by Julia London
In the room was a round card table littered with full ashtrays, coasters, a couple of overstuffed handbags, and a couple of paperbacks. The women all took a seat around the table—Eli had the impression they took the same seats each time they were together. Mrs. Banks insisted he take her seat while she went to fetch Marnie. The dog, Bingo, collapsed next to Eli’s boot with a grunt.
Sitting there with four middle-aged women giggling at him made Eli more uncomfortable than a visit to a doctor. He tried not to squirm in his seat, but they just kept watching him. And giggling. And two of them had assumed provocative poses, so that their cleavage was clearly displayed to him.
“Bev, is there anymore Wahoo left?” one of them asked sweetly. “Maybe our guest would like a Wahoo.”
“I don’t know, sugar, but I’ll look,” Bev said, and hopped up, grabbed the empty pitcher from the table, and swished out of the dining room in her denim miniskirt.
“So!” the one named Alicia said. “Are you and Marnie dating?”
“Ah, no,” he quickly corrected her. “No, we’re not. Just a business arrangement.”
“Oh!” she said brightly. “Then are you available?”
“Alicia!” the one named Linda said, slapping Alicia’s shoulder. “You know if there are any leftovers, I get them.”
Eli could feel the heat building under his collar.
“Oh, don’t worry, hon. We’re not going to do anything that you wouldn’t beg us to do,” she said slyly. “So what sort of business are you in?”
He forced a smile. “It’s boring.”
“Guess who Marnie’s friends with,” Alicia said, leaning across the table so that her cleavage was even more clearly displayed. “Olivia Dagwood, the actress.”
“Is she?”
“Have you seen her movies?” the third one, Diane, asked. “I loved The Dane, but I thought she was so lame in The Goodnight Girl.”
“Diane, please!” Alicia cried to the ceiling. “She was brilliant in The Goodnight Girl. She got a friggin’ Golden Globe for it, hello!”
“Who cares about a Golden Globe? It’s the Oscar that counts, and she didn’t get the nomination there, did she?” Diane said. “So what does that tell you? Her acting sucked.”
“I liked it!” Bev shouted from the kitchen. “I’ll tell you who sucked in that movie, and that was that English guy, Damian Reese. He’s so girly he makes my skin crawl.”
Diane and Linda gasped and leaned to one side to see Bev in the kitchen. “You think Damian Reese is girly?” they both shouted at her, almost in unison.
“Ah…excuse me, Mrs. Farrino? Can I get Eli and then you can argue about Damian Reese?”
The women all jerked around at the sound of Marnie’s voice. Eli thought it was possibly the sweetest sound he’d ever heard in his life.
“Do you know Damian Reese, Marnie?” Linda asked.
“No,” she said with a smile and a sly wink for Eli. “So, are we ready?”
Eli was instantly on his feet, as was Bingo, watching him closely as he backed out of the dining room.
“Oh, that’s not fair,” Bev cried as she came running into the room with a glass pitcher of what Eli surmised was more of the Yahoo, Wahoo—whatever—drink. “We were just getting to know your friend. I haven’t gotten a good look at him yet.”
“He’s not really my friend, Mrs. Campbell. And we’ve got a meeting to get to, so please excuse us,” she said, and slung a very tiny purse over her shoulder and headed for the front door.
Eli and Bingo did not need a second invitation. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Banks,” he said, striding forward to catch Marnie’s arm for safety. “And the rest of you ladies.”
“Bye!” they laughingly called to him as Bev refilled everyone’s glass.
“Now Eli, don’t be a stranger,” Mrs. Banks was saying as she followed closely on their heels, hopping around Bingo. “Marnie doesn’t have a lot of friends down here.”
“Mom!”
“We’re always home, so you can stop in any time you want.”
“Mom, stop,” Marnie hissed in a low voice.
