Chapter 2 #2
A glimpse of Lady Cerulean was exactly what I needed to turn this shit sandwich of a day around.
Her real name was actually Milady Sandoval.
I’d read somewhere that she’d originally made up the name Lady Cerulean to post fanfic online and that she kept using it when her music career started popping off so that her fandom friends knew how to find her shows. That was easily ten years ago.
Since then, she’d reached heights of fame that Beyoncé and Taylor Swift could only dream of.
Why would someone that famous hang out in Times Square, you might ask? Well, Lady C lives in the city and she’s known to come up with these elaborate disguises that allow her to roam around, getting inspiration for her songs.
I couldn’t spot anyone who might be her, though. I glanced back at the girl to ask and found her staring intently at me.
“Me?” I yelped, aware that a few of the people around us had come to an abrupt stop and were openly staring. “You think I’m Lady Cerulean?”
“Everyone knows about her disguises,” the girl informed me, eyeing my heart-shaped earrings. Or maybe my hair, which was neither pink nor shaped like a heart, but definitely attention worthy.
“But I’m not even the right body type,” I argued, lowering my—you guessed it—on-theme heart-shaped sunglasses.
I’m average height and almost-but-not-quite curvy and Lady C is tall and slim, with a neck like a graceful swan and legs that go on forever.
And her butt and hips are definitely more sculpted than mine.
I kept trying to point that out, but none of the tourists seemed to be in the mood to listen to logic. A bunch of them had their phones out and pointed at me, making me wish that my sunglasses were the large, dark kind. And that I had a hat big enough for my hair to fit into.
“That’s a wig, right?” someone said, and I started to back away as two pairs of hands started reaching for my curls.
It was official—today sucked.
Another hand landed on my shoulder. And like, I wasn’t going to panic or anything. Up until then, the whole thing had seemed so funny that I was already mentally adding it to my screenplay. But then another hand brushed the strap of my dress and, well, panic suddenly seemed like a good idea.
I needed to get out of there. The only problem was, the starstruck crowd had surrounded me on all sides—and it was closing in.
If this had been happening in my screenplay, I—
Oh, fuck that.
A burst of fear-spiked adrenaline went through me. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said, raising my voice in an attempt to project confidence. “But you’ve got the wrong girl, babes. Granted, I’m all starlight and flair and I have talent coming out of my—”
The tourists shifted, their attention momentarily diverted from me, as a Black guy sporting a crown popped out through the crowd and sauntered to where I was standing.
In his cream-and-gold suit, he was a dead ringer for Naveen from The Princess and the Frog.
“Where are you folks from? You have plans this evening? Hey sir, you look like you appreciate humor—do you have any interest in stand-up comedy?”
A brief murmur of uncertainty rose from the crowd, though a couple of people answered him, looking interested as he began hawking free tickets to a comedy club.
I was still rooted to the spot, half-afraid to make any sudden movements in case it drew the attention of the crowd again. But then the guy tossed a look over his shoulder at me and mouthed, “Go!”
I whirled around, intending to run the hell out of there, and came face-to-face with another guy.
One who was dressed in breeches that were molded to his thighs.
Under his teal waistcoat, his billowing white shirt covered an appealingly broad chest and shoulders that looked like they had been made for the express purpose of resting your head on them.
My gaze skipped higher, all the way to his eyes. A rich chocolate brown, they were ringed by very dark lashes and pale skin that gleamed in the glow of the billboards around us.
It was him. The Duke of Harding.
My heart stuttered to a stop before restarting like an ancient car engine.
As it roared back to life, I had to take a moment to blink and tell myself that my mind hadn’t conjured up a fictional duke in a moment of distress. Even if the guy standing in front of me was too perfectly handsome to be real.
He flashed a smile at me, as if he could tell what I was thinking. And then he held out his hand.
Let me tell you, I didn’t even hesitate—I put my hand in his and let him pull me through the crowd, both of us bursting into a run as soon as we were clear.
His long legs ate up the sidewalk like Pac-Man eats dots.
Not exactly endowed in the leg department myself, I scrambled to keep up.
It was like four or five blocks before I noticed that we were still holding hands.
