Teresa Medeiros (21 page)

Antonio’s pink-coated assistants were plastered against the shower stall, hands raised in surrender as they nervously eyed the gun Sven had trained on them.

“At ease, Sven,” Tristan commanded wearily.

Sven relaxed like a well-trained Doberman, tucking his gun back into its shoulder holster and offering the fallen hairdresser a hand. “Hello, Andy.”

“Hello, Sven.” Antonio’s nostrils flared in a haughty sniff as Sven tugged him to his feet.

“You two know each other?” Copperfield shot Tristan a disbelieving glance.

Sven shrugged his massive shoulders. “An actor has to eat. I worked as a manicurist and hairdresser before I became demolitions expert.”

“Your employer is going to be needing an attorney
more than a demolitions expert by the time I’m through with him,” Antonio snapped, brushing wisps of Arian’s mutilated hair from the front of his shirt. Snatching up his overflowing trunk, he huffed from the room, his lackeys yipping at his heels like a pack of pink poodles.

Tristan gave Cop a discreet signal to follow, knowing he was a master at calculating just how much cash was required to heal a bruised ego.

Tristan flinched anew when he saw the amputated curls scattered around Arian’s feet. Ten coral-tipped toes peeped out at him from the silky mass. He slowly lifted his gaze, wincing with the premature fear that he would find her as bald as a newborn baby.

An ethereal cloud of hair drifted around her face, framing her wary smile. “The poor gentleman was trying to cut my hair, not my throat.”

At her gentle rebuke, Tristan cleared his own throat, but his voice seemed to have deserted him. He tugged at his tie, wondering why no else seemed to have noticed how airless the room had become.

Heartlessly oblivious to his mounting distress, Arian pointed at the cardboard tub peeping out from under the towel rack. “For me?”

As Tristan rescued his humble offering, he felt more than a little ridiculous—like a smitten suitor with a bouquet of roses in one hand and his heart in the other. He forced himself to relax his grip, knowing he’d look even more foolish with melted ice cream dripping in his Bruno Magli shoes.

He handed the Häagen-Dazs to Arian with a noncommittal grunt.

As she smiled up at him, flashing a shallow dimple he’d never noticed before, a giant fist seemed to reach out and seize his heart. “How did you know chocolate was my favorite?”

Unwilling to humiliate himself further by confessing he’d had one of the janitors dig through the penthouse
trash for empty containers, he shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

Sven examined the lopsided layers of Arian’s hair. “I can fix,” he announced with a confidence he’d displayed previously only when confronted by an armed mugger or a mass of plastic explosives.

As Tristan watched Sven’s beefy fingers sift through Arian’s hair, the pressure in his chest intensified to crushing pain.

Catching a glimpse of his pasty complexion in the mirrored tile over the sink, he backed away from Arian’s stool. “If you’ll excuse me, there are some last-minute details I need to attend to.”

Arian and Sven exchanged a glance, their concerned expressions informing him they were as mystified by his odd behavior as he was.

Clutching his chest, Tristan staggered across the living room and into his private office. He slammed the door, then collapsed against it, mopping his clammy brow with his immaculate sleeve.

He’d been a bloody fool to ignore the warning signs: shortness of breath, chest pain, insomnia, inability to concentrate, sniffing at Arian’s hair when he thought she wasn’t looking.

He groaned. Christ, it was worse than he thought. He wasn’t dying of a heart attack. He was falling in love with a witch. He didn’t need a cardiologist. He needed an exorcist.

He scrambled for the Rolodex on his desk, his unsteady hands soothed by its cold, familiar contours. Of course it wasn’t love, he assured himself as he began to flip frantically through the cards. It was only a painful infatuation, no different from those Copperfield suffered with comedic regularity. Just a crush, like the crush he’d had on Sylvia Throckmorton, a doe-eyed nymph who’d had the shiniest braces and largest breasts in his entire seventh-grade class. Beautiful, heartless Sylvia Throckmorton, who had dotted her
i
’s with hearts and sent his
handmade Valentine back with
RETURN TO SENDER
scribbled on it in baby-pink lipstick.

