“Off. Right now.”
“And miss you doing the finger-pointing to ‘Greased Lightnin’? Not a chance in hell.” Still grinning, she held up the other DVD. “If it softens the blow, I had Mum burn this to a disc. Behold my sixteen-year-old debut as Ado Annie in Oklahoma! I didn’t even edit out the part where my sash catches on a wagon wheel and I fall into a wooden trough. Fair’s fair. And I promise I won’t leak yours to the tabloids next time you piss me off.”
Richard’s younger self pulled out a comb and ran it through his slick bouffant of hair in slow motion, and she tried really, really hard not to laugh. The current incarnation had lost his implacable cool. His cheeks were burning bright with colour.
A bit of summer lovin’ commenced on the screen, and he winced. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He took the other disc from her hand and held it up menacingly. “This had better be embarrassing. I mean complete and total humiliation.”
“I’m singing ‘I Cain’t Say No,’ I have hair extensions and braces, and it was a single-sex school so my love interest was played by a fifteen-year-old girl, who was just about concussed by my left boob during the finale. It ain’t good.”
“Fine. Let me know when it’s on, and you won’t mind if I answer a few business emails in the meantime. You can sit on my lap and block the TV.”
“Check us out. Compromising and everything.”
He staunchly ignored the rest of his adolescent performance, but looked reluctantly amused as he typed into the iPad with one hand. His other hand played with the ends of her hair. And she had the pure joy of hearing him laugh heartlessly when her own teenage self flounced and pouted her way across the stage.
In bed that night, she lay on her side, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his bare chest as he slept. A light scattering of black hairs trailed down his chest, circling his flat nipples, and she followed them with a fingertip. Lowering her head, her hair slipping down to pool on his skin, she touched her lips to his in a whisper of a kiss. He murmured her name, but didn’t wake. When she rolled over, sliding her arm under the pillow and closing her eyes, she could still feel his body, warm against her back.
She fell hard into sleep and would happily have stayed there if Richard’s phone hadn’t rung at dawn. Not even dawn. The bedroom was still dark when she cracked her eyes open at the insistence of his frigging annoying ringtone.
“Richard.” His leg hair was tickling her foot. She pressed her big toe against his calf and gave it a shove. “Phone.”
He didn’t even alter his breathing.
The phone kept ringing.
“Phone.”
He clearly had no intention of getting up.
Swearing under her breath, Lainie sat up, rubbing her forehead. She leaned over him, brushed the tumbled hair from his eyes, and put her lips against his ear. “Phone.”
He made a grumpy noise, but still didn’t move.
“I don’t know what you’re grunting at me for. It’s your phone.”
His response was to put his head under his pillow. He pressed it against the ear closest to her mouth.
“Fine. I’m answering it. But you’re going to regret it if it’s some other poor woman you conned into bed.” Leaning heavily on his back, she reached over his recumbent body and snagged the phone from the bedside table. “Never mind. It’s Lynette. If you shagged her, I’m too intimidated to compare notes.”
She swallowed a squawk when Richard retracted the long leg he was dangling outside the covers and tucked his cold toes into the curve behind her knee. Sliding her thumb against the touch pad, she reluctantly answered the call. Any communication from Lynette or Pat was liable to spell trouble. “Hello?”
There was a brief silence. Lynette managed to convey her amusement before speaking a word. “Good morning, Lainie. It’s a little early for you to be answering Richard’s phone, isn’t it?”
Lainie wasn’t sure if she meant time of day or brevity of relationship. Bit of a cheek if it was the latter, considering that Lynette was partly responsible for tying them together in the first place. “We’ve taken up hot yoga,” she said blandly. “You have to get up very early to do hot yoga.” Didn’t you? “It’s part of Richard’s new healthy-living image. We’re considering naked meditation in Hyde Park next.”
“I’ll start drafting the press release now. Is Richard there, or will eagle pose end in catastrophe if he takes the phone?”
“He’s here.” She ruthlessly pulled the pillow away from Richard’s head and one blue eye stared narrowly up at her. “Lynette wants a word.”
With a sigh, he heaved himself up to a sitting position and took the phone. He looked even more of a grouch than usual first thing in the morning. And the stubble situation was acute. He was verging on a full lumberjack beard now. No wonder she had patches of irritated red skin in interesting places.