Matching Wits with Venus

by Therese Gilardi

  “You’re looking chipper,” Jennie groaned. “Put the sweater back and let’s go out for a walk.”

  Amelia put her hand to her mouth. Her chest muscles tightened.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The only time Jennie ever suggested taking a walk was when she had to deliver bad news. Because she knew how profoundly uncomfortable Amelia was with large displays of emotion she had always insisted on taking her to a public space to spare her friend the need to feel like she had to react. It was what Amelia preferred. After all, that’s how Amelia had broken the news to Jennie that her parents had split, and that Daniel had died. In both cases Amelia had invited Jennie for a walk along the promenade between Venice Beach and Santa Monica.

  “I’ll tell you when we get outside,” Jennie replied, as they headed for the sidewalk.

  “It’s Mr. Ataria. He’s doubling our rent effective May first.”

  “He can’t do that!”

  “Yes, he can. You signed a document agreeing that in exchange for what was referred to as below market rental….”

  “That is so untrue! We’re already paying more than Esmeralda and half the readers on this street.”

  “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter. I called my brother and he said it’s legal. I’m sorry, Amelia.”

  Amelia stopped in the middle of the pavement. “What did I do wrong? You know, I’ve spent my whole life trying to do the right things and just when I’m feeling comfortable it all crumbles beneath my feet. Earthquake country indeed.”

  Jennie put her arm around Amelia. “I’m sure we’ll be able to pull it together.”

  “No we won’t. This loss of revenue is huge.”

  They walked around the block in silence. As they approached Happily Ever After By Amelia they saw a man standing in front of the door, his back to them. His tweed jacket draped over his broad shoulders and had corduroy patches on the elbows that gave him the air of a professor, although he had the body and blond hair of a surfer. He was holding an enormous teddy bear.

  “Good Lord, who is that?”

  “I think it’s Colin Cumin,” Jennie replied.

  Amelia frowned. “Wonder what he wants. Perhaps my head on a platter?”

  “Be nice.”

  As if he sensed they were behind him, Colin turned around and grinned. They saw that in addition to the yellow teddy bear, he was carrying a small teacup and a bakery box wrapped with butter colored ribbons. Jennie held up her hand and waved.

  Amelia looked at Colin as they drew closer. Beneath the jacket he was wearing a white t-shirt and lemon colored cashmere sweater that looked like it had been handmade with great care. His feet, which she hadn’t noticed until now, were perfectly proportioned, tucked into leather shoes that matched the patches on his jacket.

  Amelia couldn’t help herself. She smiled as she looked at him. Pleasant memories of their evening together came rushing back into her mind, until they were dashed away with the jarring recollection of his date with Randi. She frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Are you trying to ruin me?”

  Jennie rolled her eyes as she unlocked the door to the shop. "I’ll give you two some privacy. I’m running to the bank.”

  “Ruin you?” Colin asked as he cocked his head. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You tell me. But it sure seems like that’s what you were trying to do when you went out on that date with Randi.”

  Colin flinched as he walked toward the small pink velvet club chair in the corner that she’d “liberated” from a curb near her home one evening and recovered with one of the many fabric remnants she was always acquiring at the Rose Bowl flea market. She walked toward the back of the storefront and started the teakettle, like her father always did whenever there was trouble.

  “What do you want in your tea?” Amelia called out.

  “Black is fine,” Colin replied.

  When Amelia returned to the front room, carrying an antique tray holding two china cups saucers a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits, she saw the teddy bear Colin had been carrying sitting in the pink club chair, a tea cup tied around its neck, holding a lemon chiffon pie. He stood next to the chair, his jacket draped across the settee.

  “You look like a giant pie,” she said and laughed as she looked from the lemon colored desert to his yellow sweater and white t-shirt.

  He smiled. “You told me at dinner that you love lemon chiffon pie. And I know you like tea. So I figured if I could win you a yellow bear, and a yellow tea cup and then wear a yellow sweater….”

  Amelia smiled as she set the tray down on the café table. “Come on over here and bring the pie. It’s sure to be better than these biscuits.”

  She sat down. “So what happened with Randi?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. I took her to the restaurant we’d agreed to, one of those Japanese places where you sit at a big square table and they cook the meal in front of you, and she spent the night sneaking off to other tables to talk to other people and then complaining about everyone she’d just talked to.”

  “Oh, I know! She did that to me when we had lunch together.”

  “Yeah, well it was awful. And she kept yelling at this poor guy who was trying to cook, asking him how much salt was in this or that and what was wrong with him that he didn’t know where the restaurant bought their ingredients.”

  Amelia laughed as she ran her fork around her plate and scooped up a large piece of pie. Colin smiled as she ate the entire forkful then rolled a bite of crust around in her mouth.

