Strokes of Midnight

by Tarr, Hope

  “I don’t know about that. It worked for Cinderella.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cracked a joke, but even if his attempt was pretty lame, it still felt good, damn good.

  “Very funny.” Her frown told him she found it anything but. “If you knew how much these cost me, you wouldn’t be laughing, either.”

  He made a show of sobering. “Designer stuff, huh?”

  She answered with a guilty nod. “Yeah, I really splurged.”

  Max might not be much of a talker but like his creation, Drake, he was a man of action. “In that case, Cinderella, hold the carriage horses. I’ll be right back.”

  Leaving her standing by the bench, he went to scavenge the sidewalk where she’d fallen. It was a long shot but then it didn’t hurt to try. After peering beneath a hot pretzel cart, the sneakers of a twentysomething kid handing out free passes to a nearby comedy club, and the paws of a trio of leashed French poodles, he was close to giving up when he spotted a flutter of white in the curbside gutter. At first he thought it must be one of the city’s ubiquitous pigeons but bending closer, he saw it was tissue paper—tissue paper with a slender red heel sticking out.

  He scooped up the shoe in the nick of time, seconds before the wheel of an oncoming taxi sent frozen mud splashing up. Brushing it off on his coat, he brought it over to her, proudly presenting it like his dog, Scout, dropping his retrieved rawhide in a guest’s lap. “If the shoe fits…”

  Her smile rapturous, she took it from him. “Thank you, thank you! Look, it didn’t even get messed up. The sales clerk wrapped it really well and then used the Saks sticker seal to hold the tissue in place. I love Saks, and I absolutely love these shoes.” Holding the shoe to her heart, she looked up at him with shining eyes.

  Max felt as though his six-foot-three frame had just shot to a full ten feet. Eyeing the four-inch heel, he shook his head. “You really walk in those things?” Balancing on stilts like those might send her the podiatrist sooner rather than later.

  She shrugged. “I’m used to it.” She laid the shoe in the box beside its mate with loving care, replaced the lid, and picked up her packages. “Well, uh, thanks for all your help.”

  Max realized he wasn’t ready to let her walk out of his life, not yet anyway. Stalling until he could come up with some way to ask her name without seeming like a stalker, he said, “Red shoes always remind me of that Brothers Grimm fairy tale.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Shit. Judging from her startled look she didn’t think he was a stalker but instead a stalker with a foot fetish. Great going Maxwell—not!

  “You know, the children’s story about the match girl who covets the pair of fancy red slippers. Once she puts them on, though, they take over and won’t let her stop dancing, and she ends up begging a woodsman to cut off her feet to be free.”

  Though she’d never been much into shoes or fashion, period, Elaina’s classic copy of the children’s book had been one of her cherished childhood possessions. He still had it on his bookshelves somewhere, unable to part with it when he’d boxed up the rest of her stuff. Still, that didn’t explain what he was doing standing around in the middle of midtown spouting a story by the mid-nineteenth century’s answer to Stephen King. Back in his hometown of Hadley, New Hampshire, he scarcely said hello to people he’d known all his life.

  “And I thought I had a bad shoe habit.” Instead of freaking out, she shook her head and smiled. “I think you mean Hans Christian Andersen, though.”

  Caught up in that delightful smile, it took a moment for her comment to sink in. “Sorry?”

  “Hans Christian Andersen wrote ‘The Red Shoes,’ not the Brothers Grimm.”

  Max thought for a moment. Damned if she wasn’t right. “I stand corrected.” Sexy, sophisticated and smart, she was appealing to him more by the minute—minutes that were rapidly slipping by.

  “I do know my shoes if you hadn’t already guessed.” She shot him a wink, and he saw her eyes had little flecks of gold rimming the pupils. “Well, thanks again for all your help.” She stepped around him, shopping bags swinging. “Sorry again for running into you.”

  Cinderella brushed by and started up the street, brisk strides carrying her quickly away. Max hesitated, asking himself what his alter ego would do were he standing in Max’s loafers in the middle of Manhattan instead of in his cowboy boots in the Australian Outback. The answer was a given.

