by Aya DeAniege
I applied lipstick while Lilly leaned over my shoulder, peering at her reflection as she played with her hair.
She had agreed to go with absolutely no argument, which I had found suspicious, but hadn’t brought up.
Lilly had heard no rumours of the Angelica brothers, and that seemed to intrigue her more.
She knew about all sorts of things. Her girls seemed to know everything, and give it over to Lilly for access to bars and clubs and free alcohol. Or just because they were drunk and stupid.
She hadn’t even argued about us getting ready at my place instead of hers.
“Your apartment still sucks,” she said.
“Shut up, or you can eat your own food,” I said before I pressed my lips together.
“Sam Angelica? What kind of name is Angelica?”
“I think it’s made up. Apparently, all those guys I slept with? Were his brothers.”
Okay, I might have left some information out when I had invited her to dinner.
She straightened slowly and nodded once.
“Oh, okay. That’s completely normal. I’ll take three, because I know I can handle that and you just take Sam. Since he owns the club and is loaded, he could be your sugar daddy.”
I straightened and glared at her as she laughed and left my bathroom. Growling, I followed her out and toward the door. We headed all the way out of the building before Lilly stopped and allowed me to catch up. She was still smiling as we slipped into the car.
All the way to the estate she chattered about other dinners she had been to with strange men that she had never met before and how those had gone for her.
Nearly all of them had ended in sex in some way.
Either the driver didn’t hear, or he was very professional. He didn’t even flinch as she went on about it. Though, she wasn’t overly descriptive about the sexual acts.
And his boss’s brothers had sex with strange women in bathroom stalls and booths at the club.
He was probably used to hearing a lot worse than Lilly giggling over past conquests.
I left the car first and waited just long enough for Lilly to get out behind me. Then it was my turn to leave her. She trailed along behind as we walked into the estate and were greeted by all four men.
Sam hadn’t been kidding. There was even a family portrait, an oil painting, on the wall as we walked in. The four men stood behind...
Sam’s secretary?
Was she like their aunt or something? Maybe that was why she was in the painting too. Maybe Sam believed in keeping family close.
I turned to look at Sam, but his attention was focused on Lilly behind me. His eyes were a little wider as he slowly focused his attention on me.
“This is Lilly,” I said, motioning to her as she stepped up beside me.
“Welcome, Lilly,” Sam said in that deep voice of his.
Not quite as deep as, uh.
I hadn’t gotten names, and I wasn’t comfortable referring to them as Irish, Black, and International.
I motioned to the other three and looked at Sam desperately. He frowned just slightly and glanced at his brothers.
“I’m sorry, did none of you introduce yourselves?” he demanded of his brothers.
They all looked ashamed of themselves. The Irish one scuffed his feet and elbowed the International one as the Black one tried to avoid eye contact with Sam.
“Really?” Sam asked, motioning to the Black one. “Gabe here may have been adopted.”
“That is unkind of you to say,” Gabe said quietly.
“Mike likes gardening,” Sam continued, motioning to the Irish one. “And Ralph is snooty.”
“Snooty?” Ralph asked, his eyebrows raising as he smoothed out his tie. “Snooty? Truly, I’d be ashamed of being your brother, if you weren’t hosting a dinner with such beautiful ladies. Grace, may I walk you to the table while my... brother finds his manners?”
“Who will walk Lilly?” I asked.
There was a moment of hesitation, then Mike stepped forward and smiled at her, offering his arm to her. That smile didn’t seem to reach his eyes as Lilly slipped her arm through his. She smiled at him, but her smile didn’t seem to reach her eyes either. It was as if they were both trying to look happy as Mike led Lilly away. Underneath it all was an annoyance.
Why so angry?
Ralph stepped up to me, offering me his arm. I smiled at him and slipped my arm through his, wondering yet again why I had agreed to this dinner.
Rich men don’t try to set their siblings up with women like me.
We walked through quite a grand estate. Everything seemed to be made of white marble, but it must have been faux marble, I didn’t think they still built entire buildings out of the stuff. If they ever had done such a thing.
I was led to one seat, Lilly was led to the seat across from me at the table. Sam sat at the head of the table, directly between us.
He smiled at both of us, and his smile did not meet his eyes, but I hardly expected it to after his comment in his office.
He may have been interested in me, but he was determined to push me toward his brothers, which was also odd, but I was still sitting at his dinner table as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I had to admit. I wanted to meet his brothers outside of the club, to see if they still had that effect on me. It was hard to turn down that kind of attention. I had even allowed Lilly to lend me a dress and do my hair and makeup for dinner. Just to do something a little different, to seem like I could fit in.
She hadn’t overdone anything, the dress was rather conservative, a blue cotton material that had capped sleeves and went to just below my knees. She had even brought stockings for me to put on, which made it look like I wasn’t wearing stockings at all.
Kind of beside the point of stockings, wasn’t it?
“Wine,” Gabe said, reaching over me to fill my glass. “Sam said that you enjoy a white wine. I wonder what my dear brother did to get that out of you.”
“He didn’t even ask, I just told him,” I said.
