Page 42 of Hello Darling
12
Stella
Okay, so Pretty Boy can charm my socks offanddirty talk my panties off. Big deal. Obviously, the only way for me to prove to him that I’m immune to this British actor nonsense is by sleeping with him.
I’m going to prove it to him so hard.
Just one time, and then we're out of each other's systems. He'll move on. I'll move on. But, this is probably the only time in my life that I'm going to have dinner and sex with a movie star—so why not enjoy it. I'll have an exciting and totally inappropriate story to tell my grandkids one day when I'm drunk on schnapps.
Surprisingly, I am not even nervous. Even more surprisingly, I am excited. I can’t wait to get this over with. Let it rain!
I will eat that enormous chocolate chunk cookie. I will eat one whole cookie until I'm sick of it and then I won't want another bite and then that box of overwhelming cookies will go back to England or wherever and it won't matter if I start to crave it or not. It will be gone. Because that’s how the cookie crumbles. Even the unbearably moist and chewy ones.
I have a feeling I will be dealing with a level of manscaping heretofore unknown, so I spent an unprecedented hour getting ready for this…whatever…and I have brought my A game. I will also be bringing the food. He offered to cook salmon, but I’d rather he didn’t handle any more fish today prior to handling me. I insisted on picking up dinner on my way to his house, so he wouldn’t have to give out his credit card info and address. He put up a good fight and insisted on repaying me immediately “in every way possible.”
Puh-lease.
But also, yes please and he’d better.
“You look pretty tonight!” says Mrs. Wang at the Golden Panda. “Order for two—you got a date, huh? Lemme guess. Kwas?”
“No!” Oh my God how does Mrs. Wang know about the Kwas incident? “Definitely not Kwas.”
“Out of town man? The usual for you, right?”
“Out of town, yes. Usual? Not exactly.” I am trying so hard not to smile, my face is sore. I am dying to tell her that Evan Hunter will be eating Golden Panda’s Chef Special tonight, but I can’t. Or I won’t. He and I haven’t discussed it, but if he wanted to be incognito at the gym, surely he prefers to be discreet in matters of the bedroom too. I always do.
As I pull up and park in the driveway behind his rental car, somehow bringing “takeaway” Chinese food to share with him feels so domestic and cozy, and I get this weird vision of me doing this on a regular basis. I immediately toss that vision out and it is replaced with images of that actress who’ll be coming to play his love interest in the movie.
I carry my coat over one arm, and the plastic bags in the other. It’s not very cold yet, and I want his first impression tonight to be of me in this outfit instead of a puffy coat. I’m wearing a tight-fitting sweater dress that hits mid-thigh, bare legs and black knee-high boots with over-the-knee socks.
“This is just one night,” I tell myself, as I walk up the steps to his front door, and—fuck me—the door is open and he’s gripping the doorframe with one hand, the other is casually rubbing his abs under his charcoal grey t-shirt. He’s wearing black jeans without a belt and his feet are bare, and he looks recently showered and hungry and hot. He looks so fucking hot I almost turn and run away because I may have underestimated just how big and delicious a cookie he is.
“Hi,” he says, so serious I wonder for a second if he’s in a bad mood.
“Hi.”
He looks at me with that panty-melting intensity that I had imagined possible the first time I saw him running by the beach. I just hadn’t imagined that he would ever actually makemypanties melt. I just didn’t see myself standing at the entrance of his rental home while holding bags of Chinese food in my hands and a life-threatening amount of tension in my lady parts.
“Bloody hell,” he mutters to himself. “Gorgeous. You’re a proper dish. Get in here, will you?” He takes the coat from me and gracefully hangs it up, somehow managing to never take his eyes off of me.
I’ve been undressed by a man’s eyes before, but they usually seem to just rip my clothes off. Evan Hunter’s eyes are slowly unwrapping me, layer by layer, until I am so far beyond naked, I’m just the sad lonely soul who lives deep inside those layers. The one who will never admit that she needs a mate. The one who knew as soon as she saw him that he threatened to do just this—peel away the layers. The one who will stop fighting the good fight for tonight.
I’m starting to regret the decision to wear a tight sweater dress, because—warmth. My entire being just got warmer even though I’ve removed my heavy coat. The way he’s looking at me is just making me perspire. It’s not like when we’re at the gym—that’s my turf. It’s not like this morning, when I knew my brothers were outside and we had to get going. I’m alone with him in his space right now, but I feel like he is all up in mine, even though he’s standing five feet away from me. He studies the length of my legs, as if he’s trying to decide what he wants to do with them first. When he notices me squeezing my thighs together, he smirks, and magically becomes the polite gentlemanly host anyone would assume he’d be.
“Sorry, let me take those bags from you.” He steps forward, letting his fingers tangle with mine as he takes the plastic bag handles from me. “Smells good, what are we having? I hope you kept the receipt so I can pay you back.” He carries our dinner to the kitchen counter. “Actually,” he continues, “I don’t have small bills, so I’ll just give you this fifty and we’ll call it even. Delivery charge and all that.”
He pulls a folded-up fifty-dollar bill from his pocket and holds it out to me.
I take it and shove it into my purse. Best not to comment on how it makes me feel a bit like a prostitute. I place my purse on the dining table and walk over to the window that looks out towards the water, while he starts to unpack dinner. The fact that he hasn’t kissed me upon arrival leads me to believe that he needs to restrain himself in this situation, and I’m glad. I like that.
Every room is dimly lit and amber-hued. I can hear music from another room—classical. Of course. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before—Evan Hunter is obviously a vampire and he has invited me here to feast upon me. And I am fine with that. What a way to go!
“I wish I could have gotten you here a bit earlier,” he says, almost cheerily, “before the sun went down. I really want you to see that view.”
“I’ve seen it online, to be honest.”
“Oh?”
