I returned the credit card, and he pocketed it with a smile. “Nice,” he said, eyes fixed on the slit in the front of my skirt.
It was one of those moments that if Hal hadn't been present, we might have torn each other's clothes off right there in the hall.
Ranger knocked on the door, and Nancy answered.
“How long?” Ranger asked.
“Hard to say. She's undecided on gowns.”
“I'm going to knock again in ten minutes, and she'll go to the dinner in whatever she's got on.”
“Jeez,” Nancy said. And she closed the door.
“Boy, you're tough,” I told Ranger.
“It was a desperate, hollow threat.”
Ten minutes to the second, the door opened, and Brenda flounced out in a very low-cut, skintight, iridescent white gown trimmed in long, fluffy white feathers. The feathers fluttered from her shoulders and the lower half of her skirt. I couldn't imagine what sort of bird had grown the fabulous feathers, but I suspected there were a lot of them running around bare-skinned.
“Wow,” I said.
Brenda wiggled so the feathers wo
uld swirl around her. “It's from the Ginger Rogers collection.”
No shit.
She sidled up to Ranger. “I'm not wearing panties. The dress is too tight. I thought you'd want to know.”
“Eeuw,” I said.
Brenda looked at me. “You have a problem with that?”
“Too much information.”
Hal looked like he'd swallowed his tongue. Nancy took a large bottle of Advil from her purse, tapped out two pills, and popped them into her mouth. Ranger picked feathers off his black tux. The Ginger collection was molting.
We marched the bird-woman through the lobby to the waiting motorcade. Downy feather remnants drifted like dust motes on air currents in our wake, and a blizzard of feathers whirled across the floor. A handful of fans and a few members of the press took pictures, and Brenda posed and smiled and flapped around.
I felt heavy breathing on the back of my neck and turned to see the stalker hovering in my personal space.
“You're breathing on me,” I said to him.
“I thought if I got close enough I might be able to send you a mental message. It was an experiment.”
“It failed. Go away.”
“You don't understand. It's critical that I talk to you.”
“No, you don't understand. It's critical that you go away, because if you keep bothering me, that Latino guy in the tux is going to throw you out a third-story window.”
Ranger looked over at me, and the stalker backed up into a luggage cart.
Brenda moved toward the limo, and we all climbed in after her. Nancy and I sat in the seat facing backwards, and that left the seat next to Brenda for Ranger. He picked a feather out of his mouth and looked across at me and smiled. I pressed my knees together, but no matter what I did with my legs, from where he sat there was a direct line of sight up my skirt.
Ranger walked me to my car in the parking lot. It was a little after midnight and Brenda was in her room, with Hal standing guard.
“That had to be the longest night in the history of the world,” Ranger said.