Daye, Rainey - An Unconventional Love (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (21 page)

“Calm down,” Alex said as his lips twitched. “She told me when we got in that she’s starving and is looking forward to dinner tonight. And yeah, she might be sore, but that doesn’t mean she wants to cancel.”

“Oh,” Jess said, mollified. “Do you think I should go and see if she wants me to massage her aches for her?”

“I don’t think so. Remember what happens every time we give her a massage? You’ll never get your first date out of the way tonight if you make that offer.”

“All right, you’re right,” Jess said, acknowledging the truth of that statement.

“I’m gonna go soak now,” Alex said as he continued into the bathroom. “Remind me that we need to start pooling our money so we can get a Jacuzzi tub installed.”

Jess stood there as he debated whether he should give Maggie the option of bowing out if she really was too sore to go out tonight. It would be the gentlemanly thing to do. It was the type of offer a good boyfriend would make to let her know she shouldn’t feel obligated to go out when she was too tired and sore to fully enjoy herself with him.

Leaving his room, he went down the hall and slowly poked his head into her open bedroom door and softly called her name so as not to catch her unawares if she wasn’t dressed. When there was no answer, he stepped fully into the room, noting as he did so that her bathroom door was closed. Walking up to it, he knocked softly and called out, “Mags?”

He heard water splash as if his knock had startled her.

“Jesse?” she called back.

“Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “I just wanted to check to see if you still wanted to go out tonight?”

“Of
course
I do,” was the answer, which caused the knot to unravel in his stomach. “I just wanted to take a quick soak in the tub first.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “But we need to leave by seven if we’re going to get there on time.”

“What time is it now?”

“A little before six,” he told her after looking at his watch.

He heard more splashing from the tub before Maggie said, “Okay, if I start getting ready now, it shouldn’t be a problem. Thank God I didn’t get my hair wet, or I’d have to waste time blow-drying it.”

“Soak for a little longer if you need to, honey,” Jess told her.

“Can’t,” Maggie called back from the other side of the door. “I still need time to do my hair and wash my face and put on some makeup before I get dressed.”

“Ahh, baby, you know you’re beautiful without any makeup on.”

“Yeah, well, I know you guys think so, but I feel more comfortable going out in public with a bit on.”

And since all three of them had argued about this in the past, he wisely dropped the subject.

“Okay, I’ll meet you downstairs in about an hour, then,” he said before he returned to his own room to finish getting ready himself.

Just before 7:00 p.m., Jesse was waiting in the foyer for Maggie to join him. He heard her heels clicking on the stairs and looked up, only to lose his breath. Maggie smiled as she walked toward him in a white floral-printed dress. It had spaghetti straps, which crisscrossed in the back—a fact he learned when she stopped in front of him and whirled for his inspection—a scalloped neckline, which revealed the upper swells of her breasts, a tucked-in waist, and a flaring hemline, which ended a couple inches above her knees. She was wearing two-inch open-toed heels and apparently no stockings. Her hair was twisted back and pinned up in a style he couldn’t identify, while a few wisps framed her face, and her long, beautiful neck was left bare, a neck that he had every intention of nibbling on tonight. Her eyes seemed bigger and greener, indicating that she had at least put on mascara along with eyeliner and shadow. Not to mention those lush lips of hers that were painted a deep red. He found himself fully hoping that he would be trying to get that lipstick off the neck of his shirt come morning.

“Damn, you’re beautiful,” he whispered reverently. “I wish I could freeze this moment so I don’t lose this picture of you.”

“Oh, wait,” she exclaimed. “I left my camera on the dining room table. Let me go get it.”

“No, I’ll get it,” he offered. “You just stay here looking sexy.”

He quickly retrieved her camera and handed it to her. Maggie took it from him and turned it on, adjusting the settings and then showing him how to use it. “Where do you want me?” Maggie asked innocently, and he swallowed thickly at the question before he indicated that he wanted her to go stand on the stairs so it would look as if she were coming down to join him.

She quickly moved back to stand on the second to the bottom step while she placed her hand on the oak-and-iron railing. Cocking her hip and licking her lips, she gave him a seductive look before she posed. Jess snapped several pictures and continued snapping while she left the stairs and walked toward him. Taking the camera from his hands, she announced, “My turn,” and proceeded to snap several of him, walking around him in a slow circle and announcing that she just had to get a picture of how nice his ass looked in those slacks.

Laughing, Jess teasingly asked her if that meant he could take a close-up of her cleavage without getting slapped for the suggestion. When she just gave him a look, he sighed and stated how he wished he could have a picture of the two of them together but didn’t think they should call Alex downstairs to take it for them. Agreeing with him about not calling Alex, she took the camera back over to the stairs and lined it up on the flat-topped newel post while instructing him on where to stand. She then set the timer and hurried over to join him, slipping her arm around his waist and leaning into his side. After the shutter clicked, she retrieved the camera and checked the picture, showing it to him to see if it met with his approval. Smiling, he said he liked how she looked in his arms.

Leaning up, she kissed his cheek and set the camera down on the display table in the foyer before he took her hand and led her out to his car.