“Most people do seem to like serving red at dinners,” Lilly said.
She wasn’t flirting with the brothers. She wasn't her normal, bright, bubbly self. She smiled, even appeared happy, but it was a fragile veneer, and I couldn’t simply ask why. I would have to wait until we were alone.
“Red does go well with most food one might serve at dinner,” Sam said.
Not to Lilly, but to the table. I don’t think the pair of them had met eyes again since that moment in the greeting hall.
Two people dressed all in black walked in with a covered trolley. They served us food, then took their leave silently. As I watched them go, I felt something on my leg.
I looked up at Lilly expecting her to be the one touching me, to get my attention somehow. She was sipping her wine and looking at Ralph. She certainly wasn’t the one doing it.
A foot grazed up my leg as everyone picked up their utensils. From the direction it was coming from, it could only be Sam. He seemed completely oblivious to what he was doing or at least bent on ignoring my reaction to his touch. It sent a cold wash through me, followed by a fire that prickled through my flesh. Goosebumps appeared on my arms as I reached for my fork.
I grazed my teeth over my lower lip. It was an unconscious motion that I caught myself halfway through.
Instead, I focused on my food as Sam caressed my leg. Up and down, up and down.
He was doing it under the table without moving the rest of his body. It looked like nothing at all.
I sipped my wine to give myself something to do and turned away from Sam as he slipped his foot along the backside of my leg. When he grazed over the back of my knee, I twitched in a knee-jerk reaction that was quite literal. Lilly squawked and jumped in her chair as she glared at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, just a, uh, spasm.”
Behind his wine glass, I saw Sam smile slightly.
He’s enjoying this.
Biting my bottom lip
again, I poked at my food. I am not a lip biter, I swear. Normally I just blush and walk away, but I couldn’t do that at a dinner. Instead of my usual tactics, I bit my lip to prevent myself from moaning as Sam leaned forward at the table.
Under the table, his hand settled on my leg, then splayed out and grazed upward, pulling my skirt up as his fingers tickled me through the stockings. As Sam sat back, his fingers grazed off my leg, leaving cold trails of goosebumps in their wake.
The touch was brief, his fingers flickering over my stockings for just a moment before they were gone again. As they left, I found myself clenching my jaw for want of protest. I wanted his hand to remain, but already he was moving his hand above the table, reaching for his glass of wine.
What is wrong with me?
That was not like me at all. Normally I was the one who brushed off a hand.
I ate a little and glanced across the table. The other three were busy making conversation back and forth.
They were not directly excluding me, but they weren’t pestering me constantly either. Given what Sam had said, I half expected them to be drooling over me, or creepily trying to include me in everything.
Instead, their manners were reserved and very polite. Not as if they were ignoring me, but as if they were trying to carry on a polite conversation as I carried on another with Sam. Except the conversation between Sam and I wasn’t actually happening.
“My brothers and I were taught civility,” Sam said to me as if seeing the question on my face. “A woman is not here solely for our entertainment.”
“No, you’re here for our entertainment,” Lilly said with a smile.
Sam smiled, but there was sadness to that smile as he nodded once.
“That is true in a way. Many women see how we are and think that to be the entire truth. It can make it difficult to find someone that you want to spend your time with. We are used to women throwing themselves at us. And the makeup and dresses, the dates and drinks. We’ve seen it all, but at some point, a certain type of woman decided that only she was to have access to us and she’s not the type of woman that can hold our attention for long.”
“You mean beautiful women,” I said.
He gave a small shrug.
“Women are told to settle down. Men are told to only look for gorgeous women who meet the current beauty standards of the world. Except those standards are constantly changing. What is beautiful today will not be beautiful in ten years. I don’t want a fashion. I want a woman who I can wake up to every day for eternity, look her in the eyes and just know. She’s mine.”
Lilly picked up her wine as her lips pressed into a thin line. She gave me a brittle smile before she sipped it.
She may have been thinking of her ex. Even though they had been broken up at least as long as I had known Lilly, she was still hung up on the guy as if it had happened the day before. It had been mutual, but afterwards, she had realised it had been a horrible mistake, except they couldn’t be together any longer.
Though she never said why.
I ate a little, then shrugged because I couldn’t come up with anything else to say.
“All God’s children are beautiful,” Mike said from his place beside Lilly. “The physical is only one part of the being.”
“It is,” Ralph said. “But my problem with women is the alterations they do with makeup and hairspray. Why can’t they be comfortable in their skins? I realize the culture says that without that lipstick you look bad, that you can’t leave the house without mascara and all the rest, but even a hundred years ago, a painted face meant a whore.”
Lilly had once said something about that to me. Something about how women had claimed makeup as a way to rebel against men, but the patriarchy had used that to subjugate them once more.
Considering I didn’t normally wear makeup, I hadn’t been paying attention.
“You do realize both women sitting at our table are wearing makeup?” Sam asked.
His eye seemed to twitch as he looked at his brother down the table. Ralph shrugged.
“Sometimes is fine. Besides, I’ve seen her real face. There’s nothing wrong with it. But put her in front of one of those makeup specialists, and they’ll say she’s all wrong. Needs to do this, or that, or add extensions to… What do they offer extensions on now?”
