at his undisciplined fingers, and Aaron felt an odd heat on his face. A blush. Easily explained by the heat of the room, the presence of chemical additives and the disconcerting lack of oxygen.
“I never pretended to be a great example,” he muttered, and before she turned away, she smiled.
There was a bleak trickle of sweat down his neck because he enjoyed her smile. It made him warm and lethargic, and Aaron didn’t want to feel warm and lethargic, so he rubbed at his neck and concentrated on the Great Lily Massacre in the bud vase in the center of his table.
Not that it was enough. Out of the corner of his eye, he could observe her as the roller-ball pen scratched the well-thumbed pages of her Moleskin notebook. Careless and haphazard but energetic and slightly obsessed. He approved.
When she wrote, she talked to herself, reading aloud, and it wasn’t half-bad. A few dangling participles. Some verbs that could have been punchier, but overall, it was decent. He got caught up watching the movement of her mouth, and decided that her mouth wasn’t half-bad, either. It was fluid and expressive, never still, never concealing.
Oddly fascinated with her, Aaron forgot about the pungent smells and the cramped ache in his knees. It wasn’t that she was pretty, but the light in her face drew him in. A hum of energy radiated about her, not relaxing, not comfortable, but always magnetic. When she was paused in her work, she would ruffle her hair, mussing it up even more. Each time she raised her hand, the dowager glared. Not liking the glares, Aaron gifted the dowager his best crocodile smile. Instantly the stares stopped.
The drama of the world played around the younger woman, but she was immune to it all. He didn’t understand this ability to tune out the noises, and he wondered.
All too soon, the waiter came, presenting her with the check. As she pulled some cash from her overstuffed bag, she didn’t look Aaron’s way, and he told himself he was relieved. After all, he didn’t like to be disturbed. But then she rose, and he found himself supremely disturbed. He didn’t want to notice her, didn’t want to leer at her body like some undersexed boy, but it was impossible. Truly. She had breasts that would make any man want her. High lush curves that would just fit his palms.
Beneath the table, his cock throbbed painfully, and he told himself that it had been too long since he’d had sex. At one shining moment in time, his sexual appetite had been legendary. It was humiliating to realize he’d been reduced to an ordinary man with ordinary tastes and a hard-on that could bisect a brick.
Needing to focus his energies elsewhere, his fingers drummed on the wooden tabletop, hard and fast, an eerily carnal rhythm.
Thank God no one was there to see.
Except for her.
As she walked away, she glanced at his drumming fingers and then smiled at him, a quick nervous smile, not a sexual invitation, not that his body knew the difference. Stupidly he stared—and of all the human foibles, Aaron hated stupidity most of all—but he couldn’t help himself. For a second her eyes widened, zeroing in on him, cataloging each and every one of his human foibles, probably so she could pen them in her journal in her chicken-scratch scrawl.
Aaron looked hastily away. One innocent smile, and in his mind, he’d kissed her, stripped her and had her whispering his name between frenzied moans.
After she left, he calmed his oversexed blood and his undersexed cock, leaning back in his chair, breathing in the florid scent of rose like smelling salts.
In a few minutes, Aaron returned to his normally disagreeable state, and he smiled with relief, almost happy that Didi was late.
It was over an hour later when Didi finally showed, not that he should be surprised. There were many words to describe Didi Ziegler, punctuality not among them. She peered at the world through her owlish round glasses in a flamboyant red. People whispered that it was undiagnosed dementia to wear red past seventy. But Didi, who had broken hearts for nearly half a century, ignored the whispers and went airily on her way. And Aaron, who knew gossip to be only the most perverted form of the truth, chose to ignore them, as well.
“You’re late,” groused Aaron, obediently holding up his head as she kissed the air somewhere next to his ear.
“I like to see you squirm, darling. What sort of agent would I be if I didn’t torture my client?”
“A humane one.”
“You don’t want a humane agent. You want a viper, and we both know it. Save the lies for your pages. Speaking of …” She raised her pencil-line brows until they disappeared into the silvery wisps of her crisply styled hair. “Do we have progress yet, or are you still twiddling your thumbs? I suppose twiddling is preferable to other, more colorful activities. But the isolation, the provincial wilderness … the mind assumes the worst.”
Didi always knew the exact way to restore him back to equilibrium, and he flashed her a grateful smile. “Before you start the interrogation, I’d like to eat first. After the plates are cleared, we’ll progress to pointless chitchat wherein you tell me all sorts of frothy drivel, and I’ll pretend to care. Then I can complain about the state of the world, and the melting of the ice caps and ponder the fates of little baby seals.”
She cocked back her head and laughed, a rich belly laugh that caused heads to turn, and Aaron’s mouth twitched in amusement. “One of these days I will fire your worthless, delectable ass.”
“I’m the client, Didi.”
“And you keep bringing that up. A convenient truth that only muddies the patent unhealthiness of our business relationship.”
“Bite me,” he said with not a trace of malice.
“It’s a good thing I don’t have a full set of teeth, instead of these giant moons they call veneers. Tell me, Aaron, what happened to natural teeth, and natural boobs, and natural wrinkles? Ugly is a dying art form,” she said, patting her beautifully coiffed hair slyly.
“You wear it well.”
“If you call me Broom Hilda, you will die.”
“You always look lovely.” It was true. In his eyes, Didi represented the very best of the female sex. Razor-sharp, loyal, but with a large heart that few would ever see.
“I am not lovely, merely eccentric and egotistical. In the past, the men fell for it in droves.”
“They still do,” he said, and she beamed with approval.
After they ordered, they ate, and she dished the latest in the publishing world. Some old names, many new, and Aaron was glad he was longer a part of it. Moving north, “fleeing” as Didi termed it, had been the best decision of his life. Too bad she didn’t see it that way.
“I saw your father.”
“So?” he asked easily, shaking pepper over his plate, not really caring how much he used or where it landed.
“It was the Scribner dinner. He asked about you. He’s getting old and scrawny, much like the rubber chicken you are condemning to your well-seasoned hell. He looked heartbroken, as well. I thought you would want to know.”
“That’s the Scotch.”
“I could give him a message, although it would be a horrendous
