As we exited the bar, we passed a hawker for a drag show. “Opening tonight! Wham Bam Thank You Glam! See our gorgeous ladies sparkle!” A poster looked out at me from the window of the club featuring a glamorous creature in a dazzling all-silver gown. The hat store clerk. Too bad I wasn’t in the mood for theater.
Within a block of elbowing our way through the loud, unruly crowd and spotting no less than five bridesmaid and bachelor parties, one arrest, and three instances of tit-flashing, Neil pulled me off the main drag and onto a quieter street. I looked around nervously at every face, every car. It didn’t help that the tequila had made me just a little bit fuzzy. It had caught the last bubbles of my drunkenness from the tiki bar and whipped them up into a froth, a weirdly giddy mood enhanced by exhaustion and spent fear. A mood lightened by having Neil next to me.
Neil’s arm was still wrapped around my shoulders, protective if not possessive. “Are you OK?” he asked again.
“Yes. I’m OK. Now I’m just kinda drunk.”
He laughed. “I shouldn’t be laughing.”
“Please laugh. If we don’t laugh, then we have to cry, and I’ve had enough of that for the night.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, pulling me more tightly against his body. His noticeably firm body. He’d been hiding a hunk of sexiness under that nerd wardrobe, I was sure of it.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m having a great time.”
He laughed again. “We’re almost to the hotel. Then you can get some rest.”
“I don’t particularly want the evening to end on a note of dread,” I said. “Maybe one more drink?”
He looked at me askance. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
“You!” came a deep, island-accented voice from behind us, and I jumped halfway out of my skin as Neil whirled, pushing me behind him.
I peeked around him to see a group of eight or ten bewildered tourists led by a colorfully dressed woman wearing a head scarf. “You!” she said again, pointing to Neil, then waving at him to move aside. Yeah, she meant me.
“I don’t think so,” Neil declared.
“Oh, stop it now, my boy, and let her come forward. This is what I was telling you about, my friends!” she called to her little tour. The men and women seemed pale and dull under the street light as they crowded up behind the dark and beautiful woman in her flowing gown, dozens of necklaces and jangling bracelets. “Sometimes you can see in the aura a person in need. My child, come here.”
“I think it’s OK,” I whispered to Neil. Besides, I didn’t think this voodoo priestess or whatever she was would woo-woo me with all these people watching. I stepped gingerly out from behind Neil.
“You are in danger!” she said.
My mouth dropped open. “How did you know?”
The tourists gasped at this validation of her talents. She stepped closer. “Take this, my dear.” She lifted a black leather cord from around her neck strung with a pointy tooth wrapped in silver wire, flanked by colorful beads. “From the ancient creature of the swamp. It will give you protection.”
“Creature of the swamp? Do you mean an alligator?” I barely managed to avoid blurting out that I could get gator-tooth gear at every beach-towel emporium in Bohemia Beach.
“You are skeptical. You must believe!” she bellowed as I tried to hold my ground, flashing back to my father’s preaching in his storefront church. “This is special. Blessed by me. Wear it.” She looped it over my neck. Then she looked at Neil. “Protection is very valuable.”
What a scam! Neil shrugged, a smile playing about his lips, and dug out his wallet. He handed the woman a ten. She gave him a hard look, and he handed her another ten.
“Go in peace and love,” she shouted, looking from him to me, and in spite of myself, a shiver ran down my spine. She leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear. “You cannot get back what the wind has taken away.”
Then she was herding the tourists down the street. “To my shop, where we will ask for blessings!”
We waited until they’d turned a corner and then looked at each other.
“What the hell was that?” Neil asked.
I was still mulling the priestess’s remark about the wind. “I don’t know, but I’m wearing this thing every day until I get home. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, though I didn’t really feel like I had a choice,” Neil said with good humor. He took my hand this time and led me toward the turn that would take us to the hotel. His grip was strong and dry and warm, and it sent a slow-burning thrill through my entire besotted body.
