I waved my hand at the armchair so he could sit down. Then I turned to close the closet doors, having to shove them hard with my shoulder.
“What kind of movies are you covertly watching?” he asked as he took a seat. “I’m guessing Lord of the Rings and Star Wars.”
“Two for two,” I told him. “I’m also a sucker for romantic comedies.” I almost sat down on my bed but remembered the mask. “Hang on. I’ll be right back. Make yourself . . .” I was going to say at home, but he looked very out of place in a sea of mess.
I didn’t finish the thought and ran for the bathroom. I closed the door and took in a couple of deep breaths. What on earth did he want? Why was he here? We were out there making small talk about inconsequential things, while there was something important enough to bring him to my house. I set my glasses down on the counter and turned on the faucet to rinse my face. After I’d finished, I grabbed a pale gray washcloth to dry off my face and glanced down at the towel.
It was covered in brownish-orange streaks. My stomach lurched sideways.
Nooo!
Putting my glasses back on, I looked at my reflection.
I hadn’t used the facial mask; I’d put on the self-tanner Catalina had sent home with me.
And left it on about twenty minutes longer than I should have.
I’d never seen this shade of orange in the wild. I looked like a freaking Oompa-Loompa. I let out a groan of disbelief.
Marco’s voice was muffled, but I could hear him. “I know you probably shouldn’t ask someone this while they make that sound in the bathroom, but are you okay?”
I should have turned on the fan. I didn’t want him, or anyone else, to see me like this. I wondered if I could send him away. The problem was, I still wanted to hear what he had to say. Obviously he hadn’t come to my house to ask about Legolas. I didn’t want him to leave until I knew what was going on. My intense desire to know things wouldn’t allow it.
Seriously, better to look like a fool in front of him than to always be wondering what he might have said.
I cleared my throat. “Uh, so I didn’t use a facial mask. It was a self-tanner. It wasn’t labeled and I didn’t double-check.”
“A common mistake.” Sarcasm or support? I couldn’t be sure without seeing his face.
“I’m hungover!” I reminded him.
I half expected him to say something jokey, but there was just silence. Then he said, “You can use an exfoliant to lighten it. Or you can put on a combination of baking powder, lemon juice, and water as a paste and that will help.”
Walking out of the bathroom, I came back into my room to stare at him. I already knew all that. How did he?
He blinked several times when he saw me, but he didn’t smile or laugh. “It doesn’t look . . . uh . . . that is to say that you . . . wow.”
“I know. It’s bad.” I walked over to my personal chem lab and pulled off the big sheet I used to protect the equipment and the table. “I don’t have any exfoliant on hand, but I have the ingredients. It shouldn’t be too hard to make.”
Marco got up and came over to stand next to my shoulder. “Your own personal chem lab. This is some setup. And it’s so . . . clean.”
“I take good care of my workstations,” I told him. It was a necessity in my line of work.
“It feels very out of place in here. Like that game of ‘one of these things is not like the other.’”
His nearness was affecting me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. I opened a bin where I kept supplies and grabbed one of the containers on top. “I guess I’m one of those people who is better with my professional needs than I am with my personal ones.”
“I get that,” he said.
I opened the container, and it was not the finely ground sea salt I was expecting. It was glitter.
Marco took a step closer to me, as if he wanted to see what was in the jar, and his yummy smell and unexpected warmth unnerved me. One second the glitter was in my hand and the next it was all over the floor.
“Oh no,” I said with a moan. “I’m going to be finding glitter for the next ten years. That stuff metastasizes.”
“It is the herpes of beauty supplies,” he agreed. “And now it kind of looks like a drunk fairy threw up in here. Good thing you have that layer of clothing to form a protective barrier over the carpet.”
That was funny, but I couldn’t laugh. The glitter was somehow still falling, shimmering in the air around us.
Had it been Craig standing here, it might have felt like a magical moment.
It still kind of did, right up until Marco spoke. “Were you planning on making an exfoliator with glitter?” he asked, sounding interested.
“No. I was looking for sea salt. I’m not always great with labeling things correctly.”
He gave me a pointed look that said, “Clearly,” but he was polite enough not to say anything out loud about my face and the self-tanner. His gaze narrowed to my mouth and he said, “You have some glitter on your lips.”
Then he reached out with his finger and barely brushed my bottom lip, and the entire world stood still. I felt a jolt of electricity that sparked in my lips and zinged through my body to light up my nether regions.
I gasped softly at the sensation and backed up.
Marco looked surprised and then apologetic. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s okay,” I said, shocked at my own reaction. I had honestly thought I could write off my responses to him last night to my inebriation. It turned out that wasn’t even a little bit true. Although, to be fair, there was probably still residual ethanol in my body that I hadn’t gotten rid of yet. Not to mention that I might have possibly damaged dendrites in my brain by overindulging, and it was making it harder for my neurons to communicate correctly.
So the champagne might still be to blame.
He cleared his throat and offered with a weak smile, “I hope that was edible glitter.”
“Technically, all glitter is edible.”
I had been shooting for light and funny, but somehow that made the air between us feel charged and even weirder.
“Do you want me to help you clean up?” he asked, breaking the tension.
“No. I would like you to tell me why you’re here.” A topic he’d successfully evaded so far.
“Right. I wanted you to come to lunch with me.”
“Lunch?” I asked, surprised. “Don’t you have a company to run?”
“Yes, but I let myself take a break every day to eat. I let all the other employees do it, too. I’m generous that way.”
I was kind of digging the snark, but I was still uneasy about the whole why of the situation. “This feels like some kind of joke or setup.”
“No,” he said with a concerned tone, and I couldn’t blame him. Most of the women he asked to eat with him probably didn’t automatically assume it was a joke.
“Or . . . do you want me to make you something?” That was a typical occurrence in my life. The ladies in my grandfather’s bird-watching club had me whip things up for them all the time. That half an ounce of moisturizer that cost three hundred bucks online? The materials to make it cost less than six dollars and a little bit of my time. I was normally happy to do it, but if Marco was after something like that, he was going to be disappointed.