by Romi Hart
Daring Play
Dangerous, Book 3
Romi Hart
Copyright © 2019 by Romi Hart
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on life experiences and conclusions drawn from research, all names, characters, places and specific instances are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. No actual reference to any real person, living or dead, is intended or inferred.
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Contents
1. Diana
2. Cody
3. Diana
4. Cody
5. Diana
6. Cody
7. Diana
8. Cody
Untamed Billionaires - Special Preview
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Romi Hart
1
Diana
If you wanted to feel the pulse of San Francisco, you went to the Lamplight. It wasn’t the largest nightclub in town, nor the most elite. It was also in an odd location; on Telegraph, several blocks back from the main thoroughfare, in an area that still lurked with the ghostly beat of bongos and an acoustic guitar. It wasn’t noisy and crowded. It was classy. It was the last step along the way for performers who were about to hit the big time.
I studied the effect of the sheer, black nylon stocking as I rolled it up over my ankle, smoothed it over my calf, and fastened it at my thigh with a frilly garter belt. It seems pitiful to me that women have abandoned this slightly uncomfortable, but purely feminine arrangement, for something as ugly as pantyhose. It has taken a little getting used to but now I relish dressing for the stage in fragile, old-fashioned stockings, conscious of every placement, from the twinkling diamond design at the ankle, to the fabric, rolled tautly around my thigh and attached by a button to a crinkly, satin strap. It’s an art-form meant to accentuate my curves and add to the shapeliness.
“Oh, you’re wearing the black dress.” I looked up from a cascade of blue-black hair. It was Angelique, the star drag queen. He squeezed his elegant hands together and wheedled, “then you won’t be needing your boa.”
“No,” I said, straightening up and checking my profile. The dress hung in a mid-length, shimmering sheath that flared at the hips. A long slit appeared at one side. “I’m doing jazz tonight.”
“Sultry,” said Angelique. “Could I borrow your boa, please? Mine is getting so ratty. I’m careful about it on stage, but my after-hours sometimes get a bit rowdy.”
“I don’t need the fine details.” I placed a finger under Angelique’s chin and kissed the air just in front of his lips. “You know I love you, darling. Go ahead and borrow it. I won’t be using it tonight.”
Angelique left in a swirl of perfume and chiffon, the boa draped across his bare back. “You shouldn’t pamper Angelique that way,” said Penny, slapping at him. “Once you start lending him things, he’ll borrow all your clothing.”
“When I’m in drag, I’m a She!” Angelique corrected.
Penny was one of three other girls who shared the dressing room with me. We all had our own acts, but none of us had played the top circuits enough to earn a private dressing room. Penny had been around longer. She was part of an improvisation trio who had been very popular at first but now seemed to be running out of innovative ideas, consequently losing the interest of talent scouts. She saw her career fading just steps before she dreamed about Vegas appearance, yet she had taken me under her wing to teach me the ropes as soon as I began appearing in the San Francisco hot spots.
“Don’t be jealous.” It was difficult to speak with my face in front of the mirror, applying lipstick, but dallying wasn’t an option. “I would do the same for you. You can borrow whatever you like.”
“Your clothes don’t fit me. Besides, I’m a comedy act.” Penny made a little face as though the idea didn’t appeal to her anymore.
“What’s it like out there?”
“The usual,” Penny sat down at her mirror and began removing her make-up, “a bunch of college kids, some socialites, a couple of important, executive-looking types and some jocks.”
“Are the jocks rowdy?”
“Not too bad. They did seem to think the spotlight was on them but no catcalls or jeers.”
“I don’t know why Harrington puts up with them. Anyone else would get bounced.”
“Money and prestige. We can’t turn away our sports stars.”
“You should do a sports mock-up,” I said dryly.
“Can I plant you in the audience to suggest it?”
“Sure.”
I pulled on my elbow-length gloves and fluttered my fingers. “Wish me luck.”
It was a hard audience, but not the worst. All I had to do was win over the college kids. If they were enthusiastic, the rest would follow. “I do pretty well until sundown,” I purred, strolling with the microphone, lingering occasionally with my hand gliding over the back of a chair while its occupant blushed and trembled.
“It gets really bad at midnight…”
The jocks were watching intently, their chairs pulled away from the table. A cluster of women had managed to collect loosely around them, which wasn’t lost on them although, they absorbed their feminine admirers casually, as though they were only of secondary importance. They weren’t that bad. They weren’t as bulky as football players or as tall as basketball players. The youngest among them was a towhead with wistful blue eyes and a large, flashing smile.
