She took a gulp of champagne. “We’re going to need more of this, then.”
That earned her another smirk, with a wink this time. “I’ll go run some down at the bar.”
She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but she didn’t want to pry. She was pretending to be his girlfriend, not his therapist. For all she knew, he didn’t like parties.
She never had before. She’d started planning parties as a way to ameliorate her social anxiety in college. She’d always figured that if she was in charge of the food, the drinks, the invite list, the décor, and the music, she would always be invited to the party instead of sitting at home, eating pints of ice cream and wondering why nobody invited her out.
She’d gotten so good at it that several of the residence halls had hired her to plan dances and social events. Although she hadn’t realized that it was her calling until a few years later, she’d been grateful for the cover of being a planner instead of a guest.
Her social anxiety had faded away, and now everyone wanted to be at an event that she planned, and she didn’t stay in eating ice cream unless she wanted to.
Bonus, at parties she planned, she was usually too busy for anyone to pin her in a corner to talk about the weather.
Instead of risking eye contact with anyone and falling into a small-talk trap, she looked at the art. Artemesia had grown as an artist in the past few years and gotten a lot of publicity with all the arrests. From the looks of her new works, displayed next to the great American women painters of the twentieth century, she’d matured quite a bit in her subject matter.
Hannah was lost in one particularly phallic representation of an herb garden when slim arms wrapped around her waist from behind. She stiffened because it definitely wasn’t Jack, not that she was looking for PDA from him anyway.
As soon as she heard the husky Italian accent—“Bella”—she relaxed and turned, hugging her erstwhile cellmate.
“Artie!”
“I did not know you were coming; otherwise I would have put you on a VIP list.” When Artie talked, she did so with her whole body—she did everything with her whole being. She floated from project to project, continent to continent, lover to lover, as though she knew that everything would turn out in her favor at all times.
Hannah admired that about her. She could never live like that herself—planning was too much a part of her DNA—but she could admire it in her artistic friend.
“I’m here with a guy.”
Artie wrapped her bony fingers around Hannah’s upper arms and shook her, taking in the very low-cut dress she wore. “You. Look. Gorgeous.” A shake for every word. “Of course you are here with a man.”
Compliments had always made Hannah feel uncomfortable. There was a distinct difference between knowing intellectually that she was attractive and really feeling like it was the truth.
Growing up an ugly duckling with frizzy hair and darker skin than any of her classmates in suburban Minneapolis hadn’t been the best way to feel like a great beauty. The bullying she’d endured from a few vicious classmates had been enough to make her wary of a compliment. A “Your hair is so curly!” could easily turn into “Have you ever thought about straightening it?” And that was just a hairsbreadth away from “You look like a mangy lion” and everyone roaring at said curly-haired adolescent in the hallway. For a year.
So, yeah, Hannah deflected compliments like a damned ninja.
Artie knew all of this because they’d gotten into superdeep childhood shit during their brief incarceration. “Just say grazie, bella.”
Determined to steer the conversation into a lighter place, Hannah curtsied to her friend. “Grazie.”
Her friend was gracious enough to laugh. “Who are you here with?”
Even though the room was chock-full of people, Jack stood out like a beacon. He was just leaning on the bar but looking deeply fine in a pair of wool pants that looked they had been blessed in a previous life to be spending their time perfectly tailored to just such an ass and a white shirt that draped his broad shoulders like a blessing.
She couldn’t keep a sigh in, and she knew Artie would notice that she was bordering on moony-eyed over this guy. And, since the artist was utterly lacking in subtlety, she pointed at him with glee. “That one? He is very good-looking, so good-looking he must be stupid, no?”
Hannah sort of wished that Jack was stupid. She’d feel less bad about tricking him into liking her. “He’s not. He’s a journalist for Haberdasher’s Monthly. Funny, too.”
“So, a very dangerous man, then?” Though it was phrased as a question, her friend meant it as a statement.
As they watched Jack wait for their drinks, a woman approached him. She wore a black tunic over black pants and had thick, black-framed glasses. She was tall—almost as tall as Hannah. Her gray hair was brushed into a gleaming chin-length bob. She smiled at Artie as though she knew her.
The woman intercepted Jack as he made his way back to Hannah. She put her hand on his upper arm and Hannah couldn’t help but notice that he stiffened for a moment before seeming to will himself into relaxation.
That was when it clicked into place. She had the same face shape as Jack. And the adoring look of someone who’d changed the diapers of the grown man next to her. There was only one person she could be—Jack’s mother.
“Does he have a taste for much older women?” Artie joked. “That’s Molly Simpson. She’s the curator of the Twentieth-Century Women’s Collection, and she is utterly terrifying. I love her.”
“She must be Jack’s mother,” Hannah said with dawning horror. Suddenly, the low-cut dress designed to drive Jack out of his ever-loving mind didn’t seem like the best idea. She couldn’t believe that he’d sprung this on her.
Who did that?
She didn’t do the whole meet-the-parents thing. Not anymore. She’d met Noah’s parents by accident. They’d dropped by one morning before he’d had a chance to shuffle her out so that he could walk past the church he told his parents that he attended just to check in on social media before heading to a buddy’s house to watch the Bears game. His Sunday routine.
Needless to say, his parents had not been impressed by her—full-on bedhead and wearing one of Noah’s shirts. Hannah was pretty sure that his mother’s pursed lips would haunt her nightmares for years to come.
Meeting Jack’s mother was even worse because he’d knowingly sprung this on her. He’d arranged it and everything. When he’d texted, about seventy-one hours after their first date, just as she was about to go out to a bar and pick up another guy as insurance, he’d known that he was going to do this to her. And he hadn’t said a damned word.