6
I was really, really nervous as I rode the elevator down all 23 stories to the lobby.
One, I was nervous that I was about to do something really stupid and get my ass chewed out by my boss.
Two, I was all butterflies about seeing the stranger who owned that golden voice. If he sounded that good, imagine how he must look…
Let me explain. I’m not great with guys. I don’t flirt very well – in fact, any guy I find really attractive, I kind of lose it when I’m around him. Maybe it’s lack of practice. I don’t get approached that much by really handsome men, even though LA is the capital of pretty boys. I hear most of them are narcissistic and self-involved; I wouldn’t know, since they rarely give me the time of day. And when a hot, charming guy does start talking to me at a party, I either give giggly, airheaded responses that make me look stupid, or stilted, one-word answers that make me seem like I’m not interested, when in fact I’m just nervous as hell. After a minute or two of that, most of the hot ones move on.
I tend to end up dating average guys, guys I become friends with first – guys who are sort of cute, not intimidating at all. The type of guy who becomes more attractive the longer you know them. The type that grows on you. Nice guys. Regular guys who are even-keeled and sweet, or at least seem that way for the first several months until the bad things start floating up to the surface.
I like that – I like nice guys. But once… just once… I wanted to have one of the hot ones.
So I was nervous that he was going to be absolutely gorgeous, and that I was going to make a fool of myself.
Three, I was pretty much positive there was no way he was as good-looking as his voice would suggest, and I didn’t want to ruin the fantasy.
I know, it sounds stupid – “Oh, you’re afraid he’ll be good looking, and you’re afraid he’ll be ugly! Make up your damn mind!” Followed by a slap on the back of my head.
But hear me out. Ever see a guy from the back, and you’re like ‘DAMN, break me off a piece of that’? (Not that I would get to break me off a piece of that in reality, but I can still dream.) Amazing ass, great shoulders, gorgeous hair, fantastic arms? You’re thinking somebody went back in time and made a clone of Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp at age 27. Or 33. Or 38, even. And then you see them from the front…
And you’re like, ‘Oh, no. No, no, no.’
It’s the ‘glamorous Hollywood is actually composed of tattoo parlors and skeezy massage parlors’ effect.
Or the Monet effect: beautiful from far away, but not so good up close. I think that was from Clueless.
Either way, reality doesn’t match up to fantasy.
Sometimes I won’t even try to see what the guy looks like from the front even though his backside belongs in a Greek temple. I’ve been disappointed enough that I treasure my little fantasies.
It’s all about managing expectations. Again, with nice guys, it’s, ‘Oh, he’s kind of cute… I’ll go out with him. Oh, he’s funny… and he’s got a good personality… okay, I’ll give it a shot.’
‘Low expectations’ equals ‘not as much disappointment’ in my book.
And my expectations for Mr. Connor Brooks were sky-high.
If I were going to be disappointed, I would have preferred to hold on to my fantasy.
As it turns out, I was not disappointed.
Far, far from it.
7
The crowd in the marble-floored, exquisitely decorated lobby was thinned out by the time I stepped out of the elevator. In Los Angeles, anybody who has a modicum of power or money jumps ship by 4PM so they can get a head start on traffic. To home, to drinks, to dinner, or maybe out of town to Vegas.
Everybody else pretty much calls it quits by 6PM and accepts their lot in life is to suffer on jam-packed freeways.
The peons, like me, are stuck watching all the other people get on with their lives.
So when I walked out of the elevator, there weren’t that many people to get in the way of my seeing him.
Oh.
My.
God.
He was standing at the desk chatting with Stanley. It had to be him. No way that one man that gorgeous, and another guy with the voice on the phone, could simultaneously coexist in the same building and not be the same person. The odds were too high. Even if they were two people, their combined sexiness would pull them together and fuse them into one perfect male, like two stars passing too close to each other in space. Sexiness gravity.
See? ‘Sexiness gravity.’ Good God. This is the sort of stupid stuff that starts running through my head and why I sound like an idiot around hot men.
