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He’d be glad when the woman was gone. Out of his hair. He was going to have a hard enough time focusing in court today after she’d robbed him of a decent night’s sleep.
She might be stunning to look at, but her reckless, irresponsible behavior made her a danger to herself and a liability to everyone else.
Fighting off the fogging feeling of fatigue, and dismissing the dying heat in his crotch, he took the gangplank two rungs at a time, busy justifying the lingering pulse of attraction while he keyed in the code to exit the marina’s security gate. With his workload, he hadn’t gotten laid in over eight months, and if he didn’t count that weekend hookup after the office’s Christmas party, with Shelly the court reporter which hadn’t ended well, it was more like a year. He had enough responsibilities crammed into his busy schedule, to his clients and his family, without inviting any of Zelda Madison’s unnecessary drama into his life.
Even so, he couldn’t quite throw off the ripple of disappointment as he headed across the marina’s parking lot towards the crosstown bus—at the thought that when he returned this evening, his uninvited houseguest would be long gone.
You can call a cab from the convenience store across the lot. If you want to return the two hundred dollars, don’t get the money out of the ATM in the store, it isn’t safe, just mail a check or hand it to Faith next time you’re in the pub. The code to exit the marina is 1562.
TS
Zelda squinted at the neat, black script on the Post-it note stuck to the table next to the bed, inches from her nose. Clearly Ty Sullivan had not wanted to risk her missing his little missive… Or the hefty hint that he expected her to be well and truly gone by the time he returned. Or the even heftier hint that he thought her completely incapable of making even the most basic arrangements without a string of condescending instructions from him.
Holding the sheet up to her breasts, she slid her feet off the narrow bunk which also doubled as a couch. And sniffed the delicious scent of fresh caffeine in the air. Spotting the coffee pot nestled in the corner of the small kitchenette behind an empty carton of Pop Tarts, she circumnavigated the law books stacked ’round the table to get to it. Finding no clean mugs in the cabinet, she washed out one of the dirty mugs soaking in the sink, then nuked the black coffee in the microwave after deducing that the crumbs, which coated the inside of the machine, were fairly harmless. With the sheet draped around her, she cradled the coffee in her hands and propped her butt on the countertop to survey the compact living area of the barge in the daylight.
The space wasn’t huge, but it would have looked a lot more spacious if it weren’t for the mountains of crap everywhere. An explosion of paperwork covered all the available flat surfaces while dirty dishes doused with cold soapy water were piled high in the sink. As if someone had been on the verge of actually washing up only to be interrupted by a zombie apocalypse.
The wet room that doubled as a bathroom was small and muggy and smelled disconcertingly of Ty’s cologne and pine-forest scented shampoo—which she borrowed to wash her hair. The bedroom at the back of the barge—which had an unmade double bed taking up most of the space—looked like even more of a bombsite than the living area. Clothes draped an easy chair and lay in mounds on the small amount of available floor space, having been dumped everywhere but the basket in the corner—which remained defiantly empty. Either Ty Sullivan was a terrible shot, or he had simply not bothered to put anything away. Ever.
She raided his wardrobe for something to replace her stained Versace gown. Amid the stacks of clean shirts and underwear in their laundry paper, she finally located a secret cache of newly purchased white Fruit of the Loom shirts still in their plastic wrapping. The large V-neck cotton tee hung down to mid-thigh and made a rather snazzy mini-dress once she had belted it with one of his silk ties.
After digging for twenty minutes, she failed to find a hair dryer or anything resembling a hair brush, so she had to settle for attacking the tangles in her damp hair with the tiny comb she’d found in the bathroom—because the man obviously had a religious objection to conditioner. Cursing the unruly and uncooperative bird’s nest of blond tangles, she glared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Her hair had become a symbol of everything she had come to hate about her life and her modeling career. When she was first sober it had been important to her to keep her job. Because she had needed at least some semblance of stability and continuity, and she had wanted to prove she could still function in the environment in which she had once floundered so spectacularly.
