Chapter 34
“Twice in three nights?” my mother asked, adjusting the neckline of my dress to show more cleavage.
“Mom!” I said, pulling my dress back up to a respectable level. Then again, I would be shedding it in the back of Fields’s car for one of Roberta’s numbers soon enough anyway.
“What? I’m not saying do anything inappropriate. You just want to make sure he stays interested.”
“And my sparkling personality isn’t enough for that?”
“We’re doomed,” she deadpanned. She reached for my face, and I ducked away from her.
“No more pinching. Or pulling. Or any of that,” I said. “And no planning a wedding.”
“Who’s planning anything?”
“Fi—Jack told me you called his mother.”
“I shouldn’t call my friends? Fine. I’ll sit here at home all day, alone like a dog.”
“You have Grandma,” I reminded her. “And I’d never even heard of a Mrs. Feldstein until last week. She’s hardly your best friend.”
“What would you know about my friends? You’re never home anymore.”
I turned to look at her. “You want me to stay home tonight?” I was bluffing of course. I knew she couldn’t turn down a date with a Jewish man. I took out an earring as her mouth dropped open in horror.
She snatched it up and practically stabbed it back through my ear. “No no no, you go on your date,” she said. “Just maybe be a little less . . .”
“Less what?”
“Less you. At least until you have a ring on your finger.”
She was exhausting. I wondered if she had pretended to be less her to catch my father.
That was worth asking my grandmother about.
Though I couldn’t imagine my grandmother being less anything and she had turned down marriage proposals.
Her own mother practically had a heart attack over that, she had said. Then again, she lied.
A knock at the front door told me I was being saved. And although I had told Fields that I didn’t need a knight to rescue me, right now I would take what I could get.
“I hate to break it to you, Mom. But he doesn’t want less of me.” Then I ran down the stairs and flung the front door open before my parents could interrogate him further. “Let’s go,” I said, shutting the door firmly behind me. “Quick.”
“I shouldn’t come in?”
“Do you want my mother to pull the ring off her own finger and hand it to you to propose with?” I was already down the front steps and halfway to his car. He followed me, starting toward my side, but I opened my own door and got in.
Fields pulled onto the same side street for me to change without me telling him to this time, and I climbed into the back seat. “Say,” I asked as I pulled on the turquoise dress that I had told him to bring for me. “How do we follow this woman upstairs without being seen?”
“We can’t,” Fields said, his eyes drifting toward the rearview mirror. They met mine, and he looked straight ahead again, caught.
“Then what do we do?”
“We have to be seen.”
I leaned forward, resting my arms on the back of the front seat. “Then won’t—”
He didn’t look at me, but I saw him swallow. “We—uh—probably—have to pretend we’re—going to a room too.”
I digested this, a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Together.”
“It looks less suspicious than one of us staying at the hotel alone when we’re at the bar so often. If anyone follows either of us home, it’s obvious we would have no reason to rent a room alone.”
“But we have to rent a room, then?”
“It’s . . . safer that way.”
For whom? I thought wryly. If my parents caught wind of this, I was a goner.
It was a toss-up whether I would rather be caught by my mother or a dangerous Cuban revolutionary in this situation.
“How do we guarantee we get a room on the right floor?”
Fields offered me a half smile. “You say you’re afraid of heights.”
“Why can’t you be the one afraid of heights?”
“I—uh—I think you’d be more convincing to a male concierge.”
I rolled my eyes. He wasn’t wrong. But I hated even pretending to be afraid of things. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I sighed. “Zip me up, will you? Darling.”
He chuckled as he turned to pull the zipper up to my mid-back, placing the hook through the eye without me needing to ask. “Anything for you—but maybe try to sound less sarcastic, dear.”
I climbed back into the front seat. “We should have taken my mother’s ring after all. At least I’d look more respectable going into a room with you.”
“Your honor is safe with me,” Fields said.
“Is that with Jack Fields or with Jacob Feldstein?”
“Both.”
We would see about that.