Marisa homed in on something else. “Doesn’t your boyfriend mind you trying to break into adult films?”
Tiffany shook her head, causing the blonde curls to bob. “Thass jist bizness. Ah wouldn’t be enjoyin’ myself or anythin’. Ah’m good at fakin’ it. All women are at one time or another, right?”
“Absolutely!” Doris piped in.
Something about Doris seemed off to Marisa, and it wasn’t her sexual orientation. Marisa wasn’t quite sure what it was. Maybe it was her eyes, behind rimless glasses that she kept pushing up her nose. Her hazel eyes seemed far too intelligent to be satisfied with cleaning services. Not that being a hotel maid isn’t a noble profession. Well, maybe not noble, but satisfactory. Jeesh! Dig a hole lately, Marisa? Good thing I didn’t say all this out loud. The political correctness police would be on my tail faster than I could say Cher. Hole. Getting. Deeper.
Tiffany smiled brightly. “Ah’ll be workin’ in the beauty salon, Good Looks. It’s right next ta the spa, Risa. You don’t mind mah callin’ ya Risa, do ya? We’ll be seeing oodles of each other. Isn’t this fun?”
Marisa barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes. “A barrel of laughs, Tiff.”
“And, Inga, Ah’m dyin’ ta clip yer dead ends, sugah. Not that your blonde hair isn’t beautiful, but just a little layering would make you a knockout.”
Inga, who already considered herself a knockout, wasn’t so self-controlled. She said, “Just super!”
“And I could give you highlights,” she offered Doris, as well.
Doris was clearly taken aback. “Thanks, but I have my own beautician back home. Pierre would have a fit if I let anyone else touch my locks.” Doris patted her short hair and winked at Marisa and Inga. At least she had a sense of humor.
“Well, I’m going to finish unpacking,” Marisa said before Tiffany could start on her.
It was hard to be mean to Tiffany, though. She was so clearly clueless.
Tiffany raised her huge, wheeled, shocking-pink luggage and was about to go into the other bedroom. Marisa and Inga had brought only small Gucci carry-on bags, figuring they’d be wearing uniforms most of the time, and Doris had only a rolling duffel bag. Clearly, none of them was as prepared as Tiffany to be “discovered.”
“Ah’m gonna put on mah bikini and head fer the pool. Mebbe Ah’ll be discovered on my first day here, please God.”
God would want nothing to do with that kind of helping hand, Marisa was pretty sure.
“Will y’all join me?”
“Sure,” Inga said. In an aside to Marisa, she whispered, “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
Doris rolled her eyes. “I think I’ll just relax on the patio with a book.”
“I have to make a phone call, but I’ll be there in a half hour or so,” Marisa promised.
She put away her belongings and went into the kitchenette, where she poured herself a glass of iced tea. Tiffany claimed she couldn’t go anywhere without her sweet tea and therefore carried tea bags and diet sugar packets with her. Before she left, she had made the iced tea in a hotel ice bucket, there being no pitcher available.
Sitting down in one of the cushy chairs, Marisa picked up her cell phone and pressed home.
“Hi, Mommy,” her daughter answered immediately, then corrected herself, as she’d been taught. “I mean, hello, this is the Lopez rezdance.”
“Hello, sweetheart. How are you feeling today?” Izzie had been sleeping when Marisa had left the house at dawn.
“Buelita says this is one of my good days. We’re goin’ to the pool with PopPop this afternoon. He’s takin’ off work jist for me.”
“That’s nice. Don’t forget the sunscreen.”
“I won’t. Are you havin’ fun, Mommy?”
“Not yet.”
“You should relax and enjoy yourself,” her daughter advised, clearly parroting something she’d heard her grandmother or grandfather say.
“I’m going to be working hard most of the time, but I’m going to a pool now, too.”
“Will you swim?”
“If it’s not too crowded, sure.” Marisa loved to swim. Had been on the swim team in high school. In fact, had gone to college on a partial sports scholarship. But she hadn’t been swimming in ages, not with Izzie’s problems and Marisa’s workload. “Can I talk to Buelita?”
