by Sienna Ciles
Chapter Two
Stefan
I turned back around, looking for the spare shirt I’d set aside and saw the woman who’d come to my door looking a bit stunned. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a man shirtless before,” I said with a grin. “You’re too pretty to still be inexperienced.”
“No, it’s just that I don’t usually see guys dump wine all over themselves and then take their shirts off in front of random strangers,” she replied, her voice tart. “What are you even in such a hurry for, anyway?”
“I’ve got an appointment I need to get to,” I told her, finding my backup shirt draped over the back of the couch. I pulled it on and buttoned it up. “Guess I don’t need any more wine before I leave.”
“I guess not,” she said. “Look, are you going to sign for this or not?” I glanced in her direction again. I’d totally forgotten why I’d even let her into the apartment, and then I saw the flowers she’d set down on the coffee table in the living room.
“Oh, right,” I said. “S. Doss.” I finished buttoning up my shirt and grabbed my bowtie—still, thankfully, clean and dry—and started in on it again. “Listen, can’t you just sign for me? I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“And then later you’ll claim you never got them and I’ll get in trouble,” she said. “Nope.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you!” I grinned at her. “Besides, they’re flowers. How much trouble would you really get into?”
“Considering this bouquet is one of the priciest ones we offer? A lot,” she replied.
I whistled. “Well, clearly, someone loves me.”
“Clearly, they do,” the woman agreed, a sarcastic note in her voice. “Must be some kind of admirer—maybe a fan?”
“Maybe,” I said. I finished tying my tie and decided that it was worth spending a few minutes to talk with this woman. She might be sharp, but she’s pretty. Brown hair pulled back into two braids, blue eyes that wouldn’t be out of place on a kewpie doll, and a figure that even the polo shirt and long skirt she was wearing couldn’t cover up. It’d be nice to see her in some real clothes. A nice cocktail dress. Or maybe a bathing suit. I shook the thought out of my mind and started looking for my jacket.
“Whoever it was put a lot of thought into it, and we want to make sure that they’re satisfied that we delivered on time,” she said, sounding a little less sarcastic.
“I’m sure they will be,” I told her. “So, how many bouquets do you have waiting for you at home?”
“Only the ones I made for myself from the leftovers,” she replied, with a faint smile. “Come on, are you going to sign or not?”
“I’ll sign,” I said, settling the jacket on my shoulders.
“So, just out of curiosity: usually bouquets like this are from people who are obsessed with you, or people who have done something terribly wrong.”
I snorted. “And?”
“And I was wondering who might be so obsessed with you, or who might have killed your favorite puppy,” she said.
“None of the above, but why don’t you read the card while I’m signing this for you?” I took the clipboard from her and looked over the delivery information.
“Okay,” the woman said, sounding amused. She plucked the card from the bouquet and opened it. “Darling, I hope these flowers aren’t the only love you get this Valentine’s Day. Love…” She paused.
“Yeah?” I looked up from the clipboard as I finished signing.
“They’re from your mom,” she said, her face brightening with red. I chuckled. I’d known that as soon as I saw what the delivery was—my mother has sent me flowers every Valentine’s Day, ever since I was in high school.
“They are, indeed,” I said.
“It’s just that—well, normally, flowers have some kind of meaning. The individual ones,” she explained quickly. “There are different flowers for apologies, for romantic love, for friendship... there’s a whole language of flowers, actually.”
I smiled. She actually looked sweet, blushing like that as she explained.
“That’s good to know,” I said, looking her over once, quickly. I felt like I hadn’t been paying enough attention before.
“Well, now that you’ve signed, I’ll just get out of your way, since you’re in such a hurry to head out,” the woman told me, the color deepening in her cheeks.
“I have a minute,” I countered.
“Well, Mr. S. Doss…”
“Stefan,” I said, cutting her off. “My name is Stefan.”
“That seems like a pretty... non-standard name,” She observed. “There’s something about you that seems familiar. Are you a celebrity? I don’t recognize your name.”
