Page 49 of Suddenly Dating
“What are you doing?”
“Me?” He looked around him. “Waiting.”
She clucked her tongue. “Come on, you have to go in.”
Harry shook his head. “I’m not going in to the dress shop, Lola. I’ll wait out here.”
“You can’t wait!” she cried, flinging her arms open. “You have to help me!”
“Lola, no. If we were really a couple, I wouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “I spent a few afternoons following Lissa around from one Soho store to the next, and thought I was going to lose my mind.”
Her hands found her hips. “Are you my boyfriend or not?” she demanded. “Do you want to go to the party?”
Harry was beginning to realize that this one-day agreement between them could have unanticipated consequences. He dropped his head against the steering wheel, closed his eyes, and prayed for patience.
“Come on, we’re wasting time.”
Harry opened his eyes and started; she was standing at his window now, her hands shoved into her back pockets. And she was smiling, damn her, because she knew before he did that he was going to give in.
Harry turned off the ignition and pointed at her. “You’re trying my patience, woman.”
“AmI?” she asked with feigned surprise as she stepped back to give him room to open the door. “Because the way I see it, you owe me big time.” She quirked a brow above her smile.
Harry groaned and followed her inside.
Lola pushed open the door to the boutique and a little bell tingled over Harry’s head. He had to dip down to step inside. The shop was stuffed with clothing, shoes, and handbags. He was surrounded by lace and silk, could hardly take a step without brushing up against something frilly.
“Hello!” A stout woman appeared from the back wearing black pants and a colorful patchwork jacket, a scarf tied artfully around her neck. “May I help you?”
“Yes, please. I need a cocktail dress,” Lola said.
“We have some great new pieces on the back wall. If hubby would like, he can sit here,” the woman said, gesturing to a chair so small and so spindly that Harry doubted it could hold him.
“Hubby would like,” Lola said gaily, and with a smile of great amusement, she followed the woman to the back of the shop.
Harry arranged his suddenly enormous ass onto that little chair and began to count the minutes he would be forced to wait for his improbable, one-day-only girlfriend.
Fourteen
Over the course of the next half-hour, Lola tried on every dress the woman brought her. She hadn’t had much luck, and she was down to the last one: a pale-green silk dress with a vine of tiny embroidered pink roses meandering around the bodice and down to the hem. It dipped quite low in the back, just above the small of her back, and the bodice scarcely covered her breasts. Frankly, Lola was afraid if she turned suddenly or even laughed, one of them would pop out. But she stepped out of the dressing room all the same, her dismissal of the gown already forming on her lips.
She did not expect Harry’s reaction. So far he’d said, “It’s fine,” and “Hurry up,” and “That one looks good, but so did the last fifty.” But this time, his expression made her think twice about rejecting the green dress. His Adam’s apple moved with a deep swallow, and his gaze slowly slid down the length of her body, and back up. When his eyes met hers, he looked the tiniest bit hungry. Like he could down a nice, juicy cheeseburger at that very moment.
It was enough that Lola chose the dress. And it helped that she had some adorable pink sandals to wear with it. “This is it,” she said.
“Thank God,” Harry said with great relief.
She paid for the dress, then listened to Harry grouse about how long it had taken to choose it as they drove out of town. He continued to grouse about the detours she was making him take when she convinced him they should grab some lunch, and then he insisted on picking up the tab. When they finally arrived back at the lake house, he disappeared into his room with the excuse of having a lot of work to do.
That was just as well with Lola—she had to think what she was going to say to Birta Hoffman and get her game face on. So she hung her dress up, found a bathing suit on the floor of her room and put it on, and headed for the pool. She walked down the few steps and hopped on to an enormous float made to resemble the yellow duckies that populated toddler baths across the nation.
Once she was comfortably ensconced in her ducky, she paddled back to the edge of the pool and retrieved her phone, then pushed off again with a toe. The ducky twirled off in big, lazy circles to the deep end. Lola was just dosing off when her phone rang. She opened one eye and looked at the caller ID.
“What’s up?” Casey asked when Lola answered. “What are you doing?”
“Right now? I’m floating in a giant rubber ducky. What are you doing?”
“Deciding what to wear. You should come to the city tonight. We’re all going to hear Ty’s friend, Mark, play with his band in that little club on Flatbush. You know which one I’m talking about?”
