Page 17 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
“Thank you, Dev,” said Nory. “I couldn’t have and indeed didn’t put it better myself.”
Ameerah eyed Dev with suspicion.
“Brilliant!” shouted Guy rambunctiously. “First night here and already we’re being emasculated.”
“Just like the old days!” quipped Charles.
“Well, it’s all shits and giggles, isn’t it?” Nory winked, and a roar of agreement rolled along the table.
“To shits and giggles!” said Pippa, raising her glass.
And the dinner guests joined her, shouting, “To shits and giggles!”
Dessert continued in the same rowdy manner, until eventually the butler invited them to go back into the drawing room for after-dinner cocktails, presumably so that the waiting staff could clear down and go home.
Nory had become aware of Guy trying to catch her eye. At first, she had thought she was being overly sensitive, what with her being hyperaware of his wife, but when he began to lean across the table to smile at her each time Camille’s head was turned the other way, she knew it wasn’t simply her imagination.
When the group meandered back into the drawing room, Nory moved quickly away from him. She deposited herself across the room, where Charles had reclaimed his seat at the piano andJenna was looking dreamily at her fiancé as he began to sing “The Way You Look Tonight.”
Guy had always been someone whose Off button malfunctioned after one too many drinks. He’d become more audacious, and his self-belief swelled to narcissistic proportions. It was his daring and his cavalier attitude toward other people’s privacy that often got him the big scoops and center spreads in the paper; it had also earned him a few black eyes in the past, which he claimed was “the price of good journalism.”
Ever the eagle eye, Pippa caught Guy’s arm as he made his way to where Nory was standing and talked at him until Camille arrived back from the bathroom. Nory found reasons to move out of his orbit two or three times more, but she could still feel his eyes on her. She really rather wished he’d either pass out or bugger off.
Nory was breaking out in a sweat. Whose idea was it to insist on formal wear? She could barely breathe inside her cocktail dress before dinner, but now, after a three-course meal, her so-called shapewear had become pants of iron clamping her middle.
Ameerah was smooching with Dev on the chaise longue. Even if Nory had wanted to interrupt the lovers, she wasn’t sure her Spanx would allow her to sit down.
Nory wiggled out into the hall and along to the downstairs bathrooms; something was going to have to give, and it was going to be her Spanx. She had just reached the door when a warm hand touched her shoulder. She spun around to find Guy smiling down at her. His face was relaxed by excessive amounts of alcohol, and he looked puffy around the eyes, as if the champagne had nowhere left to go and had decided to fill up his eye bags.
“Hey,” he said, in what Nory assumed was his smooth jazz voice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Nory craned her neck to look around him.
“Relax,” he said, rubbing his hand up and down her arm.
“Where’s yourwife?” asked Nory, shaking his hand off.
“She’s talking renovations with Pippa; Christ knows how much that’s going to cost me.”
“I doubt it’ll costyouanything; from what I understand, Camille outearns you by quite a bit. I don’t know why you keep trying to pass her off as thelittle woman.”
Guy smiled sheepishly. One of his eyelids was drooping. “You always could see through my bullshit, Nory.”
“Not always,” Nory hissed pointedly through gritted teeth.
“Hey, I never lied to you,” he said.
“No, you just omitted the teeny fact that you were married with children!”
“You can’t deny that we were hot together,” he whispered, moving closer.
“Your wife is here, you pig!”
“Thrilling, isn’t it?”
Nory’s indignation was making her Spanx feel even tighter. She suddenly knew exactly how Augustus Gloop felt when he was stuck in the tube in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. She pushed past Guy, shoving him hard as she did so, the alcohol making his reflexes slow, so that he stumbled into the wall, then slid down it to the floor.
But Nory wasn’t taking any chances; she didn’t want him catching up with her. She walked, as fast as she reasonably could in a dress that prevented her legs from moving, toward the French doors at the other end of the hall, then pushed through them onto a veranda, down the steps, and out into the night.
