At first, Bronte had written him off as a little too loud, a little too confident. He was from Midland, Texas, for chrissake. But in that moment of crosscurrent intimacy amid the melee, she had a little recognition of her own desire to ally herself with someone who might be a little too loud or a little too confident. For once, she wanted to be the one who didn’t have to carry the conversation. Or the luggage, for that matter.
The rational, Gloria Steinem part of her railed (My mother marched on Washington for this?), but there it was. The shameful truth: a latent desire to be arm candy. To be taken care of.
“Hey,” he said.
He’d left the conversation of which he had been, as usual, the center of attention and was standing next to her at the makeshift bar. Half-empty bottles of Belvedere Vodka and Johnnie Walker Blue and Myers’s Rum were scattered across the black-granite countertop of David and Willa’s narrow, modern kitchen.
“Hey,” Bronte answered back as she poured herself a glass of red wine.
The two of them were temporarily alone in the relatively quiet space.
“So,” he asked, “you think you’ll go visit Willa and David in London after they move back?”
“I hope so. I’ve only been there once, but I loved it.” She took a sip of wine and waited for him to carry on the conversation.
“What’d you think of the show?” he asked.
“What show?”
“The concert at Madison Square Garden!” He smiled. “I thought everyone here had been there.”
“Oh, I didn’t go.”
Another friend, who was bombed, stumbled into the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the refrigerator, then weaved between the two of them.
“Hey, Bron,” he slurred.
Bronte smiled as she watched the poor guy bump into the doorjamb on his way out, then she looked up to see Mr. Texas staring at her with something akin to interest or mischief.
“What could have possibly kept you away?” he drawled.
She looked into her wineglass, then back up into his eyes. “It was a flip of the coin, but I ended up choosing the Rothko show at MoMA over the concert. My cousin is moving to L.A. and it was our last chance to hang out before she moves.”
“I don’t think I would’ve missed that concert for anything, much less some grim museum exhibit. I’ve been to that Rothko Chapel in Houston, darlin’, and I thought it was pretty lame.”
Bronte laughed. She wasn’t sure she had ever heard anyone dismiss Rothko. Or call her darlin’. If he had still been alive to meet him, her intellectual father would have absolutely despised this man.
“What kind of art do you like? The dogs playing poker?”
He smiled. “Yeah, I love that bull dog. The dangling cigarette. He’s definitely got a full house.”
“I know you are being purposely unintellectual,” she said.
“Life is grand; why struggle with all those suicidal abstract expressionists?”
From anyone else, she might have been offended, but he had this uncanny way of making her academic interest seem, if not foolish, at least needlessly difficult.
“Yeah.” She looked at him over the rim of her wineglass and wondered if he was drunk. He had a hint of mobility around his mouth, and his eyes were unsteady. But he seemed sober enough to keep his attention firmly on Bronte’s lips.
“So, you want to go for a walk?”
She laughed again. “It’s almost two in the morning. Where would we go for a walk?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinkin’ I could walk you home. You know, how one does.”
He was ramping up the Texan drawl and she had to admit it was pretty damn sexy. She hadn’t been attracted to anyone for ages. It felt good to have the warmth of his gaze on her. She’d been so focused on scratching her way to a level or two above entry level in the advertising business that her eye had simply been elsewhere. She was adept at compartmentalization. If she was focused on work, she was focused on work; she wasn’t 90 percent focused on work and 10 percent focused on seducing someone.
Bronte had looked at these post-college years as the pay-your-dues chapter. She was willing to do just about anything to earn the respect of her boss and her colleagues, to prove that she wasn’t some airhead who was working for a few years until she found a husband or hop-scotched to another industry. Whatever it took, she was going to be a kick-ass advertising account executive. She wasn’t going to wait around for anyone to whisk her off her feet.
But.
This man was proving to be pretty awesome in the whisk department. Broad, blond, confident, jovial. He reminded her of Kipling’s Kim, little friend of all the world. But big.
“Have you ever read Kim by Rudyard Kipling?”
“Is that like The Jungle Book? I’ve watched that cartoon with my nieces.” His smile was inclusive and naughty.
Every guy who entered the kitchen to grab a beer saluted him with a mix of respect and camaraderie. A string of “Dude!” and “Hey, dude!” and “What a show, dude!” punctuated by high fives and emphatic nods constantly stalled their incipient conversation.
“Why are they congratulating you on the concert?” Bronte asked in one of the lulls.
He laughed. And it was as if a great bass guitar had strummed through her. “They’re not congratulating me! We were just all agreeing how great it was. Shared pleasure and all that.”
He slowed his voice there at the end, and even though she knew it was some trick of seduction that he probably practiced (or no longer needed to practice because it came so easily), she still gave herself over to the warm flow of desire that it created.
“I like the sound of that,” Bronte said softly.
Shared pleasure and all that, she repeated to herself in her mind. She would like to know more about “all that.”
Megan Mulry Page 10
