Duping Cupid (A Valentine's Day Short Story) (9 page)

“Umm...”
Vivi said to Mrs. Melendez. “Could I trouble you for some water for him?”

Nodding, Mrs. Melendez headed to her
kitchen area and pulled a small glass mixing bowl from a lower cabinet. She filled the bowl with water and jerked her head at her bistro table. “You sit.”

After Beowulf had his water, Mrs. Melendez poured the
café Cubano
into two delicate china cups and placed one in front of Vivi, along with a plate piled high with fruit-stuffed puff pastries. “So,” she said as she took the seat across from Vivi. “You tell me what you need, eh?”

How to explain?
Without sounding like a jilted girlfriend? Or a desperate loser trying to buy back the man who’d left her? Start with the plan, she supposed, and fill in the blanks as needed. She sipped the dark, thick coffee for fortitude. Once the caffeine jolt hit her, she found her courage.

“Feel like making paella for Bass
again?”

****

Bass was forced to wait until noon on New Year’s Day to call Vivi. Twelve hours past the time he wanted.

She answered on the third ring
, her easy smile obvious in her voice. “Hey, you. Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year.
Did I wake you?”

“No. I’ve been up for hours. How was your night?”

Ridiculous to the extreme. Whenever he thought Ava’s friends couldn’t spend more money in a more extravagant way, they found a way to out-lavish the previous gala. At last night’s party, they drank Cristal out of hand-hammered, jewel-encrusted gold goblets. The gold gave the champagne a tinny aftertaste, but the partygoers didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the excess.

“Wild,” he lied. “Ava is amazing, and her friends...” He stopped there. There was only so far he was willing to go in this game.
“How about you? What’d you do last night?”

“Sarah invited me to a party at her place, but I opted to stay home and watch movies instead.”

“Alone?” He held his breath.

“No.
Wulf was here with me.”

Wulf
. Again.  “That bum’s still staying with you?”

“
He’s not a bum. I told you, Wulf is in this for the long haul.”

“Uh-huh.” His hands curled into fists, but he remembered what Ava had said last night
about Vivi’s business as deceit for the lovelorn and forced a blasé tone. “You tell your family about him yet?”

“
Better than that. He went to my parents’ house with me on Christmas,” she replied with a little too much cheer, in his opinion.

He did? What happened to “not ready to share him yet”?

“How
did that go?”

“Oh, you know.”
She sighed. “The usual.”

Sympathy warred with triumph. “The new guy didn’t pass inspection
, huh?” Or was the new guy just a figment of her imagination? Either way, he won, and he could be gracious in his victory. “I wouldn’t take it too hard. You know how your parents are. They weren’t too wild about me the first year or two, either.”
“Oh, no, everybody loved Wulf! Especially Russ. The boys spent most of the afternoon playing ball in the yard. Even my dad got involved.”

Mr. Maxwell left
his cozy spot in the den to venture out into the cold and play ball with the new guy? What the hell?

Once again, he forced a calm
outer shell, far from the turmoil building inside him. “Sounds like everything went great.”

“
Gee. Ya think?” Her tone grew caustic.

Ah, at last.
The black lining in her silver cloud. “What? What’d I miss?” Maybe Wulf set fire to the kitchen curtains or broke two pieces of the family china. A man could dream…

She sighed.
“The usual. My date is more popular than I am. You know how it goes by now. I’m the outcast in the family. Always will be. Do you know what Kate said to me last week?”

“What?”

“That I should have taken up Julian on his offer to lose the weight and I would’ve been married and a responsible adult by now.”

“Screw that!”
Kate
. Bass rolled his eyes. Vivi’s sister was a sanctimonious prig who never smiled, laughed, or had fun. He pitied her coming child because that poor kid would probably wind up living like a china doll—taken down and dusted off to show to company, then placed back on a shelf, never seen or heard until the next royal summons came. “There’s nothing wrong with your weight, Vivi. Or anything else when it comes to you. Your family’s a bunch of idiots. Kate, especially.”

Her burst of laughter warmed his insides. “That’s what I love most about you, Bass. My ego never had a more stalwart supporter.”

The words hung between them.
That’s what I love most about you
. Did she mean it? Not in the mode of friendship, but as in real love? A love where she could see herself sharing her life with him? His heart urged him to pounce, to push her to admit how much she loved him, so he could confess how much he loved her. Then he could tell her to be patient with him and convince her to dump Wulf, if he really existed.

“Oh!” she exclaimed before he could form words from his feverish thoughts. “I figured out a way to get your Christmas present
s to you. Wait’ll you hear this.”

He didn’t want his Christmas present
s yet. Not until he could give her the ring he’d bought her. “I told you there’s no rush. I can’t chance the press finding us together right now. We should just wait.”

“No. Listen.” Her excitement made her words bounce. “Mrs. Melendez is
going to make you paella. She’ll bring it to your apartment. Your gifts will be in her tote bag. If the press asks, she’ll say she was your private cook for decades and always makes you paella for the holidays. It’s not an out and out lie.”

“
Yeah, it is. I’ve never had a private cook.”

“But the press doesn’t know that.” She giggled. “
And she always makes paella for you for the holidays—well, at least for the last eight years or so, anyway. It’s perfect. You don’t even have to be home. I’m going to give her my key to your place, and she’ll leave the paella in your fridge, your gift on the counter. You just have to tell the security staff to expect her, and we’ll do the rest. Pretty clever, huh?”

“Very.” Particularly since her plan left him no reason
, under normal circumstances, to avoid giving Mrs. Melendez Vivi’s gift to take back with her. Then again, under
normal
circumstances, Vivi would already be wearing the diamond hiding in his bureau drawer.

