I cursed him out and looked around for some not-too-crunchy leaves to wipe myself off with. He stood there, staring at me curiously, until I swore at him and told him to turn around and give a girl some privacy.
He reached into his pocket, withdrew a cloth handkerchief, and handed it over.
"M'lady," he said.
I snatched it from his hand.
Still chuckling, he turned around and walked away.
3: Town and Country
I was still picking twigs out of my hair when we arrived in town about an hour later.
To my disappointment, the only places that were of interest to me, a couple of cute clothing boutiques, were just closing up for the day.
Smith approached the gray-haired woman pulling in a rolling rack of clothes.
"Are you the owner?" he asked.
Her eyes narrow with suspicion, she said, "Maybe."
He pulled his wallet from his pocket and plucked out some bills. "How'd you like to triple your day's sales?"
She laughed and told him to put the money away. "I can stay a bit longer. Just pay for whatever ya like, hun."
"This is my niece," he said, putting his arm around my shoulders as we followed the woman into the boutique.
I reached out to shake the woman's hand just as Smith said, "My niece doesn't speak English. Not a word."
I smiled and nodded.
The woman spoke loudly, enunciating every word, "NICE TO MEET you sweetheart!"
"She takes naps in the woods," Smith said, twirling one finger around his ear. "Cuckoo."
I turned my back to them so she wouldn't see me smirking.
"She doesn't have any grown-up clothes," he said. "I want to take her out for dinner, but she's a disaster, as you can see."
"We'll fix her up," the woman said.
I was already doing fine on my own, but she buzzed around the small shop, pulling out fabulous things I would never have noticed if she hadn't held them up.
I tried on an armload of outfits, each thing more appealing than the last. How long had it been since I bought new clothes? My most recent acquisitions had been from the Lost-n-Found box at the laundromat. Paying off student loan debt was a higher priority than pretty things … though pretty things certainly had their appeal. Had my legs always looked so curvy in a skirt?
Smith looked at each outfit and then he chose which pile to put the items in. He said he was paying, so who was I to argue? Besides, apparently, I didn't speak a word of English.
The woman took away the dirtied-up clothes I'd come in wearing, and I settled on a black denim mini-skirt and a cornflower-blue blouse with ruffles to wear out of there. The outfit was dressy, but just casual enough it didn't seem crazy paired with my sneakers.
Instead of us having to haul a big bag of clothes back up to the cabin, Smith made arrangements for my clothes to get delivered the next day, along with our groceries. Ah, so that explained how the food got there. Apparently, the delivery boy had a motorcycle-a dirt bike-that he rode the trails with.
Smith took me for dinner at a cozy place, an old house that had been converted into a restaurant that defined the word quaint. The building was still divided into several rooms, each containing hints of the room's former life. The hostess tried to seat us in the nursery, but Smith wrinkled his nose and said it wasn't to his liking. She steered us all the way to the back of the place, to a former mudroom with big multi-paned windows overlooking the back yard.
"Perfect," he said, grinning broadly. "My cousin Sandy and I will dine in the mudroom."
We sat at the antique-looking table, and he pointed up to the ceiling, which was covered in silk flowers and feathers.
"Now that's just ridiculous," I said, giggling. "I love it."
The mudroom was decorated with a variety of footwear running up and down the walls, but with the evening sun filtering in through the wisteria vines covering the window panes, the place was as golden and romantic as anywhere I'd ever been.
He reached for my hand across the table and grasped my fingertips gently. "You look so beautiful tonight. The shirt matches your eyes, and your creamy skin is positively glowing."
"Thanks," I said, feeling the flush of my cheeks turning red.
With my free hand, I rubbed the spot on my leg where he'd pinched me. It was up high enough that the skirt covered it, but I'd noticed a bruise forming when I was in the changing room.
Our waitress came in and rattled off a long list of things that sounded French. Smith nodded knowingly and asked a dozen questions about the wine list. It hit me: I was nervous because I was completely outclassed. He was a bestselling author, and if memory served me correctly, he'd already been wealthy from business endeavors even before he started writing.