“What?” her mother innocently protested. “What’s wrong with making your friend feel welcome? Marnie, remember Dad and I are going to the club tonight,” Mrs. Banks added as she crowded Marnie and Eli at the door, then pushed it open. Bingo was out in a flash. “We’re going to be late because there is a dinner dance and we never get out, and besides, Dad’s friends are going to be there, so I think he’ll want to stay a little while, so if we’re not here when you get in, that’s where we’ll be.”
“Okay, Mom,” Marnie said impatiently as Mrs. Banks leaned out and looked around.
“Where’d that silly dog go? Marnie, don’t forget to let Bingo out when you get home!” her mom called after them as Marnie marched down the walk.
“I won’t,” she called over her shoulder, then paused at the open garage. “Bye, Dad.”
“Oh…bye, kiddo,” came the response from deep within the cave somewhere.
“Marnie—where are you going?” Eli asked as she walked around to the driver’s side of her car.
She stopped her march and turned around. He noticed for the first time that she was wearing a wispy dress that hung by tiny little straps off her shoulders and floated like clouds around her knees when she turned. And he likewise noticed that sliding out from that pretty dress were some of the best-looking legs he’d ever had the privilege to see. Long and lean and shapely. Hell, Marnie looked…well, fantastic.
The schoolmarm, it seemed, was dead and buried.
“To my car,” she responded, sounding slightly confused.
“There’s no need to take two cars.”
“Oh.” She glanced uneasily at his truck. “I just thought that maybe this way, either one of us could take off, you know…when we wanted.”
Eli smiled. “I don’t think I’m that bad, darlin’,” he drawled as he walked toward her. “And besides, haven’t you heard about global warming? The cost of gasoline? Smog? Think of your great-grandkids and ride with me,” he said, and put his hand lightly on her elbow. “I promise to get you back in time to let Bingo out.”
Marnie looked at his truck suspiciously. “Okay,” she said, and let him lead her down the drive to his truck. “By the way, I’d just like to go on record as saying my parents are impossible.”
“I have to admit, that was an interesting group of women,” he said as he opened the door of his truck for her.
“Oh my God, you cannot begin to imagine,” Marnie said very dramatically and stepped into his truck, giving him another nice view of her fabulous legs. He shut the door behind and walked around the truck to the driver’s side.
As he pulled away from her house, Marnie checked her lipstick in her compact, shut that, put it back in her tiny little purse, then folded her hands in her lap. “Where are we going?”
“If it’s all right with you, there’s a restaurant down in Santa Monica I’m sort of partial to. It’s a seafood place that makes a mean margarita.”
She laughed lightly. “You’ve got a great Texas drawl, you know that? Even when you’re being bossy, you have a very cool accent.”
“Hey, watch it,” he said with a grin. “I don’t have an accent.”
Marnie laughed, that pleasant, genuine laugh again. He really liked the sound of it—it made him feel happy. “Does that sound okay to you? Seafood?”
“Anything,” she said, and Eli thought that was probably true. He had the impression that Marnie Banks was an agreeable, cheerful woman. Not high-maintenance, not like Trish had been.
At the restaurant on Ocean Avenue, they managed to snag a decent table with a view of the ocean, and after a lively discussion about wine—because Marnie was quite the connoisseur, and Eli was most decidedly not—she chose a Chianti. The only thing Eli knew about Chianti is that it went well with fava beans. So Marnie gave him an enthusiastic and basic education about red wines in one long breath.
“You know a lo
t about wine,” he remarked once they’d ordered.
“Yeah,” she said with a sad smile. “I learned it in my last job. Our company did a lot of entertaining when they were trying to drum up new clients. And we all know how well that went.”
He smiled. “You were the entertainment coordinator?”
“God, no,” Marnie said with a laugh. “I was a computer geek. But the guy who owned it needed someone to help out, and it was either me, or Daichi Ichiro, who never left his cubicle that I could tell. I’m worried that he’s still there. And get this—his entire cubicle was filled with Star Trek memorabilia. Little captains and Mr. Spocks and pictures of Daichi at Star Trek conventions and beam-me-up thingies.”