“It’s probably my body,” I joked. “People use my body for all sorts of things,” I told her with a little grin.
“I’m sure that they do,” she said lightly, still sounding a little sarcastic, but more in a comedic way than an irritable one.
“It’s pretty late in the day. I guess this is your last delivery?”
“Yep, headed home from here,” she told me, starting to loosen up a bit more.
“And I assume that tomorrow you’ve got some kind of great plan with your boyfriend?”
“No boyfriend,” she said. “But I do have plans to hang out with some friends, have a few drinks, and glory in the fact that we don’t have to deal with all the commercialized crap that comes with Valentine’s Day.”
“You’re part of the industry that benefits from the commercialized crap,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t that make you a little bit of a hypocrite?”
Her cheeks blazed with color again, and I saw her tits push at the fabric of her polo shirt as she took a deep breath.
“I am fine with flowers,” she said. “Flowers have history and significance. It’s all the cheesy stuff—the chocolates and the stupid stuffed animals and all that, and building it up into this big, amazing thing. That’s what’s crap about it.”
“I can see what you mean,” I told her.
She looked me up and down for a moment. “What about you? I assume there’s someone other than your mother who wants to give you flowers.”
“No one, actually,” I replied. “My girlfriend chose work over me. Well, she chose her co-worker over me. So, really, she’s my ex-girlfriend.”
She gave me a sympathetic grimace. “So, then you’re not dressed up for some big date? I’m so disappointed for you,” she said playfully. “Are you going to be one of us bitter singles tomorrow night?”
“I wish!” I said. “My friends talked me into some dinner date. It’s an annual thing. I’m not really feeling it, but I feel bad backing out at the last minute.”
“Well, hopefully, you’ll have a good night in spite of being the only one to go stag,” she said, starting to move toward the door.
“You know, you could help me with that,” I said. “Go with me.”
She gave me a sideways glance. “Not really my scene. Besides, I have plans: the aforementioned bitch-fest with my single lady friends.”
“Well, just in case you change your mind, why don’t you take my number?” I still had her clipboard and her pen, and I scribbled my number down on the receipt and handed it all back to her.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” she said.
“Just in case you do,” I insisted. “If you don’t, I’ll just have to see if I can have a good time without you there to make sarcastic remarks about me.”
She smiled again and turned to leave. “You know, your mom did a pretty good job,” she said, glancing at me once more.
I grinned and halfway struck a pose, pushing out my chest a bit. “She can’t take credit for all this,” I pointed out.
The woman blushed slightly. “I meant the flowers,” she told me quickly. “Happy Valentine’s Day!” She darted out of my apartment and all I could do was grin to myself. I hoped she would end up calling me; certainly, it had been a while since a woman had made such an impression on me so quickly.
“Hey… what’s your name?” I shouted as she walked out of the door.
“…a”, she said, barely audible as the door closed behind her.
Chapter Three
Emma
As I left Stefan’s apartment, I couldn’t help shaking my head, thinking about how absurd the whole situation was. I knew he was familiar, in some way, but I couldn’t figure it out. I had to admit that he was hot but he was also a bit of an arrogant ass.
I nodded to the front desk person as I walked through the lobby, and when I left the building, I could feel the ache and fatigue of ten hours of work in every muscle of my body, maybe even down to my bones. I was only too ready to get home, pour myself a glass of wine, heat up some leftovers from earlier in the week, and maybe, finally, get a nice long bath.
I got lost for a minute or two but managed to find my way home from Stefan’s place and get up the stairs—my building, with only three floors, never thought to install an elevator—and got my door unlocked. Bast, my two-year-old black cat, ran to the door to greet me and scolded me as I tried not to step on her. I took off my shoes, put my purse down on the kitchen counter, and took my bra off from underneath my polo shirt, tossing it onto the tiny little table in the “dining nook” my apartment boasted to retrieve later.
