Damsel Under Stress

by Shanna Swendson

  “I can see how the analogy works, even if it is kind of disgusting,” he said with a grimace.

  By the end of the day, Owen looked as tired as I felt. “Are you up for dinner?” he asked, coming around the side of the whiteboard that constituted my office wall. “Since our lunch yesterday got interrupted, I thought we could go out tonight.”

  “I know I’m not up to foraging for my own meal. Someone to bring it to me would be nice.”

  “Then do you want to go home, change clothes, and let me pick you up for a proper date, or do you just want to stop somewhere on the way home?”

  “I couldn’t begin to pick out an outfit. Let’s just stop somewhere.”

  “Good, I’d hoped you’d say that,” he replied with the first genuine smile I’d seen on his face all day. “There’s a great Italian place near my house. I can call before we leave and make a reservation.”

  “That sounds ideal.” While he moved all the sensitive material into his more secure office, I hurried down the hall to the bathroom to at least attempt to touch up my makeup and put on some lipstick. I might not have been dressing up, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to inject a little glamour into the evening. Before I left the bathroom, I undid one more button on my blouse, taking the outfit from work-appropriate to just the least bit sexy. Well, as sexy as one of my work outfits ever could be.

  When I got back to the lab, I saw that I wasn’t the only one who’d loosened up for the evening. Owen was in the process of taking off his tie and stuffing it in his jacket pocket. “Ready to go?”

  “Let me get my coat.”

  As we walked from the Union Square station up to the restaurant, he took my hand, which was a shock in and of itself. It was the kind of gesture I often hoped for from him but that he never seemed to think of. “Tonight, let’s forget about work, okay?” he said. “I know it’s hard for us to get away from, but let’s try it for once.”

  “That’s fine with me,” I said, even as I wasn’t sure we could pull it off. What were the odds that we could manage a few hours without something weird and work-related happening?

  The restaurant was small and narrow, with crisp white tablecloths, frescoed walls, and heavenly scents coming from the kitchen. As soon as we stepped through the door, my mouth started watering. The host approached us and Owen said, “We have a reservation. The name’s Palmer.”

  The host checked his reservation book, then frowned and said in heavily accented English, “My apologies, signore, but there has been a mistake. We should not have given you a reservation when you called.”

  “But there’s a table open, right there. And my name is in your book.” He pointed to the entry that very clearly showed a table for two reserved for Palmer at six.

  “Ah, but that is because we moved your reservation to another restaurant to accommodate you.”

  Owen turned to me and gave me a confused look. I responded with a shrug, and Owen returned his attention to the host. “I don’t understand. I made a reservation for two not too long ago. I spoke to you, if I’m not mistaken. And now you’re telling me you moved my reservation to another restaurant—and that it’s somehow to accommodate me?” His voice remained calm and even, so you would have had to know Owen to realize exactly how angry he was. The fact that he turned white instead of red was the only visible sign.

  I put a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. Maybe they can give us something to go and we can eat at home,” I said. “That might be even better.”

  The host shook his head. “No, no, you do not understand. The new reservation, it is for a better restaurant. We will even arrange for a car to take you there. Make it a nicer evening, no?”

  Owen again looked to me. “What the heck,” I said with a shrug. “Just as long as the car isn’t being driven by the same drivers we had the last time.”

  We went outside to wait for the car. “I don’t get it,” Owen said, still stewing. “I eat there regularly, but not to the point they’d go out of their way like this for me, and I’ve never heard of a restaurant sending business to another place. I know that me having a real date is a special occasion, but I didn’t think they’d go nuts just because I made a reservation for two.” After a moment of silence, he laughed. “Wait a second, I know what’s going on. I bet Rod did it. I told him what I had in mind earlier in the day, and player that he is, he probably didn’t think it was good enough. And maybe I do need dating lessons from the master.”

  “Just as long as you don’t take too many lessons from him. You don’t have a second date with someone else lined up for later this evening, do you?”

  “One person at a time is all I can handle,” he said as a white limousine pulled around the corner and stopped for us.

