“THERE’S NOTHING WORSE than having the hots for a sexy guy, and then finding out he has the personality of a turnip.”
Lucille Vandenberg—known to her friends and family as Lulu, which wasn’t great, but was certainly better than Lucille—didn’t try to keep the disappointment out of her voice as she griped to her friends, Viv and Amelia. Honestly, a guy who looked as good as the man holding the guitar at the crowded bar should have boatloads of brains and charm to go with his amazing body. But this one? Ugh. She’d had more scintillating conversations with her houseplants.
“Sorry he turned out to be a disappointment,” said Amelia, her pretty, gentle face full of commiseration and support.
Viv wasn’t as comforting. “If the turnip’s hung like a porn star, you can handle a root vegetable, Lulu. I mean, it’s not as if you want a life partner here.”
Lulu wasn’t convinced, mainly because, once again, she’d set herself up for disappointment. For the past month, since she’d moved to Washington, D.C., she’d been on the lookout for an interesting guy to help break her long romantic dry streak. For what seemed like forever, she had been so focused on getting through grad school, and then on her internship in Rwanda, and then on her new job with a local NGO. She hadn’t allowed herself a single date in ages. Of course, that also could have been because her last serious relationship had been with someone who’d been so self-absorbed and career-focused, he hadn’t even known her middle name, her favorite color, or much of anything else about her a year after they’d been together.
But now she needed sex. Badly. Needed to have it with somebody who would make her forget she hadn’t had it for so long...or at least make her believe the wait had really been worthwhile. She could deal with him not caring about her middle name or favorite colors, at least for one night.
“I just wanted to meet somebody nice, sexy and smart, and have a welcome-to-Washington adventure,” she mused.
And when she’d come into this Dupont Circle bar earlier in the week and met the super-hot guitar player, she’d thought she might have found the perfect person with whom to do it.
But when they’d talked tonight, he’d turned out to be as adventurous as a trip to the dentist. Not even a trip for a filling, or a root canal, just a plain old check-up. Yawn. The monosyllabic conversation they’d shared when she arrived tonight had crushed her fantasies completely.
“Who cares about his IQ?” Viv added. “It’s his looks and size that matter.”
“Maybe to you,” said Amelia, her tone a bit disapproving.
Really, the two former college roommates couldn’t be more dissimilar, and Lulu wondered how they’d survived. They were like Oscar and Felix, only female. One was sexually conservative while the other was a bit of a slut. A definite odd couple.
“I wish I could be as brutally shallow as you, Viv,” Lulu said. “But I need conversation to go with the pecs and schlong.”
Viv grinned, impossible to insult. She was the queen of mean. “Fine, forget him. But don’t give up. The night is young.”
Maybe. But she didn’t want merely smarts, she also wanted a guy who was honest and direct, who didn’t play games with his intentions. Someone who knew what he wanted and went after it...not a wishy-washy dude who couldn’t even speak unless the subject was his favorite band.
Why the hell was it so hard to find somebody like that?
Amelia raised her voice to be heard over the crowd, which was growing louder with every costumed body that crammed into the trendy bar. “There will be lots of guys here tonight. You’ll find somebody better.”
“I doubt it.”
“Have another drink. They’ll all start to look better after three of those things,” said Viv, gesturing toward Lulu’s glass.
Lulu was already feeling the effects of two. Unfortunately, they were making her more choosy, not less. “I’m not the one-night-stand-with-a-stranger type.”
Viv raised a brow and gestured toward the guitarist.
“He wasn’t a stranger,” Lulu insisted. “I sorta knew him.”
“You exchanged five words with him before tonight,” Viv said with a smirk.
“But I knew his name.”
“Only his last one.”
“Yeah, what’s up with that?”
Viv shrugged. “Schaefer’s all mysterious about his first name. I bet it’s something stupid like Fred or Homer or Ralph.”
Amelia, smiling sweetly, said, “Maybe he’s just trying to keep some things private, since he’s in the spotlight.”
Perhaps. But she suspected the broodiness and first-name mystery were intended to heighten interest in an otherwise pretty uninteresting guy. It had certainly worked on her, at least until she’d heard him say more than “Got a request?”
Sighing, she swirled her Devil’s Brew—the drink on special for tonight’s big Halloween bash—and sipped it. She was careful not to splash any of the red liquid onto the half-mask that covered her face from mid-forehead down to the tip of her nose. Lulu had gone to a lot of trouble with this costume, having fully intended to look as sexy and wicked as she could in hopes of stirring some naughty thoughts in the guitarist. She was a witch, but her green mask wasn’t the least bit scary—no long nose or warts. She’d gone instead for a Mardi Gras type facial covering, with sequins and cat-shaped eye openings. Beneath her pointy hat, her hair was curled and teased, wild and untamed. She’d also sprayed a coating of glittery red hairspray onto it, making herself even more unrecognizable.
Schaefer had noticed. She’d seen appreciation and heat in his eyes. His brain might be all vegetable, but his body apparently had some blood flowing through its roots. Er, veins.
That probably would have been enough for most sex-starved twenty-six-year-old women. Maybe it would have been enough for grad-school Lulu. But she’d changed since she’d returned from her internship in Rwanda. Working in a country filled with people who had so little, and then for a nonprofit group that gave microloans to similar, desperately-hopeful populations, would do that to a person.
She supposed she really had grown up. But that didn’t mean she didn’t still have the desire to go out and cut loose, if only to escape the sadness and deprivation she often witnessed in her job. But not with a turnip.
“Whoa, striptease at eleven o’clock,” Viv said, her dark eyes widening.
“Wow, I thought this place was more upscale than that. Maybe we should go someplace else before then,” said Amelia, sounding a little shocked.
“I wasn’t talking about the time, Miss Literal.” Viv pointed. “I mean at my eleven o’clock.”
Lulu and Amelia both turned, peering through the crowd, trying to see what had caught Viv’s attention. At first, Lulu merely spied a sea of devils, vampires, sexy nurses and construction workers. Then she spotted a figure standing alone near the dance floor, facing away from her. And she simply couldn’t look away.
The guy had donned a white sheet for the event, going for the age-old ghost outfit that had gone out of style before