Think Before You Speak

by D. A. Bale

  “What is normal these days?” I philosophized.

  She leaned across the bar. “So was he that good or that bad?”

  “With what?”

  “You know,” she gestured suggestively with both hands.

  “Rochelle!”

  “Well?” A smile spread across her face like liquid butter.

  “Is that what everyone around here thinks?”

  “It’s kinda obvious something happened.”

  My turn to lean forward and whisper. “There never has been nor ever will be any tangoing between the sheets where Grady and me are concerned.”

  Her brows pinched. “But I assumed, with the way you two act and the sexually charged atmosphere…”

  “It’s just a game. A ruse. Something we do for fun.”

  “I know some other ways you two could have some fun.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I responded, tossing a last glance over my shoulder as Grady wandered toward his office. “But not with the boss.”

  “Smart girl,” Rochelle said, then frowned. “It never pays to sleep with co-workers.”

  “Here-here,” I said, raising my refilled glass.

  Rochelle’s stare trailed away from my face to over my head. “But a customer? Now there’s a different story.”

  I twirled the barstool around to lock with familiar ice-blue eyes. Mussed dark hair hung over his forehead, and the impeccably tailored cobalt-blue shirt hugged him in all the right – yet oh-so-wrong – places before opening to reveal the plunge of tanned pecs. Pecs I knew well – and not from his photos in magazines.

  I swallowed the knot in my throat as my heartrate ticked my body temperature up toward volcanic proportions. “Welcome home, Nick.”

  ***

  So much for promises to myself to lay off the...

  Oh, forget it.

  I awoke late the following morning in a tangle of sheets, a stitch in my side, and an intermittent tap tickling my cheek. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Slinky’s butt, his tail languidly flipping and flopping across my face like a well-timed metronome. When I went to set him down, the floor seemed much closer in the daylight than when I’d gone to sleep last night.

  Oh, yeah. Almost forgot.

  After nearly two months of inactivity, my sexual energy was a coiled spring released like pulling a trigger. Like the Energizer Bunny, I’d kept going and going – until the new mattress slid right off the box springs. After the second time, we’d decided it was safest to leave it where it’d ended up. That left Nick and Slinky spooning me.

  As I flopped out of bed, I rediscovered a thing or two about muscle memory. First, it’s pretty quick to dissipate when said muscles are left to atrophy for more than a week or two. Second, they’re pretty quick to let you know they’re out of shape once you use them again. It took a bit more than a little effort to get my carcass moving toward the kitchen, but I finally dug out my robe and headed for a caffeinated fill-up.

  Another good thing about Mom? She refuses to buy me liquor, but she definitely doesn’t skimp on those necessary Bohanan staples – like coffee. And Oreos. Not two cans, but two cases of Colombian roast took up the floor space in my tiny pantry, and a whole box filled with packages of chocolaty goodness sat on top. As the fragrant, steamy aroma wafted from the percolating pot and cookie crumbs gathered at the corners of my mouth, I bowed my head against the cool stainless steel countertop and gave thanks for my thoughtful mother. God bless her.

  Guilt followed soon after the first gulps awakened my brain enough to engage. In my apartment less than twenty-four hours and already I’d returned to my Mary Magdalene ways. For weeks I’d struggled against those pesky urges and succeeded while under Zeke’s roof.

  My own roof? Yeah, I’d had about as much self-control as a certain police detective in a coffee shop when Nick showed up last night. He’d been in Europe all that time too, with no word on when to expect his return. Wasn’t like we were boyfriend and girlfriend – hell, I’d been a free agent the entire time. So why hadn’t I taken advantage of the opportunities when they presented?

  This was so not a comfortable place for my thoughts to head this early in the morning. Or afternoon.

  Nick’s warm body pressed in behind as he wrapped his arms around and enveloped me with his musky scent. “Mornin’ luv.”

  From what I felt, it wouldn’t take much to get him going again. Who was I kidding? With that Aussie accent, it wouldn’t take much to get me going again. I greeted him with a kiss of eau d’ coffee breath and a hint of an Oreo chaser.