  “What else happened?”

  “That’s it. Oh, except she acted all insulted when I refused her invitation, you know I wouldn’t really call it that, it was more of a demand to spend the night.”

  Amelia looked at Colin over her teacup. Their eyes met and he grinned. She looked away.

  “Well, I’m really sorry it didn’t go so well.”

  “I hope you’re not. You’re the reason it didn’t work. I couldn’t stop talking about you. At least that’s what she said.”

  Amelia’s hand shook as she eased her cup down to its saucer.

  “You’re all I’ve been thinking about ever since we had dinner together,” he said.

  Colin pointed at the bear. “Do you have any idea how many bottles I had to knock over to win him?”

  He reached over and touched her hand.

  She smiled. “Thanks. What should I name him?”

  “How about Lucky?”

  ****

  Justin watched Amelia as she sat in the window of her shop holding hands with the tall, blond guy he’d seen there several days earlier. He sighed with relief. It looked like she now had a boyfriend, which made him feel a lot better about the possible threat of the man who’d offered him money to follow her coming around. As he watched the two of them laugh, he saw Jennie coming up the street.

  “Hey.” She smiled at him and he nodded. “Are they finally getting together in there?”

  Justin laughed.

  “Looks that way,” he said.

  “Good. It’s about time she had somebody.”

  “What about you?” Justin asked as he looked at Jennie intently.

  “Do you have someone? I was just wondering because of all this trouble.”

  “I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself. I’ve got several tae kwon do belts.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s why I’m a white belt where love is concerned.”

  “You guys are a great advertisement,” Jennie said as she reentered the shop. “Great window candy.”

  Amelia laughed. Jennie looked at her hand, which was resting in Colin’s, and smiled.

  “Did you see Lucky, over in that chair?”

  Jennie turned and waved at the bear.

  “Maybe I should borrow Lucky next time I go to the bank. He can help us find money in our account.”

  “You’re having trouble?” Colin asked.

  Amelia made a face
at Jennie then turned to face Colin.

  “She’d never tell you this,” Jennie said, “but because Randi’s date was such a disaster she cancelled her subscription with us and convinced all her powerful friends to do the same thing.”

  Colin turned to Amelia.

  “I’m really sorry. I can’t believe I’m responsible for this. How bad is it?”

  “Six out of eight,” Jennie chimed in, and Amelia confirmed this with a nod.

  Jennie strode into the back room.

  Colin reached over and stroked Amelia’s cheek. His fingers were warm and smelled faintly of lemon.

  Amelia smiled.

  “Hey if losing Randi is what it takes to have you and Lucky….”

  She closed her mouth and bit down on her lip, horrified at what she’d said. This was so unlike her. She never spoke from the heart, and certainly not where men were concerned. It had taken her months to tell Daniel how she felt about him. She didn’t understand what was happening, how she could physically long for someone she barely knew and yearn to hear the sound of his voice all day long. Something about this man brought out a primitive side of Amelia, a corner of her soul that refused to surrender to her spreadsheets and her desire to make everything she touched orderly.

  Colin leaned forward. He touched her cheek again then pressed his lips against her mouth. His lips were soft, and his tongue tasted like pie.

  Amelia drew back and looked at Colin. She had that disorienting feeling she got whenever she’d gone deep sea fishing and the boat had begun to sway.

  Colin looked at her then took her hand in his. He traced his fingers across the back of her hand, making a similar pattern to the one Daniel used to make.

  She looked at him and smiled.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “So what can I do to help? I feel awful I’ve created this mess for you.”

  Amelia reached over and kissed Colin lightly on the nose.

  Colin cupped her hand between his fingers. The were sitting across the table from each other at the new “it” Italian bistro in Beverly Hills, their knees touching, which sent sparks flying up their legs. Amelia barely noticed the legendary actor seated a table away, the award winning actress who’d just swept past their chairs, or the famous restaurant critic eating alone in the corner, or that the air conditioning wasn’t working as well as it should. In fact, although the food was some of the best in the city, Amelia could have been eating sawdust for all she cared.

  They were having their fourth dinner together. It had been six days since Colin had stopped by Happily Ever After By Amelia with Lucky and they’d hardly spent a minute apart, except for the night Amelia and Jennie had taken Stella out in an effort to console Stella over the loss of Fernando. Amelia knew her mother was well on the road to recovery when she’d made a date with the twenty-five year old bartender.

  “Seriously,” Colin said, his fingertips slowly caressing Amelia’s knuckles. “What can I do to help?”

  Amelia could barely breathe let alone concentrate. She couldn’t think of anything except how much she wanted Colin to run his fingers slowly up and down her body. She’d never been so overcome with pure desire, even when she’d been with Daniel during what she thought had been a passionate, albeit brief, relationship.

