Behind The Red Doors (Santori Stories #1)(39)
Author: Vicki Lewis Thompson

Meg laughed, the sound deep and throaty. It wasn’t like her earlier girlish giggle. This laugh was full and rich, intoxicatingly feminine and mysterious. “Oh, she tried. Are you her boy Joey who owns dat’a construction comp’ny buildin’ the twenny story ’partment building for the millionaires?”

He shook his head. “It’s ten stories. And I’m just a contractor. Should I get up and leave now or would sinking under the table in total humiliation be sufficient?”

“I take it you’ve been embarrassed by her before?”

He shuddered. “You have no idea.”

“I might. My family’s the same way. My father fully expected me to come back to live under his roof after I finished college. When I insisted on my own apartment a few blocks away, he got all the young single cops at the local police precinct to check up on me every day. I think he was offering a dowry.”

Joe almost snorted. As if any man would need anything more than the woman herself.

“Some days I’m tempted to have a wild, public affair to shut them all up,” she muttered.

He raised a brow. “Oh? Any candidates in the picture?” Say no. Say you’re single. Say you’re unattached and ready and I’ll give you the wildest, most public affair you’ve ever dreamed of.

“The only males I encounter on a daily basis are the seven-year-olds in my class, their mostly married fathers, and the hundred-and-fifty-year-old priest who runs St. Luke’s.”

“You teach?”

She nodded. “Second grade. And if you think it’s bad having your mother trying to set you up with women who come into your family restaurant, get a load of my life. The mother of one of my students informed me last week that all the boys in my class are suddenly falling and getting hurt because they want a get-better hug. It seems they’ve been discussing the softness of my pillows.”

It took a second to sink in, then he let out a loud bark of laughter. “Starting young.”

She sighed heavily. “Males. It’s a wonder we made it out of the Dark Ages.”

Their waitress brought their drinks, and Joe watched Meg sip carefully at her hot espresso. “Better?”

She nodded. “Much. I don’t know whether I was colder from the wind or from the shock.”

“So you were really shocked seeing yourself?”

She raised a brow. “Uh, yeah. Wouldn’t you be? How would you feel if you found out women all over Chicago were ogling your half-naked body? Coming on to you? Whispering about you and cat-calling as you walked by?”

He grinned. “You really want me to answer that?”

She rolled her eyes and took another sip from her cup. “Spoken like a true guy.”

“Well, I am a guy,” he explained in self-defense. “But you’re not, and obviously you didn’t have a man’s reaction.”

“Being flattered?” she asked.

More like horny. “I guess.”

“No,” she said quietly, her eyes growing suspiciously glassy again. “I don’t think I’d say I’m feeling flattered. I’m humiliated. Shocked.” She took a deep breath. “And very angry.”

“If you didn’t give permission, I’d say that’s grounds for a lawsuit against the store,” Joe said. “One of my brothers is an attorney. If you want, I can pass you his card.”

“Thanks, I’ll think about it. Right now I’m just trying to make sense of it. I don’t understand how they could have gotten hold of my picture to begin with.”

“You’ve never posed? Never been approached to model for Sheer Delights?”

From across the table, he watched the color drain out of Meg’s face. She went pale suddenly, and her mouth opened once, then closed, then opened again in shock. “What did you say?”

“I asked if you were ever approached to model for them.”

She shook her head, still appearing dazed. “No, the other part. The name. Did you say Sheer Delights? I thought the place was called The Red Doors.”

“The complex is. But the three shops upstairs all have different names. There’s a scent and lotion one, a jewelry one, and the lingerie shop, which is called Sheer Delights.”

She sat back heavily in her seat, staring at him in complete disbelief. He saw her gaze shift quickly around the room, as if her thoughts were darting in all different directions. Finally, she smacked her hand flat on the table and growled, “That rotten, miserable, pissant little toad.”

His fantasy woman had a temper. He suddenly liked her even better.

“I’ll kill him.”

Okay. He got the picture. She had posed for some photos. Probably in private. Probably for a boyfriend—an ex-boyfriend—who’d then sold them for a quick buck.