I crouched down, wincing against the sound of my knees popping as I did, and finally gave Bast the attention she knew she deserved: scratching behind her ears and along her spine, stroking her back in long pets, letting her nuzzle and rub against me, meowing and mewing all the time. “How’s my little girl? Were you alone all day?”
She peered up at me with her big, yellow eyes and meowed as if to tell me that she had been, and that it was shameful of me to leave her alone.
I cuddled and petted her for a while until Bast decided that she was satisfied, and then got back up onto my feet and started winding down for the day: I poured myself a glass of wine, and grabbed a Tupperware container with the leftover chicken marsala and mashed potatoes I’d made earlier in the week, and set it to heat up while I dutifully gave Bast her nightly helping of wet cat food.
Then I was on the couch in my living room, the TV on, and my leftovers and wine in front of me. Another night with leftovers and my book.
I grabbed Desiree’s Secret, the trashy romance novel I’d been reading, and stared at it.
“Fuck!” I yelled to myself, scaring Bast into a defensive position.
There it was, the distinctive tattoo on the supposed “hero’s” right shoulder. A phoenix curled around a blood moon
“No fucking way…” My eyes trailed from the shoulder of the hero, down his back to his ass and then back to his shoulder. Stefan was on the cover of my book.
“Ass,” I muttered. I wanted to read it, wanted to submerge myself in the delicious thrill of heroes who were never wrong, who always showed up on time, and who actually cared about screwing things up with the heroine. Unfortunately, after meeting the guy who was definitely who I was supposed to be imagining when I read, it was impossible to consider getting into the story again. I knew that I would be imagining the guy who’d spilled wine on himself trying to drink it and tie a bowtie all at the same time, who had embarrassed me, and who had then gone on to hit on me.
I couldn’t deny that he was hot; even hotter in person than he was on the cover of the book, in fact. His face, with the five o’clock shadow and the piercing blue eyes, was even more alluring than the figure on the front of my book. But even as I opened to the page I’d left off on, I saw that there was dialogue between the hero and the heroine, and I “heard” the hero—named Chase—in Stefan’s voice, instead of the one I’d invented in my head for him. I saw him smirking, and the story itself just wasn’t all that alluring anymore. Meeting Stefan had ruined it.
“At least they’re not expensive books,” I murmured to myself, and began flipping through the channels to figure out what I would actually want to watch, instead of just using the TV as background noise. I ate my leftover chicken marsala and drank about a third of my wine, and then grabbed my phone for some kind of other distraction. I decided to text Becky. If nothing else, she deserved the story about my end-of-day delivery.
Hey, girl! You will not believe what happened to me today, I sent, going back to flipping through the channels while I waited for her to reply.
What’s up? I rolled my eyes, reminding myself that unless Becky herself had some story to tell, she was usually pretty curt in her messages.
I had to make a last-minute delivery, since we missed it out before Sabrina left on the last run. And you will never, in a million years, guess who the delivery went to. I took a picture of my book cover and held it in reserve.
Please tell me it wasn’t Jeremy, she wrote back, and I snorted.
No, it isn’t your asshole ex, I told her. I sent her the picture of the book cover.
You delivered flowers to a book? Becky sent me a selfie of her with a confused face. I snickered to myself.
Nope! I delivered them to the guy who’s on the cover of the book, I told her.
Whoa! How did you know? You can’t see that guy’s face. I found something I wanted to watch—BBC’s Merlin, in a marathon from years ago—and set the remote aside. Bast came to cuddle and curled up in my lap.
I saw the tattoo, that’s how I knew. He spilled half a glass of wine on himself and took his shirt off. I could remember that image as clearly as if it had happened only about a minute before, instead of a good hour before.
Nice! What’s he like? I thought about that for a moment.
He’s an ass, I replied, adding in a few grimacing emojis. Ruined reading the book for me.
Well, that sucks, Becky said. I can’t be on my phone—I’ve got to get back to work.
