CHAPTER NINE
Jacine
What a cluster fuck. I’m beginning to wonder about my ability to make these grown men act like adults.
“I’m sorry,” said Rory.
His words were surprisingly gentle for a physically huge man. Rory stood at six two with a bulky chest and biceps born of pounding drums for a living. Though he liked to sit behind the drum sets, he was the driving force behind his band Clash. Like many musicians he was multi-talented, and though it is usual for the band’s front man to be the band’s leader, in Clash’s case it was Rory.
The slanting sunlight casts a kind of halo in his red hair, and his green eyes glittered in a way that never came out in his band posters. He’d gained heft too, since his younger years, and I seemed to like him. He may have been number three in my affections when he played for Banshee, but now I found myself reassessing that position.
“You don’t have to apologize for those two,” I said. I bit my lip because I fully intended to check in with my father tonight. And crazily I found tears forming in my eyes.
“In a way I do. Maybe it’s fucked up, but I still think of those two like brothers. Here, my car is this way.”
He pointed in the general direction, but it didn’t take a hound dog to pick out his car. A cherry red Ferrari sat angled into two parking spots. No one was going to nick his precious baby. He clicked on the key fob, the doors unlocked with a click and he gallantly opened the door for me.
Aside from a driver, no one opened the door for me.
In New York, because I don’t have time for personal encounters, it never happens. Even if I did date, I doubt a man would do it. It’s a kind of backhanded snub to women’s independence, or least that’s the excuse for the modern man’s laziness in trying to woo a woman.
So Rory’s gesture, at once caring and masculine, overwhelmed me.
“Hey,” said Rory gently. “What’s this?” He swiped an errant tear from my cheek.
“Nothing,” I said as I sat on the soft leather seat. I buckled in with a too fierce tug on the belt.
“Yeah. I bet you cry all the time when two rock stars beat each other.” Rory gave me a rueful smile and shut the door.
I gave a half laugh, but in truth, I didn’t deserve even that small enjoyment. I felt like a bad daughter because I hadn’t seen my father all day. I worked all day getting the promos for the concert cranking, though I talked to him on the phone. And in a rush like a drenching New York rain, the weight of bearing the company on my shoulders and my father’s mini brush with death swept me. I’m glad I’m sitting because my body physically gave way to a bout of weakness that could have been the emotional strain, or a lack of food, or both.
Fiddling with the small, red strappy purse the ever detailed, Rose, my stylist, paired with this outfit, I pulled out the sunglasses she thought appropriate. They were a leopard print frame to match the leopard print open-toed mules I wore. Rose left photos of what I was supposed to wear with what, and the picture showed the model wearing the sunglasses on top of herhead. It pulled together the look, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Just wearing the cherry red duster when I’m used to New York black was daring enough.
And I am a PR maestro in LA? Without warning, the sense that I was an imposter in my own life collided with my usually rock solid self-confidence.
Engaged in my self-absorption, I didn’t notice that Rory gained the freeway, and I could see we were in for a long drive. The typical rush hour traffic clogged the roadway, but Rory proved to be a master of advanced lane changing. He used the engine power of the Ferrari to slice into openings between cars. The fading sun caught his ginger hair and the reddish stubble on his chin clenched in concentration infusing both with a sexy glow. The muscles of his arm flexed as his hand worked the stick shift and I could easily imagine that hand working me.
What the hell is wrong with me? First, randy thoughts about Tobias,an aborted hand job from Cole and to top it off with cunnilingus with Jersey? All thoroughly tantalizing but ultimately unfulfilling.
I needed to get laid.
Butnotwith one of my clients.
But the thrum of the stop/start of the Ferrari’s powerful engine as Rory navigated the treacherous lanes of LA traffic reverberated through me like a siren’s song. No wonder it is considered a sexy machine. It was sex on four wheels.
My panties are soaked, damn it, and I squirmed, swimming in the evidence of my arousal.
With relief, I spotted the exit to Hollywood Park, and I waved my hand to tell Rory to take it, but he merely nodded and zoomed off the freeway in the right direction.
My father’s house is at the edge of Griffith Park but technically a Hollywood Park address. He bought it after the market crash for pennies on the dollar because he is as brilliant with money as he is with clients. A modest home by Starland standards, the facade is unassumingly andunimpressive 1950’s plain red clapboard and boring rectangular windows. But that was my father. He believed in substance, not flash. I remember moving into it in my senior year of high school thinking it was a dump. I didn’t understand his penny-pinching ways until I accidentally ran across a bill for the private school he sent me to. That man put all his money into me. So I grew to appreciate this house because it represented my father’s love.
It’s most stunning feature however was not in the house, it was the thoroughly unobstructed view of the famous Hollywood sign from the back deck that jutted out over the slope the house perched on. My father sits out here at night, with his laptop and drink in hand. He says it reminded him of what was at stake for his clients if he screwed up.
He never screwed up.
Wanita, our housekeeper, opened the door and started in surprise to see me. She appeared to be heading out, and she held a couple of plastic containers of food.
“Oh, Miss Jacine, I was just on my way to see your father.”
