Danica walked away, and once she was within the safe confines of the restaurant, she fanned herself with her clutch purse.
“Danica, are you feeling all right?” Tem asked as she approached. She reached as though to press the back of her hand against her daughter’s forehead, and Danica was about to smile at the tender gesture until she realized that Tem was only attempting to smooth her windblown bangs. “Freshen up in the ladies’ room, why don’t you?”
Beside her, stately Willa Smart added, “We’ll order you tea.”
“I’m fine. I was just outside watching the fountain show.” I’m lying. I’m not fine. I’m about to claw out of my skin because I’m so hot for a man I can’t have.
“That wasn’t very sensible. We’ll have a lovely view of the lake right from our table.” Tem gave Willa an exasperated look before she held Danica at arm’s length for an inspection. Concern dimmed her usually vivid eyes as they paused on one arm then the other. Was she searching for something? “Always think sensibly, Danica.”
Danica watched Tem greet the hostess with her perfect smile, perfect posture, perfect not-a-strand-out-of-place hairstyle. Never would she measure up to her mother. Continuing to try would only make her a wannabe Temperance Blue. But what was wrong with being an original Danica Blue?
Tem strode back to her. “Come to the table,” she said under her breath. “You look like a lost puppy just standing here at the hostess’s station. Men are staring as if they want to take you home.”
Danica opened her purse, her ears hot and her palms damp. “Just have a call to make.”
“Go, then. Want the tea or wine?”
“Wine.” A bottle ought to get me through this dinner….
Danica chastised herself for the snide thought. “Thank you, Ma. Be right back.” Tem was already sashaying off to join Willa.
Outside the restaurant, Danica dialed slowly, giving herself every opportunity to change her mind. If it rang three times with no answer, she’d hang up and let that be the end of it.
Dex answered on the first ring.
“That night at the art gallery…” Closing her eyes, she blocked out everything but the truth. “That night, in my bed…I missed you.”
Danica hung up, not giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise. Let him untangle the undertones of what she’d said, the magnitude of what she was capable of wanting. Doing. Wanting to do again.
In the restaurant, Tem waved her over to sit at the empty seat next to her. “Why is it, Willa, that my girls insist on vexing me?” She finally turned to Danica. “I had assumed you’d take an opportunity to fix your hair or makeup, at least. Looking a little feral tonight.”
“Oh.” Danica picked up her wineglass. And smiled.
Feral. She liked the sound of that.
Chapter 10
Danica hadn’t planned to skip work. The shrill beeping of Alarm Clock 1 woke her early on Saturday, and Alarm Clock 2 quickly joined in.
Her phone rested next to her tablet on the nightstand, along with a neglected bonsai tree and a heavy lamp, which she’d left glowing all through the night when she powered off the phone, tossed her stuff down and collapsed on the four-poster bed in a state of stress-induced exhaustion.
With last night’s makeup smudging her pale sheets, and the day’s list of to-do items funneling through her mind, she emerged from her burrow under the covers at the foot of the bed to stare bleary-eyed at the clocks.
Motivated by the challenge to dress and hurry her patootie out the door on schedule, Danica showered, wrapped herself in a towel and, with her phone in tow, padded barefoot to her home office to coordinate her calendars.
But, leaning over her desk chair, confronted with calendars on the wall, on the desk, on her computer and her phone—square after square dictating where she was expected, dividing the precious moments of her life—she felt something inside her give way.
Dialing feverishly, she connected herself to the HR after-hours answering service. It wasn’t in her contract to regularly report to the admin building on Saturdays, but she’d stumbled into the routine of haunting the place, whiling away the day in her office, sometimes surrounded by colleagues, other times alone. All because she’d rather be alone at the stadium than alone in this house.
For good measure, she texted her assistant.
UNAVAILABLE TODAY.
If necessary, Lilith, who almost never worked on Saturdays, would report directly to Marshall and Tem.
