Chapter Twelve #2
“Aren’t you a little old for Mean Girls references?
” Trey asked as he placed the trunk on the table.
Since one of the other stickers had given him some very inappropriate ideas about how the stacks only a floor above them at the moment could be put to use, he chose not to comment on it.
But it sure gave him some interesting ideas.
“I think the more important question is how do you, a thirty-something dude with an architecture degree, even recognize a Mean Girls reference?” she snapped back as she followed him from the room out into the hall again.
“First of all,” he said, leading her to the kitchen, “in the interest of full disclosure, I’m forty, so there’s that.”
Then, deciding he might as well reveal all, he added, “It was one of my ex-wife’s favorite movies. At the time I thought she identified with the Lindsay Lohan character—the underdog, I guess—but later I realized she had much more in common with the main mean girl.”
Callie winced. “Regina George.”
“I guess so,” Trey said with a shrug. “Anyway, that’s how I know about Mean Girls.”
“Tricia told me what happened with your wife and your business partner,” she said, not making eye contact with him but focusing on the task of unscrewing the cap of her bottle of water.
When she looked up, he was watching her and he could see compassion in her chocolate-brown eyes. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said. “They’re clearly a couple of a-holes.”
Her sanitized swear made him smile. “Why clean up your language for me? That string of cuss words you let out when you dropped the box was enough to make a sailor go to confession.”
She winced. “You heard that?”
“Oh yeah. You kiss your mama with that mouth?”
Callie rolled her eyes. “Keep it up, funny man, and you’re going to hear some even fouler swears directed your way.”
“Miss Jameson, please,” he said in a credible falsetto as he clutched at imaginary pearls. “Think of the children!”
Stella had the misfortune to wander the room at that moment and Trey scooped her up in his arms so that he could hold her like a baby. Annoyed at the sudden movement, she hissed loudly and leapt down, scratching him in the process.
Laughing, Callie gave him a pointed look. “It’s only what you deserved after you used my poor daughter like that.”
“Pretty sure she taught me a lesson,” he said ruefully as he held up his forearm to show where Stella had left an impressive gouge mark.
Her eyes widening, Callie hopped up and took his arm so that she could look at the wound. “Ouch, I’m sorry.”
“Eh, it’s my own fault like you said.” Trey couldn’t help but notice the fresh floral scent of her hair as she bent toward his arm, though he knew his growing awareness of her could lead to some very bad consequences.
For the moment though, he had no control over it.
“I know better than to make sudden moves around a cat.”
Standing up straight, Callie gestured for him to follow her from the room. “Come on,” she said, not bothering to look to see if he was behind her. “I’ve got some stuff in my room that will fix you up.”
“I’m not sure whether to be impressed at your preparedness or appalled at the evidence that Stella has a record of previous assaults.”
They entered her room and, as she rifled through an enormous tote bag that seemed to be filled with multiple other smaller bags, Trey glanced around curiously at personal touches she’d added to the suite.
The solid navy-blue comforter he’d put on all the beds in the four rooms he’d finished renovating had been replaced with a pale blue-and-white floral-patterned duvet.
The effect was to make the room feel softer, somehow, and cozier.
She’d also propped up a framed print of a portrait of a dark-haired woman atop the highboy across from the bed.
He’d seen the painting somewhere before, maybe remembered it because of how directly its subject stared out, breaking the fourth wall.
But in this room, it said more about the woman who’d chosen to place it here than it did about the artist or his model.
At that moment, Callie turned to him with the first aid supplies and gestured for him to sit on the bed. Telling himself to stop being such a teenager about being in her bedroom, he sat on the duvet and let her lift his arm to get a closer look at his scratch.
When she dabbed at the scratch with peroxide, it stung, so he asked, “You a fan of Sargent?”
Callie glanced up, and he was close enough to see the darker band of chocolate brown that ringed her pupils. “Huh?”
It took him a second to remember that he’d been the one to ask a question.
“Oh. Uh, the print,” he finally said with a nod toward the highboy. “It’s of a John Singer Sargent painting. Are you a fan of his art?”
Her expression cleared and she smiled, lines fanning out at the corners of her eyes before she looked back down at the wound she was cleaning.
“Yeah, he’s one of my favorites. His work is always so interesting.
I imagine the women sitting for this big-time portrait artist—you know, having a really fancy piece to show how they’ve made it into high society—but he always manages to capture some utterly human aspect of their personality they weren’t expecting him to see. ”
He glanced over at the print again, taking in the lounging pose of the dark-haired woman and her come hither eyes. “Was it her provocative gaze she was trying to hide?” he asked, genuinely curious.
She shrugged, dabbing on some antibiotic ointment onto his cut.
“It was interpreted at the time to be a very sexy pose by a respectably married lady. But in reality, she suffered from a respiratory ailment all her life and had trouble sitting upright. So, it looks sexy but she was just trying to breathe.”
“That’s kind of awful,” he said with a shake of his head.
“I think it’s a beautiful painting,” she said with a shrug, “but I also like it because it reminds me that things aren’t always what they seem.”
Trey thought about how his opinion of her had shifted since she’d first arrived on the island and decided it wasn’t a bad lesson to remember.
“All done,” she said with a smile as she let go of his arm. “I’m sorry Stella hurt you. She has definite opinions and isn’t afraid to talk about them with her claws.”
Before she could step too far away, he reached out and snagged her hand. “Wait a minute, will you?”
There was a note of surprise in her expression but Trey was glad she didn’t appear to be so reluctant to be touched by him that she pulled away.
Nodding, Callie let him draw her closer.
But as she stepped nearer to him, instead of the light floral scent Callie wore, he was enveloped in a cloud of a perfume he’d recognize anywhere because it had been Khaki’s signature scent for as long as he’d known her.
His surprise coupled with the wave of memories the perfume invoked were so strong that he instinctively felt the urge to run so that he could escape it.
He held Callie off by lifting his hands to stop her, and although she seemed surprised by his rapid shift of mood, it took her only a brief moment to notice the same thing he had.
“Oh my God,” she said, raising a hand to her mouth in an expression of horror. “That’s Khaki’s perfume. Why does my room smell like Khaki’s perfume, Trey?”