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With a mutinous glare, Gina stormed to the bar.
Jack's fingers instinctively went to the throbbing bump on his head. It was going to be a long night.
Six
“You need to do something,” Lili’s cousin, Tad murmured from behind the bar. He nodded at the estrogen flock near the water station.
Yeah, yeah, didn’t she know it. She hauled in a fortifying breath and strode over to the ringleader. Her second cousin, Angela, was fronting the charge, licking her lips and bombarding Jack’s table with lustful gazes.
“If I have to tell you one more time to get back to work, tonight’s tips will be dropped in St. Jude’s collection plate at eight o’clock Mass tomorrow.” Not that she’d be stepping across the church threshold herself—she might turn to ash, but her pious Aunt Sylvia would be happy to make a donation on behalf of the servers at DeLuca’s. Angela scowled while the rest of the girls separated in a flurry of giggles, throwing longing glances in Jack’s direction.
Lili seated Mr. and Mrs. Castillo, here for their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and returned to gossip with Tad.
“So, Wonder Woman, huh?” her cousin said, giving the bar a quick swipe with a damp cloth while he shot a glittering smile at a bouncy red head on her way to the restroom. Ever the multi-tasker, her cousin. The poor girl’s perk faltered as she wobbled on her heels, helpless in the face of Tad’s blue-eyed, square-jawed, hint-of-scruff charm.
“Hey, I didn’t look half-bad in that costume,” Lili protested.
“Yeah, I heard Kilroy thought so, too,” Tad said. “And judging by the heat he’s packing tonight, I’d lay good odds he spent his day thinking about peeling you out of that costume.”
“Oh, hush.”
But Tad was right. The air was thick with sex pheromones, and while ninety-five percent of it was one-way traffic from every female in the room to Jack’s table, the remaining five percent was swimming upstream from the man himself to her spot at the hostess podium. With the scorching looks he was sending her way, she half-expected the smoke alarms to go off any minute.
“What are you going to do about it?” Tad asked.
“What? Kilroy?”
Tad threw her a well-duh look. “Cara seems to think you’ve got an in. I thought she was talking out of her bony ass as usual, but now I’ve witnessed the man in action, I’m inclined to agree.”
“I’m not his type. You’ve seen the women he dates.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t throw that Ashley out of bed for eating breadsticks.” Her cousin had clearly found a kindred penis in Jack Kilroy. “And then there was that lingerie model and one of those bikini babes from Survivor. Yeah, you’re probably right. How could you possibly stack up against those chicks?”
She knew he was being his usual sarcastic self, but it didn’t stop a sigh escaping her lips.
“Babe, I jest,” he added, his expression resolving to sympathy. “Trust me. All men like ‘em curvy. It’s like, programmed into our DNA.”
Maybe, but Lili’s DNA still screamed, Danger! An afternoon of Google-Fu had thrown up all she needed to know about the lives and lusts of Cara’s star. Last summer, he’d been a minor-league TV chef on a fledgling network with fewer viewers than DeLuca’s Tuesday night covers. Then along came Ashley van Patten, star of struggling soap opera Tomorrow’s Hope. His people must have lunched with her people angling to manufacture the next celebrity couple juggernaut. Jashley. Or Ashlack. Not as catchy as Brangelina, but it did the trick to reverse the slide of their respective ratings. Hers doubled. His tripled.
While their relationship ups-and-downs were entertaining, their train wreck break-up had been even more so: a public fight at one of those Hollywood mogul’s shindigs that ended with Jack wearing a martini and Ashley coughing up a gallon of chlorinated water after she fell in the kidney-shaped pool. Not long after, he had punched a photographer who got all up in his grill on a London street. Lili obviously didn’t have the dramatic flair to go toe to toe with Jack Kilroy.
“Ah, but still he stares.” Tad grinned, interpreting her apprehensive expression correctly. “Worried your lady bits might go into shock, babe? I know it’s been a while.”
“Maybe he’s not my type,” she said, shooting for haughty.
“Liar,” he said, then more casually, “We could make it interesting.”
“How interesting?”
“Fifty bucks says you can’t close the deal before he leaves town.”
She shot him an impatient look. “How about twenty minutes on the hog?”
Tad answered with the family stare-down, a skill learned by all DeLucas while still in the cradle. “I’ve told you before, Lili. I don’t think you can handle that much power.” Her cousin had a Harley, but refused to let her ride it. It was much more fun to take pot shots at what he called her ‘tin cup runabout.’
“Forget it,” she said, turning away.
“Okay, ten minutes. But it doesn’t matter because you’re such a chicken. You won’t go for it even if it’s offered up on a platter.” He sloped off to attend to a couple of cougars who had just stalked up and dug their claws into the bar.
