Dead Roses For A Blue Lady: A Sonja Blue Collection by Nancy A. Collins

Author:Nancy A. Collins
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-13T19:29:09+00:00

Some Velvet Morning

She was the most attractive woman he'd ever seen outside a movie theater. She was not just pretty, she was beautiful, the way models and starlets are beautiful. Her skin was creamy, as translucent as pearl, with long, wavy hair the color of raw honey. Her fire engine red lips matched her low-cut one-piece with spaghetti straps and revealing side-slit. She was wearing black patent leather open-toed shoes with four-inch heels, which showed that her toe nails, as well as fingernails, were painted the exact same shade as her lips. And she was smiling at him from across the hotel bar.

First he had to double check to make sure there wasn't another, younger man sitting directly behind him before he dared respond. No. There wasn't anyone else she could possibly be paying attention to. It had to be him.

"Hey, buddy," he said, pushing a ten across the damp bar top. "I'd like to buy that lady a drink."

The bartender nodded and palmed the bill without saying a word. A couple of minutes later a fresh Bloody Mary was placed in front of the woman in red.

She lifted the drink in a half-toast and smiled at him. And this time there was no mistaking it: she was smiling one hundred percent at him.

He nervously slicked back his thinning hair and coughed lightly into his fist, surreptitiously sniffing it to make sure his breath was passable. Satisfied, he slid off the barstool and tried to look nonchalant as he strolled to the end of the bar.

"I couldn't help noticing you were alone," he said, trying not to sound nervous. "Would you mind terribly much if I joined you for a drink?'

"Why should I mind?" she said, flashing yet another one of those smiles. "After all, you were the one kind enough to buy it for me."

He moved to sit next to her, then stopped and looked around the bar. He was a thousand miles away from home, his wife, and their friends and associates, but old habits were hard to break.

"Would you mind if we sat somewhere a little more...private?" he said, gesturing to a booth in one of the shadowy corners.

"Whatever you like—?" She paused, waiting for him to supply his name.

"John," he said, his cheeks coloring slightly. "My name is John."

"Of course it is," she replied, no hint of irony in her honeyed voice. "My name is Phaedra."

"That's an unusual name." He said as he slid into the booth beside her.

"It's from the classics. Phaedra was a queen who was possessed by unnatural desires."

"How fascinating," he said, feigning interest. He suspected Phaedra was as much her name as John was his. It sounded too deliberate to be real.

Once they were safely in the booth, he went into the same little song and dance he always did on business trips: he inflated his importance at the firm, while avoiding telling her the exact company he worked for and what it was he really did for a living, and when she asked him where he was from, he gave her the correct state, but lied about the city.

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