Posy and Patrick were about to celebrate their first anniversary, and I was nowhere closer to figuring out just what the hell had happened to me that night of their wedding in New Orleans. Or why I couldn’t let go of its memories . . .
I stole one last look at the dress as Bree hung it in the store window. Its opulently embellished halter and keyhole neckline had been perfect for the discreet touches and stolen kisses Mick had lavished upon me in public; its wisps of tiered chiffon held every whisper leading us out of the reception and back to my room.
“A wise woman once told me never to let a dress rule my life,” Laney murmured.
The serene girl who stood before me was a far cry from the hot mess who’d been appointed dress bearer for her mother’s cross-country nuptials this past winter. The one who had frantically texted, asking WWDD—What Would Dani Do?—every step of the way, until she had found her own footing. With a hand on my back, she pushed me over the threshold and out onto the quaint, one-block city street. “What would she tell you right about now?”
“I’m not as well-adjusted as you think I am,” I mumbled.
“You are wonderful.” Laney dropped a kiss on my cheek and an arm across my shoulder. “And I, for one, will always look up to you from my perch on your invisible psychiatrist’s couch. As well as pay you in brunch food. What do you say?” She nodded toward the red-and-white-striped awning of the Cornelia Street Café. I knew tea and sympathy waited inside, as well as a willing ear if I was ready to talk about my rambling feet and broken heart.
“Sorry, girlie.” I gave her a squeeze. “I can’t stop; I’ve got to see a man about a car.”
I was about to make my biggest commitment yet.
• • •
“So. How does zero interest for twelve months sound?”
My laughter reverberated off the chrome, steel, and safety glass surrounding me on the dealership floor. “Sounds a lot like my love life, actually.”
I reaped the rewards of my own joke before the cavernous showroom quickly swallowed up the sound. It was fun while it lasted.
Kind of like my love life.
“Oh, please! I don’t believe that for a second, Heartbreaker.” Jax propped his feet up on the prime Manhattan real estate that was his desk and flashed me a grin. “And everyone says used car salesmen are the scammers and con artists?”
Jackson Davenport was not your typical used-car salesman; that was for sure. Upper East Side–born and summers in the Hamptons–bred. Valedictorian of our high school, Ivy League educated, and handsomeness so rugged, you’d think he stepped out of a Patagonia catalog. But he’d swapped his silver spoon long ago for a ballpoint pen, which he was now tapping against his teeth impatiently.
“Are you going to take the car or not, Dani?”
“Hell yeah.”
Summer tour was calling, but it wasn’t going to come to me.
Jax popped out of his chair. “Good. Then let’s get this paperwork signed.”
He spread a tree’s worth of paper in front of me and pointed at the first X. “So what happened to that last guy, Marcus? He was cool.”
“Firefighter Marcus . . .” I signed with a flourish, and relished the memory of those heated discussions we use to have, along with the slow burn of his lips. “He was a nice distraction.”
“How about the bartender?” Jax flipped the page. “Here, here, and initial here.”
“Sam? Arm candy.” I tapped my temple, and then mimed cocking a gun. “Pretty empty upstairs.” I lifted my pen to indicate I had signed, signed, and initialed.
“And Noah’s friend . . . from Laney’s mom’s wedding? Soldier Boy?”
Tim had been a perfect partner in crime for the timeless, torturous bouquet and garter toss at the Hudson-Crystal wedding in Hawaii. After our respective best friends had snuck away from the reception together, Tim and I had been just about the only singles left on the dance floor to endure the humiliation. Tall and agile, he had barely needed to raise a hand to catch the lacy bit. And the flowers had landed right in my hands, despite Lady P, one of the many Elvis impersonators on site, and her valiant attempt to dive for it in her skintight black jumpsuit.
I let a wicked smile slip, remembering how Tim had eased that garter belt up my thigh, fingers climbing so high that I had to smack him with the bouquet to make him stop.
“Soldier Boy was fun,” I admitted. He and I had both arrived in town last week to attend Laney and Noah’s charity soirée for the Kitchen of Hope and had had even more fun. “But now he’s back overseas.”