  A uniformed chauffeur—who was fully human and not at all goofy-looking, thank goodness—got out of the car and came around to open the passenger door for us. “Mr. Palmer?” he said.

  “Um, yeah. This is for us?”

  “Yes, it is. Now, miss?” He held a hand out to me to help me into the limo. With a glance and shrug toward Owen, I stepped in and settled onto a plush leather seat. Owen then joined me. “Please enjoy the champagne during your ride,” the driver said before closing the door.

  “Yeah, this is definitely Rod,” Owen said, eyeing the champagne in the ice bucket and the red rose lying on the seat between us. “It’s very much his style. Shall we?” he asked, indicating the champagne.

  “Sure, why not? We might as well enjoy this.”

  He popped the cork, then poured two glasses and handed me one. “Cheers,” he said, clinking his glass against mine.

  “To a work-free, stress-free evening,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll definitely drink to that.”

  As I leaned back in the seat and stretched my legs, I said, “This is the life.” Never mind that in the rush-hour traffic, walking or the subway would have been much faster. Traffic jams weren’t so bad when you weren’t driving and when you had champagne.

  “And he’s a better driver than we had on our last trip,” Owen added. “BRAAAAKE!”

  His imitation of Rocky was so uncanny and so unexpected that I almost choked on my champagne. “Wow, when did you become a comedian?” I sputtered.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. Come to think of it, there’s a lot I don’t know about me.” He sounded almost, well, bubbly, and then I realized the champagne must have gone straight to his head. I knew he wasn’t much of a drinker, and I didn’t remember him taking a break for lunch.

  “You might want to ease up on that stuff,” I warned, feeling my own head get a little fuzzy. But before we had a chance to get too tipsy, the car came to a stop and then the passenger door opened.

  We’d arrived at a restaurant Gemma was always talking about because of someone famous having eaten there with some other famous person the night before, both of them wearing something fabulous by an equally famous designer. It was the kind of place where the paparazzi hide in the bushes nightly, just in case one of their usual targets happens to drop by. Even on a slow night they could probably get at least one tabloid-worthy photo of a socialite showing off the latest designer creation.

  That made me suddenly self-conscious of my work clothes, which were nowhere near stylish and which probably bordered on frumpy. It was going to take a lot more than undoing one button to make me fit in here. In fact, I was fairly certain that this was all going to turn out to be one huge mistake and they wouldn’t let us inside.

  I wasn’t the only one having such worries, apparently. Owen froze just inside the restaurant doorway and patted his pockets. “I bet I’ll need my tie to be let in here,” he said. “It looks like that kind of place.”

  That was when I noticed something different about Owen. It must have slipped my attention earlier because he was wearing a dark overcoat, but inside, with the coat unbuttoned, he was now wearing a different suit. It wasn’t that much nicer than his work suit, since his work clothes were usually really nice, but
instead of his usual white shirt he now wore a dark blue dress shirt with a bit of a sheen to it along with a silk tie in a similar shade. It was a look I recognized from some movie star at the previous year’s Oscars.

  “You’ve already got a tie on,” I said, and to his credit, he actually checked instead of automatically telling me he thought I was wrong.

  “This is weird,” he said. “And I guess since you’re seeing it, it’s real.” He then blinked as he looked at me. “I’m not the only one it happened to.”

  It was my turn to look down at myself. Instead of my frumpy work clothes, I had on a low-cut, flowing dress in a complicated print. I’d seen one very much like it—or possibly even the same dress—in one of Gemma’s fashion magazines. If it was the same dress, I wouldn’t want to take my coat off because then I’d feel naked. As it was, I kept wanting to pull the top up. I’d have to remember to sit up straight, or else the neckline would hit my waist.

  The maître d’ greeted Owen, then called someone over to take our coats. I considered putting up a fight for mine, but decided to be a big girl about it. Still, I couldn’t help but cross my arms over my chest as we were escorted upstairs. The dress left my arms bare, so I hoped it was warm in the dining room.

