In the Dark

by Judith Arnold

  “If you’d ever worn a suit and tie, you wouldn’t say that,” Grote had retorted.

  God knew what he’d show up wearing. Last year, quite a few attendees had arrived sporting Mardi Gras masks and strings of beads. Since Twelfth Night was essentially the opening night of the Mardi Gras season, the masks and bead necklaces had made sense.

  If Alvin Grote wore a mask, he’d still be easily identified. His bald pate and ponytail would give him away.

  Evidently, Mac Jensen was just one more person stressing out over the fete, which was all of two days away. Fine. Let him stress out. Julie would review the reservation list with him, and then she’d go home and ask Creighton to fix her one of those creamy, chocolaty, heavily spiked alcoholic drinks like the one he’d served her yesterday.

  By six, her desk was cleared of clutter. Her lipstick was long faded, and so was her energy—but if Mac felt double-checking the reservations list was that important, she’d get through it with him. And she’d keep her distance, so he wouldn’t touch her and scramble her gray matter, or give her that I-know-what-you’re-thinking look. And if his scent started to get to her, she’d hold her breath.

  He surprised her by tapping on her door, even though it was open. Usually he came and went without making a sound, and she’d assumed he would invade her office in his usual silent manner. But he did her the courtesy of knocking, and when she spun around in her chair she saw him pushing a wheeled cart into the room. “What’s that?” she asked, eyeing the lidded silver platter and the neatly rolled linen napkins on the cart.

  “Supper,” he told her. “I asked Melanie to put a snack together for us.”

  “Room service?” She laughed. “That wasn’t necessary.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it was. I’m hungry. And I bet you’re starving.” He shot her a teasing smile and squatted down to lock the cart’s wheels. His tie hung loose around his neck and his jawline was darkened by a day’s growth of beard. It occurred to her that he’d probably put in a day just as strenuous as hers had been.

  He pulled a chair close to her desk, draped his jacket over the back and rolled up his shirtsleeves. “I’m sorry I’m making you stick around after hours,” he said, “but I’ve got to get this list in order.” From a lower shelf on the cart he lifted a clipboard to which a computer printout had been attached. After setting it on her desk, he reached down to the lower shelf again and pulled out a half bottle of wine.

  “What’s that for?” Julie asked warily.

  “To make the chore more bearable.” He produced two stemware glasses from the lower shelf, then unwedged the cork, which had already been popped. “It’s a Cabernet. You like red wine, right? That’s what you ordered the other night.”

  She was touched that he remembered, but also concerned. “Wine may make the chore more bearable, but what if we get tipsy?”

  “On half a bottle? I don’t reckon we will,” he drawled as he filled the glasses. He passed her a napkin, then lifted the lid off the platter to reveal an array of cheeses, sliced fruits and crusty wedges of French bread. “I tried to con Melanie into adding some bourbon pecan pie for you, but she said I’d have to pay for that.”

  “You didn’t pay for this?” Julie gestured toward the cheese and fruit.

  Mac grinned and took a sip of his wine. “We security guys have a special relationship with the kitchen staff. They take good care of us.” He set his glass down on the cart, then stood and dragged over another chair, positioning it so he could prop his feet up on it. “May as well get started on this,” he said as he lifted the clipboard.

  Julie took a delicate sip of her wine and tried not to stare at Mac’s long legs, his sinewy, lightly haired forearms and thick, strong wrists. She swiveled to face her computer and tapped a few keys to call up the master reservations list. “I’m still not clear why it’s so important for you to have the exact identities of all the guests,” she said.

  “Ever hear of 9/11? This is going to be a big gathering. Lots of strangers pouring into the hotel. Basic security says we ought to make sure these strangers aren’t going to cause any trouble.”

  “We’ve never had trouble before,” Julie told him. When Gerard Lomax had been the head of hotel security, he’d never reviewed the guest list with her before Twelfth Night parties. Maybe he’d been lazy, though. Maybe she ought to be grateful Mac was so diligent.