“She’s going to stop by
Thursday afternoon, okay?”

“Wouldn’t you rather wait until we can exchange face-to-face?”
God knew, he did. “I mean, I know you think I’m a big nine-year-old about Christmas, but I don’t mind waiting.”

“No dice. I want you to have it now. Besides, I’m afraid
Wulf might ruin your gift if it stays here too long.”

Wulf
might ruin it? How? In a jealous rage? “What the hell…? Vivi, is this guy violent?”

Her laughter rang out again.
“No, of course not. He’s just…careless, I guess.”

Careless
. “How careless?”

“
Relax, Bass. Nothing to worry about. Although, he has ruined two pairs of my shoes already.”

“What’s he doing? Wearing them?”

“No. Never mind. It’s not important. How’s Ava?”

“Happy.”

“Lucky her.”

“Why? You’re not happy?”

“I…” She paused, and her sharp inhale pierced his eardrum. “I miss you, Bass,” she murmured, soft and kind of sexy. “Wulf is fun and all, but…he’s not you.”

He swallowed a lump in his throat—probably his heart.
God, he hated tiptoeing around her. They’d never before been so awkward with each other. He opted for humor to ease the tension. “Well, I never ruined your shoes, so that’s one checkmark in my pro column.”

“True. So, don’t forget. T
hursday afternoon. Paella.”

“Can’t wait.”
  Because he’d have the opportunity to grill the one person who knew everything going on in Vivi’s building: Mrs. Melendez.

Chapter 7

Bass
took the day off to make sure he didn’t miss Mrs. Melendez’s visit. In the morning, he called down to the lobby to alert the staff he was expecting her, gave them a full description of her appearance, and left an order to contact him once she got on the elevator.

Sure enough, at ten minutes past
twelve, his intercom buzzed from the lobby. He hit the speak button. “Yes?”

“We just sent her up, Mr. Lawrence.”

“Thanks, David.”

He opened his apartment door
and waited for the elevator to reach his floor.

The bell rang,
the doors slid apart, and Mrs. Melendez stepped out into the plush carpeted hall. She struggled with a large tote bag on her right shoulder, counterbalanced by a reusable shopping bag, overflowing with foodstuffs, in her left hand. Her eyes grew wide as she glanced around the hallway, apparently lost.

“Mrs. Melendez,” he said, waving a hand from his doorway. “Over here.”

At last she spotted him, and her face broke into a beaming smile. “Mister Bass, where have you been? You never come around by us anymore.”

He took
the shopping bag from her and nearly staggered under the weight. “Good God, what have you got in here? Bricks?”

“I’m fine, Mister Bass, thank you for asking.”

Chastened by her sarcasm, he brushed his lips across her plump, weathered cheek. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Melendez. How are you? Happy New Year.”

Frowning, she strode into his apartment through the open door
and, after switching her tote bag from one shoulder to the other, removed her fur-lined parka. Beneath, she wore a thick gray fleece sweatshirt that proclaimed her the World’s Greatest Grandma, a white turtleneck, and a red-and-white checked apron tied around her barrel belly.

For a moment,
while he took her coat, he considered telling her to remove an additional layer, but then remembered her Cuban heritage. His heat was only set at sixty-eight degrees. The tropical Mrs. Melendez would never be comfortable at that temperature.

“
Happy New Year,” she grumbled. “Hmmph. You no answer my question about where you’ve been the last few weeks.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been working.”

“That’s what Miss Cupid
say, too.” She looked around, her frown creasing deep furrows around her mouth. “Show me the kitchen.”

He led her toward the stainless steel
gourmet stove and double oven in his chrome and glass kitchen behind the living room area. While he placed the shopping bag on the forest green granite counter, she dropped her tote bag onto a nearby chair.

“How
is
Miss Cupid?” he asked.

“Lonely.” She began pulling items out of the shopping bag
and setting them on the counter: rice, a whole chicken, mussels, shrimp, tomatoes, and two cooked lobsters. “How you think?”

“Why would she be lonely?” He leaned across the counter, one foot hooked on the rung of the barstool on his side.
“Doesn’t she have some guy staying with her?” As he waited for her answer, he feigned interest in the tomatoes she’d removed from the grocery bag, pinching the red flesh.

She slapped away his hand.
“You mean that man with the dark hair I saw with her on Christmas Eve?”

His heart plummeted, taking all his senses over the edge of a cliff. There really was a
Wulf. He stared up at the ceiling and bit his tongue, but the thought still blasted through his mind.
Thanks a lot, Ava
. What had possessed him to listen to her? Ava Featherstone knew as much about life—and Vivi—as he knew about rocket science.

“Yeah,” he muttered.
“That guy. What’s with him?”

Mrs. Melendez clucked her tongue and yanked at the drawers in his cabinets. “He’s not for her.”

“How do you know?”

“You want to know about Miss Cupid and that man, you ask Miss Cupid. Where are your knives?”

With a jerk of his head, he indicated the butcher block near the stove. “Over there.”

She turned, nodded,
then turned back to him, a cooked lobster clutched in one hand. “Good. Go away. Go work. I make your paella.”

“I thought you already had it made.”
“Bah. Paella needs to be fresh. All that fish.” She twisted her lips in a grimace of distaste. “I cook it now, you eat it for dinner. Now, out of my kitchen while I cook.”

“Umm…this is
my
kitchen.”

She said nothing, her scornful gaze communicat
ing all.

“
But it’s your kitchen for today.” He thrust his hands in his back pockets and looked past where she began cutting up a chicken on his cutting board.