“You—you monster, you,” she gasped, pushing at him, but he clasped her body to his and soon she grew quiet, her breath coming in short little gasps.
His hands found her nipples, rolling them between his thumbs and forefingers until they stood erect. “Deke, oh Deke,” she murmured, her mouth seeking his. She strained toward him, pressing her breasts into his hands as if hungering for more, and, falling out of his monster mode, Deke decided to make love to her then and there.
Dorian remembered they were standing out in the open on the dock and pulled away, but Deke only smiled conspiratorially and led her into the boathouse where it was cool and shadowy, reflections of the water highlighting the rough wood of the ceiling and casting their faces into surreal blue light.
“Deke, I don’t know about this,” she said doubtfully even as his impatient fingers tugged at her bikini bottom.
“There’s nothing to know except that we want each other,” he said, his hollow voice echoing from the ceiling, the walls, the water. “Let’s not wait.”
And then she was as eager as he was, her hands urging his swim trunks down over his thighs, and before he knew what was happening, they were making love on cushions spread in the bottom of the boat, their urgent bodies sliding against each other slick with oil, their lovemaking rocking them until water splashed over the sides.
Deke’s climax was explosive, an ecstatic sharing of all that his body and soul had to give, and hers was equally cataclysmic, her body arching beneath his, her breath hot against his neck.
All his life he had wanted to be fiercely desired by such a woman as Dorian Carr. Not only that, but in a matter of a few short weeks, his greatest pleasure had become to give her pleasure. Did she know it? Maybe not. In that case, he decided hazily as the world encroached upon his senses once more, he’d have to make her even happier.
But then, he already had plans to do that. And soon.
Chapter Ten
A few days later, Dorian stared at her unlikely reflection in the mirror in the wardrobe room of the studio in Alpakka where they filmed commercials. She was costumed like Jeannie in the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie.” She wore transparent harem pants, a sequinned vest and a blouse that revealed her tan midriff. She also wore a snug cap trailing veils and with beads dipping across her forehead.
Just for fun, she folded her arms in front of her and bobbed her head, half expecting to hear something go boing! like the sound effects on the TV show. She made a wish.
I wish Deke would pick me up from work tonight, she thought, but she didn’t think he would. He’d said something about joining the chase team for a balloon flight this afternoon and going out for a drink with the guys afterward.
Mrs. Potts, the wardrobe mistress, had stepped out for what she had said would be only a few minutes, and pacing back and forth in front of the mirror, Dorian glanced impatiently at her watch. Almost everyone else had gone home; though she hadn’t wanted to, Dorian had stayed until after dark for an important fitting. And now Mrs. Potts had disappeared.
Dorian stuck her head out the door of the wardrobe room and looked up and down the long hall.
“Hey, do you know where Mrs. Potts went?” she asked a passing lighting technician.
“No, but the director wants to see you in his office. Pronto,” he said.
Barely able to conceal her annoyance, Dorian went to see what the director wanted. He talked at length about her delivery of her lines, a subject that they’d discussed only that morning. When at last he said she could leave, she went back to the wardrobe room to find it locked, and there was still no sign anywhere of Mrs. Potts.
She was indecisively trying to figure out what to do next when the same lighting technician she’d spoken to earlier drifted by. “Hey, Dorian, your limousine is here,” he said over his shoulder.
“I didn’t order any limousine.”
“Well, there’s one waiting,” he said before disappearing through a door at the end of the hall.
“Great,” Dorian said. “Just great.” Not knowing what else to do, she went to see about the limo.
The vehicle waiting outside the door was long, sleek and white, and she had to walk all the way around it to see if the driver was sitting behind the wheel. He was, and he was wearing not the usual driver’s cap, but—a bath towel on his head?
Dorian leaned over for a closer look.
At that point, Deke erupted from the car, a triumphant grin spread across his face.
“You’ve kept me Kuwaiting long enough,” he said.
Deke was dressed in a long white robe thrown open to expose his chest. The thing on his head wasn’t a bath towel but a turban ;aga la Rudolph Valentino. He even wore a mustache. Dorian closed her eyes and opened them again. Deke and the limousine were still there.
“Is that real?” she asked, overcoming her speechlessness.
“Well, I drove it here,” Deke said.
“No, not the limousine. The mustache.”
“You can test it out,” he said, sweeping her into his embrace and bending her back over his arm. He kissed her, taking his own sweet time about it. The mustache tickled.
When he had restored her to her feet, she rubbed her mouth and said, “That felt like kissing a caterpillar.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her. “And how many caterpillars have you kissed?”
“None, lately. What in the world are you up to, Deke?”
“Come with me to the Casbah and you’ll find out.”
“Just a minaret while I get my things,” she replied, delighting, as she always did, in wordplay.
“I bribed Mrs. Potts to bring your clothes and your bag out while you were talking with the director,” he said. “Get in, and I’ll whisk you away for the night of your life.”
She looked him over, thinking that the exotic costume suited him. He was ogling her, too, with frank appreciation for the way she looked in her harem outfit.
Suddenly she laughed at the sheer absurdity of the situation. “Okay, but do I have to ride in back all by myself?”
