Chapter 4 #3
Not my finest moment. Or my most professional either. Especially considering it had happened in front of the crew… and the Greysons’ nanny… and their ten- and eight-year-olds… and a friend of the children’s who’d come over for a playdate.
Had my frustration been justified? Well, maybe.
Mrs. Greyson was the most demanding client I’d ever been tasked with appeasing, and the way she nitpicked everything the contractors did made for a tense and toxic work environment.
But I still shouldn’t have raised my voice.
And even though I’d apologized, the fact that I’d exploded now hung over the three of us.
“How’s the renovation going?” I asked, just to cut into the awkward silence.
“We’re almost done,” Elaine answered. “Just working on the final details.”
Her gaze skipped to Dash, and the expectant pause that followed reminded me that I hadn’t introduced them. Silly of me not to use him as a human buffer.
“Oh! This is my friend Dash. We’re looking for an armchair.”
He leaned forward slightly, offering his hand first to Elaine and then to Mrs. Greyson, who slid her slim fingers into his palm for the briefest shake I’d ever seen.
His smile didn’t falter as he let his hand fall to his side and made easy small talk with Elaine, diverting the women’s attention away from me as if I had come right out and asked him to.
Not even Dash’s warmth could melt the frostiness in Mrs. Greyson’s excruciatingly polite smile.
An ice queen like her would never have lost control the way I had.
As Dash and Elaine discussed… I don’t know, something about armchairs maybe, I found myself examining Mrs. Greyson—her sleek, pulled-back hair, the discreet studs in her ears, the way her expression was as smooth and blank as a fresh piece of paper.
She hadn’t even blinked while I yelled at her, just stood there in frosty silence until my voice was ragged.
Only then had she said, “Was that all?”—and turned around to glide out of the room in her noiseless Chanel flats.
I’ve always been loud and I’ve always taken up more than my share of space, but I had never felt so bad about it.
Luckily for me, Elaine and Mrs. Greyson seemed as eager as I was to put some distance between us, and at the timely intervention of a salesperson, Dash and I made our escape.
“So, that was kind of awkward,” he said once we were clear across the room. “What happened?”
I kept my gaze straight ahead, all the better to ignore the sympathy in his warm brown eyes. “The redhead, Elaine, used to be my boss at the interior design firm I was working at up until about three weeks ago. The other lady was—still is, I guess—a client.”
“Sounds like something big went down there.”
“If by that you mean a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions, then yes. Something did go down.” My fingers twitched restlessly, but even with emotions roiling inside my chest like a ship in a storm, I knew better than to run my hand through my well-defined curls.
I settled for curling up my hand into a fist and shoving it into my pocket.
“I know right now it looks like I have people-shaped land mines all around the city, but I promise, I’m actually pretty easy to get along with.
You just happened to have met me at a pretty weird time in my life. ”
“I believe you,” he said easily, loping along on his ridiculously long legs. “You don’t really strike me as the sort of person who leaves a trail of enemies wherever she goes.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t mind calling Elaine and Mrs. Greyson my enemies.
Sounds a hell of a lot better than the lady who fired me and the lady who got me fired.
” I came to a halt next to a pinball machine.
“Actually, that’s not fair to Mrs. Greyson.
I got myself fired. She was just… the catalyst. And I was incredibly unprofessional and deserved to lose my job.
It all worked out for the best, though,” I added lightly.
“Because employed people don’t hang around Times Square in broad daylight and get mistaken for pop stars and chased by a pitchfork-wielding mob. ”
“I think they were wielding smartphones, not pitchforks,” Dash remarked. “But I’m happy the stars aligned and we ended up meeting.”
I paused, partly to debate with myself whether or not I should add anything more, and partly to stare at a section of the store that seemed to be made mostly of chairs.
Turns out, taking the time to actually look at the piles of furniture meant that I was able to see something interesting lurking underneath a very obviously fake Eames lounge chair.
Looking—what a concept.
“I think I see something. Can you help me get these tables off? Actually, hold on.”
I pulled out my phone and cued up a song, then asked Dash to hold it, which he did, looking faintly amused.
I turned back to the pile, and as the first strains of the Indiana Jones theme filled the air, I dug out a shapely armchair.
Her curved back was crowned with roses and vines carved out of wood, and her legs and arms undulated with sinuous, languorous grace.
She was the sexiest chair I’d ever seen.
“That’s it, all right,” Dash remarked.
Her upholstery was pretty tattered, but like I’d told Dash earlier, I was planning to re-cover whatever we found anyway. “Pink velvet,” I said, circling my precious. “Bubblegum pink—it’ll pop on camera and it’ll look amazing against your skin.”
“Which means the draperies will have to be the paler blue we picked out, right? And my coat is that deep ultramarine, so we’ll have three values for the foreground, background, and middle ground…” Dash looked thoughtful.
I nodded, grateful for the opportunity to change the subject back to our project.
“The drapes should be light and plain enough that they’ll add texture without being too distracting.
The chair will frame your body and the coat and shirt will frame your…
” I gestured in the general direction of his chest. “Torso.”
“Sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about my… torso,” he said teasingly, the twinkle in his eyes taking the edge off his smirk.
I kept my tone light. “Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but thinking about your torso is my literal job now.”
“You’re a total heartbreaker, Mariel, did you know that?
” He literally winked at me as he stepped close enough to slip my phone into my pocket.
And though he turned away almost immediately to wave down the salesperson, I had the impression that he could tell just how badly that wink had weakened my knees.
It wasn’t my imagination, right? He’d been flirty with me from the moment we’d met. But was it flirting—Oprah emphasis on the last syllable—or was it just a mixture of his natural charisma and my flighty imagination?
Either way… I had no intention of acting on it.