Page 43 of Just One Look
Into the Flood
She came out,unfortunately, dressed like somebody who didn’t want to be groped, or maybe just like somebody who wanted to make you work for it, he wasn’t sure which. Her dress was gray, with a high neckline, long sleeves, and a hemline below her knee. She was wearing it with black court shoes with an almost-pointed toe and an almost-high heel, which he guessed was right, because you wouldn’t wear that dress with sandals. On the other hand, the knit dress showed her curves. Not that it was tight, because it wasn’t. It was just that she had those curves.
Also, he now had a fair idea what she was wearing under it, and that wasn’t terrible, either. There’d been a pale-blue bra flung onto her bed, a sort of mesh thing overlaid with fabric flower petals, and a pair of undies with it that hadn’t been any bigger than the ones Webster had scarfed. And, yeh, he wondered if she was wearing those.
Especially because her hair had that tumbled, just-out-of-bed look, her eyelashes were long and dark, and her lips were a deep red. Not much makeup, just the kind that got your heart pounding, and also got you thinking about how slowly you could kiss that lipstick off her. No jewelry except her earrings, but those weren’t the gold hoops you’d expect. Instead, they were thick silver knots, textured to look like ropes.
Those earrings were hot.
Webster jumped up joyously to go say hello, since he’d been sadly deprived of her company for fifteen minutes, and Luka got a hand on his collar and hauled him back. The dog had been funny, but just now, he was superfluous.
She said, still fastening the second of those knots into her earlobe, the dark mass of her hair falling over the other shoulder, “Any success, food-wise? I warn you, I’m hungry. Or we could just go back to the place we were before. Fine by me. Although you should really let me pay for it, since you saved me that emergency-vet fee. Also, what do you think of my doll collection? You must have noticed, waiting out here. Creepy, don’t you think?” She’d gone back to what he recognized as her surgeon mode. Because she was uncomfortable, he guessed. Because she was uncertain.
He said, “Definitely creepy. Odd place to rent, surely, not to mention the dog. How’d you get custody of this dog, exactly? And you look beautiful. You make me want to take you someplace good. Which is fortunate, since that’s what I’m going to do.” After that, he gave in to temptation, since she’d come close—you could hardly avoid it, in this place—got that lock of hair between his fingers again, leaned down, and brushed his lips against her cheek.
She drew in a barely audible breath, and he stepped back, smiled down at her, and said, “Excuse to find out what scent you’re wearing.”
There was a little color staining her cheeks now, “Oh. Nothing, if that’s perfume. Not much room in the suitcase, and anyway, I never know what kind to buy.”
“No worries,” he said. “You smell good anyway.” A hint of shampoo or lotion, maybe, something like honey and almonds. She smelled like clean warmth, which wasn’t quite as good as flowers, and definitely not as good as the sort of complicated, warm, floral-and-sandalwood scent he could imagine her wearing, but it would do.
And, yeh, he might have a bit of a thing for scent. That was one of the things he loved about women: how soft their skin was, and how good it smelled.
“Surgeons mostly smell like soap, unfortunately,” she said. “There’s a lot of hand washing.”
“Do you want to wear scent?” he asked. “Because if you don’t, why should you? But if you do, why not find out what kind you like? I don’t see how you could get it wrong.”
She said, “I never thought of it that way. I think I’d like to. Maybe I will. I wonder how you find out, though. Too bad computers don’t have a scratch ‘n’ sniff feature.”
“I think you go to David Jones,” he said, “and let the ladies spray you. At least that’s what always seems to be happening when I walk through there. You need to find out how it reacts with your skin, but I reckon you’d go for something classic. Chanel, maybe.”
“That’s oddly metrosexual of you,” she said, “with all the bashing and the streaming-with-rain testosterone-fest I saw last night. I should take you with me to smell my wrists, though, you think?”
“I’ve dated a few models, that’s all.” He didn’t want to smell her wrists. He wanted to smell that tender pulse point under her ear that was his favorite spot for a woman’s scent. There was nothing like burying your face in her neck, inhaling that, and then kissing your way on down. Very slowly.
“Oh, thanks,” she said. “That hardly makes me insecure at all.” He laughed, and she went on, “And by the way, so you know—I actuallydoknow that this outfit isn’t right. It’s my work-meeting look, except for the hair. I didn’t bring much, though. It came down to this or black pants and a top, which trust me, is evenlessalluring. Let’s just say I wasn’t planning on dating.”
“It may not have been what I expected,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say it’s not alluring.”
She gave him a skeptical look. “I’m trained to listen to what people say, you know, and judge the truth of it. You may want to bear that in mind.”
There he was, laughing again. “Right, then. You look a bit like a sexy nun. The appeal could be a little pervy, but it’s definitely there. And I need to stop by my place for a jacket. You went to some effort here. A jacket seems like the least I can do.”
* * *
He took her across town.She could have asked where they were, exactly, but she didn’t. She just wanted to enjoy this.
The sight of him coming out of a door set into the brick wall in front of his house, of which she still hadn’t caught even a glimpse, pulling on a navy sport coat over his gray trousers and settling it over his broad shoulders, then giving her a smile as he got back into the car again. The Sky Tower, so close it was nearly next door, lit up in blue against the night sky as he crested the hill. The nondescript industrial white-painted façade of the building housing the restaurant, and the pleasure that was finding the cozy nest within, not to mention the barely-there pressure of his palm on the small of her back as he walked through the place with her.
It wasn’t a grope. It was a touch.
The obvious recognition at the maître d’s stand, then, as Luka’s distinctive, crumpled face and his size made their impression, and after that, her awareness of him, the sense of all that strength and purpose behind her as she followed the maître d’ out to the courtyard. She wasn’t worrying about how she looked in her dress, either, because he’d kissed her like that. Had kissed her, and then pulled back, but the way he’d looked at her …
Was probably exactly the same way he’d looked at those other women last week. Not to mention those “few models.”
There were white tablecloths in here, though, plush cream banquettes, and swaths of white fabric draped from the ceiling to soften the room, and then they were through to a courtyard lit by strings of twinkling white lights and all the way to a white-draped table just big enough for two, set beside a reed-planted pond into which water trickled.
The place was called Cibo, it was warm, elegant, and inviting, and there was no question of ordering at the counter here.
