seem like interesting people.”
“They certainly are,” he agreed. “We don’t get together much unless we’re working together on a project. Gabriel travels pretty much all over the map, but you won’t see Uri or Raphael staying in the States that much. Uri does a lot of work in Africa and India. Raphael’s pulling overtime in the Middle East.”
I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) Page 2