“After midnight…,” I murmured, drifting by, making eye contact only for a moment.
I didn’t tear down the house, but the applause was good. It was enthusiastic. I’ve spent my on-stage years cultivating my own look. My trademark is a frosty blue and wizard lock to one side of my sleek, black hair. I wear frosty colors, wintry blues and greens that contrast with my warmer skin tone.
Delivery, of course, is radical; swinging aggressively from a full-throated Joplin-styled belt to softly seductive rhythm and blues. The college kids liked my performance. After all, college kids set the trends.
* * *
I dawdled in the dressing room a full hour after my last act, cleaning away stage make-up and changing into an off-the-shoulder, stretch top and a pair of linen slacks. The piano player continued to tinkle away in the background for so
me of the audience that lingered over their drinks and visited with each other. The jocks were still there and the bevy of women that encircled them. I ignored them, going up to the bar to order my usual after-performance margarita.
It was my way of relaxing before going home. I thanked the bartender by name and reached into my handbag to pay him.
He shook a finger and pointed to the end of the bar. The blonde young man was leaning against it, his country-boy smile splitting his face. He waved and I smiled back. He approached me, keeping just enough distance between us to be respectable.
“You sing real pretty,” he said with a fake cowboy drawl.
“Thank you.” I let my hair cover one side of her face as I turned my head. “Are you a ballplayer?”
“You can tell?”
“You look like one.”
“I am! I am the San Francisco Giants rookie of the year. You would know if you followed baseball.”
“Maybe I’ve never had a good reason to follow. Maybe I need someone to inspire me.”
He let out his breath all at once. “I could probably get you help with that. Baseball has always inspired me. If you know the game, it’s all a matter of favoring a team or a player. Some players you don’t let go of, ever, no matter if they switch teams, you’re still loyal to them. They’re that good.”
“I thought the best players were loyal to their teams.”
“They are when they sign the contracts. But when the contract ends, it’s the team that offers the most money that gets the best players.”
I cupped my chin in my fist and leaned toward him. “If I was a journalist, I would be asking questions like, ‘Mr. Rookie of the Year, are you planning to leave the Giants at the end of the season?’”
He chuckled. His laughter was spontaneous, making it difficult to not respond to it. “I signed a four -year contract with them. I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s nice. Does the rookie have a name?”
“Cody James. I know yours. It’s on the program. They should have given you top billing.”
I whispered huskily, as though divulging a secret. “The truth is, I’m also rookie of the year at the Lamplight.”
He puffed out his chest and ran his hands up and down the lapels of his suit. “Then maybe we can help each other out.”
I continued to banter with him until he moved so close to me, his arm could find no place to go except around my shoulders. I took that moment to deliberately study my watch and shake my head. “I have to go now. I have a ten o’clock appointment at the dance studio and I don’t do mornings well. It was nice meeting you, rookie of the year. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Just like that, you’re going?” He looked like he was going to pout. His brows knitted together, then smoothed and pushed upward as he widened his blue eyes. The apparent innocence in them was potentially brain damaging.
“I’ve got to catch my beauty sleep. I’ll be here next week if you’re interested.” I took his clinging arm firmly with both hands and set it on the table.
“I wasted my evening with you,” he called out to me belligerently as I walked away. “I could have had any woman here.”
I stopped at the door and turned my head to look at him. I tucked my hair behind my ear and smoothed it, so it was a long, black river down my back. I smiled with just my lips, “True.”
* * *
My full name is Diana Riviera. At that time, I lived in a two-story house in the rolling residential area of San Francisco. I shared it with four other tenants. We each had an amply sized bedroom with an old-fashioned walk-in closet and a closet-sized half-bath. We shared the full-sized kitchen with pantry, the dining space was a work-study area and the living room a place we used when we felt like visits and conversations. It was a big step up from the three-bedroom apartment I had grown up in with my Oakland family.
All of us tenants were also performing artists. We had discovered early in life that only Bohemians can stand living with other Bohemians. That’s what Angelique called us, Bohemians. Angelique liked flair. She was the one who had convinced me to change my Americanized last name, “Rivers” to the more dramatic sounding, “Riviera”.
He or she, depending on whether he was in drag or not, told me that his given name was Francisco, which he said had no flair at all. He was one of the four other tenants.