  “Sorry again about the whole bed situation,” I said, tearing myself away and pouring him a cup.

  “No worries,” Nick said. “I ‘ave been in worse.”

  “A lot happened while you were gone.”

  “So I see,” he said as he strolled about the room in all his glory.

  Don’t you just love the European mindset sometimes? They’re so uninhibited and unashamed of the naked body, while this here red-blooded American girl wore a robe. He walked around admiring my new furnishings, offering me a daylight view of all God had blessed him with – every tanned, toned, and tight inch. Every last one.

  ‘Scuse me while I mop up the drool from my new kitchen floor.

  Nick continued, “This must ‘a kept you busy while I was gone.”

  “Actually this was my mom’s doing,” I responded. “And her interior designer. If Reginald von Braun hadn’t kept Mom in check, you’d be looking at a whole lot of lace and a heaping bunch of florals instead of stripes and leather.”

  “Then what kept you from calling me, luv?”

  “Say what?” was all I could think to say to the sudden whiplash in the conversation.

  He faced me with a furrow dipping beneath the mussed hair. “I was overseas for almost two months. No message whatsoever from my girl.”

  Okay, there was no friend attached to the girl. I could handle that. “Goes both ways, Nick. If you’d wanted to converse, all you had to do was pick up your own phone.”

  And they say girls are needy. Sheesh.

  “The shoot schedules and locations were in constant flux,” Nick said. “I could never properly calculate the time difference to call.”

  “You coulda let your fingers do the talking,” I returned.

  All that got me was a puzzled look.

  I tapped my fingers in the air. “You know…text?”

  Or take a remedial math class, but this I kept to myself. No need to be rude and disrespectful – at least not out loud, ‘specially after all of the stunning things he’d done to me last night.

  He caught me in his arms and pressed me up against the new kitchen cabinets. The pout disappeared and a sexy smile replaced it. “Let’s celebrate my homecoming then.”

  “Didn’t we do that last night?” My voice shivered as he nipped my ear and worked down my jaw.

  “I ‘ave got a brief shoot down in San Antonio early next week. How ‘bout we drive down Sunday and spend a little one-on-one together.”

  I could tell he was ready for a little one-on-one right now. “I’ve got work on Wednesday night next week.”

  “Piece ‘a cake. The shoot is scheduled Monday and Tuesday nights. After I’m done, we zip up the motorway in time for your work. All’s good then?”

  Wait a minute? A road trip? With Nick? Weren’t we just arguing? Weren’t we just thinking about no friend with the girl?

  Oh, yeah. That was me.

  My knees were knocking from the intimacy a trip together implied. Or maybe it was because of overworked muscles from the night before. Perhaps more from what his roaming hands were doing to my body as Nick stripped me of the robe and his mouth explored mine. A combination of those three explanations?

  Let’s go with that. San Antonio, here we c-c-c-ome.

  Chapter Four

  It bothered me how well Nick could manipulate me – and yeah, that way too. He’d discovered my weakness. How to get almost anything he wanted from me. With awesome
sex he could steer me easier than a rider with a bit in a filly’s maw.

  So with that mental image, I had even more to chew on during the four hour drive south.

  A road trip. Together. Just Nick and me. That bespoke an intimacy I hadn’t experienced since the epic blowup with Big Z. This train was barreling down the tracks toward the ravine so fast, I’d have to jump off soon before becoming a wreck on a wreck.

  But as a captive audience, I’d have to try and make the best of the next few days. In order to do that, I’d have to make it through this car ride first.

  So what could we talk about? Did we even have anything in common? Okay, his car might work. The sweet Jaguar F-Type R Coupe cut down the interstate as smooth as an all-star running back through a defensive line, with enough horsepower to challenge my Vette in a street race. For a second anyway. The only thing that would possibly make it better was if the Jag was a convertible – and black.

