Vicki looked at herself, and at Carol, wryly. “And I’m drawing attention?”
Carol’s distress faded into a smile. “Obviously. You’re a hot young blonde who’s come to town. That’ll get anybody’s attention.”
“Oh, God, ew. I don’t want that kind of attention from him. Grumpy old man. Seriously, though, he bothers you, huh? I’ll try to stay out of his way.”
“I don’t think he’s dangerous or anything. Just mean, and there’s no reason to engage with him if you can avoid it. Oh my God, no, we’re going to miss Kate’s!” Carol put on a burst of speed and ran to the cafe just before the owner flipped the door sign to ‘closed,’ and, laughing, Victoria followed her. It would be a nice enough year in Virtue, and that was all that mattered.
CHAPTER 2
FIVE MONTHS LATER
“Mr. Z?”
Zane Bellamy’s assistant tapped on the door, making him look up from a desk full of sketches. He was wearing orange, but Dion always wore orange. It looked terrific with his deep brown skin tones, but more importantly from Zane’s perspective, it made him easily identifiable. It was embarrassing to not automatically recognize the man who had been his assistant for over nine years now, but Zane had more or less come to terms with his face blindness. His wolf was better at recognizing people, but also didn’t care much about humans. Zane didn’t dare rely on it to navigate a world where most people seemed to be able to recognize and remember each other’s faces even after brief meetings.
Speaking of which, he frowned briefly at the calendar beneath his sketchpad. “I’m sure I don’t have a meeting today?”
Dion shook his head. “No, sir. I’m the only person who’s going to bother you today.”
“Thank God. What’s up?”
“The mail came, that’s all. They’ve drawn a winner for the Starlight Ball lottery.”
Zane squinted, trying to recall the lottery’s details to mind. “Is that the one where I agreed to make a couture gown for a woman off the street?”
“Technically, I think anyone could enter, but yes, sir.”
“Right, of course. In that case, am I making a couture gown for a woman or a man?”
Dion grinned. “A woman. Although I assure you I entered the contest, and am positively devastated that I didn’t win.”
“You didn’t need to win. I promised you years ago that I would design your wedding dress anyway. Tell me about our contestant winner.” Zane gestured to the chair across from him, then twisted his mouth as he realized it, like his desk, was covered in sketches and sketchbooks. The walls were, too, for that matter. He’d give up on normal walls a long time ago, and had cork board almost everywhere that wasn’t windowed. There were patterns pinned to the wall, and the sketches that went with them, and very often photographs of the finished product, usually on someone extremely rich, famous, or beautiful. Often all three at once.
Dion, long since accustomed to his boss, picked an entire stack of sketches up off the chair without dislodging a single paper and put it all neatly on the floor so he could take a seat. “I believe I’m accumulating wedding costume promises at the rate of roughly one a year. By the time I find a man who’ll have me, you’ll be making me an entire trousseau. Your winner is a first grade teacher from upstate New York.”
A nervous ball formed in Zane's stomach. He’d grown up in upstate New York himself, and while his work took him to the city often enough, he avoided the rest of the state as much as possible.
Then he pushed the nerves away with the relative ease of long practice. Nothing had to drag him back to Virtue and the contentious relationship he’d had with his father.
Dion pursed his lips, considering Zane with a tilt of his head that made even Zane's wolf lift its head warily.He has an idea.
Zane almost chuckled.Yeah, I think he does.He started to speak aloud, but Dion's expression made that cold ball in his gut reform, and then drain icily through his belly. "Oh, no. No way. No?"
"Victoria Hawthorne lives in Virtue," Dion confirmed, "and I'm sorry, Zane, but the rules of the contest say you'll go meet the winner in their home town."
"No." Zane lifted his hands, fully rejecting the suggestion even as he felt a dreadful certainty that it wouldn't work. "I'll pay to fly her out here myself. Put her up in a hotel, whatever. I'm not going back to Virtue."
"You are," Dion said very gently. "Even if she were willing to fly out here, which she's probably not because it's the middle of a semester right now, the press is going to get hold of the fact that she's from your own home town, and if you don't go they'll excoriate you."
If Dion was pulling out ten-dollar words that Zane would personally need a dictionary to use correctly, he wasn't going to win this argument. He stared at his PA in despair a few seconds, then put his face in his hands. "For the record, what exactly does excoriate mean? So that I understand what I'm facing if I don’t go to Virtue?"
"It means to remove skin. To flay," Dion said with a certain delicious enjoyment. "Or to tear you a new one, in more colloquial terms."
Zane echoed, "'Colloquial,'" and Dion laughed.
"That means 'everyday or ordinary language,' and I'm sure the press will use lots andlotsof colloquial terms if you backout of returning triumphant to your own home town to meet the woman you're going to make a devastatingly gorgeous gown for. This has romance novel written all over it, Zane. And it'll help the whole eligible bachelor look I've been trying to get you to lean into."
"I ammarried to my work," Zane told him for what felt like the eight hundredth time in the past couple of years. "I'm really not looking for a partner right now."