“Buelita!” Izzie yelled.
Marisa winced. Another lesson she would have to teach her daughter. Put your hand over the phone before yelling. Or, better yet, don’t yell at all. She hoped she would get the chance for these and all the other little-girl lessons.
Tears filled her eyes immediately, but she blinked them away.
“Love you bunches, Mommy,” Izzie said before handing over the phone.
“Love you more, peanut,” she countered.
After Marisa spoke with her mother and gave her all the instructions for Izzie’s care that she’d already given her a dozen times that week, her mother said, “Relax and enjoy yourself, Marisa.” The unspoken words were While you can.
Marisa smiled. Like minds, and all that. “I will, and call me immediately if there’s a problem.”
After donning a white, one-piece, structured maillot swim suit, a 2005 Hermès knockoff, which was cut high on the hips, with detachable straps, and an oversize Garfield T-shirt as a cover up (Izzie had a matching one, no knockoffs with these Wal-Mart specials), she grabbed her Dior sunglasses and shuffled into a pair of flip-flops. When Marisa went out onto the patio, she saw Doris tapping away on an iPad, which she immediately tucked into a canvas bag at her side and took out a hardback book, John Grisham’s latest mystery, Sycamore Row.
More contradictions. A maid who was fluent on an expensive iPad? And while John Grisham’s books hardly qualified as literary fiction, they were not the usual choice for women of a lower education level. Assuming this woman was of a lower education level.
Marisa mentally chastised herself for once again judging someone by appearances. Hadn’t people been doing that to her all her life? She should know better.
“Is the book any good?”
Doris shrugged. “I liked the prequel better. A Time to Kill.”
“What’s not to like about Jake Brigance, aka Matthew McConaughey?”
“Or Ashley Judd, aka Carla Brigance.”
Well, that certainly laid the question of Doris’s sexual preference to rest. They both laughed.
“No second thoughts about the pool?” Marisa asked.
“Nah. I’ll read a little bit, then maybe take a nap. I didn’t sleep much last night, and I had to get to Dulles by five a.m.”
“Don’t forget the employee meeting at four o’clock.”
Everyone would be starting work tomorrow, even though the conference didn’t officially start until the next day. Last-minute instructions would be doled out today. On-site training tomorrow.
“See you later then.”
Bypassing the outdoor pool, which was as crowded as Marisa had expected, mostly with sunbathers, not swimmers, she headed toward the more functional indoor pool. Her hunch had been right. There were only a few people here, and they appeared to be done, if their wet suits were any indication. Nodding a greeting to two men and a woman, she took off her shirt, placing it, her sunglasses, and her flip-flops on a poolside chair. No worry about leaving her oversize Dior sunglasses. Anyone who stole them would be disappointed to learn they weren’t worth their weight in plastic.
Without any toe testing, she dived off one end of the pool, pleased to find the temperature cool, but not too cold. She began to do laps, starting with a slow crawl, arm over arm, face half lying in the water, one side, then the other, as she moved smoothly toward the other side. She’d done four laps before she started breaststrokes, alternated with underwater swimming and backstrokes, ending on the eighth lap with a crawl once again. Swimming tended to energize, rather than tire her. It always had. The endorphin rush that some joggers got. When she emerged at the end of the pool
, tossing her hair back off her face, she saw a pair of lightly furred legs. Following the mile-long, muscled legs upward, she immediately recognized the man standing there watching her.
Oh great! “Dr. Cigar,” she said.
“Sigurd,” he corrected. “Or, as I told you before, you can call me Sig.”
“For some reason, I don’t see you as a Sig. Gurd maybe.”
He scowled at her. He did that a lot, she noticed. Dr. McGrumpy, for sure.
For some immature reason, she delighted in annoying the man. So, of course, she asked, “Why aren’t you off at some hoity-toity VIP pool, complete with pool boys and scantily clad girls to cater to your every whim?”
“Whore-tee tart-tee?”
“You know very well I said hoy-tee toy-tee. It means exclusive. For snooty folks only.”