Not once since accepting the GM position had Danica made herself “unavailable.” Doing so filled her with a strange rush of giddiness that she knew was only temporary and would come crashing down in a matter of time.
So until that time came, there was only Danica, and anyone else she let into her world. At six o’clock in the morning, there wasn’t a minute to waste.
With a daring intake of breath, she flicked open her towel and let it fall to a terry cloth puddle at her feet. Naked, alone in her house with all its ghosts of memories that were quiet for now, she marched out of the office. Fixing an omelet and savoring each bite au naturel was paradise compared to her usually rushed muffin and coffee from Starbucks.
But as she ate standing at the counter with the television on mute, a plan pieced itself together in her thoughts. To start, she would get dressed, launder her bedding, meticulously dust the entire upstairs floor of the mansion—and get reacquainted with its interesting nooks and crannies along the way.
But she had gotten only as far as the dressing part, throwing on a sweatshirt over jeans, before she’d spontaneously decided to contact her home-security team.
Overseeing the gate reset nibbled the better part of an hour, and by the time the technician gave her a refresher walk-through of the security cameras’ connections to the centralized computer, she’d been all but shaking with relief to sign job-completion papers, shake his hand and send him on his merry way.
Danica closed the front door behind the technician, then rested her forehead against the wood. No more of Marion Reeves getting past the gate…or her defenses. It was another ending, another piece of finality tumbling into place. But this time, wistfulness didn’t take her by the shoulders and rattle her.
There were no tears. No hard feelings. Nothing but acceptance.
Treat yourself. Pushing away from the door and thundering upstairs in the palace of a house to ransack her walk-in for a change of clothes, Danica made a promise to herself that she’d do just that. “I’m going home.”
*
Home was on East Poplar Avenue, snuggled between the city’s housing authority and Hadland Park. Sprawled on a generous lot, garnished with professionally manicured grounds, Faith House’s two-year-old main building rose three stories into the sky. Cast in sunlight, the front lawn’s fountain glimmered even from the street. The youth-outreach center was a beacon, a lighthouse calling to the soft side of Danica’s heart.
Tucking her Boxster between two trucks, she muscled three paper bags stuffed with groceries from the car and greeted the doorman. “Morning, Mr. Hawkins.”
“In all my days watchin’ this door, I’ve never seen you here on a Saturday morning,” he observed, allowing her into the lobby. “It sure is a nice treat.”
“The treats are in here.” She jiggled the bags as one of the volunteer tutors came forth to lighten the load. “I thought Raoul and I could offer the kids a baking lesson later. Cupcakes. A batch with the original recipe, and one that’s low carb. Don’t want to leave out anyone special.”
Mr. Hawkins’s face split into a smile. While most people Danica knew made demands as effortlessly as they blinked, Mr. Hawkins dependably worked his shifts without ever requesting anything, not a raise or an extra break or time off. Even something as everyday as a cupcake he wouldn’t ask for, which was why Danica had kept the fifty-something diabetic gentleman in mind as she’d shopped for ingredients.
As president of Faith House, Danica often spent her visits to the center in the third-floor confere
nce room, laboring over executive details with the board of directors. Grant proposals and fund-raisers were bumps in the rough terrain on her path to show Las Vegas’s kids that a hard life on the streets didn’t have to be their destiny. Danica knew from the PR and financial departments, as well as volunteer staff, that teens as young as thirteen years old walked through Faith House’s doors in search of a hot meal, a person to listen, some possibility of escape from gangs, homelessness, drugs, prostitution and violence.
Rarely did Danica see those children’s faces. Since agreeing to head up her parents’ football team, she’d run the outreach center from a distance. It was a distance that she resented. She’d rather spend more time on the first and second floors, working side by side with the staff, volunteers and the people they were committed to rescuing.
In fractions of moments when Danica stopped to just take a breath, she’d think about the teen who had slinked into her life with the intent to cause her harm. Instead, Danica had saved her life—only to have it cut short, anyway.
