“Good Lord, you’re a hair genius.”
Flicking her hair dramatically, Jacinda winked at me. “I know.” Undoing the cape at the back of my neck, she pulled it off me and then shook it out. “Now, you enjoy your time with that mountain of Klein sexiness, but don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
I was about to answer her, but Sayla beat me to it. “To be fair, she crossed that bridge when she went out on a date with him, Miss Baren Karen. When was the last time you did that?”
Jacinda just rolled her eyes. “Look, I don’t need a man in my life to be happy. This is what I keep telling you! Sex toys do what you want them to do, they don’t answer back, they don’t take up any space you don’t want them to, and then they disappear again until you’re ready to say ‘bonjour.’ What’s so wrong with that?”
There was a lot more to it for her than that, but it was an unspoken rule between us all that we never mentioned it. So long as she was happy and not going through one of her OCD and anxiety episodes because of her past, no one brought it up. Even when she was, we left it up to her to decide if she wanted to discuss it or not. And now definitely wasn’t one of those times.
“There’s nothing wrong with that at all,” I agreed, shooting Sayla a look.
“The most romantic things I can read are the words ‘high performance,’ ‘longer battery life,’ and ‘rechargeable,’ and I don’t regret that at all,” Jacinda told us all. “Batteries are also more romantic to me than flowers.”
Almost like the timing had been set up, a delivery woman walked in with a big bunch of flowers in her hands.
“Delivery for Jacinda Bandara?”
All of the women in the salon pointed at her at the same time. Smiling at her, the lady crossed over to my chair and held them out to her.
“The person who sent them said to look in the bag they’re in, too. I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s heavy and keeps making a weird noise.”
The flowers themselves were different colored peonies in various states of bloom. The base of their stems was encased in a square black gift bag, and judging by how Jacinda had to juggle with it when she took it from the woman, it was pretty heavy.
“Do I need to sign anything?”
“No, you’re good. Enjoy the flowers, and whatever’s in that bag.” The delivery lady winked and practically bounced toward the door.
I couldn’t help it, I had to know what the card dangling from the bag said, so I angled my head to the side so I could read the words scrawled on it.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
They’re all romantic,
But batteries are, too.
CK x
“Oh, shit!” I choked out, laughing at the poem. She was going to lose her mind when she read it.
Narrowing her eyes at me, Jacinda lifted the card and read it, her cheeks turning pink when she got to the end.
“That asshole.”
Evie said something to her client and then walked over to join us. “What does it say?” she asked, then frowned when Jacinda jiggled the bag slightly. “What’s in the bag?”
“Batteries,” Jacinda ground out.
Evie’s eyebrows lifted. “Batteries?”
“Yup,” I confirmed, standing up from the chair. “Either Calvin Klein found out about Jacinda’s preferences, or Canon Klein decided to woo her via her vagina.”
Glaring at me, she spun on her heel and walked over to the reception desk, leaving Evie and me watching her back as she did it.
“I didn’t know the guy had it in him,” she mused. “How did he know?”
“I don’t have a clue, but I know his brother’s sneaky and has ways of making things happen how he wants them to, so why wouldn’t Canon have those same skills?”
“You have a point.”
Hearing something clattering against the surface of the desk, we both looked over as Jacinda poured the contents of the bag onto it.
“That’s a lot of batteries,” I breathed, struggling to comprehend why he thought it’d be such a good idea to send them to her.
“Oh, my God,” Jacinda yelled. “There are even rechargeable ones in there.”
I would have thought that the customers would be confused or find it distasteful, but as I glanced around the room, they all had varying degrees of amusement on their faces. I freaking loved living here, and how relaxed people tended to be, and this was a perfect example of it.
Walking into Kleins, I did a quick mental rerun of what I was wearing. Jeans so distressed they looked traumatized, a white racerback tank, black Birkenstocks, and killer hair in a ponytail. It looked effortless, but ironically, it’d taken me more time than I’d ever spent to decide on it all. Not that it mattered. No, what mattered was Bond’s response when he saw me.