A MAN CALLED BLUE (10 page)

He held Simone's chair for her and leaned to whisper in her ear. "This is all very cozy, but I'd like to request two things. First, a cab to take me to my end of the table, and second, a 'how to' diagram for that place setting down there."

"I'm sure you'll cope," she said. His mouth, all warm breath and tease, taunted a few obscure nerves. Her neck prickled and warmed. She leaned forward to pick up her soup spoon. "Shall we eat?" She didn't dare look at him.

He took his place and the meal began, broken only by the soft scrape of sterling on bone china and the rustle of linen napkins. Simone wished she'd put on some music, anything to lighten the mood of the room. When she glanced down the table at Blue, he only smiled, as if he recognized her uneasiness, but didn't intend to do a thing about it.

Damn the man! All jokes and easy patter when it was uncalled for, and not a word when the situation required it.

By the time Mrs. Dreiser came to clear the soup bowls, Simone couldn't stand the awkward silence a moment longer. "Did you start on the Hallam sales analysis?" she asked.

Blue cupped a hand behind his ear. "What was that?" he asked, his voice about three decibels louder than usual.

Simone prayed for patience. "I asked if you'd looked at Hallam's sales numbers." She did not raise her voice.

They were interrupted by Mrs. Dreiser bringing their salads. When Mrs. Dreiser set Blue's in front of him, he shook his head. "No thanks, Marie," he said, giving the older woman a smile. "I'll skip the salad."

To Simone's surprise, Mrs. Dreiser smiled back. She couldn't recall the woman ever smiling, at least not at her. After asking if he'd prefer something else and his declining, she removed his salad and headed back to the kitchen.

"You don't like salad?" Simone asked.

"Hate lettuce. Have since I was a kid."

Simone realized she'd just asked him a personal question. Her first. She also noticed he answered her in his normal voice.

"Nobody
hates
lettuce. It's practically un-American."

He leaned back, ran a finger back and forth over the polished edge of the table, and watched her. "Everybody hates something. I figure lettuce is pretty harmless."

The subject of lettuce exhausted, they lapsed into silence, until Mrs. Dreiser brought their main course.

Abruptly, Blue stood. "This is stupid," he said, and striding down to Simone's end of the table, he scooped up her plate under the eyes of a stunned Mrs. Dreiser. "Marie, would you please bring my plate, some cutlery and whatever, to—" He glanced around, then back toward the room they'd been in before dinner. He gestured toward it with his shoulder. "In there." With his free hand, he grasped Simone's wrist and tugged her to her feet. Too surprised to resist, she went along.

He towed her back to the smoking room.

Blue selected a small table from a side wall and placed it between the two wingback chairs in front of the fireplace, and while Mrs. Dreiser briskly set it, he put on a CD from Simone's collection. Soft jazz.

He refilled her wineglass and sat opposite her. "
This
is more like it. Never eat with a person if you can't see the whites of their eyes, my dad always said."

Underneath the small table, their knees touched. She tried to ignore it. "Really?"

Blue chuckled. "No, but if he'd thought of it, he would have. Between spits and ales, that is," he added.

Simone warmed. "I'm truly sorry about that, Blue. I wasn't thinking."

He shrugged off her apology. "It's okay." He ate a piece of thinly sliced roast beef. "So tell me. Do you always eat like Elizabeth the First?"

She answered with a question of her own. "Where do you usually eat?"

"On the deck of
Three Wishes,
watching the sun go down, whenever I can."

"Three Wishes?"

"Fifty-three feet of sleek lines and purring engines. She's one beautiful lady. We're inseparable."

Simone gave him a questioning look.

"My boat."

"Sounds like a case of true love."

"It is."

"No real-life lady in your life?" She couldn't believe she'd asked the question, but didn't deny the tightness in her breast as she waited for his answer.

"Around it? Yes.
In it?
No."

Pleased with his answer, Simone didn't bother analyzing why. Instead, she sipped her wine. The room, the music, the big comfortable chair were relaxing. It had been forever since she eased back, let go. She slipped off her shoes and sank deeper into her seat, pushing her plate to the side. Suddenly, she wasn't the least bit hungry—except for more of Blue's voice.

"So tell me about her, this boat you love so much."

He stopped eating and smiled. "Never ask a man to talk about his boat or his golf score. Unless, of course, you're planning to spend the night with him," he teased.

"Isn't that what we're doing?"

He shook his head. "Uh-uh. What we're doing is spending the
evening
together. Different thing entirely. Besides, I'd rather we talk about you."

She shifted uneasily. "Shall I use the trite line there's nothing to tell—or shall I be honest and say I'm uncomfortable talking about myself."

Blue's eyes locked with hers. They were filled with an intense, fixed interest, and she had the crazy notion his eyes were keys, keys that could unlock secret places, opening them to the light and air.

He, too, pushed aside his plate, his meal half-eaten.

"I'd like to get past that," he said softly. "I'd like you to be comfortable with me."

Simone squirmed under the strength of his gaze. She couldn't imagine herself ever being truly at ease with this man. "My life isn't easily understood."

A ghost of a smile played over his mouth. "With a mother like Josephine, I'm not surprised."

Simone tensed, then, realizing his words were neither sarcastic nor unkind, relaxed.

