Her smile faltered before regaining its shine. “Just Rima, please.” If a butterfly could talk, I imagined it would sound just like Nathan’s stepmother. Soft, gentle, fleeting, like the wind could carry her words away any moment.
“Are you looking for Nathan?” she queried.
“Umm.” I wasn’t certain on how to answer. If Nathan’s parents were the traditional sort, wouldn’t it look bad to admit that I was visiting their unmarried son – alone?
“If you are,” Rima continued, “he’s not in.”
“Oh.”
She smiled again. “I left a message with his staff, telling him to drop by my hotel.” She suddenly linked arms with me and started walking towards the doors, leaving me no choice but to go along with her. “You can wait for him at my suite.”
“Oh.” It was lame, but it was the only thing I could utter, taken aback as I was. I’d never have pegged Rima Callis as the pushy type. When we made it out of the lobby, Rima asked sweetly if she could hitch a ride with me since she had only taken a cab to Nathan’s place.
I said yes right away, but when we got to my car, I slid behind the wheel and Rima slid into the backseat.
Our eyes met through the rearview mirror. “I hope you don’t mind,” Nathan’s stepmother said in the same sweet voice. “I get horribly carsick when I’m in front.”
I gave her a smile. “I don’t mind at all.” It wasn’t like I could say anything else.
Throughout the ride, Rima quizzed me about my relationship with Nathan, and I tried to be as honest as I can without sounding as pathetic as I currently felt. I also made no mention about my ill-fated feelings for Nik Alexandropoulos. That was my sin to bear, and no one else’s.
“I hope you haven’t any plans for marriage yet,” she murmured out of the blue.
“Umm.” Was there any right way to answer that?
I had thought about this a lot last night, and eventually I had come to conclude that Nathan’s father might have decided it would be ideal if his son married a nice Greek girl. He might’ve asked his second wife to deliver his command, might have even used the family card as leverage.
Do what I order and we’ll be one big happy family.
I knew it sounded more like a plot for the next big thing in soap operas, but one thought what one could when there were so few facts to work with.
“He’s still so young, you know,” Rima was saying.
“He’s already twenty-six,” I blurted out. But then I saw her lips tighten through the rearview mirror, and I added hastily, “But you’re right. There’s no rush at all.”
Nathan’s stepmother flashed me a smile. “Exactly.”
And at that moment I knew – I just knew – I had been warned.
She didn’t just disapprove of me for her stepson. She didn’t like me, period.
My stomach turned queasy for a second.
A storm was coming, I thought again. Would it come down to forcing Nathan to choose between his family and me?
I hoped not.
I prayed not.
But in the end, I realized that would have been better than the truth.
Rima Callis’ suite was the most expensive that the hotel offered, the bill of which her stepson footed since his father was rather tight-fisted.
“I see.” I still had the same question in my mind. Was there any right way to answer that?
“Anyway.” She flashed me another smile.
Back in my journalist days, I had worked on a piece about butterflies once, and the most trivial facts about those enchanting winged insects started flooding my mind as I stared at Rima.
Butterflies were cold-blooded.
Some were poisonous.
Some liked to suck blood, usually on open wounds of a larger animal.
“Follow me, please.”
Said the spider to the fly, I mused.
Maybe I got it all wrong from the start.
Another piece I had once worked on had to do with arachnids, and few people knew that not all spiders were ugly, hairy, eight-legged creatures. Well, okay, all of them still had eight legs, but a few were quite beautiful.
There was the sequin spider, for instance. They were also called mirror spiders because their abdomens consisted of reflective spots that made their bodies shimmer like a jewel.
Beautiful…
But still a spider, I thought.
I had assumed that Rima would have me installed at the living room and promptly forget all about me, but instead she led me to one of the inner rooms, which turned out to be an en-suite library decorated in mahogany panels and came complete with a granite fireplace and a comfy-looking armchair.
“Wow.” I couldn’t help marveling at my surroundings even though a fireplace in Miami didn’t exactly make sense. Functionality was overrated, anyway. If it looked really good, then it was meant to be.
The library was stocked with what looked like first-edition classics, and for just a few moments I was able to set aside my heartbreak in the presence of such beauties. Already my mind was running over the possibilities – what could be a nice catchy headline if I wrote about this suite?