Open Invitation? (7 page)

Because her skin color was pale green this morning, she swept her cheeks with a faint dusting of blusher and blotted the perspiration on her lip and forehead with loose powder.

Lil stopped on the way to work for two quarts of cold water. She should put something into her stomach to soak up the leftover alcohol, but nothing appealed to her.

She pulled into the parking lot of Finesse in her Camry and noted with something akin to despair that the red Mustang was already there. Wonderful.

She clicked in her kitten heels to the glass door between the elegant urns and juggled the cold water bottles and her purse as she reached for the handle. The door opened and slammed her in the kneecap.

Reeling from the pain, Lil clenched her teeth over the epithets that tried to get past them and vaguely registered Dan Granger's face, hidden behind a greasy paper fast-food wrapper.

“Haaaaaaaa,” he said, around whatever was in his mouth. “Oh, dang, did I get your knee? And here I was trying to be polite, Lilia.”

“Thank you,” she managed. She hobbled into the reception area and was immediately assaulted with a disgusting smell. She braced herself on the reception desk, choking back bile. Ugh! Greasy Mexican food, and egg, and some awful combination of fried sweet peppers and onion.

Heaven help her, she was going to be—

Lil dropped her purse and water bottles and ran for the facilities.

D
AN STOPPED MUNCHING
and stared. “Was it something I said?” He bent to pick up the water bottles and the handbag and placed them on the reception desk.

Lilia's tall, blond partner emerged from the kitchen and sniffed the air before shooting him a cat-eyed smile. “So that's why it smells like taco hell in here.”

She was gorgeous, loudly dressed in a screaming yellow leather jacket, and she appeared very amused.

Dan blinked twice at the jacket and fished his Oakley's out of the neck of his T-shirt. He settled them onto his nose and sighed with relief. “That's better.”

She laughed.

“What's wrong with Miz Lilia?” he asked the Amazon.

“She's feeling a little under the weather. I took her out to a bar last night and she's not used to much alcohol.”

“Ohhhhh.” Light dawned on Dan. “You have the gal doing tequila shooters or something? She looks like
one
would put her under the table. Anyway, I have just the thing for her—a breakfast taco. It'll fix 'er right up. Eggs, cheese, fried potato, onion and hot sauce. Shocks the belly into submission and soaks up the booze.”

“You don't say.” The Amazon wrinkled her nose.

She was too perfect-looking for Dan. Professional beauty, he called it. Over the top. And he also didn't care for the way she swung her hips. This one was no Audrey. She carried herself as though she'd been around the block a few times. But she wasn't flirting with him, he'd give her that.

He preferred the challenge of Lil's…purity. She had that china doll quality that just stabbed him right in the groin. Made him feel like a dirty, bad boy for thinking about what she had on under that knee-length skirt. The forbidden turned him on. Feeling dirty turned him on. Exotic turned him on. Those dark eyes…

“I'm not sure that Lilia likes that kind of—” The blonde broke off as Lil returned to the room. “You okay, sweetie? I don't believe I've ever seen that particular shade of green on a human face.”

“Shannon,” his etiquette consultant said evenly, “you are evil. You should be listed as the eighth deadly sin—and
what
is that foul stuff you're drinking?”

Dan had wondered the same thing. It was reddish brown and mucky and unappetizing.

The Amazon swirled the nasty liquid in her glass. “Carrot juice.”

Lilia choked and, to Dan's amazement, turned bright red. What was up with that? Who blushed at the mention of vegetable juice? Why?

“Mr. Granger,” she said crisply. “Why don't we go to my office? Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Only if I can have it in a cardboard cup, ma'am.”

Her lips twitched as she turned to walk down the hall
way, giving him another chance to admire that miracle of a derriere.

She swept into her office and up to her desk, saying, “A big strapping man like yourself can't be afraid of a little china.” She stopped as she saw a tall plastic bottle of organic carrot juice on her blotter.

“Excuse me for a moment, won't you? I'll get your coffee and be back momentarily.” Her words were polite, but he caught a glimpse of steel in the set of her chin.

“Surely.”

She swiped the carrot juice and departed, giving him yet another opportunity to—

“Mr. Granger! Stop ogling that, please.”

What, did the woman have an eye in her spine? But Dan just chuckled, saw that she'd placed a sturdy wing chair where the little matchstick one had been the day before, and sat in it. He finished his breakfast taco, set one on her desk as the polite thing to do and threw his wrapper and napkin away.