  I wasn’t about to concede my good ol’ American-born hot rod to some foreign-made piece of luxury without more information. Even if it was a gorgeous model that made me want to take it for a spin on my own. It didn’t hurt either that it was a pearlescent charcoal gray. It’d go great as an accessory to the new paint on my apartment walls.

  “So,” I asked, “what’re the specs on this Jag?”

  “Specs?” Nick questioned.

  “Like the horsepower.”

  “Um…not sure.”

  “Torque?” I pressed.

  “What’s that?”

  Yeah, this was going well. “I’m assuming it’s a V-8?”

  “Like the vegetable juice?”

  The scenery of brown scrub fields and grazing cattle flashed by almost as fast as my life. How could a guy own a car worth nearly a hundred grand and know nothing about it? Every man I’d ever known could rattle off the specs of their vehicle down to the brand of spark plugs in the coil. Hell, even I could tell you that much. Guys weren’t the only sex to have a thing for their vehicles. Most of ‘em got a hard on just thinking about them.

  This was going to be the longest trip of my life. “So what can you tell me about this car?” I tried again.

  “Well…it’s got leather seats,” Nick offered.

  “I see.”

  “And they’re heated.”

  “Okay.” Heated seats aren’t really necessary in Texas – especially in August. But I was willing to give him that one since most high-end cars have heat at the seat as a standard line item these days.

  The continued car interrogation took up all of about two minutes. God help me. How had I gotten myself wrangled into a road trip with Nick? What were we possibly going to talk about for the next three hours and fifty-eight minutes? It came to me about then like a ten-pound sack of stupid dropped on my head.

  Nick and I had never really talked until now. Most of our conversation up to that point had been more along the line of hey, Vicki or hey, Nick and oh yeah, just like that instead of chatter about banal and mundane things. He’d never even told me exactly where in Europe he’d disappeared to for the last couple of months. That’s a lot of geography to encompass in one statement.

  For the next couple of hours I finally got Nick talking after asking about his modeling gigs. My mistake. By the time we checked into our hotel along the San Antonio River Walk, I knew more about the vapid and shallow world of fashion than I’d ever conceived possible. Mom would’ve loved hanging out with Nick – well, except the part about my uncontrollable urges when he came around.

  Don’t get me wrong. We all know by now I like wearing fashionable clothes, shoes, and the assorted accessories. The weekly shopping excursions with Mom and her monthly credit card bill proved it. I just don’t give a flying flip about what this designer said about that designer or the horrors experienced working with certain Hollywood celebrity types. But apparently that information is well-known among the fashion elite – and Nick told me every tiny tidbit of associated gossip in agonizing detail.

  I swear, Nick would fit in better at the Celebration Victory Church ladies Thursday luncheons than I ever did. They’d gawk and fawn over him like preening peacocks.

  However, when we arrived in our room and the door clicked shut, he proceeded to spend the next couple of hours showing me any number of reasons why neither of us fit in with that crowd.

  In delectably delicious detail.

  ***

  By dinnertime, this filly had worked up an appetite that needed more than hay and oats to satisfy. While I showered and worked to make myself presentable, Nick stepped downstairs to the weight room to get in an hour of iron pumping. Don’t know why he felt the need for exercise after all we’d gotten. The life of a male model I suppose.

  When he returned to the room, he leapt into the shower before tossing on some clothes and sliding a bit of product into his hair. After five minutes prep work, he still had to wait on me to dig heels out of my suitcase.

  So not fair.

  The sun hung on the horizon as we made our way down the River Walk, casting a golden sheen across the top of the muddy water. It reminded me briefly about that trip to Venice Zeke and I had taken years ago. Strolling arm in arm along ancient pathways. Riding in a gondola beneath the San Marcos Bridge. The flung cigarette butt that nearly set my Vera Wang strapless dress on fire. The scent of rotting fish embedded in every pore and fiber that took at least three washings to get out on our return home. Ah, the fragrant memories.