He drew a card from the Rolodex and settled back in his leather chair to study it. His lust for Arian was simply the consequence of prolonged abstinence. It was no different from being tempted to gorge oneself on an unhealthy meal after fasting for an unreasonable number of hours. To his empty stomach, Arian was a chocolate-drizzled Hungarian torte—delicious but dangerous.

Proximity to another woman—any woman—would engender the same reaction, a theory Tristan was determined to prove as he leaned forward and punched out seven numbers in quick succession.

He tapped a pencil on the desk, undaunted by the breathy reply of an answering machine. When he finally opened his mouth, he was relieved to hear the clipped, confident tones that emerged. “Hello, this is Tristan Lennox. I know it’s been a while and this is short notice, but I was wondering if you had any plans for tonight?”

Arian gazed at her reflection in wonder. She might be a witch, but Sven had proved himself a sorcerer to be reckoned with. Wielding only shears, hairbrush, and a mascara wand, he had transformed her into a vision of shimmering sophistication. He had sealed his magic with a puff of glittering fairy dust he called eye shadow.

In appreciation, Arian had ordered him a fresh spinach salad from the deli downstairs and pretended not to notice when he finished the salad and began to nibble on the Styrofoam tray. He had departed shortly after that to wrap up the security arrangements for the reception, leaving Arian alone with the stranger in the bathroom mirror.

She slid off the stool, trying desperately to stop admiring herself. Puritans shunned vanity, yet Arian was unable to resist a giddy spin of delight as she spread the folds of …

 … Tristan’s bathrobe.

An icy flush of panic seized her as she gazed down at the rumpled garment. She and Sven had been so preoccupied with her hair that it had never occurred to them she would need something to wear with it. She charged toward Tristan’s closet with such haste that the electronic sensors failed to trigger the doors to open.

Muttering a curse on modern technology, she backed up and forced herself to walk sedately toward the seamless expanse. As soon as the walls began to part, she dove between them.

She found the stack of Bloomingdale’s boxes she hadn’t yet opened in a forlorn pile behind a rack of leather shoes. Dropping to her knees, Arian tore open the one on top, grimacing as a dove-gray skirt emerged without a ripple of grace. She tossed it over her shoulder and tore into the next box, moaning with regret as a shapeless shift the color of mud puddled in her hands. She remembered choosing these garments for their austerity and their modesty, the precise reasons she was rejecting them now.

She discarded two more boxes, shuddering with distaste. Sinking back on her heels, she breathed in the intoxicating musk of expensive leather and wondered what strange spell Tristan Lennox had cast upon her. Her longing that he recognize her as a witch had been overshadowed by an intense desire to make him look upon her as a woman. Intense and dangerous.

Hadn’t she vowed never to entrust her happiness into a man’s fickle hands? Her mama had been fool enough to do so only once.

Arian’s vision clouded as she remembered a burst of cruel masculine laughter.
Don’t be ridiculous, Lily. You’re not the sort of woman a man marries
. From her hiding place, Arian had heard a door slam, a vase shatter against it, then the muffled sounds of weeping. She had come creeping out from under the testered bed where her mama had flung herself. Clambering up on the feather tick, she had stroked her mama’s soft hair with
her chubby little hands and whispered,
Don’t cry, Mama. Please don’t cry
.

Arian brushed a stray tear from her cheek, prepared to admit defeat and choose between the drab garments when she noticed the final box, this one a little larger than the others and banded with a bright gold ribbon.

Her hands lost their confidence, trembling slightly as she reached for the elegant box. She drew it into her lap and gave the ribbon a tentative tug. The top sprang open, spilling a river of iridescent taffeta across her lap.

Her breath caught with wonder as she freed the gown from its stifling confines. The shimmering folds captured the light, tossing it back in a verdant shade identical to the emerald in her amulet. A Givenchy, the clerk had called it in a well-deserved tribute to its designer. Arian had found it a wistful reminder of the grace that had been missing from her life for far too long.