He noticed that his hat still adorned the head of the old coot on her credenza, and he got up and plucked it off. A second look at the old coot revealed that the bust was almost certainly of Sir Henry London.
Aw, hell.

What had he said yesterday about how the
pompous ass
looked good in it? He closed his eyes for a moment. Then he turned and hung his hat off one of the wings of the chair before settling into it again.

Lilia glided into the room without the carrot juice or the martial light in her eye. She set another delicate flowered cup and saucer in front of him and he eyed it uneasily.

Then her nostrils flared and she turned even greener, if that were possible, when she saw the breakfast taco on her desk. “What's that?” she asked in a faint voice.

“Why, it's your breakfast taco, Lil. You scarf that down and you'll be right as rain, as my grandpa Lou used to say. It'll soak up all the acid, sit like a tasty brick in your tummy and keep you on-task.”

“Breakfast
taco?
” She backed away from it as if the thing might spring at her and clamp onto her throat.

“Yeah. I was getting a couple for myself at this great little dive place, and I brought you one, too. Only polite, right? Oh, and here.” He dug some little packets of hot sauce out of his jeans. “Regular and extra-spicy.”

“That was…very thoughtful of you, Dan. But I'm feeling a bit queasy at the moment. A stomach virus, you know.”

“Would that be another one of your little white lies? Blondie out there already told me you have God's own hangover, hon. So do what Uncle Dan says, now, and eat the cure.”

“Shannon told you that I was—?” Her black eyes snapped.

“Aw, I woulda figured it out anyway. I'm experienced with that sort of thing.” He grinned and leaned forward, unwrapping the taco for her.

She stared at it with naked revulsion. It stared back at her.

“Yummy,” Dan said. “Here. Unroll the tortilla and add some sauce.”

Miz London looked as if she'd rather eat roadkill, but
her manners got the better of her. He'd brought her a gift, and she would force herself to taste it.

Dan was impressed. She actually dredged up a polite smile, added the milder sauce and held the taco to her lips.

“Come on, it's not like it's something off of
Fear Factor,
” he urged her.

She sank her small, pearly, ladylike teeth into the thing and took a bite. Her pretty pink lips wrapped around the corner of the soft taco. Dan knew he was staring, and remembered vaguely that it was rude, but he was mesmerized by the sight of her, in her French twist and pearls, with her mouth open wide around the phallic food.

She flushed as she looked up and caught him. He was quite sure his eyes were glazing over.

Her gaze flew from his and she chewed delicately, thoughtfully. “This is good,” she said, sounding surprised.

“Of course it is. Would I lie to you?”

“If I can eat this taco in a greasy wrapper, then you can sip coffee out of that cup.”

“But I'm afraid I'll break this one, too.”

“And I'm afraid that I'll drop sausage, egg or grease onto my suit. We're both broadening our cultural horizons, here, Dan.”

He grinned and picked up the cup and saucer. The china was so thin and delicate he could almost see through it. The cup rattled in the saucer as he tried to lift it by the tiny gilt handle, dwarfed between his rough thumb and forefinger. He held the rim to his lips and
drank about a teaspoonful, since it surely couldn't be proper to gulp from a work of art like this.

The cup and saucer reminded him of Lilia; delicate, old-fashioned and lovely.

Meanwhile she tugged at the wax paper wrapper on the breakfast taco and tried to avoid spilling the contents even though the tortilla was inevitably springing holes.

If he looked half as ridiculous as she did, then they were quite the comedy show this morning.

Lilia ate about half of the taco before wrapping it back up. He was glad to see some color had returned to her face.

“Thank you, Dan.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a tissue that she'd put in her lap like a napkin. “That was very tasty.”

He nodded and lifted the oversize thimble to his lips again in the hopes of putting an ounce more caffeine into his system. The tip of his index finger got stuck in the handle as he put it back into the saucer, and he had to shake it free. Meanwhile, the hot cup had burned his pinkie as he'd tried to support it. Damn the thing!

“Dan,” she said. “Don't try to put your finger through the handle. Just hold it gently—you may use your third finger, too. And allow your fourth and fifth to spread outward like a fan. Your pinkie will extend in a little loop rather like the cup handle. None of your digits belong under the cup.”

Digits? “I feel like a pansy,” he complained.