  We were a little early for our dinner reservations at the restaurant, but the host seated us within two minutes of our arrival. After wine orders, I excused myself and escaped to the bathroom with the excuse I needed to wash my hands. After that short stroll in the heat and humidity, I practically needed another shower. The gauzy strapless had wilted and clung to my curves like melted wax. The one thing I was grateful for? That Nick hadn’t made reservations for the riverside terrace. I pressed a moist, cool towel to the back of my neck.

  Was this how I was going to spend the next couple of days? Hiding out in bathrooms? Finding excuses to escape Nick’s company? He’d mentioned the photo shoots were going to take place in the evenings. Would he be away all night long or just a few hours? If he was going to be gone all night, that meant he’d spend most of the day sleeping in. A few hours of playtime in the afternoon. An early dinner together. Okay, yeah. I could do this – couldn’t I?

  I gave myself a good stare down in the mirror for some cowardly lion courage. Then with shoulders thrown back to accentuate my positives, I tossed open the ladies room door and strutted down the hall.

  Then barreled smack dab into a brick wall wearing an impeccably tailored gray Armani suit.

  “I’m so sorry,” the deep voice rolled over me as he extended a hand to help me up from the floor. “Are you alright?”

  The hand was baby soft without a callous along his dark chocolate palm. A hand that hadn’t known hard labor – at least not for thirty years or more. A hand topped by a wrist exhibiting a familiar blue-faced TAG Heuer watch. As I stood, I stared up at a strange yet well-known face, completely incongruous to his normal appearance and within my present location.

  “Reggie?”

  Chapter Five

  “Vicki?”

  The shortened name on the interior designer’s tongue sounded stilted from the usual mein liebchen or Victoria. The man in the bathroom hall showed no signs of the guy who sported loud clothes and an even louder mouth at times. No too-tight cigarette pants. No frilly hot pink flamenco shirt or psychedelic kaleidoscope jackets. The dark gray Armani suit fit him like a tailor-made ensemble, topped off with a non-flashy, conservative white shirt and navy blue tie. The wild fluffed hair speckled with hints of gray was smoothed back, showing off his strong forehead.

  My usually flaming Reggie looked – manly. Handsome. Hot in an older stud-muffin kind of way.

  I shuddered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well I…uh...,” Reggie stuttered in the deep voice before throwing open his ar
ms and breaking into his usual squeal. “Victoria, darling. How pleasant to zee you ‘ere of all places.”

  I allowed him to quash me in his arms and plant a quick peck on either cheek before he drew back and stared at me with wide-open eyes brimming with discomfort. And fear. He knew he’d been had before I even said anything.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, pointing out his clothes.

  “Oh, mein liebchen, you must know it is necessary to one’s health to get away once in awhile, no?”

  “Get away? Yes. Do a one-eighty to your appearance and lose the accent before recovering it? Not a chance.” I crossed my arms. “Sounds to me like Reggie has some ‘splaining to do.”

  “Now, now, now,” he scolded, wagging a finger in my face. “Vat vould Victoria’s mother say about how she speaks to her elders?”

  “How about we call her right now and find out?” I said, whipping out my cell phone.

  “Wait,” Reggie said as he grasped my hands.

  I arched a brow and tapped my foot in my standard nervous or ticked-off manner.

  He made a decision with a sigh. “Alright fine.” The accent disappeared again. “If I share, will you promise to keep what I say between us?”

  “You know I will.”

  Not like I didn’t already know some of his real history. There were perks to having once dated a Texas Ranger. Plus, I’d had my own suspicions from before the time I could say photograph.

  “It could completely destroy my reputation, not to mention my career, if this gets out in my normal circles.”

  I nodded. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Reggie gave me the once over, apparently satisfied with my vow of silence. “Where are you staying?”

  “The hotel just up the walk,” I said, jabbing my thumb in the general direction.

  “Can you meet me by the indoor pool around midnight?”

  “How about eleven?” I countered. It wouldn’t hurt to shy away from Nick for a little bit.