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“Not at all.” She was getting nothing further from me.
She noticed my now-empty glass and refilled it. Her company was more welcome than I would have guessed. Plus, so far so good. I hadn’t revealed any major secrets or confirmed any of her suspicions.
“What takes you to Montreal?” I asked.
“My sister lives there. I haven’t seen her or my lovely nieces since before the pandemic. I thought I should visit before they graduate from high school.”
“How old are they now?”
“Six and eight.” She laughed, a light, bell-like sound. “They were toddlers when I saw them last. Fucking Covid.”
I smiled at the profanity. The Covid-19 pandemic had changed everything, including how I met Simon. If the pandemic hadn’t kept me prisoner for so long, I wondered if I’d even have gone to the party where I met him. I noticed Ronnie looking at me with curiosity and realized I was off in a dream world thinking about him. I asked the first question that came to mind. “Where does your sister live?”
“Lambertville.”
“Mom and my grandfather are in Broxton. We’re practically neighbors.”
The gleam in Ronnie’s eyes made me realize I’d just handed her important information: my family’s location. “That’ll make it dead easy for me to help you then. Let’s drink to that.”
Despite my better instincts, I helped her empty the champagne bottle.
After takeoff, Ronnie slipped off her stilettos and put on a pair of embroidered Chinese slippers.
“Ah, that’s so much nicer,” she said. Then she touched my wrist, her fingers soft and dry on my skin. “Now tell me about this lover’s spat that you and Simon just had. Is it all patched up now?”
“No spat. No drama. Nothing to tell.”
“Really? He said that things were rocky, probably from the excitement of the party, but he’d managed to calm you down.”
I shook my head again, wide-eyed as if I had no idea what she was talking about. Simon was right. Ronnie was dangerous.
“I’m concerned about you, Sadie,” she said, using my name to add weight to her comment. “I’ve heard some gossip about Simon, that he likes things rough at times.”
“Where do you get this stuff?” I asked, resisting the urge to wriggle in my seat, reminding myself of how delicious Simon’s loving form of roughness felt. “Or do you just make stories like that up?”
Meals were placed in front of us, which put an end to the immediate conversation, but Ronnie’s insinuation didn’t sit well. Simon didn’t want to go any further than spanking, did he? My appetite vanished at the thought. I’d eaten only a sandwich since early that morning and should have been ravenous. Now Ronnie had me worried with her sharp observations, half-truths, and tainted conclusions. Maybe there were things about Simon I didn’t know. I looked at the crab timbale on my plate and my stomach heaved.
“I just wonder how much you know about your boyfriend. I’ve heard he likes a little hanky panky.” She sang a line from the Madonna number in a low soprano. Her sweet voice annoyed me. It seemed wrong that she was endowed with so much: beauty, intelligence, and the ability to sing in key.
Before she uttered the S-word, I rushed to protect Simon from whatever jealous rumors might be spreading about him. It was a stupid song anyway. Who spanks with the back of their hand?
I said, “You mean there are still couples whodon’texperiment with sex play? I thought the repressed era of missionaries and Victorian puritanism died about a hundred years ago.”
“Are you or aren’t you guys playing around with BDSM?” She grinned, baring her teeth, Cheshire cat style.
I returned what I hoped was an enigmatic smile. “I guess if we wanted our sex lives to be public, we’d make videos and post them online.”
“Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers. It’s just one ex-girlfriend said one thing, another said something else. I have many sources and lots of friends, but I try to be selective about what I put on my blog. I thought you might like to clear up any misunderstandings.” She waited for me to say something, but I took some hand lotion from my purse and rubbed it into my hands.
She dabbed the corners of her mouth with her serviette before speaking again. “I will confess that I spent some time on Seguro Island looking for a secret door to a hidden dungeon. I even tried to accidentally wander into your bedroom to see if I could find any ropes, whips, and chains but one of those overprotective security guards stopped me on the staircase.”
I said a silent prayer of thanks for the security staff that Simon insisted on positioning throughout the house and garden. What if she’d found the drawer with the hairbrush, paddle, and switch?
I yawned to feign disinterest. “For the record then, Simon Jacobson is the most loving, protective man I’ve ever known. If anyone says anything different, they should say it out loud, to his face, not whisper it to strangers behind his back.”
“I hope you don’t think of me as a stranger,” she said, signaling to the flight attendant that our wine glasses were empty. “I want to be your friend. Your best friend.”
That position is already filled, I wanted to say.