  Drake would go after the girl.

  “Hey, wait up.”

  Threading through the foot traffic, Max dodged several baby strollers, a homeless man’s shopping cart and a trio of Japanese tourists pausing for a photo op.

  He caught up with her just before the next crosswalk. She stopped and turned around, looking puzzled. “Did I leave behind more shoes?”

  Feeling like a high-school kid stumbling through his first ask out, he caught his breath and shook his head. “I was thinking maybe we could share a cab. Better yet, why not let me buy you a cup of coffee? We could go inside somewhere and warm up and…” He let the rest of the clumsy sentence die.

  She hesitated, biting her full bottom lip, her pretty top teeth coming into view, then the tip of her tongue darting out to moisten the plump pink flesh. Watching the machinations of that amazing mouth, he felt telltale heat pooling in his groin.

  The streetlight changed and a wave of pedestrians poured into the crosswalk and headed toward them. Max felt the spell break—and the moment slip away.

  “I can’t,” she finally said, dashing all his hopes with those two regrettable words. Though she shook her head, he was pretty sure he saw real regret in her eyes. “I really have to be…getting back. It was nice meeting you.” Again that hint of hesitation that had him hoping. “Have a happy New Year.”

  Feeling like a dolt, Max watched her walk away, sexy hips swaying. Of course she had to be on her way. It was New Year’s Eve, after all, the biggest date night of the year after Valentine’s. Women who looked, spoke and moved like that didn’t stay home alone on New Year’s Eve.

  He thought of the lucky guy who’d be kissing her come midnight, the one for whom she’d be wearing those sexy red shoes, and felt a jolt of jealousy. Mentally putting himself in the man’s place, he imagined the sexy little black dress she’d slip into to go with the stilettos. By the time the fantasy progressed to the dress lying in a puddle on the floor, her clothing winnowed to a pair of black garters banding the slender white thighs he’d ogled earlier, and of course those red shoes, his semierection had rocketed to a full-throttle hard-on.

  “Hey, buddy, watch where you’re goin’.”

  Max looked into the scowling face of the falafel vendor whose cart he’d apparently just stumbled into. “Sorry.”

  He walked back to his hotel in a sort of semiconscious daze. By the time he reached The Chelsea’s neon-lit marquee, it was dark outside. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there or what he might have passed along the way. It didn’t matter. Despite being turned down, he was in a “New York State of Mind,” not to mention one hell of a good mood.

  Humming the Billy Joel song beneath his breath, he stepped inside the lobby elevator. The doors closed, the scent of rosemary and mint filling his nose. At first he thought it must be air freshener but after a few more whiffs he realized it clung to his clothes. It was her scent, so fresh and wholesome and altogether clean he couldn’t think of it as perfume. With her maple-colored curls, warm brown eyes and the light brown coat wrapping her petite figure, she reminded him of a tightly rolled caramel confection, sweet but not too sweet, satisfyingly rich, sumptuously delicious. There was no chance of sampling her now, but those magical few moments on Sixth Avenue had certainly sweetened his outlook on the year ahead. For the first time in a long time, he felt alive.

  Alive—he’d almost forgotten what a good feeling that could be.

  The elevator doors closed, the polished metal reflecting Max’s smile.

  Chapter 3

  Drake walked into the outback
bar, ordered a Foster’s lager, and slid onto the stool. Restless after concluding his latest adventure, he took a long pull of the beer and glanced across the wood-paneled room hoping for some distraction. A long, tall drink of water with waist-length black hair, a body-hugging black dress and red do-me pumps stepped inside the door. Crikey, what a beaut. But more than the woman’s stunning face and killer body, it was her confident carriage as she made her way over to the bar that brought the blood pounding through his veins. She reminded him of the sleek thoroughbred filly not yet broken to the saddle stabled back on his ranch. She’d let you ride her but only bareback—and only on her terms.

  Ever ready to rise to a challenge, Drake slid back his stool, got up and rounded the bar. “Goodday, love.” He sidled over to the woman, head filling with wild images of all the ways he might go about taming her. Looking into her slanted green eyes, he lifted his beer bottle and gently slid the glass rim over the seam of her full, luscious lips. “Fancy a drink?”