“Pity. Mona and I really liked him.”
While I had my dalliance du jour, Jax had long-term relationships. Mona—or Bitch’n’Mona, as Laney liked to call her—was his latest lady love. She had appeared on the scene after I’d moved out of state for my last job, so I didn’t know her all that well. But if I knew Jax, it was serious . . . until the day it wasn’t. My friend was an open and shut textbook case of serial monogamy.
Jax leaned over my shoulder and guided me through the last of the forms. His cologne had a hint of chilled cucumber with a citrus bite, and hung from his neck like a scrapbook for my senses. I was seventeen and running along the ocean shore again, not thirty-two and running away from my memories of Mick.
If that was even his real name in the first place.
“Tell me you’re not still thinking about Mystery Man from a year ago?”
“Yep.”
And I was still dreaming about him, too . . . especially on the nights when I ate dessert after eight o’clock. Mick had been just that sweet, just that sinful, and just that much of an indulgent fantasy.
I ran my fingers along the creamy silk ribbon at my throat, avoiding the charm tethered to it, and refrained from saying more.
While I sometimes found it easier to talk about it with Jax than Laney, I still hadn’t been completely honest. The past year had hardly been a cakewalk.
“But you were the one who pulled the slutty Cinderella, right? Leaving him with a hard-on and a glass slipper at the end of the night?” Jax shuffled, collated, and stapled my paperwork while wearing a frown that indicated either intense concentration or massive disapproval.
Swallowing hard, I managed, “I just thought . . . he was different.”
“No, you thought he was perfect. And he wasn’t. So your playdar wasn’t working that night? Time to forgive and forget.”
I sighed. During the plane ride home from my sister’s wedding in New Orleans, I had managed to work through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over Mick’s deception: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Forgiving was in there somewhere.
But forgetting? Kind of impossible. Not when those pale blue eyes haunted me every time I closed my own. His were icy like a husky’s; mine were more of the Fiona Apple variety. Our gazes, made more electric and mysterious from behind the vintage masks Pat and Posy had insisted everyone wear during their reception, had locked in on each other the moment he’d stepped onto the dance floor.
I replayed his every move in stark, cinematic loops. And I heard his soft, sexy voice in stereo surround sound. I rewound my favorite parts and tortured myself by examining them in slow motion. Mick smiling. Tilting his head back in laughter. Touching my chin. Removing his black-and-gold scaramouche mask by its long-beaked nose as he moved to kiss me.
“I still can’t believe I fell for a wedding crasher.”
“You may just have met your match,” Jax gently teased. “Funeral crasher.”
I blushed at the title, thinking back to the day he and I met. I hadn’t meant to attend the solemn graveside service for Jackson’s family patriarch. But if I hadn’t, this Townie never would’ve met the teen-tycoon-turned-used-car-salesman sitting across from her. Rolling his pen between his fingers in thought and absorbing everything around him, even though his imagination was light-ye
ars away.
Jax didn’t need the job at the car dealership. But he took any opportunity to study the human condition as fodder to fuel his fiction.
“Maybe you’ll write that story into one of your books someday.”
“Maybe.” Jax came back to earth and smiled at me. “But right now, I want to put you in the driver’s seat. You ready?”
He grabbed my hand and we wound past the Bentleys and Lamborghinis smugly gracing Jax’s uncle’s showroom floor. The Davenport footprint was stamped all over Eleventh Avenue, where most of Manhattan’s elite car dealerships sat. It had also worn a path down to Wall Street and back with its hard work and success.
Back in high school, hitching a ride with Jax meant showing up at the mall in a vintage Porsche Spyder, and posing for prom pictures in front of the Lotus used on the set of a James Bond movie. Until Laney and her high school sweetheart, Allen, had decided to reenact a Whitesnake video on the hood of Grandmother Davenport’s Jaguar, resulting in a ban on young Jackson borrowing the keys to the family cars.
June heat rose from the city concrete and licked at my bare ankles as Jax pushed me gently through the automatic door and we left the air-conditioned building behind.
“You ready? No peeking, Danica James.”
