Authors: Anna Jeffrey
Her grandmother stood, spread the dress across the foot of the bed and smoothed out the fabric with her hands. “I made potato soup for supper last night and a loaf of yogurt bread. I was thinking of soup and toast for lunch. Would you like some?”
“That sounds good,” Shannon said, eager for her grandmother to leave the room so she could get out of bed.
“I’ll heat it up,” Grammy Evelyn said, still smiling. “It’ll take me just a few minutes.” She left the room, rocking from side to side in her little-old-lady gait.
Shannon sat up. She felt like hell. Her head ached. Every muscle was sore. Sex with Drake had been an athletic event. Then, she had followed up with a tense drive in the soupy weather with her jaws and shoulders taut as a tightrope all the way from Fort Worth.
Since the Piper mansion had been built in 1870, the bathroom adjoining her bedroom was
one end of a porch that had been closed in thirty or forty years back. A metal medicine cabinet with a mirrored door hung above an antique porcelain pedestal sink. She stood in front of it and stared at her reflection, only able to see her upper torso. She looked worse than she felt.
And she did indeed have a purple hickey the size of a golf ball just below her navel. On her pale skin, it purplish color competed with her tattoo.
Damn.
The thing would be weeks going away. She covered it with her hand and closed her eyes remembering the exact moment
Texas Monthly
’s Most Eligible Bachelor had put it there.
The bathtub was an old claw-foot with an overhead shower and a plastic curtain that slid all the way around it on an oval metal pipe. A clumsy and inconvenient set-up, but it gave total privacy. And that was what she wanted this morning while she bathed and further examined her body.
After shampooing her hair, she found two more hickeys on the insides of her thighs, one in such an awkward spot, she could barely twist her leg far enough to see it. That one had occurred on the kitchen counter, no doubt, when he’d had her pinned and his mouth had had free range of her most intimate parts.
The breath-stealing orgasms Drake had taken her to rushed into her memory. Sex with Justin Turnbow, or any man she had known, had never been like it was last night with Drake. How had he driven her to climax over and over and made her want him again even after she thought she couldn’t come again?
Experience,
her cranky alter-ego said.
The guy knows too much about women.
”
Shannon couldn’t argue the point.
Just thinking about how he had felt inside her set a tingle buzzing in the tiny core of her sex. She put her hand between her legs and cupped herself with her palm. With only a little help from her own fingers, she could come again right this minute.
God, she had been so needy. Embarrassingly so. She had given herself to him completely and had enjoyed it. Maybe celibacy wasn’t such a good idea for someone who liked sex as much as she used to before she gave it up.
After drying and straightening her hair, she wrapped herself in a heavy flannel robe and returned to the bedroom. She picked up
The Dress
from the bed and held it to her nose, testing. To her relief, the only odor she detected was Pleasures, the Estee Lauder fragrance she wore most of the time these days. Not too many years ago, an Estee Lauder product would have been out of her reach.
She carried the dress closer to the window and inspected it for damage. It appeared to be none the worse for wear. None of the mirror sequins looked to be missing. As she carefully hung it on its padded hanger and placed it in its own plastic storage bag, a flashback came to her of the day she and Christa had shopped for it at Neiman Marcus and the whispery debate they’d had in the dressing room:
“Oh, my God, that is you, Shannon,” Christa had said. “It’s sexy as all get out.”
But Shannon’s focus had been on the price tag. “It costs too much.”
“Hah. If I found a dress that made me look that good, I wouldn’t care what it cost. Buy it for yourself for a Christmas present. You’ve earned it. You’ve worked like a dog this year. C’mon. Go out and look at yourself in the three-way mirror. You look gorgeous.”
That had been pure malarkey, of course. Shannon had worked in retail stores for years,
knew the sales clerks at Neiman’s were paid commissions. She recognized puffery when she heard it. Still, the barrage of flattery had been too much to resist. She had bought
The Dress
.
As she hung it on the rack in her closet, she wondered if she would ever wear it again, Was there any point in spending the money to have it cleaned.?
She thought again of the moment she and Drake had first seen each other at the party. No man had ever looked at her as he had. And just like that,
The Dress
became worth every penny she had paid for it.
Finally, she ambled to the kitchen. She found her grandmother lifting the lid on a steaming pan sitting on one of the stove burners and releasing a homey aroma into the small room. No microwave for Grammy Evelyn. Eating nothing since lunch yesterday except a few canapés and a few bites of
Crème Brûlée
. Shannon was starved.
She poured herself a cup of coffee and walked to the refrigerator for cream. A dozen magnets her grandmother had collected were plastered on the refrigerator door. The one at eye-level said: BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL MAN IS AN ASTONISHED WOMAN.
“I thought potato soup sounded so good in this weather,” her grandmother said, ladling steaming creamy soup into thick crockery bowls. “That television weatherman said this storm is supposed to go away later today. But I don’t trust his forecasts. I have more faith in that woman forecaster. Did you have any trouble on the road, dear?”