  “Let’s make sure you don’t have trouble this year,” he said, then read a name off the list in his lap. “Adams?”

  Julie scanned the list on her monitor. “Joseph and Evelyn Adams. They live in the city and come every year. He works in the mayor’s office and she’s active in the historical society.”

  “They sound reputable enough. Anderson?”

  Julie skimmed the master list. “Matt Anderson. He’s a guest at the hotel. He’s a wine critic. Your buddies downstairs in the restaurant were all in a tizzy about his staying here. I’m not sure he’ll be attending the party, but he made a reservation, just in case.”

  Mac penned a check next to his name. “I wonder what he’d say about this,” he said, waving his glass toward Julie before drinking from it. “Not exactly a high-priced vintage.”

  “It’s very good,” she defended it. Drinking wine while working late with Mac might not be the wisest thing she’d ever done, but he was right—the wine certainly upped the bearability quotient of the evening’s task.

  Mac plucked a sprig of grapes from the platter and popped one into his mouth as he studied his list. “Bowman and guest?”

  “That’s my neighbor, Creighton Bowman. You met him.”

  “Right.” Mac lifted his gaze to her and smiled. “He’s the one who said I was an improvement over the guys you’ve been dating.”

  Julie felt a blush heat her cheeks. “He was joking.”

  “You mean I’m not an improvement over the guys you’ve been dating?”

  “I’m not dating you, so the question is irrelevant.” She realized that might have come out sounding blunt, but she didn’t want Mac insinuating that anything romantic existed between them. They were colleagues, and she couldn’t allow herself to imagine them as anything more. Affairs in the workplace were always tricky and fraught with peril. And while Mac was attractive, she didn’t like his overly protective attitude. Granted, he was in security, so overprotectiveness probably came naturally to him. But she didn’t want or need him looking out for her. She knew how to take care of herself—and experience had taught her to be suspicious of men who tried to take care of women.

  Besides, much as Mac seemed to want her to trust him, and much as she wanted to, she didn’t. Not quite. There was something about him, something about the way he watched her, the way he stole around the hotel, the interest he took in the hotel’s precarious finances. Something about him that made her wonder whether he was more than he pretended to be. His expensive car, his expensive suits, his refusal to participate in the employees’ health insurance program… He obviously had more money than the typical security guy.

  All right, so she didn’t trust him. And she wasn’t dating him. They could still work together, get through that long list of names on his printout and drink wine together. And munch on cheese and fruit and bread. Her stomach sent her brain a message about how empty it was, and she cut herself a small wedge of Gouda.

  “Carlyle,” he said.

  “That would be Holly Carlyle. She’s a singer. She performs here at the hotel a few nights a week.”

  “Will she be performing at the party?”

  “No. We hired a dance band. I guess Charlotte extended an invitation to her. It must be nice for her to come here sometimes just to party, rather than to work.”

  “Will you be attending?” Mac asked. “Just to party, not to work.”

  “I don’t know.” Julie helped herself to a sliver of pear. “It’ll depend on how tired I am. It’ll also depend on whether I want to put up with Creighton’s wrath if I don’t go.” She reminded herself that Creighto
n had suggested she ask Mac to be her escort for the night. She was under no obligation to fulfill Creighton’s matchmaking fantasies, however. “How about you?” she asked casually. “Will you be at the party?”

  “If I’m needed to beef up the security staff, I will.” He leaned back and gazed at her, his dark eyes seductive, his mouth quirked in a crooked smile. “Of course, if you’ll be there, I won’t miss it.”

  Yet he wasn’t asking her to go with him. Which was good, she assured herself. Even better would be if she stayed focused on the job and stopped thinking of Mac in the context of parties and dating. “Who else is on your list?” she asked.

  They continued through the names. Many of them Julie could easily identify; they were either current hotel guests or regulars who attended every year. She looked up the others and provided Mac with information that would enable him to clear them. She hadn’t known that a hotel security officer could learn about people through their credit card numbers, but he assured her he could. He seemed a lot more technologically savvy than Gerard had ever been.