I was nervous. On one level I was scared after tonight’s attack. On another I was gently blitzed. On a third I was freaked out by the voodoo tour guide. And lastly, I was wondering where things were going with Neil. Were they going somewhere? It felt like it. I was up for the ride.
I knew we were close to the hotel when I heard the tuba chugging bass notes on a tune I didn’t recognize. We were back among the ceaseless activity outside the Hotel Lebeau.
“Where’d everybody go?” I asked, suddenly remembering our fellow bartenders.
“Oh, crap, I was supposed to message them. They were worried about you, too.” To my regret, he dropped my hand, pulled out his phone and tapped. My phone pinged in my purse as well.
“Was that you?” I asked, pulling it out to read it: “Pepper’s OK, but she was threatened. Be careful, everyone. Don’t go out alone.”
“I added you to the Bohemia Bartenders message group,” Neil explained.
“Thanks.” Warmth above and beyond the alcohol suffused me, and then I thought of my friends and whether they were in danger. “Are they going to be OK?”
“I think the trombonist will look out for Melody,” he said wryly, stowing his phone again. “He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. The guys were talking about hitting a couple of the high-end craft cocktail bars.”
“Damn it, I’m sorry.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m sure you would’ve wanted to go with them.”
He paused outside the lobby doors and put his hands on my shoulders. “All I wanted to do was make sure you were all right.”
His hands on me, the laughter nearby, the gleaming facade of the old hotel, the cabs coming and going—every sensation coalesced into a whirlwind around us, and we stood in its calm center, looking at each other. He was going to kiss me. Again. I closed my eyes.
“We’d better get you inside.” His hands had left me, and my eyes flew open to see him holding the door for me as people shifted around us.
Damn it. I swallowed and followed. I was off-kilter. I didn’t want to go to bed feeling like this, even if I was going to bed alone.
“One more drink?” I suggested again.
“All right.” Neil had a helpless look on his face. “People have been giving me samples left and right. I have some interesting stuff in my room. Would that be OK? Or would you prefer the bar?”
Huh. So what did that make me if I chose his room? I didn’t care. “I’d love to try some new stuff.”
“Cool. It’s hard to find time to sample everything.” He led the way to the elevator.
“What, no stairs? And how is it that you are not drunk?”
“It’s been a while since the tiki bar,” he said. “Nothing sobers me up like worry. And I have a feeling my tolerance is better than yours.”
“Bigger isn’t necessarily better,” I scoffed.
“That’s not what I hear.”
I looked at him in shock, then nearly collapsed in a gust of laughter. He laughed, too, helping me into the elevator when it opened. We joined eight other revelers in the tiny space. I swear, at this point, everyone and everything in the Hotel Lebeau smelled of alcohol, but we survived the packed bodies and popped out at the fourth floor.
“I need to stop in my room,” I said when we reached our little corridor.
“Sure. I mean, if you want to go to sleep … ”
“Two minutes.”
“Do you want me to check it first?”
I shook my head. “If you hear a scream, come running.” But he did have a point. I opened the door cautiously, turned on the light and checked the closet before using the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and the horrors of the night came back to me. Among them, my hair. And the ruined dress, tainted with paint, a reminder of how close I’d been to—to something very bad. I yanked it off, kicked off my shoes, removed my glasses, washed off my face, combed out my hair and slipped a soft, casual, sleeveless tropical dress over the crinoline. It paid to have emergency outfits.
Feeling better, I took Neil’s medal out of my purse and opened my door.
“Sorry I took so long,” I said when I realized Neil was still standing in the hall.
He smiled. “I wanted to be sure I could hear you scream.”
“At least the tuba player isn’t as loud tonight.”
“I think he’s around the corner.” He held his key card up to his lock, then opened the door for me to enter. As he ducked into his bathroom, I looked around. The room was a mirror of mine, small but elegantly old-fashioned. The bed was perfectly made. That’s the beauty of hotels and also the trickery. I wondered if Neil made his bed at home. Was he a neatnik? A horrible slob? Hell, I didn’t even know where he lived.