When Faith Rivera, a sixteen-year-old dropout with a rap sheet, had died in an auto explosion, she’d been treated as a statistic. A blip in a news report of yet another Vegas degenerate youngster who’d met an early demise.
Until Danica had devoted herself to changing that. Now anyone who discovered Faith House would know the girl’s story. They’d know Faith Rivera’s life mattered.
After putting away the groceries in the center’s industrial-style kitchen and charming Raoul, the cantankerous, set-in-his-ways chef, to let her invade his haven for a cupcake-baking extravaganza later, Danica dug right in wherever she was needed. The morning was spent assisting in tutoring sessions, and then she was tugged away to meet with one of the crisis-shelter execs, who’d gotten word of her presence at the chief building and insisted on meeting with her to iron out details about this year’s holiday fund-raiser.
On her way out of the crisis shelter’s executive building, she checked her cell.
Among a string of text messages from colleagues that all began with some variety of “I know you’re not working today, but…” and voice mails from friends inviting her out for shopping or supper, was a text message from Dex.
STILL MISSING ME?
Danica stared at the phone until the display faded to black. Finally, she pushed through the doors of the exit and dialed his number. When he picked up, she swiped a hand over her abdomen, as if the motion would net the butterflies taking flight in her stomach. “Calling you the other night, telling you that I touched myself thinking about you, was a crazy impulse—”
“Figured you’d try to take us a step back,” he murmured over the line. “Problem with that is, telling me or not telling me doesn’t change that it’s true.”
“So, are you going to let me finish saying what I was going to say?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
“I shouldn’t have called you,” she said, meandering to her car in the lot. The butterflies in her stomach had metamorphosed into a dangerous heat dipping low inside her, licking unforgivably at her flesh. “I should’ve told you to your face. Maybe even shown you.”
Dex groaned a curse, and the filthy word all but thrilled the Goth-purple polish off her toes. “Danica…”
“That can still happen, Dex. But not now.” She fished her key chain from her purse. “I’m chillin’ at Faith House today. It’s sanity that I’ve really been missing lately.”
Ending the call and sliding behind the wheel of her Boxster, Danica sighed. She was free-falling, right into trouble. Should she trust Dex to catch her when she reached the bottom? And if he did, would she want him to ever let her go?
You and I are greedy, selfish people, and sex might not be enough.
Or would she only be setting herself up for another heartbreak?
She brushed that heap of complication from her thoughts like grains of sand and returned to the outreach center. The on-site counselors, tutors and a sprinkle of potential sponsors all competed for her attention.
The first real snag came when she and one of the kitchen volunteers rounded up the teens for a lesson in food prep.
“Cooking? As in, home ec? That shit—I mean, that stuff—is for females,” a boy protested as the group trickled into the spacious dining room.
“Is that so?” a girl fired back. “Then I don’t want to see your caveman ass eating a cupcake. You’re just punkin’ out ’cause for once you can’t show off.”
Danica intervened. “Gentlemen. Ladies. Cupcakes shouldn’t be an emotionally charged subject. To be accurate, though, plenty of men are happy to cook—and extremely good at it.”
The boy twisted his mouth in a “yeah, right” expression.
“Men like Emeril Lagasse and Guy Fieri,” the volunteer put in.
“Naw, I’m talkin’ about real-world dudes.”
“Like me?” Raoul, in his signature do-rag, jeans and the khaki uniform shirt that was strikingly plain in contrast to the colorful abstract tattoos on his thickly muscled arms, held open the kitchen’s double swinging doors.
Now, there was a “real-world dude,” and if the boy’s resigned sigh and sheepish look to his peers was anything to go by, he figured so, as well.
“Wash hands, everybody,” Raoul, captain of the kitchen, commanded, “and let’s get to it.”
A benign lesson in cupcakes turned into a fiercely competitive bake-off. Danica couldn’t have wished for a better result. Batches of creatively frosted cupcakes beautified the center’s kitchen, before one by one the treats started disappearing as the kids rushed to eat their handiwork. No flaring tempers or injuries—just an entire pan of batter hitting the floor and decorating the shoes of the few teens standing close.
