Page 31 of First Date: Divorce
Good thing Mrs.Cavendish didn’t notice the look K.D.sent her.The older woman kept smiling at him, or possibly at the credit card he held out.
“I’m sure I will be pleased.”He smiled back, not breaking eye contact, so the store manager wouldn’t look toward K.D.
Mrs.Cavendish palmed the credit card without a hitch and turned to the register.
With her back safely to them, he wrapped a hand around K.D.’s elbow and steered her toward a far display.
“What about this, dear?Have you looked at things for fall?”
Though K.D.’s jaw worked and her arm under his hand felt tense enough toboing, she didn’t say a word until they were out of earshot.Even then, she kept her voice so low Mrs.Cavendish wouldn’t hear even the staccato rhythm of anger.
“She dresses beautifully?What kind of crack is that?Andin the end?Sounds likeShe cleans up well once you scrape the grime off her.Like I’m some horse she dug out of a mud pit and has been grooming all afternoon.Or like I’m one of these mannequins — thesedummies— whose only use is to hold up the clothes she chooses to put on it.She dresses beautifullysure wasn’t her reaction to my real clothes.You should have seen her face when I took off my shirt and she saw my—”
She clamped her mouth shut.A renewed glare descended.She started to aim it at him, stopped when she apparently saw something in his face that made her look bounce away.She spun free of his hold on her arm and took three jerky steps toward another display.
Mrs.Cavendish had seen her … what?
He could imagine.
Or out of what?
He could imagine that, too.Oh, yeah, he could imagine that.
At that moment, she stopped abruptly and tried to turn around.But she slammed into him.It wasn’t that hard of a collision, yet it knocked the breath out of him.
That surprised him … for about half a second, until several things clicked.
She’d recognized the implications of what she’d just said — and hadn’t said.
She’d recognized that he’d recognized the same things.
And, to top it off, the display she’d turned away from like a dumpster fire, featured an undergarment that dried his throat by where itwasn’t.It plunged from a nonexistent neck to well below the waist and slashed up high on each hip.
It was suggestive on a mannequin.
On a body like K.D.’s, it would go from suggestion to command.
Would she react that way to almost mentioning her underwear or coming face-to-unnaturally-pointed-breast with the mannequin barely wearing that — what did they call those things?Teddies?— if she wasn’t aware of him as a man?
Oh, yeah, and a final recognition — that his reaction didn’t come from the force of their collision, but from that momentary sensation of her softness against his chest and groin.
“What?”she abruptly demanded.Having backed up a step, she propped her hands on her hips.But that made her elbow brush the teddy-wearing mannequin’s thigh.She crossed her arms over her chest.“What’s that look for.”
“Wondering if you need anything else.”He gestured toward the mannequin beyond her shoulder.“That, maybe?”
“You have got to be—” She bit that off and darted her eyes toward the register where Mrs.Cavendish appeared to be wrapping up her labors.K.D.’s next words were heavy with the kind of restraint that couldn’t be good for the teeth she gnashed.“Thank you,dear.But no.”
“Ah, Mr.Larkin.If you’re ready…?”Mrs.Cavendish cooed from the register.
“We’re ready,” K.D.sidestepped him neatly.
“Pity,” he murmured as he followed her toward the register with a final glance at what little covered the mannequin.“A real pity.”
*
The quizzing continued on the drive back, though there were quiet stretches Pauline never would have allowed.
Into one of those, Eric asked, “Whyareyou doing this?”
