California Schemin' - Kate George [32]
“I draw the line at buying cosmetics. You can go without.”
“I’ll buy her makeup,” Moose said. “I’ve got a basketful of sisters. I’ve bought all kinds of female stuff.”
I made Moose a list of what I needed, and he went off with a grin on his face. I could swear he was enjoying himself, and I couldn’t drum up an ounce of fear. The situation was too unreal. If anyone had wanted me dead, there had been plenty of time to accomplish that when I’d been unconscious. It seemed like whatever the original plan had been, it had blown up in Hammie’s face, and he didn’t know how to deal with buying dresses and taking hostages to jazz concerts.
I took the dress and the undergarments into the bathroom and changed out of the robe. I left the pantyhose unopened. I didn’t plan on wearing hose to my own parents’ funeral; no way was I wearing them for these goons. I pulled the soft material of the dress over my head and marveled at how well it fit me. Hammie really did know his clothes, much better than I did, as a matter of fact. The dress was a three-quarter sleeve with a high-waisted, formfitting, V-neck bodice that fell into a full skirt of soft folds that swayed around my calves. Nice, I thought, swooshing the skirt back and forth.
Then I looked at my feet. The only shoes I had were the sneakers I’d been wearing on the plane. How did I get those sneakers on, when I’d been lying on my bed in just my socks? Hammie put them on you. Probably before he carried you out of the house. I felt vaguely disturbed. Was I in denial or something? Why was I merrily putting on a dress to go to a concert when just this morning I’d been abducted from my home? There’s something wrong with me. But I put that thought aside and sashayed out into the main room to find out what Hammie intended to do about shoes.
I was fuming. The makeup and shoe issues had been solved, and Hammie had gone to his room and come back looking very respectable in a grey suit. Then he had gotten Moose to take a clear zip tie and an O-ring to handcuff us together. He wrapped the zip tie around my wrist, crossed both ends through the O-ring around Hammie’s wrist and then threaded the free end through the lock. Standing, our jacket sleeves hid the cuff fairly well, but I had the feeling that resting our arms on the theatre seat would expose our wrists to the world.
“Hammie, I can’t go to a concert handcuffed to you,” I said. “Someone will notice.”
“Will you stop calling me Hammie,” he said for the tenth time. “My name is Richard. The only person who will notice will be my fiancée, and with my luck she’ll notice that we’re holding hands, not that we’re cuffed together, and that will be the end of that.” He looked down at my wrist ruefully. “This hasn’t been the most stellar day.”
He led me out of the hotel room, dragging me along by my wrist. I felt like a rag doll, bouncing along behind him with Moose following behind laughing to himself.
“Slow down, would you Hammie? I can’t walk that fast in these shoes.”
He stopped at the elevator and looked at the shoes. They were sexy as hell and matched the blue of the dress perfectly. A crease appeared between his eyebrows. He probably thought all women wore four-inch heels. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.
Hammie and I sat in the back of the car on the way to the concert, not that we had any choice. There wasn’t room for two in the seat next to the driver. Anyway, it was a limo, and people would expect parties arriving in limos to emerge from the back of the car. I tried not to think about Hammie's thigh, which was touching me, or the feel of his hand next to mine, not that I was at all tempted to cheat on Beau. Hammie was the kind of guy women follow with their eyes, and it was distracting to be sitting next to him. His personality radiated out and enveloped any woman who happened to be near, and at the moment that woman was me.
Thanks to our long-sleeve jackets, we managed to get ourselves seated