  In spite of our designer duds, we were nobodies for this kind of place. Owen might have looked like a movie star, but no one knew who he was. Meanwhile, if they had any idea who I was, they wouldn’t have let me in the door for fear of damaging their cool rating. As a result, our table was strategically located behind a large potted plant. “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” I quipped as we fought our way past the greenery to get into a banquette. I looked around the room at all the beautiful people making sure they were seen eating beautiful food and unconsciously straightened my spine. “Don’t tell Rod because I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I liked the original place better. This is nice, but that would have been more comfortable.”

  “I know. This wasn’t quite what I had in mind for the evening. I was hoping we could relax.” I noticed that he was sitting up straighter, too.

  A waiter came and pushed back the palm fronds so he could hand us leather-bound menus before reciting a list of specials that sounded more like avant-garde poetry to me. Owen’s face was about as blank as mine felt, and he just smiled and nodded at the waiter. I hoped the menu was a little more understandable. It was about the size of an abridged version of War and Peace. Owen had magical tomes in his office that were less intimidating.

  “I may have to just point to something on the menu,” I said. Most of the dishes seemed unnecessarily complicated to me. I was a pretty good cook, if I said so myself, so I recognized all the culinary terms and ingredients, but I’d never considered putting any of them together in quite this way. Aspects of some of the dishes sounded like they might be good, but then there would be some oddball ingredient thrown in, as though the chef had an uncontrollable urge to make the dish different. Like, they couldn’t just serve beets as a side dish. It had to be beet froth, whatever that was.

  I went with something that sounded like it might be a steak with sauce on it when the waiter reappeared to take our orders. If I didn’t like the sauce, I could always scrape it off. Owen ordered the same thing. The waiter sniffed disapprovingly when we declined a meeting with the sommelier.

  “I think I’ve had enough to drink for the evening,” Owen said, rubbing his head, as soon as the waiter disappeared. “I’m still fuzzy from the champagne in the limo. But I guess that’s terribly unsophisticated of us.”

  “Well, I am a hick from a small town in Texas,” I drawled. “I don’t know what your excuse is.” I shoved aside a palm frond so I could look out into the rest of the restaurant. “If you had a machete with you, there might be good people-watching here. We could even get ourselves kicked out by asking for autographs. Wait’ll the folks back home in the trailer park hear about this.”

  He must have still been feeling the champagne, given the way he laughed at what I didn’t think was a very funny joke. “I think I like you a little bit drunk,” I said.

  He rubbed his temples again, like he was willing his wits to return fully. “Gloria would be disappointed in me. She’s a confirmed teetotaler.”

  “No wonder you can’t hold your liquor. Wait a second, how did you manage the champagne at the office party?”

  “Did you see me drink much of it? Besides, I ate a full meal before I went. This is on an empty stomach. I think I forgot to eat lunch.”

  This may have been the most relaxed we’d ever been together as a couple. We weren’t talking about work, and although the situation was far from normal, disaster hadn’t yet struck. I was afraid to even think about it, lest I jinx us. “I don’t think Gloria would expect you to turn down champagne in the back of a limo. She’d want you to have a little fun.”

  “Did you meet the same Gloria I know? No, you probably didn’t. She was practically cuddly at Christmas. But she doesn’t believe at all in losing control. With power like this at your beck and call, you must always be in absolute control of it. One slip can have serious consequences.” Then he winced. “And I guess I blew that with my stunt in Times Square. I should know better than to act that rashly.” There went the relaxation. I knew I shouldn’t have thought about it.

  I peered through the palm fronds again, trying to take note of any celebrities I saw and what they were wearing because I knew Gemma would be dying for details. Then I saw someone I recognized. Sylvia Meredith was sitting at a table on the other side of the room. The man she was with had his back to me, so I wasn’t sure who he was. There was a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket on a stand by their table, so they must have been celebrating something. Or maybe people who came to this kind of place regularly drank champagne like it was iced tea and didn’t have to be celebrating anything.