He shook his head at her teasing. And scowled some more. “I could not find a VIP pool, and I hear all the pool boys and scantily clad girls are on strike. What thorn do you have up your arse over my being of some VIP status?”
Not just grumpy. Rude, too. But then, I haven’t been Miss Pleasing Personality, either. “No thorns, and that was rude of me. Sorry. It’s been a long day, and it’s only one o’clock.”
He nodded his head in acceptance of her apology. “Likewise. A word of advice, though. Envy is not an attractive feature, as I well know.”
“Huh?” He well knows . . . what? Is he saying that he is an envious person? Of what? And wait a minute. Is he accusing me of being envious of him? She’d like to pull the lout down into the pool and dunk him a time or twenty. Whatever! He was twice her size. She knew who would be licking the bottom of the pool, and it wouldn’t be him.
When she raised herself on straightened arms, he held out a hand to assist her out of the pool. She hesitated, but not because she was actually considering yanking him into the water. Well, considering . . . maybe. Doing? She didn’t really have the nerve. She would have liked to, though.
No, it was the idea of her alone in this pool area, both of them wearing nothing but swimming attire. It seemed rather intimate. But then she figured that her bathing suit was modest by many standards today. So she let him help her up out of the water and to her feet on the tiled surround. Where she soon discovered that her bathing suit, when wet, left little to the imagination. And by Sigurd’s quick survey, she could tell that the man was doing a lot of imagining.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she ordered, going over to get a towel and drying her long hair, then wrapping it turban-like around her head.
“Like what?” He didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was imagining her naked.
“Like I am a snack being offered to you on a silver tray.”
“I am a Viking. We like to look. Among other things. Besides, looking is not a sin.”
Good thing it wasn’t because, if he wasn’t watching her so closely through crystal-blue eyes, she would like to devour this huge hunk of man candy with her own eyes. His long blond hair hung loose to his shoulders. He wore only a pair of black swimming trunks low on his hips, exposing wide shoulders, a narrow waist, really long legs, and the cutest belly button.
She cleared her throat and asked, “A Viking, huh? Are you from Norway?”
“Not anymore.”
She arched her brows in question.
He hesitated and his face flushed before he revealed, “Transylvania. I come from Transylvania.”
“Romania?” For some reason, that surprised her. “You were a doctor in Romania?” I was right about the medical degree from some underdeveloped country.
Stop it, Marisa. Stop being so damn judgmental.
Medical degrees from Romania are probably just as good as those from the good ol’ USA.
She gave herself a mental snort of disbelief.
“Transylvania, Pennsylvania,” he elaborated, as if reading her mind. “And most recently I was a doctor at Johns Hopkins.”
That raised more than a few questions, which she was about to toss at him, like why would a doctor with the credentials to practice at that elite hospital be working at a porno conference, but he chose that moment to dive into the pool, creating a huge splash that doused her head to toe. Deliberately, she was sure. Good thing she’d already been wet, or she would have a thing or two to say to the jerk. She still would.
But later.
She could swear she heard laughter as she walked away. He was probably staring at her butt.
Chapter 6
Scent of a woman, scent of a Viking . . . a double whammy of temptation! . . .
She paused at the doorway and waited for him to emerge from the pool, wanting to give him a piece of her mind, but he just ignored her, completing lap after lap of powerful strokes. Finally, she combed her fingers through her hair and went out to join Inga and Tiffany at the outdoor pool.
What she saw almost made her turn on her heels. She’d never seen so many Speedos in all her life. Or bikinis the size of Band-Aids.
Really, what were men thinking? Even the most physically fit guys looked ridiculous in those little bulge-revealing bits of fabric. As for the women, they might as well be naked.
She waved at Eleanor and Hedy, who were on the far side of the pool, half reclining on lounge chairs in the shade. They wore matching black Bermuda shorts and white blouses with some insignia on the one side. Probably hotel uniforms of some sort. Marisa had half expected the conference uniforms to be slutty, but maybe the hotel office staff, like Doris, or those in supervisory positions, like Hedy at the health spa, weren’t expected to follow the regular dress code. If there was one. Or maybe this was just the casual uniform. Marisa had run into Eleanor a short time ago, and Eleanor told her that she and Hedy would be rooming together inside the hotel, rather than one of the bungalows.