Personally, I didn’t make my bed at home, but I pulled the duvet up so it was more or less neat, and I tried to keep the main rooms of my duplex clean. As for the closets—it wasn’t a bad idea to wear a helmet when opening them.
Neil emerged and gestured to the desk, which was almost covered in little bottles. “So what do you want to drink?”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Yeah. They used to have a lot more of this kind of stuff at the seminars and tastings, but now most of it exchanges hands behind the scenes. Bar owners like me get a lot of it. Everybody wants us to carry their liquor.”
“But I’m a bar owner. Half of one, anyway.”
“But you didn’t register till the last minute, right? I’ve been registered for months, plenty of time for people to add me to their lists, plus I was a presenter, which means I got a nice swag bag.”
“And this.” I handed him the medal.
“You sure you don’t want to keep that in your purse?”
“Ha ha,” I said without humor. “You have the Frilly Fairy? We’ve been talking so much about it, I want to try it.”
“Yes. It’s really nice. Even their Vexatious Vodka isn’t bad, but don’t tell anyone I said that.” I giggled as he produced a couple of rocks glasses with logos on them—more swag—and poured us each a finger of the gin.
I took the glass and sat on the end of the bed. Neil sat in the desk chair at an annoyingly courteous distance, eyeing me as I sniffed the gin. The botanicals tickled my nose, floral and spicy. I inhaled deeply, then took a sip.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess their award wasn’t undeserved.”
“They’re good,” he said. “They have a Navy strength gin, too, and they’re experimenting with rum, but that has a little ways to go.”
I knocked back the gin. “What else you got?”
“Well …” He had this look like he wanted to caution me. Whereas I shot him a look that said, If you lecture me about drinking right now, I will stab you with a pair of ice tongs. And yes, I knew ice tongs weren’t particularly sharp. Which would make them all the more painful as stabbing instruments.
He drank down his gin, too, and set down his glass. He loosened his tie and slipped it off, dropping it over the back of his chair. I held my breath. Then he unbuttoned a button. Then another one. Then he popped open the buttons of his vest. Then he stopped loosening things and picked out a flask-size bottle. Damn it.
“This is a wicked good bourbon out of Kentucky. Twelve-year-old. Want to try it?”
I swallowed, maintaining my buzz, trying to maintain my composure. “Got ice?”
“In the mini fridge.”
I was closer, so I set my glass on the desk, opened the fridge and pulled an ice tray from the tiny freezer. It was a red square silicone tray divided into fourths, so it made four big cubes, the kind that were perfect in a glass of whiskey. “I can’t believe you have this.”
He grinned. “I’d like to say I remembered to bring it from home, but it was in the swag bag, too.”
I rolled my eyes and plopped a cube in each of our glasses, then put the tray back in the fridge. “Hit me.”
He chuckled and poured enough whiskey into our glasses to almost cover each fat cube.
I sat on the end of the bed again, a little closer to him this time, and held up mine. “To new friends.” Only the way I said friends, it implied a lot more. Hey, I was almost drunk.
Neil looked me in the eye. “Here’s champagne to our real friends and real pain to our sham friends.”
I guffawed. “Did you just make that up?”
“Francis Bacon,” he said, taking a deep sip of the whiskey.
I followed suit. “How do you have all this stuff in your head?”
“Slow nights behind the bar. Gotta read something.”
“Cocktail books,” I said. “I need to do more of that. I mean, I read yours, of course.”
“You did?” He visibly brightened.
“Well, duh. Of course I did. You’re fucking brilliant.” I drank some more to cover up my embarrassment. Now I was drunk, for real and sure and true. And when I was drunk, my halfhearted campaign to clean up my language really went out the window.
“That means a lot, coming from you,” he said, his voice low and warm.
“Aw, stop it.”
“I mean it. What are you doing?”
I was wrestling the crinoline out from under my dress. I pulled it off my legs and dropped the puffy, frilly pink thing next to the bed. “Sorry. It itches.”