Why don’t you try it on? It suits you
.

Tristan’s soft-spoken invitation echoed through Arian’s memory.

She had rejected his offer, yet he’d ignored her childish protests and rewarded her rudeness with kindness. Arian hugged the gown to her chest, promising herself that tonight she wouldn’t be so hasty to decline the pleasures Tristan offered.

When Arian floated down the stairs to the private ballroom of the Plaza, she felt more like a fairy princess than a witch. The skirt of the Givenchy gown belled around her ankles, sheathed for the first time in a pair of sheer stockings. Her dark cloud of hair barely brushed her shoulders. Being relieved of so much of its ponderous weight had left her feeling lighthearted as well as lightheaded.

But nothing made her feel as buoyant as the naughty scraps of silk she’d found buried in the bottom of one of the Bloomingdale’s boxes. The clerk’s taste in
foundation garments ran to the decadent and Arian felt deliciously naked beneath the sleek taffeta.

Her fingertips grazed the banister as if to keep her from taking flight. Heads turned and conversation ceased as she descended, making her bite back a smile. She should have known Tristan would leave nothing to chance. Sven had instructed her to ride the elevator up two extra floors just so she could make such a striking entrance.

She would have preferred to face the crowd for the first time on Tristan’s arm, but she was assured he had only her best interests at heart when she’d peeked into the freezer of the plush carriage that had delivered her to the Plaza to find it stocked with not one, but three different varieties of Häagen-Dazs.

Tristan’s
modest
reception included hundreds of guests, a dozen chandeliers dripping with crystal prisms, a full orchestra, a bubbling champagne fountain that shot ten feet into the air, and an imposing ice sculpture of a pointy-hatted witch in full flight perched upon a gleaming broom. Arian hadn’t witnessed such splendor since her childhood days at Louis XIV’s court.

She had to struggle not to hasten her steps as she saw the man awaiting her at the foot of the stairs. She had seen men wear naught but black during her years in Gloucester, but she’d never seen a man wear black like Tristan Lennox—not as a somber denial of light, but a sensual embrace of darkness. His tuxedo was the perfect foil for the crisp white of his shirtfront, the molten sunshine of his hair. As their eyes met, his lips quirked in that wry smile Arian was beginning to crave with such alarming hunger. She wiped her damp palm on the banister, praying no one would notice.

Lifting his hands, Tristan applauded her arrival with lazy grace.

Arian froze, paralyzed by the resulting thunder of approval that swept through the ballroom. It seemed she was finally to be praised instead of condemned, simply
because this generous man had deemed her worthy of it.

She knew her heart was in the tremulous smile she gave him, but by the time she noticed the willowy beauty clinging to his elbow, it was too late to snatch it back.

A camera flashed, blinding Arian, then another. She dreaded the thought of having her humiliation frozen for all time, but welcomed the harsh sting of the lights. Perhaps she could blame them for the mist of tears in her eyes.

A microphone was thrust in her face. “Miss Whitewood, is it true that Mr. Lennox has decided to reward you the million dollars?”

“Any chance of us printing a schematic of that broomstick, Miss Whitewood?”

“Are you a practicing member of Wicca, Arian, or do you profess to worship Satan?”

The voices around her rose to a shrill cacophony, vying with each other for the privilege of screeching her name. Arian’s brittle smile never wavered. Her mama might have had many weaknesses, but Arian had never seen her crawl before any man.

As soon as she felt the warm hand cup her elbow, she knew who it belonged to. Although furious that he should be the one to come charging to her rescue, she
resisted her first impulse to jerk away from his possessive touch and allowed him to lead her through the crowd to a stage adorned with a podium and a microphone of its own.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Tristan silenced the crowd with little more than an artfully crooked eyebrow. “Patience, please. I haven’t forgotten that I promised you an impromptu press conference before we get down to the far more pleasurable business of celebrating Miss Whitewood’s good fortune.”