When she didn't respond, he went on, "She's an outstanding woman, your mother. We had quite a conversation this morning."

"I wondered what you two would find to talk about."

"Before or after she asked me if I was gay?" he asked, shifting in the big chair to let his legs stretch fully.

Simone let out a disbelieving breath. "She didn't?"

"She did, and although your mother has the best poker face I've ever seen, I could see the truth about my sexual preference mattered a great deal. Everything after that was anticlimactic." When Blue's gaze deepened questioningly, Simone looked away. He went on, "She doesn't like me—or my sex in general," he stated.

"She's wary, that's all. It comes with running an international corporation in a man's world." The evasion stuck briefly at the base of her throat when she thought of the father she never knew, the husband Josephine spoke of with such consuming disdain. She reached for her glass of water.

"And now you're the one running the company. I guess that makes you wary, too." Blue inclined his head, idly thumbing and folding the edge of his napkin as he watched her.

"Seems like common sense to me," she said.

"Common sense, or a job requirement?"

Too close to home.
She started to stand. "I've got better things to do than listen to your unsolicited opinions about—"

"Sit down," he commanded softly.

"Excuse me?"

He took her hand. "I said sit down—please. You're right. I'm out of line. I'm sorry, and if you'll sit down, I promise there'll be no more probes into what makes Simone Doucet tick. I'll ignore my fascination—temporarily—and concentrate on being my usual entertaining self. Deal?"

Simone weighed the beckoning satin of the sheets in her bedroom against Blue being his usual entertaining self. When the two started to merge, her knees weakened and she sat down.

"Deal," she said, her voice an octave lower than usual.

"So tell me how you came to meet Nolan," he said, his tone again easy and conversational.

She relaxed marginally. "Now
that's
a question I've been wanting to ask
you,"
she countered. "You have to admit your friendship is unusual."

"Yeah, I guess it is." He paused before continuing. "Nole and I practically grew up together—from the age of about ten on. That's about the time I started mooching his mom's cheesecake. My mother died when I was five, so Evie Smythe and her cheesecake filled a big void in my life. Anyway, Nole and I went through school more or less together, then on to Harvard. After that, with our MBA's the only bright spot in our otherwise
very
skinny resumes, we went to New York."

Simone heard a delicate cough coming from the direction of the door; Mrs. Dreiser, come to clear their plates and ask if they wanted desert. Both declined and requested coffee.

When she was gone, Simone picked up the conversation where they left off. "Why New York?"

"Nolan wanted to act, and I—" he stopped. For the first time, Simone saw him hesitate.

"Go on," she urged, sipping her wine.

"I had this idea I'd be a playwright."

"This may seem a dumb question, but if that's what you wanted, why did you go to Harvard for an MBA?"

"Could have been because we both had intensely
practical
fathers and a business degree was expected of us. Although I doubt either of us would have had any real opposition if we'd chosen something else."

"And New York, what happened?"

He laughed. "It was a disaster. We were always dead broke—or as Nolan put it 'financially impaired.' I lasted a couple of years before taking a job at a brokerage house. Nole gave it a solid three before deciding his real meal ticket was his MBA degree." He smiled into her eyes. "I'd guess you know his background from that point on."

She nodded silently, still imagining two impulsive young men full of dreams taking such an exciting detour. Her detour was anything but exciting. Unless you were into pain.

"It was New York where you lived together?"

"We never actually lived together. For a time, we each rented rooms in a kind of communal dump reserved for theater groupies and assorted—" he made quote figures in the air "—artists. I didn't stay long. It was more Nolan's scene than mine, so I got a place of my own."

"When did you learn Nolan was gay?"

"In the tenth grade."

"And it didn't inhibit your friendship?"

Blue was quiet for a time, as if intent on choosing the right words. "I wish that were true. That I was always so open-minded it didn't bother me a bit—but it did. At the time he told me, I was an ignorant, macho, full-of-himself sixteen-year-old, and I reacted from that bias. It might have been easier if I'd had a clue, but I didn't. Nolan was a damned good actor even back then." His expression wry, he added, "Then, one night, we got into his dad's beer—sixteen-year-olds tend to do that—and he told me. I remember he was crying."

"What did you do?"

His eyes slipped away from hers. He hesitated. "Kissed him off. Abandoned him with the same ignorant unconcern given to lepers in the Middle Ages."

Chapter 6

Simone tried to read Blue's expression, now a complex mixture of clouded memories, old regret, and guilt. She wanted to know more. "But you ended up in New York after all. What happened?"

"A couple of things. One was my dad, the astute Thomas Bludell, Sr., asking me why Nolan hadn't come around for a few weeks. I told him there was a problem, that Nolan was into liking boys, so I wasn't hanging out with him anymore. I figured he'd agree with my decision to end the friendship. Instead, he looked me in the eye and said, 'So? Thomas, are you one of these
boys
Nolan likes?' " Blue paused and rubbed his index finger thoughtfully across his chin. "I remember I went red as a damned beet, then huffed and puffed that, of course, I wasn't."

"What did your father say to that?"

"He said, 'Then the only problem
you
have, Thomas, is to put a value on friendship.' "

"That's all he said?"

"That's it. He said he'd talk to me again
after
I'd thought it through."