He hated to think of it. Of Meg, dressed in provocative lingerie for some guy who hadn’t valued her enough to respect her privacy. Whoever the toad was, he’d not only been tacky enough to sell the pictures, he had to be pretty stupid to have let her slip through his fingers in the first place.

He had to hide a smirk of satisfaction, though, as he wondered what the jerk would think about being publicly called “little” by his ex. Every man’s worst nightmare after a breakup.

Finally, seeing the way her fingers clenched convulsively on the table, he reached over and touched her hand. “It’s okay, honey. He’s a total loser, but at least you’re rid of him.”

“Rid of him? I’ll never be rid of him. The louse is probably sitting at my mother’s kitchen table right now, eating banana bread and telling her how much he loves the family.”

Uh-oh. Maybe not such a definite breakup, after all. “He stayed friendly with your parents?”

Bad sign. The one time one of his ex-girlfriends had remained friendly with his family, he’d almost caved under pressure and gone back to her. Luckily, the Santori clan eventually got wise to her. When she heard Joe had gone to a Cubs game with someone else, she put sugar in his gas tank. That was why he now had a locking gas cap on his truck, but, thankfully, no ex-girlfriend hovering around the restaurant, making nice with his outraged mother, who held on to a grudge the way a toddler held on to his blankie.

“What a snake,” she muttered, hardly paying him any attention, even though he was holding her cold, shaking hand. “I’ll get you for this, Georgie.”

“Georgie?” Joe’s concern immediately dropped a notch. With a name like Georgie, how much competition could the ex be?

“As if it wasn’t bad enough the time he broke a window playing baseball in the backyard, then leaned my pogo stick against the sill so Dad would think it was me.”

Pogo stick? He somehow had a hard time picturing a grown woman on a pogo stick, particularly a woman as, uh, blessed as Meg. The sudden mental image was enough to make him shift in his seat as a rush of pure male heat dropped from his brain to his lap. Meg. Jumping on a pogo stick. Dressed in the pink push-up bra and tap pants.

He reached for his coffee, wishing he’d asked for ice water instead.

“Or the time he snitched one of my training bras out of my drawer and took it to school, selling peeks of it to the boys in the pew in the back of the church during mass.”

He sucked in his bottom lip to prevent a grin. She probably wouldn’t appreciate his amusement. Finally he ventured, “I take it Georgie’s not an ex-boyfriend?”

“I wouldn’t even categorize him as a human being.” She sighed heavily. “He’s my low-life, scum-sucking cousin, known throughout the neighborhood we grew up in as Georgie the Goat.”

A cousin? With naughty pictures? Kinky. “Um, your cousin took pictures of you in lingerie without you knowing it?”

She sighed. “Oh, I knew it. I posed for them.” As his brow rose, she rushed to explain. “But I was not in lingerie. I was wearing a perfectly respectable one-piece bathing suit. Blue to match the blue screen behind me. He said the suit wouldn’t show up in the actual program. I didn’t think he meant literally.”

“If Georgie’s such a…scum-sucking lowlife…why’d you pose for him?”

Instead of answering, she bit her lip and moved her hand up to tug on her long, thick ponytail, which rested on her shoulder, then trailed down her body until it ended near the tabletop. She ran her fingers through the ends of her hair, staring at it, looking deep in thought. “I have the worst hair in the world.”

The subject change came outta nowhere. “It’s beautiful.”

She shook her head and frowned. “It’s straight, flat, never holds a curl. Completely boring. But I can’t bring myself to cut it off.” She pushed the hair behind her back, looking him in the eye. “My grandmother had really long hair and she used to love to brush mine. We’d talk for hours, me sitting on the floor in front of her while she brushed and braided and fussed. And she’d tell me how much I was like her. She’d laugh and whisper about how everyone saw the sweet-faced girl on the outside, but deep down there was a wicked Irish temper and a hint of stubbornness in both of us.” She reached for her cup. “She died four years ago, right after I finished college.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, wondering how on earth they’d gone from her in lingerie, to her hair, to her late grandmother. “My grandparents were a big part of our lives growing up. It was hard losing both my grandfathers.”