  * * *

  Becky caught a cab at Forty-sixth Street, not far from where she’d left the handsome, helpful stranger. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but she swore she felt the burn of those blue eyes following her all the way up the boulevard.

  Climbing inside the taxi’s stale-smelling interior, she said, “The Hotel Chelsea, please. That’s 222 West Twenty-third between—”

  “Between Seventh and Eighth, yeah, I know.” The cabbie pulled out into traffic, cutting off an oncoming car and flipping the driver the bird.

  Becky settled herself and her packages on the cracked vinyl seat, asking herself why on earth she’d just turned down the hottest man to cross her path in…well, forever. There’d been nothing remotely creepy about him, no bad vibe or warning facial tick. Just the opposite—he’d had charming manners and a sexy smile and the absolute longest eyelashes she’d ever seen on a man. He’d even stuck around to help her up and then gone on a quest for her missing slipper like a modern-day Prince Charming. Come to think of it, he had called her Cinderella.

  And she’d liked his classic clothes, or more to the point, the totally casual, totally sexy way he wore them, as though he’d thrown on whatever and ended up looking fabulous by sheer accident. Even his lame attempt to impress her with his knowledge of classic children’s literature struck her as endearingly sweet.

  It was his eyes she kept coming back to, though. They were cerulean-blue, Jude-Law-blue, Prince-Charming-blue, but beyond that so soulful and so sad she’d had to dole out the time she spent looking into them for fear that, like the classic Cure song, “Just Like Heaven,” she might fall in and drown deep inside of him.

  Had she accepted his coffee invitation, they would have found a Starbucks or some other perfectly acceptable public place, shed their coats and settled in with white porcelain mugs and maybe a shared snack. Afterward they would have split a cab or parted ways on the street, exchanged phone numbers or not depending on how the conversation and chemistry had flowed. It could have been just a lovely interlude or one of those “fresh starts” and “dazzling opportunities” her horoscope had predicted, a prelude to the kind of happily-ever-after ending she used to love writing for her Regency romance heroines but had yet to find for herself. Either way, it would have meant breaking what she’d come to think of as her five-years-and-running curse, by having a date on New Year’s Eve.

  “Damn, I really blew it this time.”

  She caught the driver staring at her in the rearview mirror. “You say somethin’?”

  “I was just uh…talking to myself. It’s a writer thing,” she added because a) it really was, for this writer at least and b) she didn’t want him to think he was ferrying around a psycho.

  He shrugged and turned his attention back to the bumper-to-bumper traffic. In a city the size of New York, apparently talking to oneself was a normal level of crazy.

  Thoughts circling back to her latest lost opportunity, she admitted she hadn’t turned her sexy stranger down because she was worried about getting robbed or raped or otherwise jeopardizing her physical safety. She’d played it safe, too safe, because deep down she was afraid of trusting her heart and getting badly hurt—again.

  The driver skidded to a stop in front of her hotel. “That’ll be $7.50.”

  She handed him a ten, retrieved her purse and shopping bags, and stepped out onto the street. Standing curbside, she looked up to the modest redbrick hotel, the neon sign for Hotel Chelsea welcoming her like an old friend’s smile. Formerly home to the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen, the campy old hotel had hosted its share of suicides, drug overdoses and artistic spats. But even sans its colorful past and celebrity cache, Becky still would have wanted to stay there. With its smaller, more intimate scale and comfortably worn interior, the Chelsea always made her feel welcomed and at home in a way the big, impersonal chains never quite could.

  She bypassed the front desk and cut through the art gallerylike lobby on the lookout for celebrities. Half the fun of staying at the Chelsea was never knowing who you might see, be it a Hollywood legend like Peter O’Toole who had a suite named after him, or an under-thirty brat packer like Christina Ricci, or…a handsome blue-eyed stranger with a penchant for classic clothes and classic fairy tales?