“Just do it anyway.” Lilia got up and went to a closet on the far side of the room. She took a folding card table out of it and refused his help in setting it up. Then she pulled a white, lacy tablecloth from a chest of drawers
in the corner and unfolded it onto the table. Another drawer yielded a bunch of dishes and silverware, which she placed precisely in two place settings.

The crazy woman put three forks to the left of a large plate, two knives to the right of it, plus a big spoon and a weird little fork inside of it. Then at the top of the plate she added another spoon and another fork! Worse, she put a second little plate to the left of the big plate, and then four crystal glasses of varying shapes and sizes to the right of it. Dan blinked at the array. What in the hell did anyone do with all that, and more importantly, why?

She beckoned him over and reluctantly he came face-to-face with it all.

“All right, Dan. Now do you want to take a guess—”

“No. Just tell me. The only thing I know is that you eat off of the plate.”

Lil smiled at him. “Actually the only thing on this table that you won't be eating from is the plate.”

“Huh?”

“That large plate is known as a service plate. You'll use everything but the service plate, which will either be removed as the first course is served, or the first course will be served on a dish which goes on top of it.”

“So it's useless? They just put it there to screw you up? Make you look stupid?”

She laughed. “Nobody's trying to make anyone look stupid. It's actually very simple. The general rule is to use each utensil, going from the outside of the plate toward the inside, as the courses are served.”

“What about the fork and spoon at the top?”

“Those are provided for dessert, and yet another spoon would be brought for coffee after dinner. Sometimes you won't see the utensils at the top of the plate—it's a little more continental in nature than the typical American place setting. If you don't see them, then they'll be provided for you as dessert is served.”

“What's the little munchkin fork for? The one inside the big spoon?”

“In this case, your first course is likely to be oysters. That's what the small fork is for. The next course will be soup, and you'll use the large spoon for that.”

“I eat oysters from the shell.”

“Not at a formal dinner, you don't. Slurping tends to be frowned upon—unless you're in China, but that's a whole other topic.”

Dan frowned and shook his head. “And all the other forks to the left?”

“Salad—see the one thicker tine at the left? That's used for cutting large lettuce leaves if necessary. Try not to use a knife on salad.”

“Why?”

“Just try not to. Now, the next fork is for fish, which is what the middle knife is used for as well. The inner fork and knife are for meat—the main course…”

Dan's eyes began to glaze over—this time from boredom and irritation, not from lust.

The glasses turned out to be for all different kinds of wine, and then one for water. Then there were napkin lessons. You put the darn thing in your lap a certain way. You dabbed with it, and never wiped the table with it.
You didn't spit anything into it, according to Lilia (though there were two schools of thought on how to remove a piece of fat or gristle from “one's” mouth, and some said hocking it into your napkin was okay).

Lilia advocated the palm to plate method, where “one” shoved the “offending morsel” under a “convenient bit” of parsley.

There were even frigging rules to follow when you were
done
with your damned napkin! He wasn't supposed to leave a napkin folded, since the implication then was that you thought your hosts might put it away without washing it. But he wasn't supposed to twist it or crumple it, either, because that would be untidy. He couldn't leave it on his chair—because that might indicate he was trying to steal the table linens.

“Oh, bullshit!” Dan exclaimed.

“I beg your pardon?” Lilia asked.

“This is ridiculous.”

“You will refrain from cursing at the table, please. And from doing so in the presence of a lady.”

“But—”

“Now, what do you do if you drop your napkin or it falls off of your lap?”

“Duh. Pick it up.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“You will leave it on the floor and signal the waitstaff that you need a fresh one—if they don't notice this on their own and take care of the problem right away. You'll signal them with eyes only.”

“In other words, I don't yell ‘Yo, dude!' in the middle of the conversation?”

“Exactly.”

“So what
can
I do with my napkin at the end of the meal?”

“You will place it loosely to the left of your plate.”

“Jeez. All these rules for a blasted square of cloth.”

They talked about elbows, serving and removing, not blowing on anything to cool it off. She showed him what a finger bowl was, and how to use it. They discussed the proper way to pass salt—always with the pepper. And so on and so forth.

Dan began to yawn uncontrollably, having not slept well the night before. Lilia made him cover his mouth with his hand, to his annoyance.

“But if a yawn is the body trying to get more oxygen, then why would you block it?” he argued.