Marisa sat down in the limited shade of an umbrella-covered, poolside table next to Inga. Already perspiration popped out on her forehead and underarms. The temperature must be close to ninety. Inga’s blonde hair was brushed sleekly off her face, and her bikini was still wet from a recent swim. “The suit looks good on you,” Marisa commented.
“Yeah, I like it.”
She and Inga had raided Steve’s garage boxes yesterday, and Inga had discovered the vintage red-and-white polka dot number, a classic Chanel design from around 2000.
“Your brother has good taste,” Inga went on.
Marisa gave her friend a rueful shake of the head. “Too bad he didn’t use that good taste for a real job once in a while.”
“When’s he getting out?”
“Next year, if he’s lucky.” Marisa loved her brother, but with all the other stress in her life, she couldn’t allow herself the luxury of worrying about him. He was thirty-one years old, for heaven’s sake! Who was she kidding? Of course she worried about him. “He’s studying graphic design in prison.”
Inga rolled her eyes. “Oh Lord! He wouldn’t dare print counterfeit money when he gets out, would he?”
“What do you think?”
Marisa accepted a small beaded bottle of icy water from a passing waiter (the core hotel staff was still working), and drank deeply. Then she sat back in her chair and looked around at the several dozen people walking or sitting around the pool. “So what’s new?”
“Well, our friend Tiff is networkin’ her little Dixie ass off, dontcha know, darlin’,” Inga said in an exaggerated Southern drawl.
“That’s mean,” Marisa said, knowing she was equally guilty. “It’s like beating a cute little puppy dog.”
“She’s already met two film producers who want to give her an audition and Madeline something or other, who sells discreet sex toys through her mail order company, My Ladies Boudoir. Madeline will be giving out samples this afternoon at the employees’ meeting. She highly recommends The Bobber, according to Tiffany. Oh, and there’s the editor of some skin magazine who might consider doing a layout on Tiffany if—”
“Let me guess. If she auditions for him?”
“
Bingo! From what I can tell, it’s a mixed bag of folks here . . . so far, anyway. There are the porno wannabes, like Tiffany, but not an overwhelming number. Mainly because it’s so expensive to attend. Five thou minimum. The industry biggies are here, of course. Company owners. Wealthy men and women who are either looking for action or new investments, probably both. Lobbyists . . . yeah, some of these companies know the power of having politicians on their side. PR experts to hype pornography as the ultimate freedom of expression. By the way, we’re going to be told in the employee meeting not to use the word pornography. It’s FOE now, baby. Freedom of Expression, not forwarding order expired. Art films, not skin flicks. Sensual literature, not erotica. Yada, yada.”
“What a crock!” Marisa said.
“Watch for the Internet types who are riding the electronic smut waves. You can easily identify them. They look nerdy. And mostly they’re young and full of themselves. In a way, these are the most dangerous. They’re smart. Really smart. And they know how to access millions of people at the click of a key, as in computer keyboard, and profit from that talent.”
“I’d like to meet some of them. All I need is one good guy, or girl, who knows code to help me set up an Internet campaign for Izzie.”
As if she hadn’t spoken, Inga continued, “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the working actors and actresses from the aspiring ones. Except the celebrity ones have fans trailing after them, including—you won’t believe this—a celebrity dog named Mr. Big after that Sex and the City stud.”
“Holy Toledo! A dog? I’m afraid to ask.”
“Don’t.”
They both burst out laughing.
“One guy asked me if I’d like to try out for his upcoming film, Thor and His Really Big Sword. Not because I’m built like a brick shithouse, his words, not mine, but because I look like a Norse goddess.” Inga smiled. “Shall I go on?”
“Enough said!”
“And then there’s a bunch of folks just like us, trying to earn some extra cash while holding our noses.”