Confident in her sobriety now, she didn’t need to validate herself and her decisions anymore. She had earned more than enough money in the past five years to give herself time and space to find a new career that would finally fulfill the burning need inside her to do something useful with her life.
Selling hair care products didn’t quite cover that.
But she wished now she hadn’t been quite so rash and euphoric last night after speaking to her agent for the last time.
The decision not to step out of the limo when it had arrived at the red carpet event—and she’d seen the barrage of flashbulbs firing at the actress who had stepped onto the carpet ahead of her—had felt justified at the time. Now it felt reckless and immature. She’d made a commitment to attend the event that she should have followed through on. The decision to tell the limo driver to keep on going and take the expressway out of Manhattan and into Brooklyn was considerably more idiotic, because it would be construed in the press as another sign of her wild behavior. And be accompanied by the usual heated speculation about whether she was back to her wicked ways.
Well, she wasn’t. But she had no desire to face the furor just yet.
If she could stay in Brooklyn, incognito on Ty Sullivan’s house barge, where no one would find her, over the Labor Day Weekend, the headlines would have time to die down. She would have to do a press conference once the news got out that she’d ditched Fantasy shampoo’s generous new contract offer. But their PR people were still chasing her agent—and no way would Bob tell them she had let him go, because she was the only big client he had. So she had a few weeks grace before the story hit the headlines.
She dumped the comb into Ty’s minimalist grooming supplies, conceding defeat as it resolutely refused to make any inroads into the thatch of tangles. Another good reason why deciding to take that midnight swim had not been her brightest idea to date.
She knotted her hair like a hunk of rope and headed into the living space to find her purse.
Ty was going to be less than pleased to find her still here when he got back. His note had been fairly clear on that score. So she’d have to try a lot harder to schmooze him than she had last night. Surely the man could not be as schmooze proof as he appeared. She glanced around the messy house barge. Maybe there was a way she could get into his good books while he was out fighting the good fight for the people of the Marlboro Projects.
He thought she was a princess, a high-maintenance lush who couldn’t and wouldn’t do for herself. What better way to prove him wrong than to give the barge the spring clean it so desperately needed? Especially as she planned to live here too for a few days and ever since she’d been sober she’d become a bit manic about keeping her living space meticulously clean.
From the stack of pizza boxes and takeout cartons stacked on top of his kitchen bin, which she shoveled into a black plastic bag, he also didn’t eat much other than junk food. She’d go to the market, there had to be one around here. She happened to be an excellent cook, because she’d taken classes while finding other things to do instead of partying all night. And if there was a way to schmooze the unschmoozeable Mr. Ty Sullivan maybe it was through his stomach.
Leaving the barge, she dumped her first sack of rubbish into the dumpsters by the security gate and headed out of the marina.
First things first. Her phone was dead. She needed to get it charged so she could call her AA sponsor. Walking out on her modeling career was a decision she’d already discussed in depth with Amelie, but she needed to tell her about last night’s escapades. Her sobriety always had to be her first concern and she wanted to be sure that the midnight swim wasn’t in any way a sign of her losing control. It hadn’t felt that way at the time—it had felt like a statement of purpose and empowerment, of joy and freedom from the things that had shackled her for too long. But still, she’d be happier once she had Amelie’s input.
Then she needed to track down her nearest meeting. If she was going to be in Brooklyn for a few days, she needed to find one nearby. And then she would get to the market. She could leave off calling Seb until she returned to the Masoleum. If he was true to his usual form, he’d be unlikely to even notice that she’d gone missing.
But after leaving the marina and crossing the parking lot onto Knapp St., she spotted the red and white spiral of a barbershop on the opposite corner of the junction. She crossed over to the shop and surveyed the massive beehive on her head making her reflection in the window look like Quasimodo.
She strolled into the shop. A chubby man sat in one of the chairs, his face swaddled in a hot towel as the barber cleaned an old-fashioned straight-blade razor.
“Good morning, kochanie, are you lost?” The thin white-haired barber smiled at her, as he wrapped the razor carefully in a cloth.