  By seven-thirty, they’d completed reviewing the list, but the platter on the serving cart was still heaped high with cheese, fruit and bread, and they had yet to refill their glasses. Mac divided what was left in the wine bottle between them, and Julie slid off her shoes and perched her feet on an edge of the chair he’d appropriated as a footstool. She carefully smoothed her skirt around her knees so he couldn’t see up it. The floral pattern of her skirt and her turquoise sweater brightened the room, which seemed even more blandly utilitarian at night, when Charlotte was gone and the workday bustle subsided.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Mac asked as he slid his clipboard back onto the cart’s lower shelf, then stood and busied himself filling a plate with grapes, chunks of cheese and a slab of bread. To her surprise, he handed the plate to her instead of keeping it for himself. “If you’re as hungry as I am, you need this.”

  “I’m hungry,” she conceded with a smile, balancing the plate on her knees. “Thanks.”

  He filled another plate for himself, settled back into his chair and raised a piece of bread to her in a mock toast. “So, you really had to starve yourself when you were modeling?”

  “Not starve myself,” she explained, “but I definitely had to watch my weight.”

  “You don’t look like a woman who has to watch her weight.”

  She laughed. “I hope that’s a compliment.” She bit into a cube of cheddar and let the aged cheese flake across her tongue. Once she’d swallowed, she elaborated. “You have to be really thin to succeed as a model. Supposedly the camera adds ten pounds, though I’m not sure I believe that. But the fashionable look these days—and back when I was modeling, and thirty years before then—is a very thin look. That’s what the clients want.”

  “I think most models look too thin,” Mac said. “I can’t speak for all men, but I bet a lot of them would agree. We like women with a little flesh on them. Curves. Hips and breasts.”

  “Even skinny models can have curves.”

  “If they go to the right surgeon, maybe. It’s kind of obvious when you’ve got a woman without a lick of fat on her, and she’s got huge boobs. It doesn’t look natural.”

  “Well…” Julie shrugged, amused to be discussing women’s bosoms with Mac. “If that’s what the clients want, that’s what the modeling agents give them.”

  “Models have agents, then? Like actors?”

  “Sort of. Models sign with an agency, and that agency finds jobs for them. It’s different from actors because the agents don’t hear about jobs and go after them. Instead, the clients come to the agency, and they work with the agent to find a model with the look they want.”

  “So you were with one of these agencies?”

  Julie tried to keep her face neutral. If Mac seemed overprotective now, imagine what he’d be like if she told him about Glenn Perry and the part she’d played in getting him convicted. If Mac knew Glenn had been recently paroled, he would probably connect that info to the e-mails she’d recently received—which, she had to admit, was a connection she herself had made. She’d dismissed it; surely Glenn had better things to do with his new freedom than hound her with silly e-mails. But still, the possibility lurked in the back of her mind. The morning she’d received the first one, the e-mail itself hadn’t frightened her so much as the understanding that Glenn was out of jail, that she’d been the one to put him in jail, that he might harbor the world’s biggest grudge. That he’d been a mean son of a bitch ten years ago and could be even meaner today, and he might blame her for his fate.

  “What?” Mac goaded her gently.

  Her troubling thoughts must have shown in her face. She sipped some wine for fortitude, then said in an admirably bland tone, “I was with an agency, but I wasn’t happy there.”

  “Did you move to another agency?”

  She shook her head. “I wound up quitting the business, going to college and never looking back.” Except for an occasional nervous glance over her shoulder.

  “Just because you weren’t happy with the agency?”

  “I told you, Mac, modeling was boring.”

  “And you were starving.” He helped himself to another piece of bread and some cheese. “So why did you go into modeling in the first place?”

  One more sip of wine, and she realized she didn’t mind answering that particular question. “You really want to know?” she asked. At his nod, she crossed her legs at the ankle, cradled the bowl of her wineglass in her palms and smiled. “I was a tall, gawky, funny-looking kid. People were always making fun of me.”

