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“We could. Like we used to. Or we could stay here.”
She looked into his eyes, seeing the way they narrowed slightly as he assessed her. She was assessing him right back.
“Here,” Bailey opted.
Penske’s grin widened, and he signaled the bartender. “Two more,” he said, pointing to the bar in front of them.
“You’re drinking both of them yourself,” Bailey warned, to which he said in his cocksure way, “We’ll see.”
His cell phone rang, and he pulled it from his pocket and squinted at the screen.
“Need some help seeing?” she asked.
“Nah.” He tucked it back in his pocket.
He drank another whiskey pretty fast, but Bailey was still sipping away on her first. She started to feel very warm in the chest.
A slow country-music song came on, and Penske pulled her away from the bar and into his arms. She felt a bit silly, dancing, but it was really nice.
“Let’s get outta here,” he whispered in her ear.
“I thought we were staying.”
“Can’t a guy change his mind?”
Pretty sure she was making a big mistake, Bailey nevertheless let herself be guided through the door and into the parking lot. She started toward Danny O’s, but Penske twirled her around and into his arms.
“Wanna fool around?” he asked, pressing her body close to his.
She could feel his hardness, and a thrill zinged through her. She let her hands move down to his hips, pulling him closer, intensifying the feeling.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said breathlessly, moving her toward their vehicles at the back of the lot.
Chapter 13
The First Fives had all left the reunion except for Zora, and there definitely was that “party’s over” vibe as Ellie poured the rest of her wine down the bathroom sink. She glanced around. The golf club was definitely lower tier in the decorating department. Faded flowered wallpaper, pinkish tiles on the floor, ornate and gilded fixtures, tarnished in spots. It probably hadn’t been redone since the eighties, but it was about the only game in town in West Knoll for an event this size.
You shouldn’t have come, she told her reflection.
She’d thought for a moment that Delta and Amanda might really get into it. Now, that would have been a story. Old rivals duke it out at the ten-year reunion. She could have a field day writing a tongue-in-cheek article that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to sell as a human-interest story. She wanted to write. Her gig at Channel Seven wasn’t really giving her what she needed creatively.
She walked back out of the bathroom. There were still a number of people around, but the place was definitely starting to thin out. Almost to a one, her classmates had brought up that they’d seen her on the news . . . and almost to a one they called her the “weather girl.” She wasn’t the meteorologist, she was just the fill-in. She supposed she should be gratified that they’d seen her at all, but she found it more annoying than anything else. She was a journalist who’d written for a number of local newspapers and then went off on her own to interview different people for stories around Portland, sending her tapes into the Portland television stations, hoping for a bite.
Nada.
But she wouldn’t give up. Alton had called her his fierce Chihuahua, which she didn’t like either, but he and his wife, Coco, had a Chihuahua named Penny who was mean as dirt. That dog could only snarl and growl and glare, as far as Ellie could see, but she’d pretended to think it was just darling because Alton was an anchor on Channel Seven and he told her he had a thing for redheads when she stalked him into a bar after work one night and struck up a friendship. He’d seemed half-interested in her work, more interested in getting her into bed, but she held off on the latter until he’d read some of what she’d written. “It’s good,” he told her, sounding surprised, and then they ended up in a downtown Portland hotel room for a couple of hours before he had to go home to Coco.
After that, Ellie worked her way into meeting the production staff. One of the producers took a liking to her, and she almost jettisoned Alton in favor of Rob, but luckily she stuck with Alton, who she could tell was really falling for her. Rob was a bit younger and brasher, and he was definitely a decision maker, but he was engaged to a woman whose family had money, according to Alton, and so Rob wasn’t going to stray too far.
She managed to keep Rob at arm’s length, but not much farther away, and she learned her hair color was a plus on television. “People notice red hair,” Rob told her. “And yours is natural.”
It took a little bit more time before they put her on screen. Ellie wanted to be a reporter, but Channel Seven was the domain of that bitch on wheels Pauline Kirby, who, though getting a
little long in the tooth, had a big following around the Portland area. Ellie sometimes fantasized that Pauline would just keel over and die and she, Ellie, would be able to pick up the mantle as Channel Seven’s number-one reporter. Not so. She was . . . the weather girl . . . part-time.
But she had Alton. He was leaving Coco, that was for certain. He was more concerned about leaving Penny, the Chihuahua, than his crazy wife. Penny was a purse dog, tucked into Coco’s big bag whenever they came to the station. Ellie made faces at Penny when Coco couldn’t see, and the dog went ape-shit. Rob had caught her at it once and smothered a smile. Alton loved the dog too much to ever see what a pain in the ass it was, so Ellie kept her low-grade loathing to herself as much as possible.
Now she thought about Alton as she cruised through the main room of the reunion one more time. Most of the guys were still hanging around together, and they’d traded in their beer cups for shots at the bar. Always a good idea. Justin Penske had left with Bailey; go figure.