He looked like he was torn between laughing and—oh, my. That spark of heat was back in his eye. He took another sip of bourbon.
“Are you drunk again?” I asked.
“Not nearly enough,” he said.
“Enough for what?”
“For this.” He put the glass down and sat next to me on the bed. He took my glass and set it on the desk as well, then cupped my chin, searched my eyes, leaned in …
The kiss was even better this time, because he initiated it. Because I knew he wanted me. Because he chose this moment, and I dove into it, opening to him, to the delicious bourbon and Neil cocktail that made me higher than a parasailing parrot over Bohemia Beach.
I wasn’t making much sense.
I pushed his vest off his shoulders, and he let it drop. He moved his mouth to my neck, the sensitive spot behind my ear, and I moaned.
And he jumped back as if he’d been stung. “What the hell am I doing?”
“I don’t know, but I liked it,” I said, breathless, reaching out for him.
He dropped back into the desk chair. “Whoa, now.”
“You started it! Are you going to lecture me about human resources again?”
He laughed, and then I laughed.
“Come here,” I said.
He shook his head. “We can’t do this now.”
“We damn well can.”
“Pepper.” He moved slowly and sat next to me on the bed. “You’re drunk. I don’t want to do this—I mean, I do want to do this, OK?”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I don’t want to do it when you’re drunk. I want you to know what you’re doing.”
“Baby, I know what I’m doing,” I said in my best Mae West accent.
He exhaled. “Oh, boy. No. No, you can’t do this.” Talking to himself. I could relate.
“Neil, honey?” I ran a hand over his trim beard, leaned in and nuzzled his neck, wrapping my arms around him.
“Not tonight, Pepper,” he said, but his tone said he was struggling. And a glance down confirmed my conclusion.
Good, damn it. I wanted him to struggle if he was rejecting me again.
He gently disentangled my arms from his person and stood. “You’d better go. We’ll have breakfast in the morning, OK?”
“Oh my God. I cannot believe you are throwing me out.”
“It’s not like that—”
“Yes, it is. Yes, it is!”
“Pepper, please. It’s because I respect you.”
“I don’t want you to fucking respect me! I want you to—” When I realized what I was about to say, I put my hand over my mouth to keep it in. He had a pained look on his face, and I felt dizzy. The liquor hit me hard, all of a sudden, and all the stress and terror of the evening came rushing back to me. I looked up at him and spoke in a small voice. “Listen. Just listen for a second. If you don’t want to ravish me, fine. But don’t let me sleep alone tonight, OK?”
He let out a long breath, his face softening. He sat next to me again and gathered me in his arms. “OK, Pepper. Stay with me. I’ll keep you safe.” He kissed my neck again, but this time, it wasn’t as hot. Not quite as hot.
“Undress me.”
He pulled back a little, his face still reflecting his inner struggle, and looked me over. I leaned forward and cocked my head, expectant. After a moment, he ran his hands over my bare shoulders, checked out my packaging, then reached down and grabbed my hem. Awkwardly, as I shifted my body, he peeled the dress over my head and handed it to me. I tossed it to the side.
“Jesus,” he said, his eyes wide as he scanned me in my matching green bra and panties.
I was just drunk enough to pop off my bra as he stared, drop it to the floor and slip under the covers. Half asleep, I watched him as he tried to put his eyeballs back into his head. He slowly took off his formal shirt, shoes, socks and pants, leaving on his black boxer briefs (oh, my!), which were noticeably strained, thank you very much, and a clingy, plain white T-shirt that suggested a lean, muscled torso. But I didn’t get to savor the sight. He turned off the light and slid into bed next to me.
If I’d been a little braver, I would’ve tried to make something happen then, but things had shifted again between us. I didn’t know where they were going, and I was too tired to worry about it. But in a moment, he pulled me close to him, wrapping an arm around me, warm and strong.
I relaxed into him, liking the feel of my breasts rubbing up against his shirt, his hard chest.
He probably liked it, too.
“Goodnight, Pepper,” he whispered.