Abe snorted, his dark skin gleaming under the porch light. “If they had, you wouldn’t still have that look in your eye.” Leaning his outdoor chair back against the wall, his feet up on the railing, the keyboard player said, “You have to get laid, man.”
“What are you? My social secretary?”
“Way you’re going, you need one.”
Not answering, David went into the house to get into dry clothes. When he returned to the porch, Abe poured him another drink. “Just say the word if you want to hit the clubs. I’ll be your wingman.”
Sitting out on the porch under a carpet of glittering stars long after Abe hauled his ass to bed, David thought of the only woman with whom he wanted to get naked and sweaty and dirty, and wondered what she was doing… whether she’d spared him a thought at all.
Thea stared at the maddening, brain-eating, energy-sucking, demon-spawn of a memo she’d been working on for four days. It was stealing her sleep, invading her dreams, making her question her grasp of the English language, and the entire thing was David’s fault.
“Thea Alice!” Her mother’s petite figure stopped in front of her. Lily had her hands on her hips, the scowling look on her face one Thea knew all too well. “I thought you said you weren’t working this trip.” The words were spoken in Balinese.
Thea replied in the same language. “I’m not, Mama.”
“Oh?” Lily looked pointedly at the laptop Thea had snuck out into the sprawling back garden and set up on a wooden table her father had built when Thea had been a child. Settling on the equally weathered wooden seat beside it, Thea had figured she’d be safe from discovery—her mother’s garden was a beautiful jungle.
Saucer-sized hibiscus flowers in yellow and red, orange and pink, as well as astonishing hybrids with hearts of fire and gold, bloomed in glorious abandon. Brilliant purple bougainvillea poured over and through the crosshatched frame above the table while a frangipani tree stood next to it, its fragrant flowers hanging heavy and lush within touching distance. Unable to resist, Thea had picked a creamy bloom and tucked it behind her left ear.
A few feet from the other side of the table stood a banana palm with green bananas hanging from it in two firm bunches, next to it a papaya tree with its fruit starting to ripen to a pale yellow-orange, and behind them both a large and luxuriantly green mango tree devoid of fruit this time of the year. Then there were the myriad flowering plants she couldn’t identify, some exotics, others experimental hybrids. Thea’s mom, a dynamo with tiny, competent hands and fierce, dark eyes, was a self-taught horticulturist.
Lily might not have a degree to her name or fancy letters behind it, but people wrote to her for advice from around the world. Her hand-grown seedlings were in high demand from professional gardeners, all of whom paid a premium for the exquisite Lily Hybrids, her name synonymous with the unique and the precious. The most recent one had incited a furious bidding war that had been major news in horticultural circles.
Thea was so proud of her mom. She was also slightly scared of her. “I promise I’m not working,” she said, half closing the lid of the laptop. “I’m writing a letter to… a friend.”
“What’s so important you have to spend days telling your friend about it?” Lily’s eyes grew bright on the final words, the delicate beauty of her face wreathed in a dazzling smile that lit up the golden brown of her skin from within. “A man!” Clapping her hands, she slid onto the wooden seat opposite Thea. “Tell me everything, Thea Alice.”
Thea could bluff with the best of them, manipulate the media like an expert, but the one person she could never fool was her mother. “It’s not a man,” she began, then groaned when Lily pointed a finger at her. “Okay, okay, it’s a man. But I’m not sure I want to get involved with him.”
“Why not? Is he like that one?”
“That one” was Lily’s way of referring to Eric. “No,” Thea said at once. “No, he’s not like Eric.” Well, she hoped he wasn’t, but the simple fact was David was a rock star who had women buzzing around him like flies. Thea was too pragmatic not to understand what that might mean; fidelity wasn’t exactly a priority when there were a thousand women waiting in the wings should the current one prove too much of a hassle.
“Thea.” Her mother reached across the table to take her hand, her eyes holding such a depth of love that it filled Thea to overflowing and made her own eyes burn. “What’s wrong, baby? You like this boy, don’t you?”