I’m at the button shop. You really need to take a look at the social media buzz this morning.
She opened Instagram and Twitter to a flood of mentions, likes, and comments all based on a series of moonlit images taken of her and Ryan on the jetty, her cupped hand extending the grapes to him across the jetty. The cattails seemed to curve around them in the moonlight, giving the scene a romantic air set to crackling by the obvious chemistry between them. The photographer was a random Manhattan resident who had lurked in the bushes at the end of the jetty and watched the whole conversation play out, then capitalized on being in the right place at the right time.
“Merde,” she said. She didn’t want to be a part of Ryan’s scandalous ways, but a quick look at the replies and comments showed a fair bit of chatter about whether Ryan was dating Lily Graham, speculating about Simone’s role in the relationships.
Lorrie arrived, breathless. “She had sixty followers yesterday,” she said without preamble as she hurried past Simone into the workroom and set down a teetering stack of button boxes. “Now she’s nearing five thousand and climbing.”
The only thing to do was to wait it out until the next news cycle. “He’d better not set one foot in my showroom,” she muttered.
Chapter Seven
For five long days the city was at its worst, seething with heat and smells, trapped in a humid, hundred-degree blanket of air the forecasters promised would break on Saturday night. At the end of this heat wave, Ryan came back to the showroom, and he didn’t come alone.
He brought Lily Graham.
Simone noticed them immediately, as did everyone else in the showroom, gazes alternating between Simone, Ryan, and Lily in a way that told Simone that she was in danger of becoming not just well-known, but notorious. Her heart tripped when she saw Ryan in her peripheral vision, infuriating her even more. She kept her attention on Tilda Davies, owner of a couture stationery boutique in the West Village. Simone had hired Tilda’s team to design invitations for her grand opening the prior year, and Tilda had become a regular customer. Today she was shopping with her attentive law enforcement husband, gun and badge discreetly hidden by his suit jacket, who seemed to see everything and say nothing. Each time the door opened he glanced up, but he paid no more attention to Ryan and Lily than he did to anyone else in the shop. Instead he stayed close to Tilda, who held herself with a new strength and vulnerability since the last time Simone saw her, early in June. He remained a quiet presence at her shoulder, completely comfortable in this ultrafeminine setting, focused on luxuriously pampering items for Tilda than anything overtly sexy. At his request Simone gathered several items, including a nightgown and robe set in a shimmering shade of garnet red that was guaranteed to set off his wife’s pale skin, gray eyes, and tousled black curls to perfection. When she’d made Tilda and her husband comfortable in a dressing room, she looked for Ryan.
His appearance shocked her: grooves in the skin by his mouth, dark circles under his eyes, and he even looked thinner than he’d been at the Delacorte. He wore faded jeans that were white at the hip seams and the button fly, a loose Oxford, and boat shoes. The clothes were timeless, as men’s fashions often were, but something about the limp cotton and the basic Levi’s jeans suggested clothes he’d brought out of storage from an earlier period in his life. College maybe, when he was younger, thinner, someone else. Lily wore a white cotton dress with a boat neck, fine blue stripes, and brown buttons at the shoulder. Ryan returned Simone’s noncommittal greetings with a smile so fragile it would shatter if she breathed on it, and a look of quiet desperation in his eyes. Lily gave her a look that would curdle milk.
“Welcome to Irresistible,” she said, determined to be the grown-up in the room. “Are you looking for something for a particular function or event?”
“A house party in the Hamptons this weekend,” Ryan said, when it was clear Lily wouldn’t respond.
“Are there special events you’re planning to attend? A concert, or a dinner party?” Simone said.
“You know what? I’m fine on my own,” Lily said. Her voice dripped with the acid sweetness of someone with a poison-tipped knife waiting to slip into your back. “Keep him entertained for me, would you?”
She purposely turned her back on Ryan and Simone, and began browsing the racks.
Simone shot Ryan a look that should have sliced him to ribbons. How dare he? How dare he bring this woman who was spoiling for a fight to her showroom on a Friday afternoon? “You’re making a spectacle of me,” she said under her breath.