The intellectual was Larson Oates. He was also the snob. He was a thespian actor who quoted Shakespeare. He quarreled over the art posters on the walls, designating any that didn’t pass his inspection to the individual owner’s bedroom. He would have been very hard to live with except he was smitten with another actress that lived within our domicile, Alice Brigham.
Alice wasn’t a Shakespearean actress. She called herself a method actress, but she would take any theatrical role she could get. She was small, curly-haired and bubbly, the exact opposite of Larson. Our final performer, Keri Smith, was the lead singer for a rock and roll band until she broke up with the drummer. She was now performing her crisis, unable to decide whether all was lost, if the band could get back together or if she should find another for advancing her career. The acting company encouraged her greatly with her dramatics.
Angelique was more sympathetic. He tut-tutted gently when Keri threw herself down on the sofa and mourned the end of her life. He brought her a cappuccino and a shot of brandy. He wiped away her runny make-up. Grabbing a pillow, he sat down beside her, huddling it in his arms, as though it was the only protection he had between himself and Keri’s enormous pain, “maybe you should find another band.”
“I don’t want another band!” she moaned. “We spent three years getting our sound together. It’s terrible. It’s a mess.” She began digging at the rips in the knees of her blue jeans, making them even worse. “All I told him was, ‘Jackie, go softer on that last score. You’re drowning me out. I can’t sing over the top of you.’ He said, ‘maybe we need someone with a stronger voice. The drums are supposed to get loud’. Not that loud! We couldn’t even hear the bass guitar.”
She erupted in another flood of tears and took Angelique’s pillow away from him, burying her face in it. He stroked the back of her head. “Oh, my dear. You’ve bruised this man’s feelings. Give him more time, he’ll come around.”
“It’s been three weeks! I’ve done one, seventy-five-dollar gig. If this keeps up, I’ll have to take a job waitressing.”
“You would not!” I gasped, settling on the floor next to her. “Why don’t you check with the Gardenia? They were looking for another solo singer.”
“I’m not Gardenia material. I’m a rocker! Cotton candy hair. Check. Eyebrow piercings. Check. Leather field jacket. Check. Tell me how I’m going to sing Cabaret?”
“With gusto,” encouraged Angelique. “You could be the new rage.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe I should scrounge around Hyde Park and see if there are any lonely musicians looking for a female lead.”
Larson and Alice had been watching from a cleared corner of the room they used for stage rehearsal. They had both been practicing the wringing emotions of anguish, using Keri’s display as a cue, but stopped now and looked at each other with alarm. “Hey now,” said Larson. “I remember the last time you dragged in a street musician. He drank all our booze. He bummed cigarettes and never chipped in for pizza. Five days later, he was gone.”
“The only song we heard him play was ‘Proud Mary’,” added Alice.
“It’s a good song,” said Keri hopefully.
“It’s the only song he knows, and your hippie grandma sings it.”
“Hippie grandmas are never wrong.” She struggled to a sitting position, wiped her eyes and folded her arms, ready to fight anyone who talked about her grandmother.
“No, they aren’t,” agreed Angelique. His cell phone buzzed from the coffee table and he paused to pick it up. Angelique had several transformations. Around the house, he liked to wear baggy sweats. He liked simple kitchen duties, including cook
ing and pressing weights. He wore silk suits to go out on dates and had a girlfriend who buzzed in and out of his life with as little disturbance as a butterfly flitting to a flower.
But whenever they were in the living room, where they shared their thoughts and ideas and played at life as liberally as little girls holding a tea party, he practiced his femininity through his close relationship with me and Keri. We were like sisters.
When he answered the phone, however, he was completely masculine. His voice was deep, his face serious. He was very much a “Francisco” in that way.
He listened for a few minutes and answered with a small collection of “uh-huh” and “I’ll see”, followed by “I’ll get back to you on this.”
When he hung up, he clasped his hands at the back of his head and looked up at the ceiling. “That was the Lamplight. Penny and her troops decided to take their show to the road.”
I had found a bowl of Bing Cherries and was popping them into my mouth. My hand dropped in disappointment. “They were let go?”
“Not quite. They just thought a change of scenery might get their inspiration back. It happens to all of us, darling.” He unclasped his hands to pat Keri’s knee, “This might be the break you need. They like the band that auditioned for the spot, but they didn’t have a good female singer.”
“What kind of band is it?”
“They say they are sassy and brassy and looking for a bold, big-voiced singer.”
“They are a brass band?”
“No! Well, they have a saxophone and a trombone. But they also have a cello and a fiddle. Big sound. I told them I had someone who might try out. You could do it, Keri.”