  But now she knew better. During her senior year of college she’d studied pheromones, those chemicals that instinctively drew humans and animals toward their mates. She’d been skeptical at the time, but now she realized she must have been wrong. How else could she explain the attraction to this man she barely knew? This was that animal magnetism her father studied, a desire to mate driven strictly by instinct.

  She knew she would restrain herself. Even now, despite her longing to be with Colin, Amelia refused to totally surrender to her heart. Her head throbbed, aching from the internal war raging between her rational mind, which told her to wait until she knew this man better, and her irrational body, which kept leaning so far forward in its quest to reach this man that she was going to be laying in her bowl of spaghetti if she wasn’t careful. She giggled as she imagined herself flipping the table and straddling Colin’s firm thighs right there in the restaurant.

  Colin caressed her arm. “How about if I apologize to Randi? Explain to her that you had no idea I was so crazy about you. I could even say I was visiting the shop that day because I’d seen you before and wanted to get to know you.”

  “No. That’ll never work because she saw you with the personality questionnaire. Besides,” she whispered, “I would have noticed you if you’d been around before.”

  Colin squeezed Amelia’s hand.

  “I don’t care,” she said, smiling at him. “Let her think what she wants.”

  “But she seems to have an awful lot of control over so many of your clients.”

  Amelia shrugged.

  “That’s just a sign I need to widen my applicant pool beyond the Hollywood set. Attract a more diverse clientele. This is a huge city with a lot of singles.”

  Colin frowned.

  “Tell me about Randi.”

  “What don’t I know about her?”

  Amelia smirked as she took a sip of Chianti.

  “You met her. You know what she’s like. She’s always certain her name appears in every trade publication and gossip magazine. She wanted to be with someone who’ll look good next to her in photos, which she’s in an awful lot for someone who supposedly works behind the scenes. Mind you, she’s so obsessed with how she looks that she only hires women shorter and wider than her so she’ll appear even taller and thinner by contrast.”

  Colin laughed.

  “You’re not serious!”

  “Serious as a heart attack.”

  “Serious as a heart attack?”

  Amelia laughed.

  “That’s American for yes, I am dead serious,” she said as she narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “There are plenty of people like her in this town.”

  Colin smiled and said, “Not you.”

  “No, not me,” Amelia replied, and grinned. “If anything I’ve done the opposite, working with someone who looks like a magazine cover even on her bad days.”

  “She’s not prettier than you. No one is.”

  Amelia felt her knees tingle as Colin pressed his legs against them under the table.

  “When I say pretty I don’t just mean your face.”

  Amelia tilted her head.

  “Too far?” Colin said teasingly.

  She laughed.

  “A bit over the top but I’ll take it.”

  “Okay then back to your business problem. What if you created some kind of buzzword so that Happily Ever After By Amelia would turn up at the top of every search engine seeking restaurant and nightspots in LA?”

  “That’s a good idea. Up until now we really haven’t had to do much marketing; our business has been pretty much by word of mouth, thanks to our initial matches. Guess those days are over.”

  Colin put a finger to Amelia’s lips. “I hope so - I want this mouth all to myself.”

  Amelia’s eyes lost a bit of their focus. Colin sighed.

  “I had a wonderful time,” Amelia said as they walked toward his car.

  She smiled as he held the door open for her.

  They drove to Amelia’s bungalow in the companionable silence that had become a part of their routine. Amelia fiddled with the jazz station on his radio and turned up the volume when she came across an old Billie Holiday number. She turned to Colin as he parked in front of her house.

  “I love the fact that I feel so relaxed with you.”

  Colin smiled and touched her cheek.

  “I know what you mean.”

  He opened his car door then helped her out of her seat and walked her to the entrance of the bungalow.

  “Look at that. My flowerpot is broken.”

  She saw Colin winced as he looked at the chunk of terracotta.

  “What’s that doing out here? Wasn’t it in your courtyard?”


  Amelia’s neck stiffened. Her eyes grew wide.

  “How’d you know that? I did used to keep this pot in the back.”

  Colin shrugged.

  “You said something about having flowers in your courtyard so I just assumed that’s where you kept all your plants.”

  Amelia leaned into him. His heart seemed to be beating quite rapidly. He smelled of musk and citrus. She smiled happily as he ran his warm fingers through her hair. He pulled her even closer and she looked up at him, shocked. She wondered if he felt the magnetic pull of their bodies. It would be so easy to invite him in…

  Colin stepped back.

  “I had a great time. Thanks for joining me. I’ll be by around two on Saturday. Be sure you wear hiking boots and something warm.”