I know, I know, I wrote her back. I just wanted to share my weird experience with someone. I’ll see you tomorrow.
She sent me back a heart emoji and I set my phone aside again, settling in to watch Merlin. I decided that I’d watch the episode I’d come in on while I finished up my wine, and then finally get into my bath, and go to bed after that. And then I would have an entire day off, and the prospect of a girls’ night with my two best friends, Gretchen and Becky, and I could just ignore the whole business of Valentine’s Day like I always did.
Chapter Four
Stefan
“You’re late, Stef.” I rolled my eyes at Nate as I walked past him in my tux, headed for the main part of the bar from the hotel lobby I’d walked through. The stage was already set up, and some of the other guys who’d been roped into the event were mingling, having a drink. There were tons of women in the bar, too, and they were definitely dressed to the nines as well. A bunch of signs proclaimed the event in bold, bright prints, full of pink and red and purple: Pre-Valentine’s Bachelor Auction Tonight!
Thankfully, I wasn’t one of the men being auctioned off for a date; when the sign-ups had been going on, I’d still had a girlfriend. When she’d left me, I had kept it on the downlow right up until it would have been too late for Nate to try to convince me to put myself up for auction for a Valentine’s Day date. Instead, I was going to be hosting the event, auctioning off some of the guys from the bar, some hotel staff, and some volunteers, and the proceeds would go to a local shelter that specialized in taming and making pets out of feral cats.
As soon as I started to circulate around the room, the attention started. The ladies were already primed to paw at any of the men wearing a tux, and while I’ve always tried not to have too big a head, I had managed to figure out that I was easy on the eyes years before, when I’d first started doing some minor modeling gigs. So, when the women started coming up to me, asking whether I was up for auction, I smiled and told them no. “Somebody’s gotta keep you lionesses from getting too aggressive with the prey,” I said.
“Oh, come on, Stefan, you could get enough bids to fund Caturday Sanctuary for a year all on your own,” one of the women—someone I knew from the bar—said as I tried to
politely get myself free of an older member of the crowd.
“Yeah well, I’m not on the block today,” I told Jessica. “I am strictly talent. Not for sale.”
“That’s a first,” she told me tartly, signaling to the bartender that I’d have a beer.
“It must be a nice change for you, at least,” I pointed out. “Not being the one everyone’s trying to grab.”
Jessica raised an eyebrow at me. “Some of these women want to impress the men pretty strongly, as if that’s going to make a difference in who wins. I’ve had about half a dozen women try and make out with me.”
“Can’t believe I missed that,” I said. I took my beer and headed in the direction of the stage, doing what I could to direct attention from me and onto the men who were actually up for grabs.
I made it to the stage and took the mic one of the hotel staff offered me. “All right, everybody, I think it’s time to get this show on the road, don’t you?” A deafening cheer met me, full of mostly-female voices. “My name is Stefan Doss, and I will be your MC for the evening, running these bids and presenting these men to you. I am not for sale. I want to make that clear. But I will be introducing all you lovely ladies to these great men, and hopefully helping you fulfill your dreams of a romantic Valentine’s Day!”
The men managed to disentangle themselves from the women trying to get at them and lined up on the side of the stage like we’d practiced. I took another sip of my beer and settled into the role I’d been given: hype up the men and control the bidding.
“First up, we have Jackson!” I rattled off the material Jackson had given me and nodded to the DJ, who was running sound. I went through the usual spiel while Jackson posed and half-danced around on the stage, showing himself off. I started the bidding on cue and tried to get the women energetic enough to bid higher, throwing out random “facts” about Jackson. “Come on, ladies! He goes to the gym five days a week; you can’t let all that muscle go to waste…”
I went through a few more of the guys, generating some pretty good bids. Jackson went for five hundred, Phil managed to generate about six hundred, Chuck got someone to bid four-fifty for him, and so on. I called a break, because I was supposed to make the event last over an hour, and went out into the audience again.