And since it wasn’t a romantic thing at all—more like a did we just escape a raving mob and also narrowly avoid getting hit by that car kind of thing—I didn’t bother disentangling my fingers from his until another few blocks were safely behind us.
Promising myself to sign up for a gym membership as soon as I solved my cash-flow issue, I leaned against the hot brick side of a building, hands on my thighs, probably looking like a goldfish that had just made an unwise leap from its bowl as I sucked in breath after breath.
Looking much more composed—and much less sweaty—than me, the guy stood under his own power, looking mildly alarmed at my wheezing.
“You okay there? That was…”
“Unholy,” I supplied through a hard inhale. Finally, I got my shit together enough be able to say, “I look nothing like Lady Cerulean.”
“There is all the starlight and flair, though,” he said, and I let out a breathless laugh.
Away from the crowd, no longer about to succumb to a panic attack, I took a moment to examine him.
It wasn’t just the outfit that made him look like he should be on the cover of a romance novel—it was the way his warm brown eyes caught the light, the way he held his mouth like he was on the verge of a smile.
“I know it’s like a sauna out here, but can I thank you with some coffee or something? I mean, unless you have to get back to—” I waved in the general direction of Times Square. “I did interrupt your performance.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, that was my buddy Chase’s idea. He’s the dancer and I’m just… humoring him. To be honest, you probably did us a favor—if it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be getting arrested as we speak for accidentally assaulting someone with my flailing limbs.”
The way he moved told another story. Maybe he didn’t have the tightly controlled grace that had made Prince Naveen look like a panther as he strolled through the crowd, but he knew how to use his body to his advantage.
And that included his face, I noticed when he punctuated his words with a smile that should have been accompanied by a cartoon sparkle in his teeth. “My name’s Dash.”
“Dash and Chase? Cute,” I blurted out. “I’m Mariel.”
I held out my hand for a dorky handshake, and immediately realized what a mistake that was as our fingers met and electricity zinged through me.
It wasn’t just leftover panic, either; it was my body alerting me to the fact that Dash was stupid hot.
Which was completely unnecessary, because I had eyes that worked. “So, uh, how about that coffee?”
A slow grin broke over his face. “I could never say no to coffee.”
Which, to each his own. Not everyone has to share my opinions about hot bean juice. And I had offered.
I didn’t think I could take another coffee shop that day—luckily, the restaurant down the street from us had a beverages window where Dash could get a Thai iced coffee.
Ordering a pink lemonade for myself, I reached into my purse for my phone and came up with a handful of crumbs.
Also known as the muffin from earlier, now mashed to oblivion.
Just another reason for me to be mad at Milo.
Dash eyed me with obvious amusement as I wiped my hand on my dress and dug back into my cute-but-impractical purse, handing him each item as I pulled it out.
Holding assorted lip glosses and scrunchies in one hand, he shook crumbs off my emotional support paperback and glanced at the clinched couple on the cover. “You like Georgie Hart?”
The Queen of Hearts, as her fandom called her, had been writing Regency romances for, oh, about fifty-eight decades. A slight exaggeration, maybe, though she’d been so prolific that it was easy to believe that her best-selling books had been around forever.
“I like romance novels in general.” My fingers finally came into contact with my phone. Brandishing it triumphantly, I turned back to the bored cashier.
“Me too,” Dash said.
“Really?” I blurted out as I paid. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a guy who was into romance. Not that guys aren’t allowed to be into romance, of course.”
Grabbing our drinks, we strolled away toward a little neighborhood park as Dash started waxing poetic over a Beverly Jenkins he had just finished. It was marginally less hot under the leafy canopy, so we found an empty bench near the dog play area and settled in to watch the pups.
“I haven’t read any Ms. Bev in a while,” I told him. “I’ve been making my way through every Regency ever written.”
“Ambitious,” he said, looking… well, not impressed exactly. More like he didn’t have the heart to tell me just how many Regency romances were out there. “Are you on Fling?”
I had to blink, mostly to make sure that he wasn’t a product of my imagination after all.
An incredibly hot guy with excellent taste in books is one thing—one who reads Beverly Jenkins and is on the ultimate app for romance readers?
If you’d asked me an hour ago, I’d have said it would be as impossible as encountering the Duke of Harding in person.