Once they were on their way to where the dinner theater was located on the east side of town, she thanked him for choosing her pick. “I really didn’t think either of you would choose it when I wrote it down,” she revealed.

“I almost didn’t,” he confessed. “Frankly, I had no idea what the hell it was, so I set it aside. But for some reason my eyes kept going back to it, and I finally Googled it on the computer to find out what it was. It actually sounded interesting, like a dinner and a movie at the same time, so I went ahead and put my initial next to it.”

“Did you know it was my pick?”

“I was hoping, but as I read through all those slips, I realized that I couldn’t really guess who wrote down what. Hell, I didn’t even recognize some of my own, at first,” he admitted, causing Maggie to laugh.

“How did you hear about the dinner theater here?” Jess wanted to know. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I didn’t even know there was one in town.”

“I didn’t know there was one,” she confessed. “But since we all agreed to write down things that we would really like to do, I decided to go ahead and put it down on my list.”

“So why is it something you wanted to do on a date? Was it something you heard about?”

“No. Every year for as long as I could remember, my parents took me to a dinner theater for my birthday. Since I’ve been away at college, I haven’t been able to go to one for my last two birthdays.”

“Well, then, we’ll just have to take you back for your birthday next fall,” Jess promised and was rewarded by Maggie’s heartfelt smile.

“What show are we going to see?” Maggie wanted to know.

“Something called ‘Barefoot in the Park,’” he replied.

“Ooh,” Maggie exclaimed. “I loved that movie.”

“It’s a movie? I thought dinner theater is a play or musical.”

“If I recall correctly, it was originally a Broadway play or something written by Neil Simon that was made into a movie in the sixties, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. A pretty funny comedy.”

“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Another relic from your TNT-watching past with your dad?” he ventured with a grin, and Maggie nodded her head enthusiastically.

He pulled into the circular drive of the dinner theater and marveled that although he had passed this place numerous times in the past, he had had no idea what it was and even less interest in finding out. And now here he was having his first date with Maggie here.

He followed the line of cars since they seemed to know where they were going. As they reached the awning over the front entrance, a valet opened his door to park his car while another one stationed at the entrance opened the passenger door and helped Maggie out. Joining her at the entrance, he placed his hand on her lower back and escorted her inside, where a line of people waited to be seated. While they waited, he looked around the room. It was designed as a half oval with many terraced levels leading up from what appeared to be a curtained stage in the center of the room. There were steps on either side of the room, leading down to the different levels. Each level had a pipe rail along the edge of it with tables seating two to four pushed flush against the rails with chairs on either side of the table, leaving the wide aisles clear. The larger tables were in the middle while the deuces were set up toward the ends of each aisle. There was seating for larger groups on the very top level.

When they reached the maître d’ stand, he gave the hostess his name, and she consulted a ledger in front of her. She then spoke cryptically to a server who had stepped forward to seat them. “
R
three, fourteen and fifteen.” And the server simply smiled at them and said, “If you’ll follow me, please.”

The code was solved when she turned to the right and then proceeded to lead them down to the third level of tiers up from the stage and then proceeded to lead them to a deuce that had the numbers fourteen and fifteen riveted to the outer edge of the table. After they had taken their respective seats, the server took their drink orders. Maggie explained her selection of iced tea to him by saying that alcohol would probably make her sleepy, and she didn’t want to ruin her date with him by falling asleep, making his heart swell with even more love for her. The server also announced that they were offering prime rib and chicken tonight, before standing there expectantly with her pen hovering over her order pad. When Jess could only gape at her, wondering where the hell the menus were, Maggie filled the breach by saying that she would take the chicken and he would have the prime rib. The server made a note of their selections before she then reached into her apron pocket and fished out two colored cards, one red and one blue, and placed them next to the numbers on their table before moving off.

As Jess turned to Maggie to ask her what that was all about, he noticed that the other occupied tables also had colored cards on their tables next to where their numbers were. “Do you know what just happened here?” he wanted to know.

Maggie chuckled as she said that each dinner theater she had been to was different but seemed to follow the same general setup. Sometimes a buffet-type meal would be set up on the stage itself and diners would be released to go down to it in some type of order before the show began. Apparently, this dinner theater offered diners a choice of main course and brought their food to them instead. “Dinner theaters aren’t known for their world-class cuisine, but sometimes they can surprise you,” Maggie said cautiously when he remarked that he hoped the food would be good since the cook didn’t have to prepare a large variety. “That’s why I ordered one of each. The meal comes with the show, and if one totally blows, then we can split the other.”

A different server wearing a slightly different outfit was moving around the tables with drinks on his tray. He was consulting a notepad as he doled out the drinks, eventually bringing them theirs. Jess passed the time asking Maggie about some of the shows she had seen with her folks before remarking, “It’s taking an awful long time for the food to arrive, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” Maggie said as she sipped from her second iced tea. “I should have warned you. Dinner theaters run on a pretty tight schedule. They wait until all the patrons have been seated and then serve everyone at once. They usually start with soup or a salad, and I’m assuming that since they didn’t take our order on that, then we get whatever the chef has prepared.”