Eli laughed and settled back as Marnie launched into a very colorful and amusing tale of her old job, where they all lived in cubicles and worked long hours. Nonetheless, she was very upbeat about it, and professed to miss the high-tech world where every day in cyberspace was a new adventure. He liked that about her, too—the pervading enthusiasm she seemed to have about life.
By the time they had drunk a glass of wine and poured a second and were eating oysters on the half-shell (his suggestion), Marnie had told him her entire life story. High school at Los Angeles High, college at SoCal. Tons of friends around the States, but none in her neighborhood. She did not, he noticed, mention a significant other of any type. Not that he cared, because he didn’t—he couldn’t have cared less. Really.
When the main course was served, Marnie artfully turned the conversation to him. “So Midland, huh?” she said with a grin after she’d gotten him to admit where in Texas he’d grown up. “A redneck?”
Eli chuckled, took another bite of his steak. “You could say that.”
“So what did you guys do in Midland?”
“What did we not do?” he asked with a snort, and told her about growing up in the middle of dirt. His parents were ranchers—they had cattle and some oil. Cooper’s folks, too. Jack’s dad owned a body shop, which came in handy when the three of them started to drive.
“How’d you get started in the thrill-seeking business?” she asked.
“Blowing up stuff,” he said.
She blinked. “Blowing up stuff?”
Eli laughed low, remembering the three of them and their homemade explosives. “Coop has an older brother, the orneriest cuss you’d ever meet. In fact, he’s probably doing time somewhere now. Anyway, we were maybe eight or nine when he taught us how to make cherry bombs and throw them in the toilet. The thing was, after we’d dumped cherry bombs into all our toilets, we weren’t satisfied. So we thought we’d blow up Coop’s fort.”
“Cardboard boxes?” Marnie asked, leaning back in her chair, one arm slung over the armrest, her fingers dancing on the stem of her wineglass, her eyes glimmering so deep that Eli could feel them tug at him a little.
“No, a real fort,” he said, frowning playfully at the suggestion they’d have anything less than the best. “Made out of actual wood, built up on the fork of an old oak tree. We built the biggest cherry bomb ever seen—worked on that sucker for days, it seems like. And on the day of the big blast, we put it up in the fort, set it off, and ran like hell to get away from it.”
“And?” she asked, beaming.
“And it worked, all right. Wood was flying in every which direction. Only we forgot one thing,” he said, smiling broadly now. “Coop’s mom had an old tomcat. And that tom liked to take his morning nap on top of that fort.”
“Oh no!” Marnie exclaimed.
“Oh yes. Now don’t look at me like that. We didn’t kill him—just singed him a little.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I can only speak for myself. Coop’s mom called mine and Jack’s mom in tears. I’ll never forget the sight of my mom’s pickup hauling ass down that old caliche road to Coop’s house. I was shaking in my short pants, and I had good reason. When my mom got out of the pickup, she was as angry as I’d ever seen her. She latched on to my ear and didn’t let go all the way home. And that’s when she turned me over to Dad. I don’t think I sat for two weeks.”
Marnie laughed roundly. “I had a similar experience with a Barbie doll. A virginal sacrifice gone awry, thanks to my next-door neighbor,” she said, and told him of how her older brother Mark had been the one to rat her out.
It was, Eli thought as they ordered dessert, one of the most pleasant evenings he’d spent in a good long while. He was enjoying her company, loving the way she laughed so openly and fully. She had a great sense of humor, was engaging when she talked, and the best part about it, she was very easy on the eyes. Extremely. No shit—he could look at her all night…although he’d prefer it if she were naked.
As their talk turned to the wedding, and she very confidently began to rattle off facts about linens and silver, something like that, something miraculous happened. For the first time in months, Eli was beginning to feel alive. Not the dull, dead lump of flesh he’d been feeling like for so long. It seemed impossible, but he was having a good time and really didn’t want the evening to end.
But then she had to go and mention the arch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After shopping in a trendy boutique on Rodeo Drive (because Olivia said Marnie could really update her look there, and by the way, had she considered Botox?), Marnie was now sitting in a happening restaurant, wearing a wispy new dress, dining with a very fine man who sported a very sexy five o’clock shadow.