  Get real, Becky. How many times could she expect the universe to drop a tall, broad-shouldered hunk into her path? In this case, she hadn’t just let “dazzling opportunity” pass her by. She’d turned tail and run from it.

  Wishing she could rewrite the episode on the street as easily as a scene in her book, she stepped inside the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor. Room 324 was spare and smallish but at only $200 a night, it was a bargain by Manhattan standards. She hung up her coat in the tiny closet and offloaded her shopping bags onto the bed. Sitting down on the side of the mattress, she bent to take off her boots, belatedly realizing her butt was feeling pretty tender.

  Crossing her right leg over her left, she massaged her cramped arch and took stock of her blisters. Since quitting her consulting job, her power lunches with Pat provided one of her few chances to step into the shoes—literally—of a glamorous romance heroine like Angelina. Pat telling her to call her on a holiday, even one largely devoted to football and loafing around the house, still amounted to a huge deal. Depending on what answer Becky gave her editor, today’s lunch might be their last.

  Switching legs, she rubbed her left foot back to life and considered what to do with her evening. Usually after an afternoon immersed in the Manhattan mayhem, including a soul-satisfying shopping spree, she was content to order room service and hunker down to write, but tonight was New Year’s Eve. Even if it had been a regular night, until she decided what to do about her career, writing anything would be tantamount to spinning her wheels.

  Picking herself up off the bed, she shuffled into the small bathroom, switched on the light, and took stock of the damage in the chipped wall mirror. God, I’m a mess. Worse than a mess, she looked like hell, or at least like a bat recently flown out of it. Her hair was down around her shoulders with one side sticking out like porcupine bristles, and her lipstick had worn off, along with most of her mascara. To add insult to injury, when she slipped off her dress and underwear, she saw that her right butt cheek was sore with good reason. It looked like a hippie’s tie-dyed T-shirt, a mottling of black, green and blue bruises.

  She turned around to face her reflection and gave her naked self a good long look. Barring her bruised backside and sad lack of a tropical tan, for thirty-four—okay, almost thirty-five—hers was not a bad body. Forget the thirty-four-almost-thirty-five part. Not a bad body period. Sure, it would be nice to be a little taller—okay, a lot taller—but then again that was why some gay European fashion designer, bless his soul, had invented the stiletto. And yes, she supposed if she were the shallow type, she might wish her breasts were a bit bigger—okay, a lot bigger—but thanks to the invention of various bras with words like miracle and wonder in the name, she could at
least fake filling up her A-cup. On the upside, her waist was small, her hips were trim, and when it wasn’t swollen from kissing the sidewalk, her butt was tight enough that other women in her aerobics class still laid claim to hating her. If that wasn’t positive confirmation, what was?

  She turned back to the counter with a sigh and looked for the small travel-size hair brush that would fit into the new Cavalli purse. In no mood to hunt, she upended her toiletry bag. A year’s worth of beauty supplies spilled out—along with three shiny gold foil packets.

  Condoms. She must have had them in her bag for over a year, packed and ready to go for that L.A. trip that had never materialized. She started to toss them in the trash but something stopped her. How long did condoms stay…fresh anyway? She picked up one of the packets and read the expiration date. Sturdy little devils, they didn’t expire for another whole year—a year supposedly chockfull of fresh starts and dazzling opportunities, at that.

  Becky hesitated. Maybe it was her horoscope-inspired optimism or just her ingrained dislike of wastefulness from growing up in a big family, but instead of dropping perfectly good prophylactics into the garbage, she dropped them into her evening purse instead.

  Manhattan was a magical place. She’d always thought so and after that day’s midtown encounter, she was more convinced of it than ever. When you were in a city that never slept, you never knew who you might…bump into. From now on there would be no more hiding behind her laptop screen and definitely no more tossing sexy blue-eyed strangers back into the single sea (no wedding ring—she’d checked), at least not without first testing the waters. It was New Year’s Eve, after all, the holiday for embracing the boundless possibility of 365 days of yet-to-be-written-upon blank pages.

  If there were fresh starts and dazzling opportunities to be found out there, by God, Becky was going to find them.