“Can you give us a minute, Bess?” Roz asked her friend. “I think he wants to talk to me.”
Betsy was surprised. Usually the guys picked her first. Roz was usually the one they went to when Betsy turned them down. Not the other way around. “Sure,” she said. Then she smiled at Mick. “Nice seeing you again.”
“Same here,” Mick said with a smile. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” Betsy said, looked at Roz again as if it was some kind of conspiracy going on, and then headed for their building’s entrance.
“I didn’t know she was your neighbor,” Mick said.
“Yeah, she is. We live in the same building. That’s how we met.”
“I thought it would be at that acting studio, in your class.”
“That came afterwards. She found out I taught acting and decided she could use some pointers.”
“Is she any good?”
“Actually, she is. She’s one of those natural talents you spoke about.”
Mick nodded.
“Her question, however,” Roz said, “was a good one as well. What are you doing here?”
Mick felt a little embarrassed by the question. It revealed, he felt, more than he ever wanted to reveal. But it couldn’t be helped. “Do you have plans this evening?” he asked her.
Roz didn’t have plans, and she wasn’t going to pretend she did, or that she had to check her calendar first, as if she wasn’t interested. She was interested. When he left her apartment building three weeks ago, she felt as if she had missed some great opportunity. She didn’t like the feeling. This felt like her second chance. “No,” she said. “I have no plans.”
“I have a dinner date with Barry Acker and his wife. I’m sure they have room for one more. Care to join us?”
It sounded almost dream-worthy. The idea that she would break bread with the likes of Broadway Director Barry Acker and his wife. Things like this didn’t usually happen to Roz. “Actually, yes,” she said. “That sounds great. But will I have time to change?”
Mick glanced down at her attire: a nice gray pantsuit. She undoubtedly always dressed nice. But he understood. She wanted to freshen up. “You absolutely have time to change,” he said. “I have some phone calls to make so I’ll wait for you out here. Take your time.”
Roz was pleased to know it was no rush situation. She looked at Deuce, who seemed pleased too. “I won’t be long,” she said, as she made her way across the sidewalk and entered her building. As soon as the door closed, she ran upstairs. If there was a way that feeling like a million bucks could be personified, she was the personification of that feeling.
Mick was sitting in the backseat of the limo finishing up yet another business call when she came back out of the building. He looked at her, intending only to glance, but he found himself looking again. And then lingering in his look. Talk about hot, he thought. She wore a form-fitting black pencil skirt with red piping at the hem, a tucked-in white sleeveless blouse, and matching heels that elevated her average height. Her thick, wavy hair was lifted up and held together by a tasteful pin, while the back of her hair dropped down in curls along her thin neck. The socialites of his past, the wealthy businesswomen and supermodels, did so little with so much. Rosalind was different. She did so much with so little. Because that simple, understated outfit she wore looked more tasteful and ladylike to him than all of those name brand, impractical, and uncomfortable clothes his prior ladies wore as if it were their birthright. Roz looked so sweet to him, and so vulnerable to him at that very moment, that he felt a sudden need to protect her. He felt a sudden need to keep her close. He felt a sudden need to want to do right by her.
Mick ended his business call and got out of his limo before Deuce could get back out and make his way around to the passenger door. Roz was smiling as she came. “Hope I didn’t take too long,” she said.
The way she walked with such bounce in her step, and the way her bright, white, beautiful dimpled smile lit up the night, made it clear to him that she could have taken hours and he would not have complained. “Not at all,” he responded. He was not the kind of man given to sentimentality or any kind of romanticism either, but he felt both tonight.