And he was hot. Over six feet tall, probably six-two. Dark, wavy hair in a fashionable cut, slightly over the ear but not too long. Strong chin, perfect jawline. A strong nose that was just rough enough to make him look more manly than pretty-boy. A perfectly even set of white teeth in a heart-melting grin. And the lips on that smile… oh my. Those were lips made for long, lingering kisses.
The most astounding, crystal-clear blue eyes. Like ocean water in the Caribbean, the color you see in picture-perfect postcards. They somehow managed to envelope you with their warmth and send a shiver through you, too, like he could look deep inside you to your innermost secrets and desires.
I couldn’t pinpoint his age, but I figured it was late 20’s to early 30’s. He had the very beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, a mischievous crinkle that went with the gleam in his eyes when he grinned. The crinkling wasn’t the age so much as the tan, though – a beautiful golden brown. Not the type that says, ‘I go to a tanning salon,’ but ‘I just came back from two weeks in Hawaii.’
He was dressed in a dark suit – something exquisitely tailored and very expensive-looking – so it was a little harder to see his body, but what I could see made my stomach flutter. His shoulders were broad. His chest pressed but didn’t strain at his crisp, white shirt. He was wearing a blue tie, one that matched his eyes beautifully. He had loosened it and unfastened the top three buttons of his shirt, exposing a powerful, chiseled neck, more of that tan skin, and the upper edges of well-defined pecs. A few dark chest hairs peeked above the top fastened button.
His thighs looked like they were muscular under the expensive pants, though it was hard to tell. He had on these trendy, kick-ass shoes – probably boots of some sort, with a kind of rock ‘n roll embroidering, if that makes any sense. They would have gone as well with a $500 pair of jeans in a night club as they did with his $5000 suit.
And I swear I don’t care about these things, but… I couldn’t help notice that his shoes were pretty big. And so were his hands: well-crafted, masculine, and large, like Michaelangelo’s David. (No wedding ring, by the way.) I also stole a brief, very brief look at his… ahem, below his beltline, and while I’m not very well-versed in judging these sorts of things with all the clothes on, let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised if he filled out his underwear pretty well in the front.
I shouldn’t have said that. Oh God. But, hey, I thought it at the time, so there you are. Can’t take it back now.
If you want the short-hand version, he looked like a model in an ad for a highbrow, extremely expensive brand of scotch. The kind of guy who would have hung with Sinatra in the 50’s, or with George Clooney or Kanye West now. Hell, the kind of guy they would call to hang out with. The kind of man who would have kicked Don Draper’s ass in Mad Men. A Young Turk on a break from conquering the world. The kind of man that every guy wanted to be, and every woman wanted to get to know.
‘Get to know’ is a euphemism, in case you hadn’t figured that out.
As I walked up, Stanley and the stranger were finishing talking about sports – the Lakers or something. Then Mr. Movie Star looked over at me and his eyes lit up. He got that gleam I described earlier, and the corners of his eyes crinkled as he grinned.
“You must be Lily,” he said, and held out his hand.
My heart was already pounding, but when he said that, it did a triple flip in my chest. Hearing that voice on the phone? Super sexy. But not even half as good as hearing it in person.
The difference was like homemade banana pudding versus the stuff in a packet. Don’t get me wrong, I really like the stuff in the packet. But I loooove me some banana pudding made from scratch.
Okay, that’s kind of goofy (and now you know more than you ever wanted to about my dessert preferences). A better analogy would be real sex versus phone sex. Phone sex can be incredibly hot – but it doesn’t hold a candle to real sex.
Um… just to be clear… at that point in my life, standing in that lobby at 6PM on a Friday, I’d never had phone sex.
Yet.
One other thing: as I held up my arm to shake his hand, I smelled his cologne.
Ohhhhhh God.
I read somewhere that our deepest and most primal memories are connected to smell. If you think about it, as a baby, you probably responded to scents – your mother’s, your father’s – before you could figure out what the hell sounds they were making, or before your eyes even focused right.
Even now, when I think of Christmas, I smell baking cookies in the kitchen and that clean, pine scent of freshly cut Christmas trees.
Other memories are just as vivid: burning leaves on an autumn day. Clean laundry fresh from the dryer.
When I think of him now, I smell that cologne.