  “No.” He scrutinized her thoughtfully, then scowled. “I’ll buy tall, but not gawky or funny-looking.”

  “I really was. I was skinny, too. I was all knees and elbows, and my eyes were too big for the rest of my face, and I had a pointy chin—”

  He laughed. “And your ears flapped like Dumbo the Elephant’s, and you had zits all over your nose. I’m having trouble picturing you looking bad, darlin’.”

  “It’s the truth. I towered over the other kids in elementary school. They used to call me freakazoid.”

  “Freakazoid?”

  “Freak, for short. I always got picked first for basketball teams, but I wasn’t that athletic, so my height did me no good there. Even in high school I towered above most of the boys. No one ever asked me out. My sister advised me to slump my shoulders so I’d look shorter—she’s tall, too, but only about five-seven. Nowhere near freakazoid proportions. I didn’t like slouching, though. So I held my head high and tried to ignore the idiots shouting up at me, ‘How’s the weather up there?’ and ‘You ought to wear a flashing red light so planes won’t crash into you.’ They all thought they were so original.”

  “I grew up tall, and no one said those things to me,” Mac argued.

  Julie snorted. “Because you’re a guy. It’s okay for guys to be tall. Not girls.”

  “Unless they go into modeling,” he guessed.

  “Exactly. I grew up in a suburb north of New York City, and one of our neighbors was an editor at a fashion magazine. She said I had the perfect build for modeling, and she offered to put me in touch with some people in the business. I’d never really thought about modeling, but I figured if I succeeded there, I’d show all those jerks at my school that I wasn’t a freak.”

  “And you did show them,” Mac said.

  “I did.”

  “Did they treat you better once you started modeling?”

  She lapsed into a memory and grinned. “As a matter of fact, yes. What a bunch of phonies. They decided I must be hot stuff if people were paying me for my looks. They also assumed I must be rich, because models supposedly made lots of money. I wasn’t exactly earning millions, though. My parents would allow me to go to shoots only on weekends and during the summer. They weren’t going to let the modeling interfere with my education. Some girls drop out of school once they start getting jobs.”

  “They
model full-time? Even when they’re that young? What about child labor laws?”

  “Once they’re sixteen, they can leave high school and work full-time,” Julie explained. “There were quite a few girls at my agency who’d left home and come to New York from all over the country to make it as models. They were sixteen, seventeen—no high school diplomas. All they had were their looks and their dreams.”

  “Was that enough? Did they succeed?”

  Julie hesitated. To explain about the girls Glenn had exploited would bring her to the subject she wanted to avoid: her part in sending Glenn to prison and his threats of revenge. “No,” she said carefully. “They would have been better off staying home and finishing school.”

  Mac studied her, as if he knew there was more to her story. But she wouldn’t say more. She still remembered how Glenn used to get the girls to open up, to share their problems with him. She remembered how he’d promise to make everything better, then would gradually take over their lives until they were so dependent on him they’d do anything he asked of them: take weight-loss drugs, take other drugs, hand over their earnings to pay for their drugs…and in a few cases even sleep with him, because he told them if they did he’d get them the best jobs. And the best drugs.

  Not that she thought Mac was capable of using and abusing people the way Glenn had. But she’d learned that trusting powerful men and relying on them, believing in their promises of protection, could lead to disaster.

  She knew Mac was powerful, not just because he seemed independently wealthy or was technologically savvy, not even because he was tall and no one had ever called him a freak. Simply his confidence, the way he navigated through the world, the way he gazed at her, the way he smiled…

  The man had charisma to spare. Charisma and power. And she wasn’t going to let down her guard with him.

  “Thank you for bringing this wonderful food,” she said as she drained her glass. “And the wine.”

  “Thank you for going over the reservations list with me,” he countered, lifting her empty glass from her hands and placing it on the tray. “Are you all right to drive home?”