  I ducked back behind the camouflage. “Sylvia Meredith is here,” I hissed to Owen, even though the room was noisy enough that I doubted anything I said would carry all the way to her table. “You know, the one we think is teamed up with Idris.”

  Owen immediately looked about as alert as he could manage with champagne still in his system. “Where?”

  “Over on the far side of the room—the blonde who looks like she’s got a touch of shark blood in her.” He craned his neck to see, and I snapped, “Don’t look! At least, don’t be so obvious about it.”

  “Who is that with her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t recognize him from the back of his head.”

  An alarmingly skinny girl who I thought I recognized as the heiress to something, or maybe a pop star, or possibly both, walked past Sylvia’s table. She wore a filmy blouse that gave her even less coverage than my dress did, and the spaghetti strap kept slipping off one of her shoulders. That wasn’t too unexpected, since she was basically a hanger with legs and didn’t really have shoulders to hold up straps. But then the strap went clear to her elbow, so that she flashed the entire restaurant with her unspectacular but totally bare chest.

  Sylvia’s dining companion turned to watch as the girl struggled to pull her blouse back up, and I was then very glad I hadn’t been eating anything or I might have choked. “It’s Idris!” I said. He was dressed in a nice suit instead of his usual ratty black trench coat, and it looked like he’d had a haircut since I’d seen him last. No wonder I hadn’t recognized him from behind.

  “Yeah, and what do you bet he was the one who pulled that girl’s blouse down?”

  The waiter arrived then with our food, distracting us as he laid out plates with a flourish, then carefully arranged a bed of salad greens and finally added what looked like a small McDonald’s hamburger in the middle of each plate, the top bun slightly askew to show the purplish sauce on top.

  “This is it? It’s a hamburger.” I said when the waiter had gone. It didn’t look like more than a mouthful of food. I guessed that was probably how the restaurant’s patrons stayed so skinny.

  Owen poked suspiciously a
t his burger with a fork. He looked up at me and opened his mouth to speak, but another voice interrupted him. “Owen Palmer. Well, well, well. They’ll let anyone in here these days.” Of course, it was Phelan Idris. He must have come over to our table while the waiter was busy artistically arranging our hamburgers.

  “I take it you’re celebrating the launch of your new company,” Owen said with the cool he usually showed under pressure. Meanwhile, I tried to shrink back into the banquette and hide behind the potted plant because Idris had brought Sylvia over with him. I hoped she wouldn’t recognize me out of my disguise as Sue Ellen.

  “Yep, it’s been pretty successful,” Idris said with a smug grin. In his nice suit he looked like a kid dressing up for his first dance. His sleeves weren’t quite long enough for his arms, so his wrists showed. “And we’re also celebrating the start of a profitable new partnership.” He put a possessive arm around Sylvia, who looked like she would probably be burning her clothes as soon as she got home.

  “So, how’s Ari?” I asked.

  He turned red in a blush worthy of Owen, and Sylvia turned even redder. “It’s not that kind of partnership,” she hurried to correct. “Strictly business.” She took one step sideways away from Idris. Then she took another look at me. “Have we met?” she asked.

  “I doubt it,” I said, fighting to hide any trace of my Texas accent. The conversation had caught Idris’s attention. He was looking at my low-cut neckline, and I remembered that magic could affect my clothes even if it couldn’t affect me. I casually hooked a thumb through one of my dress straps so I could be sure to hold my top up. “I’m Kathleen Chandler, and you are?”

  “Sylvia Meredith, Vandermeer and Company,” she said stiffly, like I ought to have known.

  “So, you’re funding Idris?” Owen asked. “I’d think that would be a losing proposition.”

  I might have expected her to act smug, as though she was in on something we couldn’t possibly know about. Instead, she got defensive—the kind of defensiveness that comes when you know you don’t have much of a leg to stand on. “There are nuances I don’t expect you to understand,” she said, not meeting his eyes. There was also a trapped air about her. I halfway expected her to start blinking an SOS in Morse code. Then again, if I’d been out with Idris I’d have already written my “help!” message on the bathroom mirror in lipstick.