Masculine and heady, with the basic layers of musk and sandalwood, and just a tiny bit of sweetness thrown in.
It wasn’t overpowering at all. Just a hint. A tease. I mean, I was right next to him, and I caught the barest whiff.
It smelled classy. Expensive. Exotic, and yet… comforting, somehow.
And damn sexy.
Because I was completely tongue-tied (what with the voice and the scent), I looked over at Stanley. He nodded reassuringly like, Dude’s okay.
Which was good. I trust Stanley. If he gets a good read off of somebody, I accept his intuition.
“M-Mr. Brooks?” I stuttered as my hand clasped his.
Ohhhhhh God.
His skin was so warm. His handshake was really strong, but unlike a lot of jerks who try to push women (and other men) around, he didn’t try to crush me. He just let his hand envelope mine. Firm but inviting.
I melted a little bit more.
“Good to put a face to the voice,” he said as he hung onto my hand for a second or two longer than was absolutely necessary. (I didn’t mind. Not at all.)
“Yes,” I agreed, because that was all I could think to say at the moment.
Then he dropped my hand and got down to business. “Okay. Call your boss for me.”
The unpleasant prospect of having Klaus chew me out over the phone pumped a shot of adrenaline into my system. And that temporarily overrode all the sex hormones flooding through my veins.
“Ohhhh… I don’t really know if – ”
“Relax, Lily, you’ll talk to him first, and it’ll be on your phone, so I won’t even see the number. Besides, he’s probably not even out of the parking deck yet, is he?” Connor smiled.
And, no, the truth was that he probably wasn’t.
I sighed, pulled my cell phone out of my little black purse, and hit ‘KLAUS’ on my contacts list.
This was not going to go well.
But how could I say ‘no’ to what was actually a pretty reasonable request?
And, even more importantly, with those gorgeous blue eyes twinkling at me?
“What,” Klaus’s perpetually pissed-off voice answered.
“Um… I have Mr. Brooks here, and he’s pretty insistent about – ”
“WHAT THE HELL?! What part of your brain shut down when I left, Lily?!”
And then he went off on a mini-tirade of profanity and insults that was worse than usual.
Just as my blood reached the boiling point (which was really only 1.5 seconds in, after Klaus dropped the first F-bomb) and I was on the verge of saying something that would get me fired, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and caught that smell again. That sexy, intoxicating scent.
I looked up to see Connor’s hand extended towards me, palm outward, right about my shoulder level.
He was looking at me with a bemused expression. Like puppy-dog eyes, but if the puppy dog knew you weren’t a very good owner and he had to explain to you how to walk him and feed him, but he still loved you anyway.
“May I?” he asked with that sexy-as-hell smile.
Meanwhile, Klaus’s torrent of profanity was still pouring full force into my ear.
What the hell, I thought, grinned wryly, and handed the phone over to him. Connor glanced at the phone screen and then held it up to his face.
“KLAUS!” he shouted in a backslapping, Hey, buddy! kind of way. “Connor… Brooks here from LMGK. How’s it going?”
First impression: Connor just commanded the conversation right from the beginning. He reached out verbally, took hold of Klaus by the neck, and steered him in the direction he wanted him to go.
Second impression: he paused slightly after his first name. At first I thought he was being friendly by saying ‘Connor’ alone, then realized Klaus might not know who he was, so he included the last name as a formality.
Turns out I was wrong, which I found out later that night.
The torrent of profanity ended abruptly. There was a long pause, and then a single word on the other end: “Hello.”
He didn’t say it in a friendly voice, but it was a hell of a lot friendlier than what he’d been subjecting me to a second ago.
“Here’s the thing, Klaus – I’d like to call you back on my phone so I can conference in somebody else. He’s expecting my call. You okay with that?”
There was the muffled, Charlie Brown’s teacher wah-wah-wah-WAAAAH of Klaus’s voice complaining on the other end.
“Thirty seconds, Klaus, and I’ll get right back to you. Be sure to pick up, bud – you’re gonna wanna hear this!”
And then Connor hung up on Klaus without waiting for a reply.
Ohhhh CRAP.
Mr. Movie Star had pretty much just signed my death warrant.