“How can I peek with your hands over my eyes?”
Jax knew me too well. I reached to pry his fingers apart to sneak a look, just like I’d do when he tried to protect me from the gory parts in a horror movie.
His hands dropped to my shoulders, mingling with my curls, and we both gazed upon the mustard-yellow Volkswagen bus baking in the midmorning sun of the back alley.
“You like?”
“Oh, my God. It’s perfect.” I gave his hands a squeeze, then shot forward to run my own down the VW’s flat face. “How on earth did you get it?”
“Mugged a hippie.” I threw him a look, and he laughed. “I put my feelers out. Auction in Michigan. It’s a 1972 Westfalia. Fully restored, with a pop-up top.”
“I see that.” Teetering on the tiptoes of my sandals, I scoped out the camper’s interior through the long side window. “A sink?”
“Yep, along with a few other upgrades. Built-in closet, icebox. Table folds out. Convertible bed, the works.” Jax rocked back on his heels, pleased with himself. “Check out the seats. I think the upholstery is original.”
“Avocado green. So sexy!” I reached through the open window and tentatively touched the wide steering wheel. The cogs in my head were already turning. “How many miles does it have on it?”
“Seventy-nine, five.”
Not bad for a car ten years older than me. But still. I was going the distance. “Will it last me all summer?”
“It’s going to get you where you need to go,” Jax said.
I grimaced. That wasn’t exactly the answer to my question.
“Treat you to lunch?” he asked. “We can hit the Rocking Horse.”
“Depends. Where’s your evil twin?”
Dexton Davenport hated me with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. And was often Jax’s lunchtime companion if he roused himself out of bed early enough.
“Midtown. I think he was hitting Sam Ash and a few other guitar stores today. Come on,” he coaxed. “Manhattan’s big enough for the both of you.”
“Dex despises me.”
Jax rolled his eyes. He’d been stuck in the middle of this tug-of-war between me and his brother for years.
“No, Dex is just in a mood.”
“He’s been in a mood since your grandfather’s funeral.”
Jax laughed. It was a fairly accurate observation; what teenager wouldn’t be grumpy upon learning of a deathbed confession that rocked his cushy little world, threw his family’s inheritance into jeopardy, and forced him to slum it out in the suburbs for the rest of his high school career?
Jackson Davenport, for one. The good twin.
“So . . . carnitas and margaritas?”
His offer was poetic and tempting.
But I really needed to get going while I had the light.
“Rain check,” I promised, throwing my arms around my friend. “How can I ever repay you for this?”
“Make good on the loan,” he laughed. “Gypsy masseuse heartbreakers carry their checkbooks out on tour, right?”
“Always.” My fingers performed a fluttering effleurage down his spine. “And maybe you’ll take me up on that offer of a massage someday?”
“Rain check on your magic fingers,” he managed, pulling away before he allowed himself to melt into me. “Oh, and I took the liberty . . . ” He reached through the passenger window and pulled out a pair of custom vanity plates stamped with WWDD.
“Oh, Jax.” Now it was my turn to melt as I watched my friend affix my favorite motto to my ride.
“Listen to that little voice inside your own head for once, will ya? WWDD?”
What Would Dani Do?
The phrase echoed as I navigated Mean Mistress Mustard, my new old van, through the snakes of traffic and into the Lincoln Tunnel with her headlights on.
It was true; my friends always looked to me for that voice of reason. My perfect mixture of level-headedness and levity. Just walk away, I had told Laney tenfold, guiding her through the land mines that came with loving a rock star like Allen Burnside. Live a little, I had urged her, when I knew all she wanted to do was die a little after losing him to cancer. And be open to a grand adventure were my words that helped get her on that plane to her mom’s wedding and move her from heartache to happiness with Noah.
I needed to take my own advice, and taking the job as a backstage masseuse for the Minstrels & Mayhem Festival tour was certainly a start.
The tunnel rose, darkness dashed away by the unblinking eye of the summer sun.
I would forget Mick.
Starting with no dessert after eight o’clock at night.
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Dictatorship of the Dress (9780698168305) Page 33