Butterface

“Don’t try to soften me up, buster.” The cane came down on his toe this time. “I’m beyond flattery.”

His toe throbbing, Ford took her at her word and took a step back and tried another tack—honesty. “Look, lady, I messed up with the woman I love, and she’s inside, and if I don’t talk to her and set everything straight, then everything is going to go right to hell.”

The gray-haired bouncer kept her cane on the ground and glared up at him. “Don’t use that kind of language around me. I’m a lady.”

“One with a cane she’s not afraid to use,” he muttered.

“Damn skippy,” she said, using it to tap his toes with enough force to remind him of the damage she could do with that thing. “Now, I don’t want to know what you did, because it’s plain as day that it was total foolishness.” She put the plastic stopper of her cane down on the ground, missing the inside of his foot by two inches, and leaned on the handle to bring herself to her full height of probably five foot nothing. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“Tell her I love her.” That was all he had so far when it came to having a working plan.

The old lady gave him a look that screamed try again. “Pretty words are cheap.”

If he clamped his jaw closed any harder, he was going to lose his back molars. Taking a deep breath—or at least as much of one as he could through his nostrils—he looked over the old lady’s head to the ballroom beyond. The lights were dimmed, but he could see people dancing, a wedding party up at the front, and a DJ in front of a huge movie screen. That was it. Everything had started with that Kiss Cam. Maybe that would fix everything, too.

“Ma’am,” he said, his voice louder than he meant for it to be, but volume control had gone out the window the second time she’d gotten him with her cane. “I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get her back.”

The old woman gave him an assessing look, then snapped, “So what are you doing standing out here?”

What the hell? After all that, she was just going to act like he was the one delaying everything? It had to be the wedding. People lost their minds at weddings. Not willing to waste another second on trying to unravel that mystery, he rushed inside the ballroom.

Gina wasn’t near the DJ booth. She wasn’t near the catering stations. She wasn’t by the bridal party dais. He was getting ready to breach the dance floor, when light spilled out from the swinging door leading to the staff area. There was no mistaking that brown, wavy hair with its tendency to frizz. He’d found her.

He rushed over to that side of the ballroom and through the staff doors into a makeshift kitchen in full go mode. There were waiters and guys in tall chef hats and dishwashers carrying heavy tubs filled with cutlery and mini plates rushing around the room. And there, in the back by a woman in one of the hotel’s signature black blazers, stood Gina. She was wearing that green dress again from the first night they’d met. It had made him stop and take notice. Now that he knew the woman in the dress, he appreciated how beautiful she looked in it even more.

His mouth was open to call out to her before he knew it, but he clamped his jaw shut. He’d spent the past week giving her words. That wasn’t going to be enough. He needed to show her this time, and for the first time since she’d walked out of his parents’ house, he knew exactly what to do.

And sadly, it wasn’t going to be as easy as just getting her on a Kiss Cam again.

…

The wedding had gone off without a hitch and the reception finished early, and Gina was so glad that at least one thing in her world was turning out the way she’d hoped. She walked into her house and swept up the mail scattered on the floor under the postal slot in her front door.

The daily paper was on the top, with a huge front-page spread about how the Waterbury Police Department had stopped a shipment of heroin and arrested ten people associated with the Esposito crime family. After that it was bills, junk mail, and one blue envelope with a foreign stamp. She was about to dump it all on the foyer table when the return address on one envelope caught her attention.