Did it get any better than this?
She was on top of the world, and hey, Eli was really turning out to be not quite as bossy as she’d originally thought. He was a little more talkative tonight—he actually told her something about himself. Even though it was something violent and involved a helpless animal, it still made her laugh. He was really a great guy, she was deciding.
And when Eli smiled, ho Jesus…he had these beautiful blue eyes, and they crinkled in the corners. His lips were full and so damn sexy, especially for a man, just like the models in Vanity Fair she thought were lip-enhanced. Eli’s lips spread across even white teeth and ended in those fabulous dimples in each hollowed cheek. Marnie imagined he used that smile on women all the time. She could picture the cowboy sauntering into some saloon, and with one smile, the dance girls would come running.
She might, if she weren’t working for the guy.
Oh yeah, she was really beginning to think she had lucked into the job of a lifetime and settled back in her chair, one arm propped on the polished armrest, her legs crossed and a foot, encased in a new Rodeo Drive shoe, swinging carefree. She laughed at Eli’s stories of three daredevil boys in Texas dirt while she surreptitiously admired her dress (Olivia was right—it did drape beautifully), and somewhere in the back of her mind, she was telling herself that she had arrived, that it was only up from here, that she was meant to be hanging around the rich and the famous, and obviously, that was why the dot-com thing hadn’t worked out. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if people were seeing her right now, checking her out, wondering, who is that girl?
And then Eli asked her about her meeting with Olivia. And she said—which, in hindsight, perhaps wasn’t the brightest thing she might have said—“I bought this dress!” And she sat up, so he could see how cool it was.
Eli looked. His gaze was sort of hidden beneath really long lashes and heavy lids, but he looked a good long minute, long enough for her to feel her blood start to heat. He looked from the top of her dress, which draped low on breasts encased in a new lacy push-up bra, to the hem, which was on her knee. And on down to her toes, and her very cool, very strappy beaded sandals.
Then he lifted his gaze and looked her in the eye. “You didn’t go shopping, did you, Marnie? I thought maybe you’d sworn that off with the debt you’re in.”
Oh hell, that again.
“And weren’t you supposed to make a little progress with our client?” he added.
“I did,” she protested. What did he think, she was a complete novice? Well
, okay, he might have reason to think that, but she had done more than shopped. All right, not a whole lot more, since they had shopped most of the afternoon, and he was right, dammit, that she had sworn off shopping. But hey, she was due to get a big payment here soon!
Anyway, she hadn’t left Olivia without getting something about the wedding accomplished. In fact, the insinuation that she had “just shopped” was insulting the more she thought about it, and she snorted, “Honestly, Eli, I know what I’m doing.” And she rolled her eyes.
“I’m sure you do. But I’m thinking you probably can’t do a whole lot of wedding planning in the middle of some pricey dress shop.”
He had a point, but Marnie tossed her head nevertheless. “For your information, we talked about the chef and how many guests she’d like to invite, and stationery, which Olivia is not big on, and linens, which she is very big on and must be BBJ linens, and the music, and then how we might incorporate an arch into the ceremony.”
His heart-stopping blue eyes immediately narrowed at that, and he shot forward like a striking snake. “What did you say? You talked about what?”
“A chef—”
“Not that,” he said, gesturing for her to move forward.
“The guests?”
“No,” he said, frowning. “The last thing you said.”
“Oh! A little arch she wants to incorporate into the ceremony. You know, get married under it.”
Eli closed his eyes and sighed for a moment. Then he opened them and pinned her with a look that made her shiver a little. “Marnie,” he said evenly, and put his giant hand on her wrist, let his long, thick fingers wrap around it. “Do you know what arch she’s talking about?”
“Yes. It’s an arch that they used in the filming of The Dane.” Right, like she didn’t know what arch. It held great sentimental value for Olivia, and she said it was made of plastic, so it wasn’t a big deal as far as Marnie could see, and Olivia said she’d pay for the shipping. Bottom line, she’d saved TA money today.