Shannon had always wondered about Grammy Evelyn’s sarcasm toward men. “It was foggy and wet, but I took it slow. That’s why I got home so late.”
“Christa called. She’s eager to hear about your evening. As am I.”
“I’ll call her later,” Shannon said.
She sat down to eat at the small round oak table in the frilly Victorian breakfast room. Ivory crocheted lace shadowed the windows from the outside light. Mauve and blue floral-patterned chintz covered the chairs. A round blue antique rug lay on the floor under the round table. This room was a step back in time, which, for some reason, made Shannon feel secure.
Grammy Evelyn brought a china teapot and two delicate china cups and saucers to the table. Shannon had always thought having tea in china cups with her elderly grandmother in this era-gone-by setting was a fitting thing to do. A fantasy, like “
Alice in Wonderland
.”
As that thought crossed her mind, she thought again of last night. The entire evening had been one big fantasy. But it was more like a porn movie
.
”
Afterwards, Shannon called Christa.
“Come over,” her pal said.
“I thought I might just hole up for today and—”
“You will not! I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking about you all dressed up at that party. I want to hear all about it. You aren’t about to keep me waiting.”
Christa was the only person with whom Shannon shared any part of her personal life. “Okay, okay,” she said, laughing. “There’s plenty to tell. I’ll see you later this afternoon. I have to go to my office and do a few chores, then I’ll be over.”
****
Piper Real Estate was located in a forties vintage house Shannon had bought and had
remodeled and was making mortgage payments on. It wasn’t on the main street, but was just around a corner from the state highway that ran through town. It wasn’t open on Sundays unless she or one of her team had a customer. Usually, after taking Grammy Evelyn to church, she went into the office and spent the quiet afternoon updating her files and catching up on what she had neglected through the previous week.
Today, even in the silence and privacy of the empty office, she couldn’t concentrate. Instead of working, she sat at her desk, her eyes closed, her cheeks resting in her palms, while she replayed the previous evening, the hour or so in bed with a prince of Texas and the words he had murmured to her.
She could make neither heads nor tails of her emotions. On the one hand, what she felt was akin to grief over blowing her opportunity with a man who could be the man of her—or any woman’s—dreams.
On the other, she didn’t want a man—even one like Drake Lockhart—interfering with her life. For the first time ever, she was her own person, not relying on or worrying about what some guy was doing or thinking and she liked that feeling, had no plan to ever let it go. Independence. She had never known anything like it.
Besides, her experiences with the opposite sex had been so negative she didn’t trust men—any of them.
And she had no sooner had that thought than she returned to thinking about Drake and wondering how he had reacted when he awoke today and found her missing.
Despite having a hard time concentrating, she finished her tasks quickly and headed for Christa’s small house in one of Camden’s older neighborhoods near town. Christa had never left Camden. After high school graduation, she had played at going to a junior college until she married her first husband. She had gone to work for Vista Title Company as a clerk and researcher. Now, twelve years later, she was a closing officer.
When Shannon decided to open her own real estate company, Christa was who she had talked to first, who had convinced her she had what it took to run her own company.
By late afternoon, Shannon was sitting at her best friend’s kitchen table, drinking hot chocolate. Surrounded by the noise and commotion of Christa’s sons playing a video game and the spicy aroma of chili simmering in the Crockpot, Shannon made a full confession. She didn’t have to explain who Drake Lockhart was. Anyone in the real estate profession knew.
The blond friend leaned across the table, her big brown eyes alive and warm. “This is so exciting. What’s he like, really? I mean the things people have written about him—”
“Oh, Lord, Christa, he’s hard to describe. He’s charismatic. And intense. And he’s aggressive. A real no-holds-barred kind of guy. And he’s so…he’s just so…” She looked down, embarrassed. “I couldn’t tell him no. He’s persuasive.”
Christa’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, my God. Did he force you?”
“No, no.” Shannon quickly shook her head. “It was me. I could’ve left any time I wanted to.” The look in Drake’s eyes at the moment she consented flashed in her memory. “But I guess I didn’t really want to.”
“He’s so good-looking in his pictures,” Christa said.
Shannon nodded, thinking back again about seeing him cross the room to the bed and how she hadn’t been able to stop staring at him. “He looks better in person.”
Christa heaved a sigh and sipped her hot chocolate. “I can’t believe this. When you got that invitation from that other Realtor, who would have ever thought?”
“I know, right?” As another memory flitted by of Drake’s sleeping countenance, Shannon
touched her forehead between her brows. “He’s got this deep line here. It makes him look like he’s frowning. It never goes away.”
“Serious minded, huh? Do you think he’ll try to find you?”
“Lord, no, Christa. I’m just a chick he picked up in the bar. A one-night stand, you know?”