“Eyebrows and hair,” Gabe said.
“Eyelashes and hair,” Lilly corrected.
“Right, they remove the eyebrows,” Gabe grumbled. “The eyebrows protect the eyes from dust and falling dirt; they have a purpose.”
“While we like fine clothing, the clothing does not make a person,” Sam said. “If I like a woman and won’t date her based on what designer she wears, I should be re-evaluating my decisions, not thinking poorly of her. Or, if I want her to wear something, I should purchase it for her.”
“Is there anything you don’t like?” I asked.
“Uncleanliness,” Sam said. “Soap and water, brush through the hair if the hair will permit such a thing. That’s all.”
“And if your woman has hairy legs?” Lilly asked.
Sam shrugged.
“Unless she has a problem with me growing hair where I will, it’s none of my business if her legs are hairy. I mean, what’s it matter? Is… is the hair capable of summoning demons? Will it create so much static electricity that we explode? I have hairy legs. A little hair on my chest as well.”
He rubbed his chest with the back of his fingers, right where his buttons were. He even looked a little proud of himself as he smiled at Lilly.
“The physical can change on a daily basis. What is in fashion today may not be in fashion tomorrow. Choosing a partner based on whether she shaves her legs isn’t really in my interest. I’m not looking for a woman who is in the crowd. The herd doesn’t matter to me. My success and the success of any children I might have isn’t based on shaved legs or following fashion. I don’t think anything that my family does can be said to be fashionable.”
“Are you trying to reassure me, or scare me off?” I asked.
“Reassure you,” Sam said. “I’ve seen that look before. It’s the look of a woman, surrounded by good-looking men, who is afraid to decide because they are supposedly out of her league. You are just as beautiful as any of the women who come to my club, possibly more beautiful. The difference between them and you is that they put on masks. They paint themselves up and pretend to be something that they are not.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Lilly answered before I did.
“Some of my girls are butt-ass ugly without the makeup,” Lilly said. “It’s practically witchcraft, what women can do with makeup these days to alter their look.”
Sometimes, she got like that. She would interrupt and just go on and on until the conversation’s topic changed. Especially if she felt like someone was bringing up an awkward topic.
In this case, the topic of what I thought of the odd arrangement. Sitting at a table as they waited for me to choose one of them?
I should have questioned that, but at the back of my mind was that little voice saying to go with it.
As I thought that, I looked up and caught Gabe looking me over. I flushed and focused on Sam, who was looking at Lilly in surprise.
“Right?” Sam said. “They can completely change their features with makeup, oh, but heaven forbid you suggest they go without because it’s tantamount to making them go naked.”
“Except they basically go naked anyhow,” Lilly said. “Suzy wore this dress on Saturday that was a sheer material. You could see her nipples and everything. No one had to reach up her skirt to know that she wasn’t wearing underwear, they could see it.”
“Exactly. And if a woman wants to go naked, by all means, but don’t get upset over going without makeup as if I’m making you go naked when you’re already going naked.”
“It’s just insanity,” Lilly said with a shake of her head.
“I was just never taught, and never owned makeup,” I said.
I shrugged. “After going without my whole life, it just feels wrong. Like, who am I trying to kid?”
“Isn’t vanity a sin?” Lilly asked.
“Maybe,” Sam said. “That would be something to ask Michael, not me.”
Lilly made a sound but didn’t turn to ask Michael the question. Instead, she ate a little. The rest of the conversation through dinner was boring, with little to comment on. Sam didn’t touch me under the table again.
I regretted that.
The plates were cleared away. Once the servers had left, Lilly cleared her throat in a bit of an awkward fashion, apparently wanting to draw the attention of others.
“I need to relieve myself,” she said. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“I will show you,” Sam said, standing.
“You could just tell me.”
“I would much rather show you.”
Had he changed his mind?
The two of them left, with Lilly walking ahead of Sam. Her, at least, I could read. She was irritated and wasn’t pleased with Sam’s attention. Lilly might end up choosing a brother, but not before I had made my choice. She would say that’s because she didn’t want any hard feelings.
She could get lots of men. This, though, was the first time that there were men fighting over my attention.
“Grace, could I show you the gardens?” Ralph asked.
“Certainly,” I said, needing the distraction.
I stood and followed Ralph out of the dining room. The walk out of the estate was short, the dining hall was at the back of the building it seemed, and positioned right near the doors. Perhaps to allow for easier entertaining.
“Sam is not interested in Lilly,” Ralph said as he put some distance between us.
“What? I didn’t think that,” I said.
“You did,” he said, he smiled at me. “It’s okay, Grace. Few could put up with Sam. Most want to give him a try because few can resist his looks, let alone his charm when he turns it on.”
“Then, why are we in the garden alone?” I asked.
“I wanted to speak with you, without Gabe or Mike listening in on us,” he said. “They both would pay a great deal of attention to you, and you’d probably be very happy with them. But I think you’d be happier with Sam. It’s just… Sam had his heart broken a long time ago, and he’s never quite been the same since.”
