Chapter 2 #2
“I need coffee.” She maneuvered her sunglasses back into place and turned toward him on the stool, giving him a clear view
of the gown’s tight, straight bodice not quite flattening her famous, voluptuous breasts. The distant memory of caressing
those breasts gave him no pangs of nostalgia and not even the trace of arousal.
“Coffee I’ll do, but that’s all,” he said coldly. “After that, you’re out of here.”
“Mr. Squeaky Clean,” she drawled. “Still not willing to hang with the bad girls.”
Her mockery didn’t quite ring true. Good. “Coffee, and then you’re leaving.”
“Sure. Whatever.” She pushed her fingers deeper into her hair, dislodging a hair extension so it drooped longer than the rest.
As the coffee brewed, he used his phone to shut her out, scrolling through the messages, but only paying attention to the text from his sister, Rory, with the latest photos of his niece.
He loved that kid more than he loved anything.
He still couldn’t figure out how Rory—the sister who’d insisted she’d never have children—could run a growing corporation and keep her marriage to Clint’s ex–sports agent rock solid, all while they raised a rambunctious little girl.
Dancy slid off the stool to look first toward the windows facing the lake and then toward the windows facing the woods. She
pressed her sunglasses more firmly on her nose. Between the window walls and the creamy, enameled, lava-stone countertops,
the kitchen blazed with light just the way he wanted it.
“This is a bitch of a place for a hangover,” she said. “Not that you’d know anything about getting drunk.”
He’d gotten drunk, all right. More times than he wanted to count, just not recently.
She shielded her sunglasses with her hand. “I hate this kitchen.”
“That means I did it right.” The room was unusually long and narrow, with parallel glass walls. The center island held the
sink, cooktop, ovens, storage, and eating area, with a built-in refrigerator at the end. No matter what the season, any meal
he ate here felt like an outdoor picnic. He especially loved settling in during a thunderstorm, with the rain pummeling the
windows from both sides, or as a fresh snowfall piled up, although during football season he couldn’t come here as much as
he’d have liked.
She climbed awkwardly back onto the barstool, her skirts rustling. “I remember you used to draw houses in your notebooks.”
Dancy had drawn evening gowns, but Clint wasn’t going down memory lane with her. “Why did you come here?” he said.
She shrugged, not answering. Her loose hair extension touched her collarbone.
The coffee was ready. His earthenware mugs, imprinted with oak leaves, were hand-thrown by a local potter.
He filled one, passed it over, and watched her fingers curl around the mug’s rough, nut-brown surface.
Curiosity overcame his animosity. “How did you find me? I don’t exactly advertise this address. ”
“One of your teammates I met a while back. I think he got it from your mother. I’m sure Kristin still hates me.”
He’d never let her know how much her long-ago transgression still stung. “You were a seventeen-year-old kid,” he said roughly.
“Time to get over it.”
Her head snapped up. “Oh, no, you don’t! I’m not asking Saint Clint of the Gridiron for forgiveness.”
“I wasn’t a saint,” he shot back. “And I’m the wrong person to relive your teenage misdeeds with. I barely remember high school.”
A lie. He remembered it all.
“I’ll bet you remember the games,” she said. “Thirty-one touchdowns junior year. Even as a kid, you could turn your body midair.
The college scouts drooled over you.”
He’d made thirty-two touchdowns junior year, but he wasn’t correcting her. “What do you want, Dancy?”
“A place to clean up would be a gift from the gods. Or from the God.” She directed a metallic silver fingernail toward him.
She was getting under his skin, just like she used to. He had to move beyond his visceral reaction to her. “There’s a sink
in the laundry room and some clean gym clothes.”
She maneuvered off the stool and backed toward him. “Help me get out of this gown.”
“I’m not touching you.”
“This isn’t a seduction,” she declared. “I can’t get out of by myself. It takes a village. Literally.”
The back of the gown looked like some kind of corset with no visible fastenings, so she was telling the truth for a change. “There’s a placket in the center,” she said. “The hooks are underneath. Ignore those little battery packs.”
“Battery packs?”
“The dress lights up.”
“It does what?”
She pressed her hands to the front of the gown to hold it up while he gave in to her demand and looked for the hooks. “In
2016, Zac Posen designed a fiber-optic gown that Claire Danes wore to the Met Gala. I paid a fortune to have a designer re-create
it, and I haven’t been able to draw a full breath since I put it on.”
He didn’t care about fashion history, only about getting her out of this gown so she’d leave.
She was right about the hooks. The dress fit so snugly over her ribs that he could barely get his big hands to work on the
multitude of tiny clasps. As the fabric began to part, he saw ugly red welts in the pale skin along her back. Her ribs expanded
as she took one deep breath after another.
He backed away. “When you’re cleaned up, I’ll call a car for you.”
“You do that.” Clutching the front of her gown, she swept across the kitchen toward the laundry room like a jaded royal, leaving
him with bad memories and a long blond hair extension coiled on the floor.