“I’d like it if you’d ride up front with me.” He walked around and opened the passenger-side door.
When he slid in behind the steering wheel, she asked, “Whatever possessed you? Why are you doing this?”
“You told me about your Rudolph Valentino fantasy, see, the night we first made love, and I wanted to make it come true. Somewhere along the way, it turned into my fantasy, too,” he said, his eyes crinkling with pleasure. He slid a tape that played Middle Eastern music into the tape deck and eased the car into gear.
It was dark; the back roads where he took her were narrow and deserted.
“What’s next, Deke? Belly dancers?”
“We’re going to our own private oasis,” he said, twirling the end of his mustache. He did, Dorian thought privately, go about it with a certain inexpert charm, so much so that she couldn’t suppress a chuckle.
“Anything wrong?”
“I’m merely awed by your inventiveness.”
“Do you feel as if you’re living a dream?” he asked anxiously.
“Do you?”
“No fair, I asked you first,” he said before turning down a deserted country lane arched over with massive trees.
“Well, there’s a certain unreality about all this,” she admitted. “Where in the world are we, anyway?”
“This is a farm that belongs to a friend of mine. I borrowed his favorite fishing spot on a pond for the evening. We’re almost there.”
They rounded a curve where tall torches guided the way down a narrow path to a wide clearing. At first all Dorian saw was moonlight on the water beyond, and then she gasped.
At the edge of the clearing, Deke had erected a multicolored tent made of silk. When Dorian got out of the limo, her unbelieving eyes saw that the inside of the tent was furnished with oriental carpets, plump pillows of every shape, size and color, and a low table set for two.
She turned to look at Deke, who was grinnin
g down at her. “Just like in the movies?” he asked.
“Deke, I—” She stopped. She didn’t know what to say.
“Well, will you join me? Or stand there gawking?”
She could do nothing but stare up at him, at his dear face, the mustache slipping now to one side, his dark eyes laughing down at her.
And then she was sitting beside him at the candlelit table, and he was serving her lamb delicacies, a honey-and-date concoction and a heady wine that made her head spin while muted desert music lent an exotic aura.
“How long have you been planning this?” she asked.
“A long time. It was the tent that was so hard to find. Omar the tentmaker is out of business these days, so I had to order it from a Hollywood company that designs movie sets. Do you like it?”
“I’m—I’m—” she began, but words failed her, so she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek instead.
When they had both eaten until they could eat no more, they leaned back against the silken pillows, unable to stop smiling at each other. Deke took Dorian’s hand in his and caressed it gently.
“Happy?” he asked.
“I do feel like I’m living a dream,” she said truthfully.
“I would, too—if you’d move a little closer.”
She obliged, and he slid an arm beneath her neck, kissing her forehead, her earlobe, the pulse at her throat.
She thought she had never known a man as unpredictable as Deke Washburn. Or as handsome. Or as ardent.
He plucked at her vest. “How does this come off?” he said.
“You have to say `Open sesame.’”
“Open sesame,” he repeated obediently. She slipped her arms out of the armholes, tossing it out into the night.
“And what do I have to do to get you out of this T-shirt?” he said, tugging at her blouse.
She giggled. “It’s not a T-shirt. And I’m not eager to take it off due to possible sabotage by bloodthirsty insects. There’s a mosquito hovering near your left eyebrow.”
He sat up, and one side of his mustache came loose. Momentarily disconcerted, he stuck it back on.
“It seems a shame to let the wide cushiony back seat of that limo go to waste,” he said thoughtfully. “I think Rudolph Valentino would have taken full advantage of it.”
She held her arms out to him. “Carry me,” she said, “just like in the movies.”
He swung her up into his arms and strode with her to the limousine, where he rolled up the windows, turned on the air-conditioning and proceeded to make wild, passionate love to her in the back seat to the accompaniment of a recording of sensuous desert drums.
The drums wore out before they did, and finally, as they rested on a heap of filmy veils and headdresses and one very tired and bedraggled fake mustache, Deke said, “I’d say that it was some weird genie that brought the two of us together.”
Dorian laughed softly, her head cushioned snugly against his shoulder. “Oh, it wasn’t a genie,” she said confidently.
“What other explanation could there be for two people as crazy as us to find each other?”
She kissed the freckle on his earlobe.
“Kismet,” she said.
* * *
LATE THAT WEEK Dorian’s work required that she unexpectedly fly to California to confer with the director of the Dr. Feelgood commercials, the scriptwriters and Maxie Lubner.
She stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel in a suite of rooms paid for by Mediactive Creations. Despite Jill’s gloomy predictions, the earth did not quake, canyons did not erupt into firestorms, no one rioted, and as far as Dorian knew, not one house slid into the ocean. Her whole visit approximated Barbie’s Dream Date, except for not having a man along. She should have had a wonderful time, but her mind was filled to overflowing with Deke, Deke, nothing but Deke.
She missed him terribly and couldn’t wait to get home to him. Never mind that he was president of a multimillion-dollar company; she wished that he could receive telepathic messages through his fillings like that other guy she’d read about in the newspaper. If he could, he’d be receiving nonstop messages from her now: Deke, I miss you. Deke, I want you. Deke, I can hardly wait to come home.