As five o’clock loomed, the demands began to thin. Closing time was in another hour. Danica was passing the receptionist’s desk when she heard Nellie shriek, “Oh, my freaking gosh!”
Approaching the desk, Danica looked through the glass interior doors toward the lobby…where Mr. Hawkins stood shaking hands with Dex Harper.
“Is he coming in?” Nellie asked hopefully, glancing at Danica. “I want an autograph for my sister. Wait—uh, don’t the Slayers people consider him persona non grata?”
“There are no hard feelings. Why don’t I see what I can do about getting you that autograph?”
Nellie nodded enthusiastically, but the ringing phone slapped her professionalism into place. “Good afternoon. Faith House.” The crisp, attentive tone was a stark difference to the infatuated-girl-on-the-prowl shrieking of a few moments before.
Danica made it through the interior doors as Mr. Hawkins let Dex past the front entrance. They met in the middle of the atrium lobby. Fingers of late-afternoon sunlight penetrated the glass, streaking over his mussed hair and the shoulders of his simple yet exquisitely fitted dark shirt. In a romantic film, this would be the moment that they’d be wrapped up in each other. But since this was reality, and their reality included rules, expectations and, of course, security guards scrutinizing them behind opaque sunglasses, Dex shook her hand in the same fashion that he’d greeted the doorman.
The contact jolted her, calling to life a billion little sensations that danced with anticipation. “I’m beginning to think you enjoy catching me off guard,” she whispered. “When I said that I’d be hanging out here today, it wasn’t a roundabout way of asking you to come see me.”
“Think about the place I care about and go there—that’s what you told me at the Bellagio. I want to see the place you care about.” His mouth—oh, sweet God, his beautiful mouth—quirked into a private smile. “And hell, yes, I like you off guard.”
“What’s with that hungry look in your eyes?”
“I’m off guard, too, Danica. I wasn’t expecting you to smell like dessert.”
And you’d devour me if I let you…. “We had a bake-off. Think Cupcake Wars, teen edition.”
He smiled, and her heart karate-chopped her ribs. “C’mon in,” she said, raisi
ng her voice for security’s benefit. “The receptionist tells me that she’d like an autograph.” She escorted him inside, where a flock of gawking teenagers were already stationed around Nellie’s desk.
Danica stood a safe distance away from the mob of kids who were assailing Dex with praise for his athletic prowess and prying questions about the investigation. It wasn’t every day that they met a professional athlete up close and personal. The group trip to a Slayers home game at the start of the season had been a onetime treat. Though she was the founder and president of Faith House, and the general manager of the Slayers, they were still two entirely separate entities.
“There’s a football in the equipment locker,” Kiefer, a boy with a pierced eyebrow and impressive cupcake-frosting techniques, said. A victim of physical abuse, he’d come to the center as a reserved, quiet boy, but now he was settled in a new foster home and more outspoken. “Can you give us some pointers?”
“Outside,” Nellie added, appearing a bit concerned at the thought of an indoor scrimmage.
“I’m always ready for football,” Dex said. Competing with the raucous cheers, he hollered to Danica, “What about you? Want to get in on this?”
“Not in these shoes.” Valentino slim-heeled pumps weren’t made for loping in the grass. Neither were the tuxedo-style blazer and calf-length trousers she’d spiced up with Goth-inspired jewelry, smoky makeup and a sheer pink blouse with a black bow collar.
Danica designated herself cheerleader on the makeshift sidelines while the others lost themselves in practicing passes. The hour rolled much too soon, and she was sorry to see Nellie trek out to announce closing time.
“I wish I could freeze this day, hang on to it, you know?” she confided in Nellie as the two brought up the rear of the group.
The receptionist nudged her companionably. “You’ll just have to come by more often. Will we see you at the free brunch the crisis center’s hosting? Oh, no, no. Football time, isn’t it? Big game tomorrow.”
Midnight Play Page 12