Dawn didn’t kid herself. She knew what they’d experienced was purely physical. She’d shared that same sizzle with too many deliciously handsome men to read any more into it than basic animal attraction. It was just Ellis’s pheromones responding to her scent.
As advertised, she thought with a grin. Dawn and her team had designed the labels for this particular line of bath products, which had been based on a study by the Smell & Taste Research Foundation in Chicago. The study demonstrated how combinations of various natural products triggered a wide variety of responses, including a few she found very interesting. Supposedly, the scents of lavender and pumpkin pie when sniffed together reportedly increased penile blood flow by forty percent!
Naturally, Dawn had read the study from cover to cover. She’d had to, in order to conceptualize the designs for the ads. She’d also conducted her own field trials of the new products. Her final choice of the lemon and lotus blossom shampoo didn’t appear to increase penile blood flow quite as dramatically as the lavender and pumpkin, but it had done wonders for her normally flyaway red curls. And it had certainly impacted Brian Ellis’s libido, she thought with a stab of satisfaction.
Not that she’d specifically intended to impact it. Although she was as attracted to Big Bad Brian as he apparently was to her, neither of them could let the sizzle gather steam or heat. He’d made it clear he wasn’t looking for any kind of permanent relationship, and Dawn was pretty well convinced there wasn’t any such animal.
She knew she came across as fun and flirtatious. Knew, too, she’d developed a love ’em and leave ’em reputation. The irony was that her parents’ toxic example had left her so gun-shy that she never went beyond flirting. Well, almost never. The only exceptions had come after she’d convinced herself she was in love—which only went to prove how flawed her instincts were.
That thought led to a quick glance at the digital clock on the nightstand. It was twelve twenty in DC. Six twenty in the morning in Rome. Kate and Callie would be up now and getting ready to leave for the airport.
Propping her shoulders against the headboard, Dawn booted up her laptop. How did any friendship survive these days without FaceTime? She tapped her fingers against the computer’s frame while waiting for the connection. Kate came on first, wide-awake and wearing a wide, cat-got-the-cream smile.
“Bitch!” Dawn exclaimed. “You had wake-up sex.”
“I did. And it was wonderful. Glorious. Stupendous. With the sun just coming up over the seven hills and...”
“Please! Spare me the details.”
“About what?” Callie asked as her face materialized on the other half of the split screen.
“About Kate’s wake-up call. Apparently she started the day off right.” Frowning, Dawn peered at the screen. “You, on the other hand, look as pasty as overcooked fettucini.”
“Gee, thanks.” Callie tucked a wayward strand of mink-brown hair behind her ear. “You’re not exactly glowing, either. Jet lag?”
“Yeah. No. Sort of.”
“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t give us that,” Kate huffed. “We knew you before you got braces or boobs. Why so blah?”
“I think I’d better change my shampoo.”
Both women grasped the underlying context instantly. They should. They’d devoured the smell study as avidly as Dawn. They’d also been privy to the results of her personal field trials.
“Change it,” Kate urged. “Tonight!”
The emphatic responses made Dawn blink. “It’s not exactly a life-or-death situation.”
“Yet.”
Callie’s response carried considerably less emphasis but still hit home. “You told us you thought Brian was a fantastic dad, but otherwise a little cool and detached. Does that remind you of anyone?”
Dawn blinked again. “Oh! Well. Maybe.”
Fiancé Number One hadn’t been either cool or remote, but he did tend to act supercilious toward store clerks and restaurant servers. Having worked as both during her high school and college years, Dawn was finally forced to admit the truth. Not only did she not love the guy, she didn’t really like him.
Fiancé Number Two was outgoing, gregarious and a generous tipper. Until he decided someone had wronged him, that is. Then he morphed from fun-loving to icily, unrelentingly determined on revenge. Dawn still carried the scars from that close encounter of the scary kind.
She couldn’t see Brian morphing into another Mr. Hyde. She really couldn’t. Then again, she’d been wrong before.
“All right,” she told her friends. “I’ll lay in a new supply of shampoo tomorrow.”
“Do it,” Kate urged again, giving her the evil eye. “I’d better not catch a single whiff of lemons or lotus blossoms when you and Brian and Tommy come to dinner this Saturday.”
“We’re coming to dinner?”
“You are. Seven o’clock. My place. Correction,” she amended with a quick, goofy smile. “Our place. Travis gets in that morning.”
“I thought he needed to fly back to Florida after he wraps things up at Aviano.”
“He does, but he’s taking a few days in between to scope out his new job at Ellis Aeronautical Systems. Callie will be there, too,” Kate offered as added incentive. “Despite her objections to banging headboards, she’s agreed to spend some time with us in Washington. So Saturday. Seven o’clock. Our place.”
“Got it!”
Dawn signed off, relieved that she’d shared the incident with Brian but feeling guilty that she’d lumped him in with her two late, unlamented ex-fiancés. Yes, he was aloof at times. And yes, he held something of himself back from everyone but Tommy. But she hadn’t seen him condescend to anyone. Take his pilot and limo driver, for example. Judging by their interaction with their boss, the relationship was one of mutual respect.
Nor could Dawn imagine Brian peeling back that calm, unruffled exterior to reveal a core as petty as Fiancé Number Two’s. Of course, she’d never imagined Two having that hidden vindictive streak, either.
Just remembering what the bastard had put her through after their breakup gave Dawn a queasy feeling. Slamming the laptop lid, she dumped it on the nightstand, flipped off the lamp and slithered down on the soft sheets. Their sunshine-fresh scent reinforced her determination to hit a drugstore and buy some bland-smelling shampoo first thing in the morning. Then, she decided with an effort to rechannel her thoughts, she and Tommy would have some F-U-N!
* * *
The next four days flew by. Dawn stuck to her proposed agenda of zoo, Smithsonian and shopping, with side excursions to Fort Washington, the United States Mint and paddle-boating on the Tidal Basin. The outings weren’t totally without peril. Fortunately, Dawn grabbed the back strap of Tommy’s life preserver just in time to keep him from nose-diving into the water when he tried to scramble out of the paddleboat. And she only lost him for a few, panic-filled moments at the Air and Space Museum.
Those near disasters aside, she cheerfully answered his barrage of questions and fed off his seemingly inexhaustible, hop-skip-jump energy. Together, they thoroughly enjoyed revisiting so many of her old stomping grounds.
As an added bonus, the weather couldn’t have been more perfect. An early cold snap had rolled down from Canada and erased every last trace of summer heat and smog. Washington flaunted itself in the resulting brisk autumn air.