They had already planned that Deke would meet her on her return to Atlanta. But Dorian couldn’t bear to be away from him for one unnecessary minute, and so on the day she left California, she managed to sweet-talk her way onto a morning flight leaving LAX and scheduled to arrive in Atlanta at 6:00 p.m. Atlanta time. She anticipated her reunion with Deke as the plane skimmed over the vast brown desert east of California, as the pilot cheerfully pointed out the Mississippi River running like a blue thread through the landscape below, and as the blurry outline of Atlanta appeared in her window.
As soon as her plane landed at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport, she ran to a phone and called Deke at his Europa penthouse. He wasn’t there.
No matter. She caught a cab to La Roacherie, not even flinching at the hefty fare. She couldn’t wait to change clothes, shrug off all the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and come down to earth where Deke was waiting for her—or would be soon.
At her apartment complex, she tipped the cab driver generously and fairly flew across the little bridge and up the stairs. She fitted the key into the lock, the door swung open, and she saw...
A red-haired woman whom she did not recognize reclining on the couch, reading a dog-eared copy of Cosmopolitan that Dorian instantly recognized as hers.
“Excuse me,” Dorian said, flustered. She couldn’t be at the wrong apartment, could she?
The woman stared at her. Dorian set her suitcase down in front of the door.
“Sandra?” Jill called from her bedroom. “Did I hear the door open?”
“You must be Dorian,” said the woman, swinging her feet down off the couch and tossing the magazine aside. “I’m Sandra. We thought—”
Jill came out of her bedroom. She was carrying a laundry basket full of clothes.
“Dorian,” she said, stopping in her tracks. “Is something wrong?”
“Is this any way to welcome me home?” Dorian asked, shrugging out of her jacket and slinging it across the back of a dining room chair.
“Deke said you wouldn’t be coming back here,” Jill told her, easing the clothes basket onto the table.
“I can’t imagine why,” Dorian said, purposefully heading for her room. She couldn’t wait to get out of her traveling clothes and into something more comfortable.
She stopped in the doorway. Another comforter, not her own familiar pink-and-white striped one, was on the bed. Someone else’s toiletries were spread across the top of the dresser. A green throw rug that she had never seen before lay on the floor.
Sandra was right behind her. So was Jill. Dorian whirled to face them, the blood draining from her face.
“What—?” was all she could say.
“Deke said you’d be going straight to the Europa when you came back from L.A.,” Jill said with a helpless shrug. “Sandra’s my new roommate. Dorian, this is Sandra. Sandra, Dorian.”
Dorian looked from one to the other. “I think you’d better explain,” she said heavily, following them back into the living room.
“I’ll brew some tea,” Jill said.
“Make it coffee. I don’t think I could stomach tea at the moment,” Dorian said darkly.
“Okay, then, coffee,” Jill agreed.
“I’ll make the coffee. You’d better talk with Dorian,” Sandra said tactfully. She went into the kitchen and closed the door.
“Where’s all my stuff?” Dorian asked.
“Deke sent two men with a truck to take your things to the Europa three days ago,” Jill said promptly. “He called and cleared it with me first. In fact, I let the movers in.”
“And they packed up my things and took them?”
Jill, who still looked upset, nodded. “I knew it wasn’t like you to do something like this without letting me know, but Deke seemed so positive.... Dorian, what
is going on?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t put a deposit on a new apartment yet because I never found one that I really liked. I told Deke that. I told him...” Her voice trailed away as she recalled how he had pushed her to move in with him. She lifted her hand and massaged her eyelids. She was beginning to feel very tired, and it wasn’t entirely due to jet lag, either.
“I think I’d better get in touch with Deke,” she said.
“You can sleep on the couch, Dorian. You’re more than welcome.”
“I know. I just—I just don’t know what to think. What to do,” she said as Sandra brought in a tray with three mugs on it and handed them around.
“Deke acted as if he had your approval,” Jill said unhappily. “Believe me, I had no idea that this was something you didn’t know about.”
“I don’t blame you,” Dorian said. Now that her initial bewilderment was over, she knew what she had to do. She set her mug down and stood up. “I want to call Deke.”
“Good idea,” said Jill, looking relieved.
Dorian dialed the number of Deke’s penthouse with trembling fingers. He answered his phone on the first ring, sounding bouncy, happy, jubilant.
“Deke, I took an earlier flight and I’m home,” Dorian said without preamble.
“Great! I’ll hop in the car right now and be at the airport to pick you up in less than thirty minutes. Meet me at—”
“Deke, I’m not at the airport. I said I was home,” she said.
He must have sensed from her tone of voice that all was not well. “You’re not at—?” he said.
“I’m at the apartment that you so graciously vacated for me. That you moved all of my belongings out of. That I no longer live in. Explain what you’ve done, Deke Washburn, and it had better be good.”
“Damn,” he said after a long silence. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to work at all.”
“How was it supposed to work, Deke? You were going to pick me up at the airport tonight, right?”
The World's Last Bachelor Page 14